Sweet Charity at Ohio Northern

The logo used for ONU's production of
Sweet Charity.

The musical theater department at Ohio Northern University is well known for its Broadway style performances in the area surrounding Ada. The Freed Center for the Performing arts hosts two shows per academic semester. One performance takes place in the Stambaugh Studio Theater, and is usually a smaller production or play. Later on in the semester, the students take to the main stage in the Biggs Theater to put on a larger and much more elaborate production. These shows can range from the obscure such as Lysistrata, or the Broadway classics such as Anything Goes or Chicago. This years ambitious production was a run of the 1960’s musical Sweet Charity. The show centers on the story of a young girl struggling to live in New York City. She is down on her luck as the story begins, being robbed of all of her savings from working as a “Dance Hall Hostess” to a man with whom she was having an affair. The line of the story introduces us to Charity’s colorful coworkers, a film star who takes charity into a nightclub to make his lover jealous and most importantly we meet Oscar. Oscar is a painfully shy and awkward man who Charity meets at the YMCA. The two really hit it off when they are trapped in the elevator of the YMCA and begin dating. The story twists and turns throughout, and ultimately comes to the point where Oscar proposes to Charity. On the eve of their wedding day, Charity says her goodbyes to her “little gang” at the Fandango Ballroom and leaves with her fiancée. After an argument that ends their engagement, Oscar accidently pushes Charity into the Central Park Lake, and runs off. Charity then hauls herself out of the lake, and proclaims that maybe her life is turning around because she at least still had her money this time.

The Freed Center for the Performing Arts at
Ohio Northern University

Ohio Northern’s production of Sweet Charity upheld to the original script of the show under the direction of the theater arts department’s own Courtney Kattengell. With music done under the watch of the Freed Center’s own Michael Jordan, lighting done by Kathleen DeVault, costume design and management done by Ameera Ansari and the production’s elaborate set constructed under the supervision of Brian Phillips by the Freed Center Stage Shop. The casting and rehearsal process for the show began early in this semester, and concluded on the opening night of the show on Thursday April 19^th. The show ran for a total of five performance on main stage in the Freed Center. The show in my opinion was run very well. The parts that personally impressed me the most was the band and also the complex transitions of the scenery carried out by the cast. The platforms used in every scene were incredibly large, and required to be moved and rotated for every scene change of the show. The musical accompaniment to the singing and dancing of the actors was also very well done. The actors performed the show spectacularly from the complex and risqué dance numbers to the several characters that were played by each of the cast. Walking in to the show, I was not sure that I would like the show based on the limited knowledge I had of the plot. However, the cast at Ohio Northern University put on a performance that kept me interested through the entire performance and made me a fan of Sweet Charity.