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Arts & Entertainment

Local Playwright Brings Back Classic Theatre Style This Weekend

Three performances of "Love at Last Sight" at the Takoma Park Community Center showcase local talent.

Inspired by the romance of New York’s musical theater in the 1940s, Takoma Park playwright John Guernsey wrote a musical which seeks to recreate the fun and whimsy of that time.

“Love at Last Sight,” took six years to write and it contains 21 songs — four of which are new and written specifically for performances this weekend at the Takoma Park Community Center, Guernsey said. The play’s title is from a song he wrote that has the same name.

“I started out with the song called ‘Love at Last Sight’ and I checked to see if there was anything else with that name, but all I could find was a book about dogs, and you can’t copyright a title,” he said.

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“I thought it was a pretty good song and that song led to another and another.”

“Love at Last Sight” follows the adventures of “Hannah Brown,” a girl in her late teens who has left a troubled home life in Utah to pursue a Broadway career. Hannah Brown is played by 17-year-old Hannah Untereiner, and Guernsey says it is a coincidence that the actor and character as both named Hannah.

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“It makes us think she was born to play the character,” he said.

That might be so, for Untereiner has played the part twice before, including at the Greenbelt Arts Center.

There would not be a romantic comedy without a romance, and Hannah meets hers almost immediately after stepping off the bus, for that is when she encounters “David” (played by Robin Dreher). Guernsey said he was so impressed by Dreher’s experience — the young actor played the lead in the Montgomery Blair High School production of "Sweeney Todd" — that Dreher was instantly selected to play David.

“Just come to the rehearsal,” Guernsey said he told Dreher.

Guernsey was also influenced by the songs of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers.

“They were the greatest songwriters who ever lived,” Guernsey said.

In addition to the four new songs, Guernsey has written four new scenes including a show-stopping tap dance.

Three performances of “Love at Last Sight” are scheduled this weekend: Friday, Feb. 4 at 8 p.m.; Saturday, Feb. 5 at 8 p.m.; and Sunday, Feb. 6 at 2 p.m. Admission is free, but donations are accepted.

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