Playhouse in the Park Lines Up ‘Bye Bye Birdie,’ ‘Sound of Music’ and a Summer Theatre Camp for Kids

Playhouse in the Park, the outdoor community theater across from the Mobile Museum of Art in Langan Park, has set its 2011 season around two classic musicals and a summer camp for young performers. The lineup pairs a satirical 1960s crowd-pleaser with one of the most beloved stage scores ever written, and gives the park’s amphitheater a full calendar from May through August.

The theater’s setting is part of its identity. Langan Park — the sprawling green space in west Mobile that also holds the city’s Museum of Art, its azalea-lined lakes and its walking trails — gives the Playhouse an open-air stage that few community theaters can match. On summer evenings, audiences bring the weather with them: warm air, cicadas, and a sunset behind the trees as the overture starts. For generations of Mobile families, a Playhouse show has been as much a park outing as a night of theater.

‘Bye Bye Birdie’ opens May 13

The season kicks off with Bye Bye Birdie, the hit stage-and-screen musical about fictional 1950s rock star Conrad Birdie’s publicity tour stop in small-town Ohio, where his farewell kiss to teenager Kim MacAfee sends the whole town into a frenzy. Performances run Friday through Sunday, May 13–29, with evening shows at 7:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. matinees on Sundays. Danny Mollise directs, with Pamela Mollise handling scenic and costume design. Tickets are $15 for adults and $12 for students and seniors; reservations are available at 251-602-0630.

The show itself is one of the great parodies of American pop culture. Written as a gentle satire of Elvis Presley’s rise and his 1957 draft induction, Bye Bye Birdie follows a struggling songwriter who arranges for Birdie to kiss one lucky fan on national television before shipping off to the Army. What follows is a small town turned upside down — a frenzy of screaming teenagers, scheming parents, and television cameras — all set to a score that has kept the show in constant revival since its original Broadway run.

For an outdoor cast of community performers, the musical offers a wide playground: big production numbers, comic character roles for actors of every age, and songs audiences walk out humming. The period setting also gives Pamela Mollise’s costume and scenic work plenty to do, recreating the look of small-town America at the moment rock and roll arrived to scandalize it.

The May run — three weekends of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday performances — takes advantage of the season’s best weather window. Evening shows at 7:30 p.m. begin as the Alabama heat breaks, and the Sunday 2:30 p.m. matinees give families and church groups an afternoon option.

‘The Sound of Music’ takes the stage in July

The theater follows with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, July 21–31 and August 5–14, using the same showtimes and ticket prices. Open auditions are set for June 1 and June 3 at 6:30 p.m. at the Playhouse. The production again teams director Danny Mollise with designer Pamela Mollise.

The choice of The Sound of Music brings the season its most demanding and most beloved score. The story of the singing von Trapp family — a postulant who becomes a governess to seven children, and the family’s flight from Austria as the Nazis take hold — runs from comedy to romance to drama, and its songs, from the title ballad to “Do-Re-Mi” to “My Favorite Things,” are among the most recognizable in musical theater.

The two-part run, broken by a week’s dark week between July 31 and August 5, gives the production a six-weekend presence in the park and allows the cast to sustain the show through the deepest part of Mobile’s summer. Outdoor performances in August carry their own production challenges — heat, sudden Gulf Coast thunderstorms, and evening humidity — but the Playhouse’s August audiences have historically been rewarded with some of its most atmospheric nights.

The open auditions on June 1 and June 3 are exactly that: open. Community theater works because anyone willing to prepare a song and read from the script can step onto the stage, and productions of this size need performers across the age range, from the children playing the youngest von Trapps to the adults filling the roles of the Captain, the Mother Abbess, and the Nazi officers whose arrival darkens the second act.

Summer Theatre Crafts Camp for ages 5–12

Younger aspiring performers can sign up for the Playhouse’s Summer Theatre Crafts Camp, an introduction to acting, musical theatre, scenic art, puppetry and dance. Two weeklong sessions run June 6–10 and June 13–17, from 9 a.m. to noon, each closing with a demonstration for parents. Tuition is $150 per week or $275 for both weeks, with a 10 percent sibling discount.

The camp’s design reflects how theater education works best for young children: mornings only, short enough to hold a five-year-old’s attention, and varied enough that no single skill dominates the day. A camper might spend part of a morning learning a song, another stretch painting scenery, and end with a puppetry exercise — a rotation that keeps the experience playful while quietly teaching stage discipline, cooperation, and the habit of performing in front of other people.

The closing demonstration on the final Friday of each session is the payoff. Parents and grandparents fill the same benches the musical audiences use, and the campers show what they have built — scenes, songs, dances, and artwork — in a low-stakes performance that introduces them to the audience-performer exchange before they ever audition for a full production.

The two-session structure with a discount for attending both weeks ($275 versus $150 per week, plus the 10 percent sibling discount) makes the camp accessible to families with more than one budding performer, a practical consideration in a community where summer childcare options fill up fast.

The pipeline from camp to cast

The camp and the mainstage season are more than adjacent offerings — they are two ends of the same pipeline. Children who discover the stage at a Crafts Camp session in June grow into the youth casts of future musicals; The Sound of Music, with its seven von Trapp children, is exactly the kind of show that draws its youngest performers from the camp’s alumni pool. Parents who bring children to the morning demonstrations in June will find the same families populating the auditions the following season.

The Mollises’ dual role in the season — directing the musicals while Pamela Mollise designs the scenery and costumes — mirrors that pipeline at the adult level. Community theaters run on multi-talented volunteers, and a season built around two productions allows a design team to plan both shows together, moving set pieces and costume pieces between them and building each production’s look with the other in mind.

Planning a visit

For audiences, the season’s structure is simple. Bye Bye Birdie runs three weekends in May — Friday through Sunday, May 13–29, at 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights with 2:30 p.m. Sunday matinees. The Sound of Music follows July 21–31, pauses for a week, then returns August 5–14 with identical showtimes. Tickets for both are $15 for adults and $12 for students and seniors, with reservations available at 251-602-0630.

Outdoor theater in Mobile carries a few customs worth knowing. Evenings cool pleasantly by curtain time but insects remain a consideration, so seasoned Playhouse attendees come prepared with repellent. Rain is a fact of Gulf Coast summers, and patrons should expect the theater’s standard arrangements for weather-affected performances. Blankets and cushions are welcome in the open-air seating, and arriving before the 7:30 p.m. curtain leaves time to settle in as the light fades over Langan Park.

The setting makes pre-show outings easy. Families can pair a matinee with a walk around the park’s lakes or a visit to the Mobile Museum of Art across the road, turning a two-hour show into a full day in one of the city’s most beautiful public spaces.

A season of classics

The 2011 lineup amounts to a statement about what community theater does best. Neither show requires spectacle that only a professional budget could deliver; both depend on familiar songs, big-hearted performances, and audiences happy to sing along. In a park setting, with ticket prices a fraction of what touring productions charge and a camp feeding the next generation of performers, the Playhouse’s season is built to be part of the neighborhood it sits in.

Reservations for either production, and registration for the Summer Theatre Crafts Camp sessions June 6–10 and June 13–17, run through the Playhouse at 251-602-0630. The season opens May 13 — and the first notes of Bye Bye Birdie’s overture under the Langan Park oaks will mark the start of another summer of outdoor theater on Mobile’s west side.