Weston Theater Company has long been known for its spectacular musicals, and 2025 will be no exception. Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” the 2008 Broadway musical based on the 1954 hit movie starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen, reprises most of the show including the big dance numbers.
Creating those dance performances is Weston choreographer-in-residence Felicity Stiverson, who is just beginning the process. And perhaps her biggest challenge is that, because of Vermont’s floods, this year’s productions will remain in Weston’s 140-seat Walker Farm Theater as opposed to Weston Playhouse’s 306.
“So how do you make a huge production number with a cast that’s significantly smaller than what you would have on Broadway or a National Tour — and create something that feels like what we’re seeing is still a gigantic production number?” Stiverson says.
“And how do you utilize the actors and dancers we have in the best way?”
This is the first of three columns that will follow Stiverson as she choreographs the Weston Theater Company production of “White Christmas,” running July 16-Aug. 10 at the Walker Farm Theater in Weston.
“White Christmas” follows two buddies, Bob Wallace and Phil Davis, who after World War II, become a popular song-and-dance duo. Through a series of comic misadventures, they end up rescuing their former commanding general by putting on a show at his struggling Vermont inn. The book is by David Ives and Paul Blake, with delicious music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.
Stiverson, who lives in New York City, first came to Weston in 2013 as the dance captain for “42nd Street,” and she has returned every season since. Her first choreography was in 2017 for “Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical” (directed by Tim Fort and starring Susan Haefner and the late Samuel Lloyd Jr.). Stiverson’s first main stage production came the following year, “West Side Story” (also directed by Fort).
“It’s really a treasured place for me, a treasured theater, a treasured group of collaborators, that I really look forward to working with every year and creating something special.”
Stiverson is at the very beginning of her process. She has read the script several time, and, of course, knows the film frontwards and backwards from watching it every Christmas.
“The stage show is different in a lot of ways, one of which is that they took out some of the songs and added new songs and shifted some stuff around narratively,” Stiverson said. “I have also read that this stage show didn’t work as well. So I guess that would be one of our challenges, to make it work.
“You know, Susannah (Gellert, director and Weston’s executive artistic director) and Larry (Pressgrove, music director) and I approached some of these musicals that have been done a lot, and I feel like we always manage to land on kind of a fresh version both because of some of the restrictions of doing it in a smaller space, and doing it with a smaller cast than they maybe had on Broadway.
“There just tends to be magic in setting some fresh eyes on it in Vermont and not feeling beholden to what people have done before us,” Stiverson said. “Sometimes, I feel like we end up with a better, more magical, version.”
It’s a real big classic song and dance musical, so Stiverson approaches it that way.
“But typically, it’s staged I would say in a super classical way that for me feels a little old-fashioned and maybe a little uptight,” she said. “And so a lot of my choreography is very physical and grounded and really jazzy.”
Stiverson starts with the structure of the big old school musical, but looks for places she can insert her kind of energetic, grounded, jazzy choreography.
“When we had the auditions here in New York, I had to tell the dancers in the room, some of whom have done a bunch of different productions of ‘White Christmas,’ forget all the kind of stylistic things you’ve done in other ‘White Christmases’ and try to approach this choreography with the fresh eyes that I’m using to see it,” Stiverson said. “And there were some exciting moments in the dance studio audition room because I felt like I was getting a really great energy from all the dancers. So I’m excited to see what we can create with the people I cast.”
Stiverson has been particularly busy lately, including choreography for operas. (She is on the faculty at Manhattan School of Music).
“The first thing I always do is really sit down with the score and the script to create a ‘To Do List’,” Siverson said. “Basically, even if I think I know the show well, I mark out all the numbers that I think are going to have major choreography, and then all the transitions that might have more movement or more musical staging.”
Between now and June 7, the next column, Stiverson will be in the studio starting to work on the nuts and bolts of choreography, choreographing phrases, starting to sketch out formations and the numbers, and everything that goes into this.
“I just do a lot of preparation myself in a studio so that when we get into the rehearsal space, I really know what I’m teaching right away,” Stiverson said.
Stiverson’s success as a choreographer has actually been a challenge to her work at Weston. On Monday, she started working on a production of “Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story” at Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts.
“It’s a little bit of a reprise of the ‘Buddy’ that we did two years ago in Weston that got flooded out,” Stiverson said. “And so David Bonanno is going to be in it and Meredith (McDonough) is going to be directing it (both from the Weston production). And so, I do that for the next few weeks and then I have a couple weeks before I jump into being in Vermont.
“And so, in those couple weeks between the two shows, I’m going to be urgently working on all of this choreography for ‘White Christmas’,” Stiverson said. “I’m already getting a head start on it but that’s kind of the time frame I’m looking at, ‘Buddy’ right into ‘White Christmas,’ which is going to be exciting.”
Jim Lowe is theater critic and arts editor of The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and Rutland Herald, and can be reached at jim.lowe@rutlandherald.com or jim.lowe@timesargus.com.
