... and things that go bump in the night

Posted by Bruce Miller
True story. At least I think it’s true. Sometimes I inadvertently make this stuff up. Someone please help me out if my memories fail to jive with reality.

About 30 years ago, right here in River City, an older woman (watch, it will probably turn out that she was in her mid- to late-50s, younger than I am now) died a week or so after falling off the stage into an orchestra pit in a darkened theatre.

Here name was Margaret Eddington. She and her buddy Jean Alfred used to volunteer at theatres all over town. Or maybe they were employees somewhere. I’m not sure. I guess I knew Margaret either from the erstwhile Children’s Theatre of Richmond, or Rec and Parks (at the Mosque, now Landmark), or Dogwood Dell—maybe all three.

Which brings me to the subject of ghost lights—our third theatre superstition of the week.

Almost every theatre I’ve ever worked in has had a ghost light. We have one at Barksdale at Willow Lawn and another at the historic Empire. And now that I think about it, I ought to run out this week and buy one for the stage at Hanover Tavern and another for the Theatre Gym (the new name as of two weeks ago for the former Little Theatre).

Ghost lights are basically night lights, or safety lights, but you’ll seldom if ever hear them referred to by that name by a theatre insider. The names “night light” and “safety light” have no drama at all, so why use ‘em.

Ghost lights also have their own unique look. Most of them roll on and off-stage on a built-in three-wheeled base. Traditionally, they have no on-and-off switch. To turn one on, you either plug it in or tighten the bulb; to turn it off, you do the opposite. They tend to have long cords, no shades, a single bare bulb of pretty high wattage, and sometimes a capsule-shaped steel cage built around the bare bulb to protect it.

Where does one even buy these things—at Home Depot? Pleasant’s? An occult shop?

Do places other that theatres use them? I don’t know. And if and when they do, do they refer to them as ghost lights?

Let’s face facts—theatre folk love their traditions. And if those traditions come attached to superstitions, all the better.

A ghost light has a very practical purpose. Before leaving the theatre for the night, the stage manager always plugs in the ghost light (or tightens the bulb) and rolls it out to center stage. Only then can the stage manager leave the building.

In practical terms, the ghost light is there to protect the dear Margaret Eddington’s of the world as they creep back on stage in a darkened theatre to retrieve a forgotten prop.

For the superstitious, ghost lights are uniquely theatre-centric. They are there … and I’ve heard both of the following explanations given, but I greatly prefer the first:

1. to continue to light the stage after all the Lekos, Fresnels and PARs have been extinguished, so that the ghosts of the theatre, who emerge only after the muggles have left the building, can once again enjoy their moment in the spotlight; or

2. to ward off evil spirits who otherwise would surely wreak havoc by sawing half-way through stage braces, hiding props, and removing the safety locks from trap doors once the stage manager is no longer watching.

I’ve heard many a story about the ghosts in Hanover Tavern, which surely must have them, being more than 200 years old. Jacquie O’Connor, I believe, has had a close encounter of the third kind.

I too have encountered a ghost or two in my time, but I’ve yet to do so in a Richmond theatre.

If I could only remember which Richmond theatre dear Ms Eddington was in when she took her tumble. Surely there must be a ghost there. I’d love to see her again just to get my facts straight.
Till then, I hope to see YOU at the theatre!

--Bruce Miller

A Spritz on Both Our Houses

Posted by Bruce Miller
In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the mega-hit movie from 2002, the father of the bride uses Windex as a cure-all. “Put some Windex!” he continually shouts as he sprays every ailment from facial blemishes to curvature of the spine.

At last night’s Bootleg Shakespeare production of Romeo and Juliet, Windex’s “medicinal” properties did an about-face. The Smurf-blue solvent stood in as the poison that brought about the final demise of our title characters.

Jacquie O’Connor, in the role of the Apothecary, rummaged through her bag of tricks for the toxicant Romeo requested. She pulled out a bra, a pop culture magazine, and a few other dainties before finally retrieving the powerful venom (in a convenient spray bottle) for which she had been searching.

