SingerElla is a locally themed musical written and composed by Sally Oberstein and Michael McKinney. The basic plot details of the story are available on the Alaska World Arts Festival website:
“After Ella’s father dies, her deceptive stepmother Cruella takes ownership of Cruella’s Cocktail Castle. Her stepmother and two stepsisters treat Ella like a slave, but play nice in front of the producer of Some of America’s Got Talent, who has arrived in Alaska to make someone a superstar. Homer is his last stop and he makes plans to visit open mic shows at Khartakers, Excuses, Downwind Saloon, Cannisters, and the Briney Beagle on the Homer Spit. Ella’s stepmother bans her from going to the open mics but Vito, her fairy godfather paves the way. When the producer falls in love with Ella’s voice, he doesn’t know how to find her again because she was in disguise…”
Oberstein and McKinney explain some of the basic details of how the musical got started, following their 2025 performance of the Wizard of Odds and other co-produced performances:
“Yeah, I think SingerElla just came up, and then we thought if we do SingerElla in Alice's and make Alice's a part of the show, that might be fun too for the audience. So, we'll see how that works,” McKinney said.
“Yeah, every year when we do this, we think, "Gosh, are we ever going to come up with something new? Then we start pacing the floor and telling jokes to each other and going back and forth, and see what we end up with,” Oberstein said.
“And then we solicit the best people we can possibly think of to be in the cast, and they make us look good. So yeah, they've added so much to this show. It's just really a lot of fun to work with them….” McKinney said.
Cast members who provided comments to the radio include Corey Geysbeek as Quince, Casey Langner and Sage Dance-Wright as the stepsisters and Jenny Medley as an open-mic performer.
Geysbeek commented on the local features of the production and the benefits of providing individual takes to the production:
“It just lands so good with the audience. It seems like, and it just kind of gives us a little bit of sense of pride in our community. We get to laugh at ourselves a little bit, which just kind of brings everyone close together, anyways…I think one thing that's fun about this show compared to some of the other ones that we did, is it seems like a lot of a lot of the little side acts get brought up, they were allowed to come up with their own kind of creative acts, and you really get to see kind of their own personalities come through and their own creative like take on certain things come through, which has been yeah, that's been really fun to see them have a little more ownership over their acts,” Geysbeek said.
Casey Langner and Sage Dance-Wright play the roles of the wicked step sisters:
“It's been really fun, especially getting to be silly together and getting to figure out the wicked part and just get into our inner mean, but remaining silly. Yeah, it's been really fun. Casey and I didn't know each other before this too, so I feel like it's been really great just to step into such a goofy role that really gives us a chance to be kind of sassy and catty and ridiculous,” they said.
Finally, Jenny Medley shares her roles in the play as an open mic performer as a mime, an interpretive dancer, a trumpet player and member of a group song:
“So, there's a lot of open mic scenes in the show, and I am in a number of those scenes. So each time I come on stage, I'm a different character. I think one of the things about being an open mic performer is I have. I have the opportunity to improvise, so I'm not sure there's a guarantee that I will do the same thing every time I get on the stage,” Medley said.
Oberstein made a final comment about the general familiarity of songs in the production: “all of the songs in this production are familiar to people because they're all 100 years old or more in the public domain. So we chose every song that would be familiar to people.”
Homer’s SingerElla will be performed at Alice’s Champagne Palace on Fridays and Saturdays through September 26th and tickets are available online at alaskaworldarts.org.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
