‘The Spitfire Grill’ Offers Good Home Cooking

(left to right) Micah Friedman as Percy Talbott, Rhonda Rae Busch as Effy Krayneck, Suzanne Graff as Hannah Ferguson, Frankie Breit as Sheriff Joe Sutter, and Rachael Zientek as Shelby Thorpe in Skylight Music Theatre’s production of The Spitfire Grill, running February 27 through March 15, 2026. Photo by Mark Frohna.

Sweet. Intimate. Warm. These are not words automatically associated with musical theater. But they apply positively to the current Skylight production, a musical created 25 years ago with the aim of making the original movie’s plot less dramatic and more penetrating.

One of the changes was to move the location of the dying town of Gilead from Maine to rural Wisconsin, allowing the music to be that inviting mix of country and folk melodies that many still link to Wisconsin-grown, fiddle-friendly shows, only here there are classical echoes as well.

The current version of The Spitfire Grill, reinserting some words from deceased lyricist Fred Alley, is directed by his partner, co-book writer and composer James Valcq, a big name in Door County with a marvelous musical track record, starting as a boy soprano in Milwaukee in the 1960s and moving on to composing and conducting.

So he knows this material up close, and his choice is to keep it feeling homegrown and neighborly human, conducted onstage by keyboardist David Bonofiglio with informally dressed band members looking homespun though they are talented musicians. They are busier than most of the audience realizes, keeping the musical underpinnings central to the experience. (Another Skylight veteran, as is Bonofiglio, Janna Vinson, served as music director.)

Six singers, aside from a silent, mysterious Stranger, play all the roles with wonderful harmony and sell-to-the-front lyrics that touch on nature but smoothly advance the story, with songs like “A Ring Around the Moon,” “Ice and Snow” and “Shoot the Moon.” Valcq directs with masterful understanding of the appeal of the music — he wrote it! — while taking his time for emotion to sink in.

You may not go out humming the tunes, but they are pleasant and forward-moving, allowing the cast to turn Wisconsin broomsticks and shovels into percussion instruments. The story smartly plays upon all the “lonely diner” tropes of movie and theater fiction (think of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Waitress and so forth) where diverse and conflicting strangers meet for breakfast and develop a special rapport.

In this case, there are hints in her lower-register tones and physical flinches at why Percy Talbott went to prison. She has been released to work as a waitress in the lone diner left in the picturesque but failing town of Gilead. She is played with intense, warm singing and attractive acting by Micah Friedman. She spends much of her stage time interweaving her contralto with soprano Rachael Zientek as Shelby, another warm performance. It becomes quite engaging after Zientek enters, a bit too dramatically, as a shivering, neglected wife.

The restaurant is run by the ailing, aging Hannah, played with some powerful vocalizing and center-stage space-holding by Skylight veteran Suzanne Graff. Another role may be musical-comedy stock — the gossipy intruder Effy, annoying all the patrons with her inquisitions — but it is well handled by Rhonda Rae Busch. And while their acting is nothing special, the vocal contributions are full-blown excellent from the cast’s two men — Frankie Breit as the sometime love interest and Nathan Marinan as the bossy relative.

The story centers on how a lottery suggested by Percy warms the rustic charm of Gilead, where the locals had long been consumed by the town’s troubles, not the beauty. The plot also seeks to resolve two mysteries that have kept the audience hanging— one of them the reason that Percy went to prison, and this is neatly resolved by Friedman’s acting and by Zientek’s singing “Wild Bird.”

The other mystery is handled in more maudlin fashion, as if the play can’t escape its melodramatic roots and then decides on an overused staging device – comforting color leaves drifting down from the ceiling at closing.

Leaving the mawkish ending aside, The Spitfire Grill, through March 15, is an enjoyable diversion at the Cabot Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. More info at SkylightMusicTheatre.org.

The Spitfire Grill Gallery

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Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here. For his Dom’s Snippets, an unusual family history and memoir, go to domnoth.substack.com.