By design, the actors in Bootleg Shakespeare provided their own props. Anything can and did happen. After the Windex arrived on stage, it was a slippery slope to the climactic reconciliation of Capulet and Montague.

When young Paris tried to prevent Romeo from entering Juliet’s crypt, Romeo dispatched his rival not with a dagger or sword but with a quick spray of Windex to the face. Soon thereafter, Romeo removed the spray nozzle and guzzled the Windex down, immediately responding with the exact grimace and gurgle one would expect should one contemplate a greedy gulp of household cleanser.

Suffice it to say, last night was not your daddy’s Shakespeare.

But it may have been somewhat reminiscent of your great great great…(add however many greats it takes to get you back to the late 16th century) granddaddy’s experiences with the Bard.
Scholars advise us that Shakespeare’s plays at the Old Globe were performed after only minimal rehearsal (Bootleg Shakespeare was rehearsed over the course of one day), and that they almost certainly were not directed (the concept of a stage director uniting a cast’s intentions did not emerge until two to three hundred years later).

Also, all of Shakespeare’s women were played by men. So when all the world was Shakespeare's, seeing the wonderful Molly Hood as Juliet would have been far more jarring than seeing the equally wonderful Fredrick Kaufman as Juliet’s Nurse.

Best of all, there was no reverence whatsoever in last night’s friend- and fund-raiser for the up-and-coming Henley Street Theatre. For one night only, Shakespeare’s work was light on gravitas and rife with spontaneity—which I suspect was VERY much what the Bard himself expected and experienced in merry old London.

And in the middle of everything, was Joe Carlson's magnificent portrayal of Mercutio.

Just like Shakespeare, last night’s event was popular with the masses. Granted, it was free and there was only one performance. Nonetheless, what a thrill it was to drive into the parking lot at Willow Lawn at 6:10 pm and see a line of well over a hundred stretching from Barksdale’s front door half way to Staples.

Now if they'll only return for the sheer delight of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

All of us at Barksdale felt privileged to have had the opportunity to work in cooperation with Henley Street as they brought to Richmond this fun and exciting new venture. If you couldn’t make it last night (or arrived too late to snag a ticket to the sold-out event), you missed a night to remember.

Congratulations to all involved!

--Bruce Miller

"Bus stop, bus go, she stays, love grows"

Posted by Bruce Miller
I've always loved the pop song Bus Stop by the Hollies. It was part of the soundtrack of my first romance. Ann Bristow and I started dating on Valentine's Day 1966, and by August we had exchanged high school rings and were officially going steady.

Bus stop, wet day, she's there, I say
Please share my umbrella
Bus stop, bus go, she stays, love grows
Under my umbrella
All that summer we enjoyed it
Wind and rain and shine
That umbrella we employed it
By August she was mine

Sondheim lyrics they ain't.

The song has nothing whatsoever to do with the classic American play Bus Stop by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright William Inge. Bus Stop the play will open at Hanover Tavern on November 27, playing throughout the holidays.

The plots of the play and the song, however, are certainly similar. Weather conditions bring boy and girl into close proximity with each other. By the time the bus goes, the girl has decided to stay and romance is in the air.

Ah youth.

Our production of Bus Stop will be directed by Amy Berlin, who last manned the helm for Shirley Valentine. Terrie Powers and David Powers, who have co-designed every Tavern set since our return, are again creating this slice-of-Americana set, with lights by Slade Billew and costumes by Marcia Miller Hailey. Jonathan Hardison, who last acted with us in The Man Who Came to Dinner, will serve as Fight Choreographer. Tiffany Shifflett is providing stage management. Chase Kniffen is our Production Manager for Hanover Tavern.

Amy has assembled a top drawer cast.

Alia Bisharat will play Cherie, the Kansas City "chanteuse" who catches the eye of Bo Decker, a lovesick and decidedly not worldly wise ranch hand played by Jonathan Conyers. Alia and Jonathan are the two fresh-faced lookers in the top right photo.

