SEQUIM — Talk to the nuns as they’re getting ready for their big performance, and you hear a lot of verbal jostling.
These sisters, see, are busy singing the praises of their colleagues. Sister Leo the novice, aka Sequim Gym owner Kristin LaMoure, first hails her choreographer, Marianne Trowbridge, and conductor Dewey Ehling. They are one graceful pair, LaMoure says.
And along with director Larry Harwood and a small flock of habit-clad women, they are staging “Nunsense,” one of America’s more irreverent stories of Catholic activity.
This classic, whose comic routines have been translated into some two dozen languages, opens tonight at Olympic Theatre Arts, 414 N. Sequim Ave., and runs each Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday through Feb. 20.
“Every time I’ve seen this team do anything together, it’s been a really, really good show,” LaMoure said of the Trowbridge-Ehling-Harwood triumvirate.
Among Ehling and Trowbridge’s credits is “Cabaret,” the musical that opened the new Olympic Theatre Arts playhouse last February.
“Nunsense” is musical theater, but it’s practically the opposite of the dark “Cabaret.” The women wear wimples rather than fishnet stockings, and the hijinks are nonstop.
Here’s the nuns’ story: Sister Julia Child of God made a batch of vichyssoise that wasn’t so good. Dozens of the Little Sisters of Hoboken perished; they had to be stored in the freezer.
To pay for a decent burial, the surviving sisters stage a fundraising talent show. Their venue is their Catholic school auditorium, where the eighth-graders are putting on the 1950s-themed musical “Grease.” Which is why there’s a picture on the wall of Marilyn Monroe looking as lusty as the nuns look prim.
Truth is, of course, the sisters have abundant zest for life. And they love being on stage.
“We all have egos the size of Mount Everest,” LaMoure said of herself and the rest: Sister Mary Hubert (Karen Pritchard), Sister Robert Anne (Robin Hall) and Sister Mary Amnesia (Teresa Pierce).
The sisters sing, dance and mingle with the audience, teaching Christian values all the while. And ironically, Sister Mary Amnesia, who lost her memory when a crucifix fell on her head, administers a quiz on Christianity, complete with small rewards for effort.
And LaMoure, the youngest nun, loves ballet and dreams of appearing in a tutu — until Sister Mary Hubert, mistress of the novices, sings her a song about that old thing called humility.
As Sister Leo, “I’m doing penance,” joked LaMoure, who played the temptress Lola in last year’s Port Angeles Community Players production of “Damn Yankees.”
On a night when Janice Parks, who plays the Mother Superior, couldn’t come to rehearsal, LaMoure and her sisters raved about her abilities: Parks not only has a lovely voice, but she also does a nimble Irish brogue.
“When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a nun or a princess,” Parks admitted in a telephone interview. “There was something about the habits that I thought was really cool.”
A music major at the California State University in Fullerton, Parks grew up to be the worship and arts director at the Dungeness Community Church. She also has appeared in numerous community theater productions, from Olympic Theatre Arts’ “Godspell” and “Side by Side by Sondheim” to playing the queen in the Port Angeles Light Opera’s “Cinderella.”
The thing about “Nunsense,” Parks said, is that the actresses “have developed such good chemistry.”
The nuns are excellent singers, dancers and comediennes, she said, adding, “we are all in awe of each other.”
Hall, who plays the streetwise, basketball-playing sister from Brooklyn, said this isn’t a Catholics-only show. Everybody, she promises, can get the “Nunsense” humor.
“You can lose yourself, for two hours, in laughter,” Hall added.
Curtain time tonight is 7:30, as it is on each Friday and Saturday night of the show’s run. Saturday and Sunday matinees are slated for 2 p.m. through Feb. 20; Wednesday performances are at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets are $25 for adults, $10 for children 11 and younger, while active-duty military service members and Olympic Theatre Arts members enjoy a $2 discount.
Tickets can be purchased online with a $1.50 service charge at www.OlympicTheatreArts.org, and more information awaits at 360-683-7326.
