Current stage roles a perfect fit for Poway twins

The actresses are featured in “A Hot Night at the Blue Note” at the Broadway Theater in Vista. The new musical, set in a St. Louis jazz club in the summer of 1945, was written by the theater’s owner, Randall Hickman, who also acts in the show.

The sisters play Heidi and Heather Hampton, two singers at the club, whose owner decides to do a live broadcast for the military to save the club from creditors.

“We do several duets and we get to sing a lot of standards from the ‘40s,” said Shauna. The musical concludes with a selection of military-themed songs, including “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “My Buddy” and “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover.”

It also includes “A Tisket, A Tasket,” “This Joint is Jumpin’?” and a big tap dance number set to “It Don’t Mean a Thing.”

“This is a fantastic opportunity because there’s so much history in that era,” she added. “Many of the patrons of the theater have an emotional attachment to the songs.”

The show plays through Sept. 5 at the theater, 340 E. Broadway in downtown Vista.For more information, call 760-806-7905 or click here.

This is one of several instances in which Hickman has created roles specifically for them. The sisters have played twins in local stages so many times, they’ve lost count.

Shelly and Shauna, who both dance, sing opera and act, pursued their craft separately for years.

Shelly has a music degree from Cal State Fullerton and a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii, while Shauna has a vocal performance degree from UCLA and a master’s degree from SDSU.

They moved to San Diego in the early 2000s and started performing in shows around town.

They’ve been in shows both together and individually, performing at the San Diego Opera, Lyric Opera San Diego, The Welk Resort, The Broadway Theatre, Premiere Productions and Cygnet Theatre.

“We’ve done a lot of performing on our own,” said Shelly. “Being together is just a fun thing we do. We enjoy being together.”

The sisters also have their own production company, which they launched to produce two shows in town, including a critically acclaimed staging of “Sideshow,” the Broadway musical about conjoined twins that they produced at the Lyceum Space Theatre in Horton Plaza.

They also wrote the other show, “Our Story, Our Song,” a cabaret musical that’s about a subject near and dear to them: being twins.

“Because we’re twins we’ve gone through all of the years with people asking us a lot of questions,” Shauna said. “We’ve put all of those stories into the show.”

The “two woman show,” will be returning to the Broadway Theater for five shows only on Aug. 22-24, during the off nights of “A Hot Night at the Blue Note.”

The show plays at 6 p.m. on Aug. 22 and at 4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 23-24.

The show came together as an outreach project for the Lyric Opera, Shauna said. They developed it and staged it for the first time in 2006 at the Broadway Theatre. Since then they’ve toured a condensed version of the show at various places around the county.

Shelly said that the show came together naturally after years of them coming up with random ideas, that when it came to writing it was more as if they were just coming together to make things official.

“Really, everything we do comes from a long period of working together and knowing each other,” she said.

For more, visit their website at www.hartsperformanceinc.com.