A Thomas Hardy story "On the Western Circuit" has been given a whirl around the musical theater genre. It is called After The Fair by its creators, and this miniature-sized musical is a bittersweet charmer filled with ironies, lovely tonal music, intelligent lyrics, and it's performed by a splendid cast of four. The haven't-we-heard-this-before plot concerns a virtually illiterate maid who, on her day off, has a fling with a dashing young man whom she meets at a fair. The time is 1890s England. After the fair, they must part but promise to write each other. When the maid realizes she is pregnant, she confides in her mistress. Convinced that the middle-class gentleman, an aspiring barrister, loves her and would marry her if he knew of her situation, the maid enlists the help of her mistress to write romantic letters for her to him (Shades of Cyrano are duly acknowledged, even in the script).
Jennifer Piech does a captivating transformation as the maid who is prepared to use her wiles to pass herself off as literate, and as a proper wife. While James Ludwig, as the duped barrister ultimately torn between the love of two women, and David Staller, as Edith's neglectful, yet indulgent-to- a-fault husband do not have the most sympathetic roles, they offer striking and observant characterizations of the Victorian male. It's a delight.
Married to an inattentive bore, the mistress finds her long- dormant romantic inclinations fulfilled by writing the love letters for her maid, who can barely write her own name. That all four characters are bound to have their lives and relationships undergo great changes is a given, but not the delightful way the creative team conspires to keep you watching and waiting for each new twist and turn. Travis L. Stockley has staged this genteel yet romantically insinuating menage deftly and with imagination. Some of the action, past, present and in different places, is seen simultaneously and comically considered, as when the young lovers, frolicking through an intimate encounter in a field, make use of the same table being used for quite a different purpose in a sedate drawing room. As with all good stories, things don't turn out exactly as you might expect. But as things do turn, you will be moved by the rhapsodic longings of Michelle Pawk as Edith, the ignored wife who is renewed by the passions that she gives expression to in her letters.
