Liner Notes for "Forever Hold Your Peace":

Forever Hold Your Peace premiered in January of 1992 and ran for four months, with most performances being sold out.  In fact, the show was so popular that it returned for three more runs, each featuring refinements and revisions, which resulted in this final version of the show, edited from four performances recorded during August of 2007.  As always, the many residents of Dumpster, Texas, were played by Radio Music Theatre’s three-member resident company…Vicki Farrell, Rich Mills, and writer/director Steve Farrell.

Forever Hold Your Peace is one of the shows most commonly selected by Fertle fans as their favorite.  Like all RMT comedies, it was designed to stand alone, so that first-timers could enjoy it without having seen the earlier shows in the Fertle Family series.  However, it offered a lot of new twists for RMT’s diehard fans, making the first references to “little baby owls” (owl references were later added to all Fertle shows), introducing the character of Braxton Hix (Lou Fertle’s high school nemesis), and finally uniting Uncle Al and Gwenda (who had been flirting with Al since the death of his first wife, Orabella).

 
This was also the first show in which Pete DePugh, Justicena’s downtrodden and henpecked husband, was given a major role in the action.  The play begins with a menopausal Justicena throwing Pete out of their car, leaving him cold and alone on a deserted highway in Maine.  That’s when God speaks to Pete, sending him on a divine quest.  Somehow, Pete’s saga and the wedding of Al and Gwenda unite to form a comedy…and we hope you’ll enjoy it as much as this audience did, sitting shoulder to shoulder in RMT’s packed 180-seat cabaret back in 2007.