The Daly News

Music has been a key feature of productions at GRSF since our debut season in 2004. The Festival has been graced by several accomplished composers including Gregg Coffin (Much Ado About Nothing, 2005; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 2009) and Daniel Kallman (As You Like It, Macbeth, 2007; The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, 2008; The Tempest, 2009). Numerous GRSF productions have featured curtain calls reprising songs sung earlier in the evening; last season’s Love’s Labour’s opened with an adaptation of the traditional American tune, “In The Good Old Summertime” that served helped introduce the play’s cast of characters.

Attendance at GRSF’s Friday and Saturday free pre-performance Prelude Concerts on the green, co-produced with Theatre du Mississippi, demonstrates GRSF audiences’s love of music, as well as Minnesotans’ love of being outside during the summer months. Last season’s sold-out benefit performance of GRSF company member Jonathan Gillard Daly’s WWII musical memoir, The Daly News, adapted from his grandfather’s newsletters to extended family and friends across the country and around the world (with music by Gregg Coffin and Larry Delinger) made crystal clear our audience’s appetite for musicals.

Thus, the decision to include The Daly News, featuring Daly and fellow Milwaukee Chamber Theatre cast members Jack Forbes Wilson and Jeff Schaetske, as part of our 2010 season seemed entirely natural.

Martin Daly’s four sons (one of whom, Robert Daly, was Jon Daly’s father) plus a son-in-law, all served in the military during WWII. Martin would retreat to his basement “publishing center” in the “family manse” on Washington Boulevard in Milwaukee once a week to compile, edit, mimeograph, and then mail what turned out to be an extensive series of newsletters that kept friends and family informed about his four boys’ service to their country.

The good news is that all five boys came home safe and sound. The newsletters also survived and were passed from one generation to the next. It took Jon many months to read through the three bound volumes of “The Daly News,” as Martin called his weekly publication, but he knew instantly that he had been entrusted with a theatrical goldmine.

The result is this season’s production of The Daly News, originally premiered at PCPA Theaterfest in Santa Maria, California, and further honed and developed into its three-actor incarnation, first produced at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre in 2008. The musical is a virtuosic piece for its performers, who play multiple roles and also provide live piano accompaniment. The Daly News is a funny, poignant, not-to-be-missed experience that will not only tug at the heartstings of members of “the greatest generation,” but of anyone who has longed to say the things he or she never got to say to a parent or to a child.

10 performances only.

Approximate running time: 2 hours, including intermission.