thePULSEThe Royal Worcester Corset Company Proves that Everything Old is New Again
By Jason W. Prokowiew
In 1993, Shrewsbury’s Virginia Byrne and Worcester’s Kallin Johnson set about writing a musical about Worcester. The Royal Worcester Corset Company told the story of Jennie Ballou, a young French Catholic girl who in 1910 is enjoying everything Worcester was back then ~ a leading industrial city, a destination for immigrants from all over the world, and a place to make good money as a seamstress in the Corset Company, the world’s leading manufacturer of women’s corsets, founded by Worcester’s David Hale Fanning.
“We were doing research at the Worcester Historical Society when Virginia found this Corset Company,” Johnson explained. “It seemed a natural hook for a production here. We then dug through the voluminous materials at the Society about David Hale Fanning and we created the Jennie Ballou character from a list of people who lived on Grand Street next to the Corset factory and then Per Larson a young man who lived on Upsala Street.”
Enter love, in the form of a Protestant Swedish immigrant named Per Larsen, who falls for Jennie. Enter the drama of Corset, as the two lovers find no support from their communities for their cross-religious, cross-cultural romance.
Working with funds from a Worcester Cultural Council grant, Byrne and Johnson first staged Corset at the Zecco Performing Arts Center at Anna Maria College. Then they put Corset away. And more than a decade passed. The dust settled.
Enter Ted Coghlin, who saw Corset in 1993 and is now the Chair of the Board of Directors for the newly opened $100 million Technical High School ~ the same technical high school that sprang from the efforts of David Hale Fanning, the founder of the Corset Company. Coghlin approached Byrne in 2005 about resurrecting Corset for the inaugural show at the school.
“He literally harassed me for about a year and a half to revive the show as the grand opening,” Byrne said.
Anyone who knows Byrne, whether it’s a student at Notre Dame Academy where she heads the Arts Department or an audience member whose seen the fiery Byrne in one of many shows she’s helmed in Central MA over the years, knows she’s no delicate flower. She’s tough stuff. She resisted Coghlin, and the work of bringing Corset back, until she saw the school’s 800-seat, state-of-the-art George F. and Sybil H. Fuller Auditorium. That’s when she and Johnson caved.
They fine-tuned their research, cut some scenes, added others.
“I [rewrote] the whole score, scoring it for the Broadway orchestra of today and adding a lot of connecting music,” Johnson said.
They talent scouted at local theatres, held auditions, and called on their combined 45-plus years of theatre and music experience in Central MA to mold a roughly 25-person cast and production team ~ featuring choreographer Denise Day, founder of Denise Day Dance Center in Shrewsbury, and costume designer Kurt Hultgren, resident designer of the Theatre Department at Holy Cross College.
“It’s exciting to hone the script and stage it again with a cream of the crop cast and staff,” Byrne said.
A call from Johnson to Worcester native and New England Conservatory graduate Erin Conley yielded the Jennie Ballou they wanted.
“Kallin called me and said he knew me from somewhere,” Conley said, “He said there was this part in this play, and he thought I might be good for it.”
Over the summer rehearsals got underway, and now Corset is set to open again for a 9-show run, with fresh purpose, on October 13.
“The star-crossed romance will still move the audience,” Byrne said, “but the pride of the city’s industrial history will be more focused because of the school. It seems as if perhaps we wrote the show for this event, we just didn’t know it at the time.”
Corset runs Oct. 13 and 14 at 8 pm, Oct. 15 at 2 pm, and Oct. 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, and 28 at 8 pm. Tickets are $25 for orchestra seats, $20 loge, and $15 for students with ID. Call the Plante Agency at 508.752.0888 to reserve yours.
