There is nothing quite like hearing four guys singing in tight four-part harmonies! It’s a beautiful sound that audiences will hear plenty of in the Sterling Community Theatre Troupe’s production of the hit musical “Forever Plaid” which will be staged at 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, June 14 and 15 and at 2 p.
m. on Sunday, June 16 at the Betsy Dutton Theatre in Sterling High School. This close-cropped, plaid-clad, tight-harmony quartet of high school buddies, Jinx, Smudge, Frankie, and Sparky, go rolling in their cherry red ‘54 Mercury, hopped up about the group’s first big gig, at an airport cocktail bar: The Fusill-Lounge.
Just as they soar to an E flat diminished seventh chord on “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,” a bus crammed with Catholic schoolgirls, on their way to see this new British group, the Beatles, make their American debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” knocks the Merc into discordance, or as it turns out, a kind of non-living limbo. The teen girls survive, the boys, not so much. Though technically dead, the fellas step up again 60 years later in “Forever Plaid” to finally perform that dream show.
That’s the conceit writer/director Stuart Ross concocted for his jukebox musical, playing off the old clean-cut, spiffily-dressed vocal quartets of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, groups such as the Four Aces, the Four Freshmen, and the Ames Brothers. The show contains many golden oldies, songs such as “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “Mome.