Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry will come to life tonight (Wednesday) at Kaleidoscope Theatre.

Leader of the Pack: The Ellie Greenwich Musical will begin tonight (July 15) and run July 16, 17, 18, 20 and 21 at 7:30 p.m. with a special matinee performance on July 19.

“This is a play I found quite a few years ago and I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time, but it just didn’t seem like the right time ever, until this summer,” Director Becky Neuman said. 

“I think what really made me want to do it was the music, because it is the early 1960’s rock ‘n’ roll. It just seemed like a really fun thing to do. It is actually a musical review more than a musical, so there is a lot of music and a lot of songs that people will remember,” she told the Mail.

The cast consists of 18 members with several other as crew and music. The part of the young Ellie Greenwich will be played by Rebecca Graf and the part of Jeff Barry will be played by Landon Brown. A young Darlene Love will be played by Misha Maeska and Phil Spector, under the name Gus Sharkey, who was a big producer in the 1960’s, will be played by Michael James.

Neuman said the musical is set in the early 1960’s when Greenwich and Barry were writing songs. They met, fell in love and were married. 

“While they were together they wrote a number of songs and so this is some of the songs they wrote together plus some that they did on their own,” she said. “It is their story, how Ellie got started work and met Jeff and fell in love. That is just kind of interlaced through the songs.”

Some of the songs the cast will be singing will include: “Chapel of Love”, “Da Do Ron Ron”, “Be my Baby”, “Hanky Panky”, “Do Wah Diddy” and of course the title song “Leader of the Pack”.

Neuman said the musical was put together quite fast because of scheduling.

“I had readings and auditions in May, but we really didn’t start working on it until the end of May (beginning) of June. We have kind of hammered it together real quickly. It has been a lot of work because we didn’t have a lot of time to put it together. Normally I would like to take two or three months. We just had to rehearse a lot harder and a lot faster than we normally would have.”

Kaleidoscope Theatre, located at Drumheller Valley Secondary School on Highway 10, is Drumheller’s community theatre. 

All of the cast, crew, and behind-the-scenes members are volunteers.

For ticket information visit www.kaleidoscopetheatre.ca 

Police remind residents that the best way to protect yourself from crime is to not give criminals the opportunity to make you a victim.
    This comes in light of a number of break-ins to vehicles being reported in the area.
   Corporal Kevin Charles, acknowledges there have been a number of reports of thefts from cars.  The problem is also widely reported on social media and it appears that different neighbourhoods throughout the valley are being targeted. He says they have made some progress in investigating some of these incidents, but police also need the support of the public.
   “There were some kids just the other day who were actually caught breaking into a car,” said Charles. “We really want people who do have information to come forward. There are people who might have knowledge, but they are friends of friends, or they don’t want to get involved, so that makes it difficult for us as well.”
    He asks if people see anything suspicious, to report it to police right way. He also urges residents to take some simple steps to protect themselves.
    “Don’t wait, call right away,” said Charles.
    Other simple steps include making sure vehicles are locked, valuables are removed and there is nothing in plain sight to tempt potential thieves.
   “People are leaving valuables in their cars with the doors unlocked and in plain sight. Unfortunately we are not living in a world where we can do that, because there are people who will take advantage of people’s good nature and victimize them.”
   “We do what we can with enforcement and patrols, but we can’t be everywhere at once, we have kids skulking around at night.”
   The RCMP is deploying another tool to help patrol. This is the bike unit.
   “That is why we are putting guys on bike patrol, at night when we can. These are the kind of crimes we want to target, and we simply can’t with guys driving around.”