Musical preview: Nice Work If You Can Get It

Story offers “a cool” role reversal

Members+of+the+cast+practice+in+the+halls+during+SMART+lunch.

Members of the cast practice in the halls during SMART lunch.

Kennedy’s upcoming musical comedy Nice Work If You Can Get It will take audience members back to the 1920s, the era of prohibition and bootlegging.

The musical will be performed at Kennedy the weekend of April 23, 24, and 25.

Characters are played by Brennan Urbi, jr., Maia Bennett, jr., Adam Burstain, sr., Caleb Marner, jr., Nina Yu, jr., Rizwan Sidhu, jr.

Teacher Nick Hayes, the show’s director, says the musical features many famous and recognizable songs.

“[The play] is taking a bunch of George and Ira Gershwin tunes-these are songs that occurred in movies starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, these are songs sung by Frank Sinatra and other famous singers-and they decided to write a musical around those songs,” Hayes said.

The musical is a comedy of errors about a gang of bootleggers. Bennet’s character, Billie Bendix, is one of these bootleggers, and she falls in love with Urbi’s character, a playboy named Jimmy Winter.

“The cool thing about this musical is that the main character, the guy, is kind of our ditz,” Hayes said, “whereas the tough one is the female role. So it’s a cool kind of gender reversal.”

To get ready for the musical, the cast members have to put in a lot of preparation.

“There’s a lot of rehearsals,” Bennet said, “there’s a lot of, if you have lines, memorizing lines on your own, and there’s a lot of running lines outside of rehearsal with other people, and learning the songs on your own a lot of the time too.”

Both Hayes and Bennett expressed their excitement for this production.

“It’s a really great cast of main characters,” Bennet said. “It’s going to be fun working together.”

“I’m most excited to be able to share this story with the cast and help merge my initial vision with their performance,” Hayes said. “We’re going to blend those to make something that’s never really predictable, so I’m always excited to see how they mesh together for ultimately producing a final performance that always surprises us and is never quite what you expected, but in a great way.”