Spokane Valley Summer Theatre will enter its 10th anniversary season singing, and it won't stop until the curtain falls on the closing production. Whether by accident or design, every show — including special events like its annual Rising Stars showcase — is largely sung through, which means spoken lines of dialogue are rare.
"Pirates of Penzance is all sung. A Grand Night for Singing is one song after another. And then Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is also pretty much all sung through. So it's like the super-musical season," says Andrea Olsen, associate artistic director for Spokane Valley Summer Theatre.
The emphasis on song seems right for SVST, which has always had one eye on cultivating top-tier vocal talent.
During the organization's inaugural season in 2016, a Central Valley High School student named Christopher Tamayo appeared in an SVST production of Bring It On. These days, Tamayo is on Broadway with Maybe Happy Ending, the South Korean musical that just scooped up six Tony Awards. And that very same production of Bring It On also happened to star Coeur d'Alene native Amber Fiedler, who went on to compete on American Idol in 2020.
Collin J. Pittmann, the director of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as well as Rising Stars, says that the 10th season is as committed as ever to nurturing what might very well be the next generation of American Idol and Broadway stars.
"Fifty-six percent of our cast members this season are completely new to SVST, which we're thrilled about. That, to me, screams growth but also excitement and energy, particularly about the shows that we're producing this season," he says.
The milestone 2025 season inadvertently sketches a mini-history of musical theater. By kicking things off this weekend with Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, the season opens with one of the 19th-century light comic operas that helped pave the way for the earliest crop of narrative-driven Broadway musicals like 1927's Show Boat.
A Grand Night for Singing, which runs July 11-19, moves things into Broadway's Golden Age by taking the most beloved — as well as the underappreciated — songs of another theatrical power duo, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and presenting them in the form of a revue. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat then rounds out the season Aug. 1-17 with a prime example of the modern megamusical era.
Olsen says that Pirates has long been on director Yvonne A.K. Johnson's wishlist for SVST, and this production will reflect the "spectacular" vision that she has for it.
Some of that spectacle will come from Olsen's own choreography, which has the actors incorporating a good dose of swordplay into their routines. After all, they have to display enough derring-do to go toe-to-toe with an equally stunning set piece.
"David Baker, our amazing technical director, has built a full-size pirate ship that sails onto the stage, complete with crow's nest and bowsprit and all of that," she says.
Even before Pirates wraps on July 6, Olsen will have shifted to the director's chair for A Grand Night for Singing. Despite a long theater career both onstage and off, this concatenation of songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals marks her directorial debut.
"I joke about Grand Night being a jukebox musical before those were even a thing. Walter Bobbie put this together, and it represents the whole span of the Rodgers and Hammerstein repertoire," she explains.
Bobbie drew not only from popular shows like Carousel, Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music but also from under-the-radar musicals like Allegro, Me and Juliet, and Flower Drum Song.
Although there isn't a single narrative to connect the songs, Olsen is creating a sense of cohesion by setting the entire show in Central Park.
"We've got this colossal staircase that is like a bridge in Central Park. The band is going to be on stage as if they were in a gazebo in Central Park. Rather than feeling like you're just sort of hitting shuffle on your favorite album, my challenge, and I love doing it, is making it make sense to the audience why the songs are in this order."
Grand Night also puts a fresh spin on some of the familiar tunes by approaching them from a different emotional perspective or handing them over to other characters. In South Pacific, for example, "Honey Bun" is sung by a woman pretending to be a sailor, whereas Grand Night features a male singer.
Spokane Valley Summer Theatre's 10th Season
The Pirates of Penzance, June 20-July 6
Rising Stars, June 28-29
A Grand Night for Singing, July 11-19
Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Aug. 1-17
Tickets and info at svsummertheatre.com
"There's some fun twists on what you would expect," Olsen says.
For the season finale, Olsen will step out onstage to sing as the Narrator under Pittmann's direction. It's something of a role reversal for the young director, who credits Olsen and a high-school production of Dreamcoat — one that, incidentally, also starred Christopher Tamayo — as a source of personal and professional inspiration.
"This time, instead of seeing the show, I'm directing it. So it's come full circle in so many different ways. And I'm trying to take in that moment. Here I am, at 25, being entrusted with this massive production, and it's so intergenerational. We have people at various points in their theatrical journey all coming together for this production," Pittmann says.
As a nod to his earlier experience with Dreamcoat, a musical that's loosely based on the biblical tale of Joseph and his brothers, Pittmann is looking to sidestep the "glitzy, glittery, tacky Egyptian tourist gift shop feel" that he sees as the default visual style for many stagings.
Instead, he's encouraging choreographer Angela Rose Pierson to play to her strengths and devise genre-spanning near-acrobatic routines that are "super energetic and even more athletic" than the ones typically done in this show. Pittmann and Baker have also conceptualized a set that incorporates stars and constellations designed to symbolize the cosmic power of dreams.
"I identify as a dreamer," Pittman says. "And I think, in many ways, SVST as an organization has been all about dreams from day one. So it seems really fitting that we're closing this 10th season with a show that's all about dreams and how important dreams are." ♦