Bill Brock is Carl, the driver of the bus that unloads our entire cast into a rural Kansas bus stop and diner in the midst of an unseasonably early blizzard. The object of Carl's affections is Grace Hoyland, the owner, chief cook and bottle washer of the roadside diner, played by Jacquie O'Connor.

Grace's teenage waitress, Elma Duckworth, is played to wide-eyed perfection by Emily Bradner. She catches the roving (lecherous?) eye of Dr. Gerald Lyman, an aging professor much too old to be casting his gaze upon teenage girls. Dr. Lyman is played by Christopher Dunn, last seen at Barksdale Willow Lawn in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Keeping watch over this diverse group of wayfaring strangers is the local sheriff Will Masters, played by Michael Hawke (The Full Monty, Mame), and Bo's mentor and best friend, Virgil Blessing, played by Eric Williams (Smoke on the Mountain and Sanders Family Christmas).

I love this funny, heartwarming, holiday play about finding ourselves in the love we find in others. We're now taking reservations for individuals, families and groups. Hope you'll join us for this colorful and charming American classic from 1955!

--Bruce Miller

Oh Christmas Tree! Oh Christmas Tree! Look!! The Show I Did in '63!!!

Posted by John Steils

The good men and women of Barksdale’s Bifocals Theatre Project—our dynamic initiative for senior theatre artists and audiences—are launching a new program. During the next several months, they will be working independently and with Barksdale’s artisans to create handcrafted Christmas tree ornaments to represent each of the approximately 300 mainstage shows that Barksdale has produced since its founding as Richmond’s first professional performing arts organization in 1953.

Simultaneously, we will all begin creating ornaments for each of the mainstage productions at Theatre IV and the Virginia Museum Theatre / TheatreVirginia, the two other great stage companies whose resources and energies contribute so much to make Barksdale the powerhouse it is today.

Eventually, all these ornaments will be hung each year on the festive trees located in the lobbies of our Willow Lawn, Hanover Tavern, and historic Empire performance facilities. Christmas and Hanukkah are an ideal time to remember and celebrate all the great professional productions that have made Richmond the theatrical capital of the region. Who knows, maybe other theatres will join in the project to create memory trees of their own.

During my three months at Barksdale, I’ve had the privilege to meet and talk with many of the hundreds of theatre artists, Board leaders etc. who make up this landmark institution. Kevin Kilgore, Jacqui O’Connor, Essie Simms (she’s seen every B’dale production since 1953!) and many, many others have shared stories of the Tavern that have made the historic Barksdale come alive for me. Ford Flannagan, Gordon Bass, Terrie Powers and their pals have related stories that go back to Theatre IV’s founding in 1975, allowing me feel like I was in those touring vans myself. Did Jan Guarino really learn the entire score to Jubilee! while riding in the van on the way to a Newport News performance?

Sue Griffin, Meredith Stanley Scott (pictured with husband Alfred in the '70s to the left), Bob Albertia and dozens of others have shared their tales of VMT / TVA, keeping that company very much alive in the hallways, dressing rooms and rehearsal halls of Barksdale. Did you know that six of our current staff members, scores of our talented theatre artists, even our artistic director are all VMT / TVA vets? Shoot, the evening gown that Jan Guarino wears nightly in Swingtime Canteen was first created for and worn in Bubbling Brown Sugar at TheatreVirginia, and Jan herself starred in countless TheatreVirginia productions (in between those notorious van rides at Theatre IV).

You generous people in Richmond’s vibrant theatre community have had the good sense to combine and unite your passions to create a current company that thrives on all the strengths of the various companies that preceded it. That’s a pretty amazing achievement, and I don’t think there are many theatre communities that could pull it off. Pete, Nancy and Muriel (and Leslie Cheek, Robert Telford et al) must have been amazing people to have created the family you have become. Now, the three memory trees you are creating will represent their and your star-studded history in all its glory. You have my undying admiration.

