Audience Plays Role in Hackmatack Playhouse's 'BUDDY'

There is a moment in the musical, "Buddy," when the audience realizes they are part of the show. They are not just the audience at Hackmatack Playhouse in Berwick, Maine, but they are thrust into the Buddy Holly show itself as part of the audience at the Apollo Theater in New York.

"That is the most fun for me, when the audience suddenly realizes we will break the fourth wall," said Michael Fisher, a New York actor who plays a singer at the Apollo in "Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story," opening Wednesday, July 5, at Hackmatack.

The scene has added poignancy because the Maine audience, which is apt to be 99 percent white, is supposedly an all-black audience in the 1950s at Harlem's famous theater.

"This story about the famous rock and roll icon takes place during a time when white performers playEd White music for white audiences and black performers played black music to black audiences," said Michael Guptill, owner and producer of Hackmatack. "When Buddy Holly steps out before the supposedly all-black audience, everyone from the band to the audience members are stunned, according to the script."

The production includes 16 cast members who tell the story of how Buddy Holly, who died in a 1959 plane crash at the age of 22, became an inspiration for rock stars to come. He was widely considered to have broken not just musical barriers, but racial barriers as well.

For 32-year-old Fisher, the only black performer in the show, this scene holds import as well as humor, which helps dispel the tension around a sensitive topic.

"That scene breaks the racial barrier so that when Buddy and his band finally hit the stage the audience can also find the comedy in it and that makes it all ok," said Fisher, noting that the real life audience members are the only ones who actually know Buddy Holly is not black.

"Everyone thinks that he's black because of his music, but they know," said Fisher.

In the same scene as Fisher appears, a Latina singer played by Dana Eisman, 22, of New York, introduces Buddy Holly and his band, The Crickets, saying how much everyone is gong to love these performers. She notices and is surprised by a row of white people in the front of the theater, because she too does not know Buddy Holly and the band are white and she does not realize these people came with the band.

Fisher and Eisman, who sing together, say they will play the scene to fit the audience reaction, a decision backed by director Billy Butler of Rye.

"Billy gave us a lot of freedom to do what are doing," said Fisher, who has played this role twice before in productions in Manchester and Meredith, NH.

"A lot will depend on the energy the audience brings," agreed Eisman. "Usually theater audiences are very open and like to experience new things. They like being brought into a whole new world."

The good thing, said Fisher is that music "is the one universal language everyone can get on board with."

"Buddy, the Buddy Holly Story," will be at Hackmatack Playhouse at 8 pm Wednesdays though Saturdays July 5 through July 22 and 2 pm for matinees on Thursdays, July 6, 13 and 20. For more information or tickets call 207-698-1807 or go to hackmatack.org.

Pictured: Michael Fisher and Dana Eisman, both actors from the New York area, play singers at Harlem's Apollo Theater during the production of Buddy, the Buddy Holly story at Hackmatack Theater.