Now, eight years later, the Troy Theatre Ensemble is putting on the show she helped make famous, and Sutton’s former high school director Rick Bodick and his group are doing her proud. And she could tell them that in person, as she came out for the show’s big opening night to see the show and talk with the cast members.

Their big opening night featured the next Millie of Troy, Kelly Studnicki. Determined to become thoroughly modern, Millie is determined to marry her boss (when she gets a job). Marrying strictly for the money, believing love has nothing to do with it. And when she gets blindsided by love by a fun but mostly money-less guy? Well, it can hurt, as Kelly explains while leading a cast of romantically stung stenogs in the big Forget About the Boy number that opens the second act with raging gusto. Kelly Studnicki has a good voice and a very real personality. Her pain feels real, her desire for love seems real in her huge Gimme Gimme solo, and her desire to seduce her boss and getting seriously turned on by her boss’s talk of Tom Sawyer seems…well, let’s hope that’s just good acting. It’s certainly very funny.

Nicholas Flaherty plays Tom Sawyer’s chief rival, the poor but fun and streetwise Jimmy Smith, with Nicholas lending some nice vocals to the role. Tyler Parent is Trevor Graydon, Millie’s new boss whom she is so eager to marry for money, and Tyler shines in the drunken melodrama of the closing scenes and when he falls madly in love in a hilarious I’m Falling in Love with Someone scene – a scene also featuring the ultra-sweet-and-innocent-looking Miss Dorothy Brown (Bridget Dennis). Bridget knows how to play up her sweet-and-innocent look just right, making her humor and her steamy “grrr” temptress side all the more hilarious.

And then there are the villains. Namely Mrs. Meers, Millie’s comically creepy apartment manager who is always on the lookout for orphan actresses who are sadly all alone in the world. Katie Parent has a dry sense of humor and great feel for the melodrama, as well as a quick temper that always has a powerful affect on her accent (ranging from charmingly Asian to angrily Brooklyn-ish). Daniel Cho as the lovesick Ching Ho and Alex Pan as the pragmatic Bun Foo are Meersie’s two Chinese assistants who get translated via subtitles as they aid Meers in her “white slavery” export trade, all in the hopes of getting their beloved “Mammy” from China to America. But what will happen when Ching Ho meets the sweet-and-innocent-looking Miss Dorothy Brown?

Performed March 7 - 15, 2008.

Rob Hopper
Executive Director
National Youth Theatre

~ Cast ~