Winning Smiles at Children's Hospital

Posted by Bruce Miller
One of the great pleasures of the Christmas, Hanukah and Kwanzaa holidays is the opportunity to give the gift of theatre to those who have no chance to enjoy our work under other circumstances.

Throughout the year, Barksdale and Theater IV regularly donate approximately 10% of all our tickets to those who otherwise could not afford to attend. We've been doing this since Theatre IV's founding in 1975.

Most of the free or deeply discounted tickets are distributed through about 40 different nonprofit organizations that regularly work with us on two service initiatives: Barksdale's Bounty at B'dale and Tickets for Kids at Theatre IV.

At Christmastime, we also enjoy taking smaller performances out to children and seniors who can't make it in to one of our theatres to see us perform in our native habitat. One of our annual holiday visits is to the wonderful children at the Children's Hospital on Brook Rd.

On Wednesday, Dec 9, the Richmond Kiwanis Club and nine performers from Barksdale Theatre and Theatre IV joined together to bring some holiday fun to about 30 kids, many of whom live in their wheelchairs and hospital beds at the Children's Hospital full time. The annual Holiday Party is made possible by a donation from the Kiwanis Club, all of which is used to buy refreshments and gifts for the hospital's inpatients and day patients.

During this year's party, Kiwanis members helped the children unwrap their gifts, and carolers from Theatre IV's production of A Christmas Carol (Charlie Dacus, Robin Harris-Jones, Billy Christopher Maupin, Mark Persinger and Ali Thibodeau) plus Chase Kniffen, Jennings Whiteway, Snow Bear and I donated time to sing for and with the hospital's patients and staff.

The ultimate event of the party is, of course, a visit from Santa.

"Most of our inpatients will be spending the holiday season at the hospital this year," said Stephanie Allan, Special Events Coordinator at Children's Hospital. "This event allows the children to enjoy the holiday spirit by bringing the festivities to them."

"Our club takes great pride in our long relationship with the Children's Hospital," said Bill McAllister, Co-Chairman of the Children's Hospital Committee of the Kiwanis Club of Richmond. "This will be the 56th year of our sponsorship of the Holiday Party. What a great way to kick off the season."

"Providing access to the theatre arts is part of Theatre IV's mission," said Jennings Whiteway, Donor Stewardship and Events Manager for Barksdale Theatre and Theatre IV. "We are grateful for partners like Children's Hospital for giving us the opportunity to share the wonder of live theatre with these kids, lifting their spirits, especially during this time of year. It is a rewarding experience for everyone involved and something we love to be part of each year."

Many thanks to the performers who volunteer their talents each year to service initiatives like this one. If you'd like to participate or assist in future programs, please let me know. I can't think of anything we did this holiday season--and we did a LOT--that put me more in touch with the Christmas spirit.

Until next year's holidays, I look forward to seeing you at the theatre!

--Bruce Miller

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Posted by Bruce Miller

In response to a recent blog entry (Summer Stock Memories - Part II [Aug 19]), a curious reader commented as follows: “I don’t mean to be dumb, but what the heck is Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?” The question, of course, is not dumb at all.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a game. I understand it’s now even a board game. I've never seen the board game, but the photo to the right and above, found on the internet, seems to indicate that a board game version does indeed exist.

For years it was a boardless trivia game, inspired by the career of the talented actor, Kevin Bacon, pictured to the left. It required no equipment other than a knowledge of and interest in theatre and film.

The game was originally inspired, I believe, by the brilliant John Guare play, Six Degrees of Separation, which was itself inspired by the interconnectedness theories espoused by the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in 1929, and the subsequent "small world" research conducted by Harvard-based American social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, in the late 60s and early 70s.

The basic idea is that everyone in the world is interconnected. If you are separated from your friend by one degree, then you are separated from your friend’s friends by two degrees. Milgram’s research suggests that when we extend this theory forward to six degrees, everyone in the world is connected to everyone else—and by a fairly short chain.

John Guare’s play is a funny, thought provoking and deeply moving examination of what this means when we look at our daily lives and social responsibilities. It’s one of my two or three favorite plays in the world. If The Little Dog Laughed works well on the 2007-2008 Signature Season at Barksdale Willow Lawn, expect to see Six Degrees of Separation appearing in a forthcoming seaon not too far down the road.

Anyway, back to Kevin Bacon. Inspired by these same theories, the game depends on the belief that every actor in the world can be connected to every other actor in the world by a chain of cast mates. The object of the game is to discover the closest connections in the shortest amount of time.

Let me give you an example: I recently mentioned Charlie Dacus, the child actor who just appeared in Bye Bye Birdie at Dogwood Dell. Can we link him to Sir Laurence Olivier, the “greatest English-speaking actor of the 20th Century”?

After about 5 minutes, here’s the chain I discovered. Charlie Dacus was in Theatre IV’s The Wizard of Oz with Jan Guarino (one degree). Jan Guarino was in Swift Creek’s Once Upon a Mattress with Phil Whiteway (two degrees). Phil Whiteway was in Theatre IV’s West Side Story with Blair Underwood (three degrees). Blair Underwood was in L A Law with Jill Eikenberry (four degrees). Jill Eikenberry was in Arthur with Sir John Gielgud (five degrees). Sir John was in Richard III with Sir Laurence Olivier (six degrees).
And yes, I have noticed that Kevin Bacon appears nowhere in the chain noted above. But he doesn’t have to, at least the way I’ve always played the game. The game is called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon simply because, as college kids were inventing and playing the game in the 90s, Kevin Bacon’s name kept coming up because he tends to have been in lots of movies with lots of diverse actors, including his wife Kyra Sedgwick. That's Kevin and Kyra in the photo to the right.

