Root Beer Lady the Musical by Barbara Cary Hall (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Root Beer Lady the Musical by Barbara Cary Hall
• Eero Laine

ROOT BEER LADY THE MUSICAL. Book, music, and lyrics by Barbara Cary Hall. Directed by Laurie Kess. Ely’s Historic State Theater, Ely, MN. September 8, 2023.

If you drive far enough, you eventually run out of road. And if you’re driving north through Minnesota, you might hit the end of the road right around the town of Ely. You can keep traveling, but you’ll need a canoe to transport you through the federally designated wilderness that borders the town. Throughout its history, Ely was a mining town, a logging town, and also a tourist town—a gateway to the wilderness for anglers and campers, youth groups, and adventurers.

Ely is also an arts town. Photography, painting, and other visual arts have flourished in Ely since the turn of the twentieth century in no small part because of the beauty of the landscape. The area, it seems, is also full of singers, poets, musicians, and actors. The Ely Music and Drama Club celebrated its centenary in 2023, and Ely’s Historic State Theater has been significantly expanded and updated in recent years. If you find yourself at the end of the road during Ely’s annual Harvest Moon Festival in September, you will likely have a chance to see Root Beer Lady the Musical, which premiered in 2017 and has been performed in different iterations ever since. The musical celebrates and remembers Dorothy Molter, who spent her life not in Ely but out past the border of what is today the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Molter lived on an island called the Isle of Pines for the better part of the twentieth century. It is a small island, and it’s still there on Knife Lake, if you are willing to paddle a canoe for half a day and carry it over a series of portages and small rapids. That is more or less how Molter got to and from her island home for most of her life. She moved there in the 1930s and stayed until her death in 1986. Not long after she moved to Knife Lake, the federal government began buying up private property with the intention of converting the area to federally managed wilderness. The process took decades, and as it wore on, Molter saw modern conveniences and connections to society recede one congressional bill or executive order at a time.

Molter supplemented her income by selling supplies and snacks to passing canoeists. However, a 1949 federal law prohibited float planes from landing in the area, making it difficult to transport enough inventory. Realizing she had a significant supply of glass pop bottles on the island, she began to brew and bottle root beer that she could make with lake water and dry goods that were more easily transported by canoe. She then offered the root beer to summer canoeists and campers for a donation. She was eventually known in the region (and nationally) as the Root Beer Lady. Her obituary in the New York Times reminded readers that she had once been described as the loneliest woman in the United States, living alone, on an island, in the pine forest of northern Minnesota.

And what better way to commemorate a woman who lived and died in the solitude of the wilderness [End Page 241] than with a comedic jukebox musical featuring polka music, local pop and folk songs, and Scandinavian and eastern European waltzes? Fittingly for the region and for an homage to Molter, the ten-person cast of Root Bear Lady the Musical was costumed in denim, plaid, and fishing caps. The set featured pine tree silhouettes, and a large screen filled the back of the stage. As the cast sang and waltzed through the various songs, linked loosely by skits and scenes from Molter’s life, images of Molter herself and the Isle of Pines on Knife Lake were projected across the back of the stage. The overall production swung wildly and charmingly, between huddling together in a wood-paneled living room to watch a family slideshow and a Hamm’s Beer-fueled night out at the...