March 6, 2023 By Roy Harris
The all-woman cast Hingham Civic Music Theatre has chosen for “The Sweet Delilah Swim Club,” set to open for two weekends April 28 at town hall’s Sanborn Auditorium, includes two actors from Hingham, two from Rockland, and one from Kingston, director Danny Bolton has announced.
Hingham stage veterans Sarah Dewey and Patty Bowes-Phillips play Sheree and Jeri Neal, respectively, with Rockland’s Bonnie Gardner and Carol Cahill as Lexie and Dinah, and Kingston’s Stephanie Baker as Vernadette.
They will combine in an intimate portrayal of “the journey of five women who first met on a competitive swim team and have forged a 50-year-plus bond of friendship,” says the Braintree-based Bolton, esteemed as both an award-winning actor and a director. “I have loved this play from the first time I read it, and found myself laughing out loud.”
Playwrights Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten, he adds, created scenes that unravel to show the five “reap the inherent joys that such a long-standing bond can bring.” And “at its generous heart” it is about “the bonds that sustain us and make life ‘Sweet.’ It is said that we laugh deepest and longest with the people who have known us deepest and longest, and this play lets us do just that.”
As the HCMT ensemble of Dewey, Bowes-Phillips, Gardner, Cahill and Baker will show, “Bittersweet mixes with hysterical; tears of laughter spring from tears of sadness,” says the director, a Boston College graduate who has played the Shubert Theatre, Lyric Stage, and Company Theatre and other local venues. His acting has garnered coveted IRNE awards for Best Featured Actor and Best Actor in a Musical, a BroadwayWorld Award for Best Featured Actor, along with a Moss Hart Award for Excellence in Theatre. He has been an Actors Equity Association member since 1995.
The April 28-29 opening will be followed the next weekend, May 6-7, at Sanborn, 210 Central St. Ticket information will be available soon.
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Roy Harris is a Hingham-based journalist who has acted in South Shore community theater productions for two decades.