Sadly, sort of, for me, this is my last blog entry. I came to Richmond at the end of September to be with my sister, who was seriously ill. The wonderful news is that she is now SO much better and I am able to return home. While I was here, Barksdale was kind enough to welcome me into the fold, and give this theatrical fish-out-of-water a temporary home. My part-time internship with the marketing department has been a lifeline for me during a somewhat stressful time, and I can’t thank you all enough.

So Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah! I will miss you all, and I thank you for being the most amazing theatre I’ve ever had the privilege to know. Long may you thrive!

--John Steils

Another Fantastic Cabaret at the Empire Theatre

Posted by Billy Christopher Maupin

I am often accused of not sharing information early enough, so even though there are a lot of exciting things going on next Friday for First Friday at the Empire, I wanted to start getting the word out about the cabaret that will be playing in the lobby FOR FREE (which seemed to be the big question last time: "How much is the cover?"). FREE ENTERTAINMENT; How cool is that?
We featured an incredibly well-received cabaret for First Friday in September; so well-received, in fact, that we are featuring another next week, with several returning faces/voices and several new ones as well.

This time around Corey Davis (most recently of Stuart Little at Theatre IV and Austin's Bridge at the Firehouse Theatre Project, also to be seen in the upcoming Rumpelstiltskin's Daughter at Theatre IV),

Billy Christopher Maupin (seen in Mr. Marmalade and Austin's Bridge at the Firehouse Theatre Project and earlier this year in Smoke on the Mountain at Barksdale Theatre at Hanover Tavern),

Audrey Snyder (Stuart Little with Theatre IV, Frankenstein Lives! at the Carpenter Science Theatre, Where's Charley? at Barksdale Theatre),

and Chloe Williams (Barksdale Theatre's smash hit production of Mame) will return to the stage.

And the vibrant new voices of Taylor Baltimore (currently rehearsing as Petra in Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's A Little Night Music with Live Arts in Charlottesville),

Catherine Dudley (who just closed as Snowbell in Stuart Little),

Jacquie O'Connor (recently seen in The Full Monty and Scapino! at Barksdale, as well as I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change at Swift Creek Mill Playhouse),

and Jonathan Spivey (Barksdale's Cyrano de Bergerac, numerous performances at the University of Richmond, and a stunning Lady #3 in Paul Deiss' adaptation of The Magic Flute with Theatre IV) will join them.

The upcoming cabaret will feature songs from Cabaret, Chicago, Dreamgirls, Side Show, South Pacific, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and more!

So come check out all the exciting things happening, grab a drink at the cash bar and check out a fine cabaret. Life is, after all, a cabaret, ol' chum. So...(yeah...you're singing it...)

Friday, November 2, starting at 7:30PM at the historic Empire Theatre in Downtown Richmond!

(Pictured at right, from September's cabaret are Robin Harris-Jones, Billy Christopher Maupin, Russell Rowland, Janine Sears, Andrea Ross, Audrey Snyder, Corey Davis, Chloe Williams, and Keydron Dunn.)

(NOTE: Headshots appear in order of mention and not necessarily adjacent to name.)

Happy Half-Birthday to the Buzz

Posted by Bruce Miller

Tomorrow marks the sixth month anniversary of the Barksdale Blog--although I suspect you can't have an "anni" anything until you've reached at least a year. But as all parents know, up to the second birthday you always count by months.

So here we are. It will be six months ago tomorrow, on March 15, that we began this cyber adventure. You can click into our archives to revisit that first blog entry and almost every posting since.

I say “almost” because a few articles that found their way onto our blog for brief periods of time are no longer with us. For example, there was some blog editing (purging?) late at night on July 23, the “most read” day in our brief blog lifetime. During the course of that day we experienced a riot of anonymous comments, a few of which were fairly intense about our theatre or one or another of our respected colleague theatres.

As word of the riot spread around town—and wouldn’t you know I was the last to hear—a record 315 people logged on to view the carnage. When I discovered what was happening, I shut down the blog, temporarily, removed the posts that somehow prompted the blood bath and scrubbed them of all incendiary comments before reposting them the next day.

