Catching up with the director of “Catch Me If You Can,” this year’s Apple Blossom Musical

WENATCHEE — Hailey Tolman is a woman of many talents. It used to be that to be an actor, you needed to be well-rounded in a Vaudeville sense: Acting, yes, but also singing and dancing and a charisma that creates its own camera effect.

To direct, however, takes a whole other level of talent and commitment. You have to have all of the above and couple it with the sense to wrangle the same out of a group of people, many of whom you may never have worked with before. And MUSIC theater is an entirely different beast, because it requires a fluency with all of those skills at once that sometimes isn’t required with “regular” plays that have no singing or cues based on the beginning, middle or end of a song.

In a musical, you can’t miss a note.

So it’s been fun to watch Tolman move from her place on the stage in last year’s Apple Blossom musical — as Rizzo in “Grease” — to behind the scenes for this year’s production of "Catch Me If You Can,” a musical stage adaptation by Terrence McNally of the movie by the same name, which is in turn based on an autobiographical work written by the main character of the true story, Frank Abagnale.

How has Tolman achieved the seamless transition from player to playmaker? She trusts her actors. “I like to give them, what I call, I give them the room. I give them floor and the walls, and I let them decorate it. So I give them, ‘There, that's a good way of putting it, yeah.’ I give them their general vibe. ‘This is what is happening in the scene now. This is how I feel that your character would react. Let's have you start over here. By the end of the scene, I need you to end up over here,’” says Tolman.

This musical is special to her. It’s not just that it’s a story that could be told in any generation to any crowd, played by good actors from any background.

“I grew up loving the movie. It was a big staple in my house. My parents were huge Leo [DiCaprio, the star of the film] people, and so I grew up watching it, and when I first heard the soundtrack, I was like, ‘Okay…’ And then I saw the musical, and was like, ‘Oh, this is fabulous.’ Then when I went back and re-watched the movie, I was like, ‘Oh, this is exactly when this musical number would happen. This is exactly when this musical number would happen,” she says.

There has to be a sense of wonder for a 25-year-old woman who sees a piece of art, then sees that art reinterpreted, then gets to reinterpret it herself. And while that’s probably part of the overall fun for Tolman, it’s likely that the larger wonder of it all comes from her background. She moved to this area just a few years back from Wyoming, which is not necessarily known for its vibrant music theater — or even regular theater — scene.

Coupled with the sense of community that Wenatchee’s expansive network of performing arts engenders even in newcomers, directing makes Tolman feel like a true part of our city.

“Coming from Wyoming, we had one community theater that was in a tiny building, and there were maybe, like 30 to 40 of us, right, that were a part of it. And that's it. We didn't have anything else. Our playhouse at max only held about 200 people. We didn't have a Numerica Performing Arts Center. We didn't have a town Toyota Center, right? We didn't have the theaters they have up in Leavenworth, we didn't have any of that. I first moved to Wenatchee and thought, ‘I need to get into the theater scene.’ I start doing research and looking things up. There's 12 different groups that I could jump right in and be a part of. I think it's because of just the deep rootedness in being so community-centric, because the theater is a place that you can come to, and everything outside of the doors does not matter. When you are in the theater, you are part of something bigger. You are all collaborating as a team. It doesn't matter what one person thinks over the other, because you're all as important as each other.”

For something as important to this town as our annual Apple Blossom Musical, it’s hard to imagine meeting someone more appreciative of the opportunity to contribute. Her team is outstanding this year, with Mark Belton producing the show and a classically trained singer in the lead role, and a whole cadre of theater regulars who perform in everything they can get a script for.

This Apple Blossom, everything seems to be playing into the theme that the city picked for the 2025 festival: “The Best Time Ever.” This show promises to be a good time, and Hailey Tolman has certainly had a good time putting it together.

“That's what I love so much about the Apple Blossom show, is you have a huge cast of all kinds of different people. I mean, we have people who, you know, work part time in a cafe and then get to come do this for fun. Or we have people who are doctors and lawyers and, you know myself, I'm a mortician. And we just get to come to this place. We just get to come to this place and have fun for a few hours.”

You can have fun watching Catch Me If You Can at the Numerica Performing Arts Center May 1–4 and 7–10 at 7:30 p.m., with a 2 p.m. showing on Sunday the 4th. Tickets are available through the Numerica Box Office or at this link.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media