PUMPED

posted by James Reel

    Still immersed in the Fund-Raising Campaign That Will Not Die, still no time for original blogging, insofar as anything I do here is original. Merely a link to my latest piece in the Tucson Weekly:

    Hal Hundley's back in town. He's started a new musical theater company, and he's putting on a show this weekend.
    A show that, oddly enough, doesn't really reflect what Hundley intends to accomplish with his group.
    Roundabout Music Theatre is presenting Pump Boys and Dinettes, a country-music revue. "It's not typical of what I do," Hundley admits, "and it's a little difficult to put together, because it's mostly music, not much dialogue, and actors play the musical instruments instead of having a separate orchestra."
    Hundley is usually a traditional book-show kind of guy. He founded SALOC--the Southern Arizona Light Opera Company--in 1976, launched it with the musical 1776, and then went on to standard Rodgers and Hammerstein-style fare. That's the sort of thing Hundley intends Roundabout to present in the future, on a reduced scale, but for now, he wanted something that would appeal to both bikers and Woody Guthrie fans--he hopes to draw an audience from this weekend's Tucson Thunder biker gathering and the Tucson Folk Festival. The Sound of Music probably would not have been a good choice.