While at the University of Virginia, a grad student named Brett Tjaden created the Oracle of Bacon website and computer program to determine if Kevin Bacon was, in fact, the Center of the Hollywood Universe. Tjaden entered data for the 800,000 plus actors listed in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to see which actors had the closest connections to the largest number of other actors. He determined that whereas Kevin Bacon was in fact in the top 1% of all film actors in terms of his close connections to all other film actors, he was beat out by Rod Steiger (pictured to the left), Dennis Hopper and Donald Sutherland for the top three spots.

Some people play the game by giving each actor a Bacon Number. If you are Kevin Bacon himself, your Bacon Number is 0. If you have appeared in a cast with Kevin Bacon himself, your Bacon Number is 1. If you have appeared in a cast with someone who has a Bacon Number of 1, then your Bacon Number is 2.

Richmond All-Star Robyn O’Neill (pictured to the right with Pat Carroll) has a Bacon Number of 3. You can read her comment to my previous blog post (Summer Stock Memories – Part II [Aug 19]) to count the connections. The only Richmond actors who I know have a Bacon Number of 2 are John Glenn, Pat Carroll, Sam Wells and Kelly Scallion. John (pictured to the left in The Man Who Came to Dinner at Company of Fools) works in Idaho with Demi Moore, Pat was in E. R. with Noah Wyle, and Sam and Kelly were in Miss Rose White with Kyra Sedgwick. Demi and Noah were in A Few Good Men with Kevin, and Kyra is married to Kevin and appeared with him in Murder in the First. So, if you’re a Richmond actor and you’ve appeared with John, Pat, Sam or Kelly, you also have a Bacon Number of 3.

To a certain extent, my wife and daughter, set designer Terrie Powers and Hannah Miller, have you all beat. When Miss Rose White was filming in Richmond, Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick and their child (children?) all lived in a rented home by Byrd Park. When Hannah was a baby, Terrie used to take her to the Byrd Park playground. One evening Terrie came home very excited, because she and Hannah had just spent the entire afternoon playing in a Byrd Park sandbox with Kevin Bacon and his son. Terrie was a huge Kevin Bacon fan, but just like I had done years before with Arthur Miller, she never let on that she knew who he was. So they sat there for a couple hours playing and talking as two parents. If she’d done the “fan thing,” he probably would have left.

All reports are that Mr. Bacon himself is not particularly into the celebrity game. When interviewed about the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, he good-heartedly replied, "I felt as if I was the brunt of some massive joke at my expense: 'Can you believe this loser can be connected to Marlon Brando and Katharine Hepburn?'"

A "loser" he certainly is not.

On a final note, if you’re a fan of The Closer starring Kyra Sedgwick (and if you aren’t, you should be), you’ll know that Kyra’s dad is now being played by Barry Corbin (pictured below and to the right), who was with us here in Richmond as a special guest star last October for Virginia Arts & Letters Live at the Empire. So if you performed in that iteration of VALL, your Bacon Number is now a 3.

All those who want to accept the challenge of discovering the other Richmond actors with Bacon Numbers of 2—I know there must be some—please do so in a comment to this blog.

--Bruce Miller

Bidding Bye Bye to "Birdie"

Posted by Bruce Miller

I was sad to be out of town (or otherwise engaged) during the recent run of Bye Bye Birdie at Dogwood Dell. The original "rock ‘n’ roll musical" was performed six times from August 3 until 11 as the grand finale in the Dell’s 51st annual Festival of the Arts, produced by Richmond’s Dept. of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities. From all reports, it was a huge success, attracting, I’ve been told, the largest Dell crowds in a decade.

Bye Bye Birdie won the Best Musical Tony in 1961, and put Charles Strouse on the road to earn the Broadway legend status he enjoys today. Charles has quite a few Richmond connections, and that’s one reason I really wanted to see Birdie. But more about that in a future blog entry.

The main reason I wanted to see Birdie was to enjoy the work of all of my friends who were involved in the production.

The show was directed by Tony Sharpenstein, a fine fellow who co-starred in a production of The Prince and the Pauper that I directed years ago at Theatre IV—a production I remember fondly. It would have been my first time seeing Tony’s work as a director, so I’m really sorry that my schedule didn't allow me to attend.

I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t know who choreographed, music directed and/or designed Bye Bye Birdie. The press releases that I can find on line simply don't list that information. If someone wants to leave me that info in a comment, I’d appreciate it.

Among Birdie's adult cast, Robert Fuhrman is an alum of Barksdale’s Where’s Charley?, David Janosik appeared as a child in Theatre IV’s Charley and the Chocolate Factory, Dee Lynch co-starred in Theatre IV’s production of Cowgirls and music directed Barksdale’s productions of The Full Monty and Anything Goes, and Terri Moore was wonderful in that same production of The Prince and the Pauper that I mentioned earlier.

Among the young people in the Birdie cast, Charlie Dacus recently dazzled me with his backbends in Theatre IV’s The Wizard of Oz; Ryan Lynch, Hannah Martin and Liz Van’t Reit were a joy to direct in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (also at Theatre IV); and Sarah Pruden, Robert Watkins and Chris Withers simply knocked my socks off in last summer’s Greater Richmond High School All Star Musical, Grease, co-produced by Barksdale Theatre and The Steward School.

I'm told that Robbie Fuhrman and Sarah Pruden were terrific as the leads in Birdie, playing Albert Peterson and Kim McAfee, respectively, so I’m especially sorry to have missed their performances.

Anyway, I’m proud of all our Theatre IV and Barksdale veterans, and look forward to the next time when I’ll be able to catch them on stage. If Birdie was half as good as friends told me it was, you all did a GREAT job.

--Bruce Miller