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Highland to Present Spring Musical Dogfight

Highland to Present Spring Musical Dogfight

The Highland Community College theatre and music departments will once again join to present the College’s annual Spring Musical.  This year, the departments will present Dogfight, which has been favorably compared to Hamilton.  The Highland presentation is directed by Sam Smith and Shayna Leahy.  It will grace the Mary Helen Porter Stage in Culbertson Auditorium on March 8and 9 at 7:30 pm and March 10 at 2:00 pm.  This performance is for mature audiences and is open to the public free of charge.

Dogfight is a coming-of-age story of a young marine in the Vietnam era and his relationship with a diner waitress. The story takes its name, Dogfight, from a demeaning game. In 1967, Eddie Birdlace, a U.S. Marine just returned from Vietnam, rides a Greyhound bus heading for San Francisco. As he travels through the night, he remembers Rose Fenny ("Prelude: Take Me Back") and the night he spent in San Francisco four years earlier. Memories overwhelm him and suddenly it is November 21, 1963.

The Greyhound bus becomes a military bus, carrying Private First Class Birdlace and his rowdy fellow Marines, fresh out of training and ready for action. Arriving in San Francisco, they are eager to take the town by storm on their last night in the United States ("Some Kinda Time"). Birdlace and his two best friends, Boland and Bernstein, who call themselves the Three Bees ("We Three Bees"), are participating in a dogfight, a cruel game with simple rules. Each Marine puts $50 in the pot. The one who brings the ugliest date to the party wins the money. Birdlace and his friends set off to scour the city for potential dates ("Hey Good-Lookin'").

The production continues through a night of drunken debauchery before returning to Birdlace as he returns to San Francisco in 1967, a war-torn, though wiser, man to deal with his relationship with the waitress.

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