Ross Valley Players brings history onstage with ‘Hello Girls’

History lessons are rarely more vivid or more engaging than “The Hello Girls” at Ross Valley Players. The high-stakes musical runs at the Barn Theater through March 1.

During the First World War, the United States Army was in dire need of highly skilled switchboard operators to handle telephone communications in contested areas of France. These operators had to be fluent in French and English with the ability to shift instantly from one language to the other. Army Commander General John J. Pershing was discouraged by the lackluster talent he had to pick from among his all-male fighting force but found what he was seeking in a group of Bell Telephone Co. operators who all happened to be women.

Efficient and clear communications are essential to the success of any military operation. Over objections from traditionalists, almost 300 women were recruited into the Army’s Signal Corps.

Based on real events, “The Hello Girls” is the story of five women who were sent to France, where they performed the telephonic equivalent of air traffic control — at first in the relative safety of Paris, and later, at their insistence, near the eastern front, where they were subjected to repeated shelling from the Germans like real soldiers.

Monica Rose Slater as Grace Banker in Ross Valley Players’ “The Hello Girls.” (Photo by Robin Jackson)

They weren’t initially treated as such. They even had to buy their own uniforms at $50 each — a whopper amount in 1918. Helen Hill (Malia Abayon), a recruit from Idaho, can’t scrape together the funds for a uniform, so her comrades concoct their own version of a “bake sale”: a dance party where male soldiers eager to meet them each pay an admission fee. It’s one of many sweetly humorous moments in this historically accurate musical directed with aplomb and passion by Maeve Smith.

An onstage band directed by Christopher Hewitt does a terrific job with gorgeous but sometimes difficult music by the show’s co-writer Peter C. Mills, in tandem with Cara Reichel. All of the performers are expert singers; some are multi-instrumentalists, such as Abigail Wissink in the role of Bertha Hunt, who plays piano, accordion and glockenspiel. Grace Margaret Craig appears as Suzanne Prevot and also plays accordion, cello and guitar. As Louise Le Breton, the only native French speaker in the group, Jacqueline Lee performs on violin.

In his Ross Valley Players debut, North Bay veteran performer Nelson Brown gives his character, Lt. Riser, a commanding gravitas leavened with sympathy. He also sings and plays guitar, while Dean Marchant’s Private Matterson plays the flute, and Landers Markwick, as an unnamed “doughboy,” plays the drum and guitar. Michael Lister is compelling as another nameless doughboy, as is Joseph Walters as General Pershing.

“The Hello Girls” features one of the most multitalented casts seen on the Ross Valley Players stage in a very long time. All are in fine voice, most significantly Monica Rose Slater as group leader Chief Grace Banker, a bright woman with a beguiling blend of self-doubt and self-assurance. Banker majored in French as a college student but doesn’t believe she has the fluency to do the job. But doubts be damned: supervised by Lt. Riser, she assembles a crew of four expert operators, and together they go off to the trenches — or near the trenches, to be more exact.

⇒Read the entire article on the Marin Independent Journal website here:

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