CAMP COLLIDES WITH CHAOS: Panache premieres ‘Disaster! The Musical’

Chase Harrison
23 hours ago
6 min read

In the back offices of the Wilmington Railroad Museum, I watch two hunched figures exchange disembodied body parts between one another. The thoughts race, as with a cocked eyebrow I witness a severed hand pulled from a box, examined by one of the figures, and then dismissively tossed back from where it came.

“Do we have any more different body parts to throw around?” Director Ben Thomas-Reid asks his producer, Holli Saperstein.

“Other than the ones that I got you now?” Saperstein replies with a wide-eyed earnestness to her words. She goes on to list, “We have three hands, one foot—and OH and a trachea!” Saperstein exclaims with glee.

Exchanges like this leave me giddy as I start recording these interviews before they “officially” begin. The two cohorts close up their box of… um… “parts” and we gather around to discuss Panache Theatrical Productions’ latest venture, “Disaster! The Musical.” The production is a jukebox musical parody send-up to the disaster film genre, popularized throughout the 1970s. You know, those celebrity stuffed features like “Airport” in ’70, “The Poseidon Adventure” in ’72, “The Towering Inferno” in ’74, and many others.

Saperstein tells about how she came to know about this musical. “I got to see this show in New York during previews on Boardway. A dear friend of mine who knew Seth Rudetsky, one of the musical’s writers, was given tickets to the preview by Rudetsky. We just had so much fun, and there was no message to take away! You know how every show has to bring it to a stop and bring you down with a message? Not here, there is no message here with “Disaster: the Musical!”

Thomas-Reid adds, “Plus, it has never been done in Wilmington, which is always appealing.” Panache has always aimed to bring off-the-wall productions to Wilmington stages. That’s a fact Saperstein, a founder and producer of the company revels in. “We like to do shows that are unexpected or [have] that shock people. Some of the shows we have done I don’t think have been done since we did them and probably wouldn’t have if we didn’t!”

Saperstein presses her finger against the table adding physicality to her next point. “Despite the fact we do “weird” shows, we do quality weird shows. We might do it on a shoestring budget, but you’ll never see anything produced by us without care given.”

After hearing what attracted the company to the show, I wanted to hear what the director found funny about it. “Apparently I have a talent for farce” Thomas-Reid answers.

Saperstein quickly interjects, “Let me tell you! I saw the funniest show I had seen in a very long time when I saw the vampire show this man directed.” Holli points over to a beaming-with-pride director Thomas-Reid.

The stellar comedy Saperstein mentions was “Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors,” which Thomas-Reid directed last year and became the most nominated play at the 2026 Wilmington Theater Awards, where Thomas-Reid earned a nod for Best Director.

Saperstein continues, “I just died laughing the whole time, and that production made me feel the way I did when I saw ‘Disaster’ on Broadway. So, when we selected the show for the season, I knew already the perfect person to direct this level of crazy was Ben. When he accepted, I was thrilled!”

This will be the fourth musical that Panache has staged in The Ruth and Bucky Stein Theatre at Thalian Hall, with the musical opening this coming Thursday, April 23. Saperstein stresses that it’s kinda “crazy” and “demented” to try and put a musical up in this venue. However, past productions such as “Heathers: The Musical” and the Wilmington Theater Award Winning production of “Lizzie” Panache put on in the Stein Studio, the company knows it is more than doable.

“You also just have to trust your audience.” Thomas-Reid says, “I have seen so many shows where they waste time and resources over, say a house used for a one-minute scene, that you’ll never go back to for the rest of the show!” The director emphasizes, “You can trust your audience and just put a table on set or change lighting, and your audience will go with you.”

Thomas-Reid goes on to say “A lot of this is on the actors and I tell you they are not playing subtle at all. Nothing is subtle.” The director goes on to detail that “… At one point in the show the entire ship flips upside down, and how we are solving that is incredibly dumb! I don’t want to give away how we are solving it, but trust, it’s dumb, people will think it’s dumb, and they will laugh. Think of this show as the movie “Airplane” but with the greatest hits of the '70s being sung by everyone through it.”

The production consisted of 51 scenes! To help communicate that, projections will be used to shift from one location to the next aboard the doomed ship. “Shakespeare walked on stage and said we’re in Dunsinane Woods, I mean come on!” Thomas-Reid says.

Bryan Underwood, who serves as the production’s musical director, was very blunt about his being there, “I’m just doing this ‘cause Ben made me.” Underwood says with a laugh. “I’m new to the area, I’ve been here a little over a year now, and have gotten to know Ben. I’m a pianist by trade, but I also have a separate theater resume. I had told myself I wanted to give myself a year. A year to settle into a new place and new job. It seems it was a year and a day, Ben is calling me up saying, ‘So, you’re gonna be my musical director.’”

Saperstein energetically interjects, “And let me just tell you, once people hear and see what he has done with these songs and these wonderful performers. I may never get to use his talents again!” Ben adds “He’s going to be very poplar”

Like Saperstein, Underwood saw “Disaster” while on Broadway, “It is fantastic. I have a soft spot for movies that are dumb, on purpose, and that’s what this is. I mean any show that opens with Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” right out of the box, I’m in.”

Thomas-Reid and Saperstein discuss the outrageously hammy first table read, where the cast arrived with fully formed characters, and caricatures, to the table. Yet my attention is drawn to the life-sized skeleton waving at me from the office’s doorway. What odd sites one meets in theater? My nerves calm when the skeleton is puppeteered into the room by Jamey Stone, cast member and Saperstein’s partner-in-crime.

The two not witnessing the bizarre sight behind them tell me about the cast and I zone back in. “Basically, we have the who’s who of Wilmington Theater Royalty in this cast, in my opinion.” Thomas-Reid tells. “We have Heather Setzler, Brent Schraff, Amy Carter, Jamey Stone, Erin Sullivan! It’s like how I am working with these talented people, as THEIR director. I’m so new to town, to have all these talented people who want to come and work with me, I just get so excited about that. I don’t think I’ll never get excited about that.”

“We cannot stop laughing!” was Thomas-Reid’s response when I ask how the rehearsal process had been. He would go on to add “I’ve had to start telling the actors that they’ve had their fun, it’s time to stop breaking on stage now.”

I ask the team what they hope future audiences will get out of the production, to which Saperstein strongly reiterated her earlier point of, “I hope they walk away with zero message!”

Laughter erupts from the surrendering cast filing in as our conversation unfolded. Saperstein continues, “And I hope their faces hurt from laughing, and that they dance in their seats… OR in the aisles, I do not care. I want… I want them to walk away from this show and say this show is the most fun I’ve had in a theater in a long time!”

Thomas-Reid nods his head in agreement looking over at his producer, “Ditto, I want audiences to say that is the funniest show I have ever seen since Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors, and what is he doing next?!?”

I think music director Bryan Underwood summed up perfectly for everyone involved when he said, “I hope the audience's response will be, I needed that.”

Before taking my leave and letting rehearsal begin; the production treated me to a preview of the opening number. What I saw was a hilarious, multiple-person, madcap cover of Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff!” If this number alone is a sign of things to come, then missing this show would be the real dIsaStEr.