The Calais Town Hall sits on Kent Hill Road in East Calais, a two-story white building with a spectacular chandelier hanging over its upstairs hall. It was built in 1866, and for much of its life it was known as the Gospel Hollow Town Hall. Like a lot of rural Vermont meeting halls, it eventually fell into disrepair. Its revival as a working performance space is one of the quieter stories behind a new musical that opens there this October.
That musical is "Great-Great-Grandfolk," written by Chris Colt and presented by the Gospel Hollow Players. It runs for eight performances over two weekends: October 8, 9, 10, 15, 16 and 17 at 7 p.m., and October 11 and 18 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 general admission, available through TheaterEngine or at the door. Colt co-directs with Tom Blachly, with musical arrangements by Peter Schmeeckle. The cast includes Jessica Goodlin, Colt, Alfred Mills, Linda Moschelle, Theo Exploration and Sarah DeBouter.
To understand why a new musical in a small Vermont town matters, it helps to know the playwright. Colt is a Calais-area writer who, in May 2021, suffered a stroke on the very day he and director Margo Whitcomb had planned to meet about producing another of his plays. He was rushed to the hospital and spent about a month and a half there, first fighting for his life and then, in rehabilitation, fighting to regain basic function.
Five years on, Colt remains essentially paralyzed on his right side. He walks with a cane and a leg brace, and he lives with aphasia, a language condition that can make speech halting. In conversation he is lucid; a word sometimes gets stuck, and then a whole sentence bursts through. What the stroke did not touch was his creativity. He wrote his musicals using only his left hand, working on the composing platform GarageBand. He also sings in Vermont's Aphasia Choir, a group whose members are stroke survivors; the choir has performed at Saint Michael's College.
"It's been slow, but I've come a long way in five years," Colt told Seven Days.
His collaborators are neighbors in the most literal sense. Bob Hannan, who lives nearby, wrote music for several of Colt's songs, with Colt supplying lyrics and Hannan composing and refining. Whitcomb, who has directed Colt's work, has described his material as "enchanting and slapstick." And the venue itself is part of the story: the Gospel Hollow Players are a local troupe that rehearses upstairs at the Calais Town Hall, and the town's own calendar lists those rehearsals through the fall.
This is not the first time Colt's work has christened the refurbished hall. An earlier musical of his, "Marconi's Wave: A Musical Tainted Fable," with music by Jim Thompson, was staged there by the Gospel Hollow Players across two weekends in October, with a cast drawn from the same circle of local performers. Colt's plays have also been produced at the Unadilla Theatre in Calais, the barn-and-black-box operation run by the Blachly family, where Tom Blachly has directed and where he grew up in a theatrical household. That web of relationships — a playwright, a neighbor-composer, a director from a local theater family, a cast of townspeople — is what a community production actually looks like up close.
What "Great-Great-Grandfolk" is about remains largely under wraps; the title suggests a story reaching back through generations, which would fit a writer who has been thinking about legacies and second chances. What is documented is the shape of the thing: an original musical, written by a man who relearned how to make one, performed by his neighbors, in a hall that was itself brought back from the brink. Three comeback stories, as one account of Colt's work put it, packed into a very small town.
The run is short and the seating is whatever a town hall holds, so the practical advice is simple. Shows are October 8, 9, 10, 15, 16 and 17 at 7 p.m., and October 11 and 18 at 2 p.m., at 1662 Kent Hill Road in East Calais. Tickets are $20, sold through TheaterEngine or at the door. For anyone within driving distance of central Vermont, it is a rare chance to see a brand-new musical in the room where it was rehearsed, in a building that has been hosting this kind of thing since 1866.