In another instance—I believe it was on August 6—I wrote what I considered to be an affectionate and respectful (but also satirical) post in homage to Robin Arthur. A few days before I had written some favorable comments about Henry IV, Part I at Richmond Shakespeare. Jacquie O’Connor, who was in IV/I, quite naturally wanted people to come see it. So she was encouraging friends to read my blog entry. Robin Arthur, it turns out, is blog averse, so she finally turned to Jacquie and said, “Jacquie, I wouldn’t read Bruce Miller’s blog if he wrote about my #&*@* !”

Now, I’ve learned my lesson and therefore substituted all those punctuation marks for the word Robin used, a word that is synonymous with “burro.” And "buttocks."

Robin told me this story herself so that I would get a good laugh out of her blog aversion, rather than hear the story through the grapevine and assume that she was intending to speak ill of me. I thought the story was a hoot. I also thought that the gauntlet had been thrown down.

I was determined to write a blog post about Robin’s … “burro.”

So I did. Just for fun. It was titled ROBIN ARTHUR’S ASS in big bold letters. And let me remind you all that “ass” is a perfectly acceptable word that I’ve read from the pulpit of my church. It’s a word that’s included in the script of Peter Pan, which Theatre IV will be producing this spring. It’s the moniker that Peter tells us Tinker Bell has assigned to Wendy. If you play the old Mary Martin tape from the Peter Pan TV special of the 1950s, you’ll hear it loud and clear ... with no one objecting.

But the language police are a lot pickier now than they were in the 50s, more’s the pity. So when my blog post told the tender story of Robin’s pet donkey, recounting it’s many adventures and including quite a few fun photos I found on line, the ladies in our Marketing Department, who are far more wise than I, reminded me that the Barksdale blog reaches out to all kinds of people who may be somewhat less “accepting” than we crazy theatre types. They suggested that perhaps I should disseminate my satire in a less public forum. They were of course right; the post went down.

But I saved it as a word document. So, if anyone really wants to read it and see the photos, just drop me a line and I’ll send it to you in a plain brown email.

Are all such blog purges the equivalent of censorship and therefore inherently evil? Yes. Do we do it anyway? Yes. Hey, business is business.

Basically, we’re learning the blog business as we go along. We're making some mistakes, and we're certainly not pleasing everybody. I know I still tend to be too long winded and formal (BORING is the word one commenter chose to put in all caps). Others on our blog tend to write far more whimsically and/or shorter. Hopefully we find a balance.

I know we sometimes post content too frequently for some (my pal Mr. Timberline comes to mind), too sparingly for others. Some want our blog to be more "educational," some want a good deal less of that. We appreciate all opinions and points of view. The business studies we're reading suggest that daily postings and multiple perspectives increase blog readership. Readership is what we're after.

Our prodigal Heifetz ("giving in abundance") has brilliantly suggested some 15-second video blog posts that we're going to be trying soon to promote our various productions.

And here’s where you come in. Now that we’ve established critical mass (138 blog posts; 719 people, shows, companies and places etc. indexed in our labels), we want to invite any and all of you to submit blog posts to us. Just write whatever you want to put out there, and email it to j.daugherty@barksdalerichmond.org with the word BLOG in the subject line. If the posts you submit contain content related to professional theatre in Metro Richmond or beyond, and/or if we think your post will be of interest to the Richmond theatre community, we’ll likely publish it. The exceptions will be blog posts that we consider to be mean spirited about our theatre, our artists, or any of our respected colleagues, be they individuals or organizations.

We cordially invite you to join us in the merry mayhem of blog land. Tell us your stories about theatres and productions of days gone by. Tell us what your life is like after moving from Richmond into a larger or smaller market. Tell us how you’re doing in college, or what it felt like to perform with that company in Idaho. Or Poughkeepsie. Tell us your opinion of what we could or should be doing better. We’re open to any and all voices; we welcome your input.

Six months from now, when we hit our One Year Anniversary, we hope you’ll consider the Barksdale Buzz to be YOUR blog too, not just ours.

--Bruce Miller

PS - Should you venture into the archives and discover that many of the pictures are still down, be assured that we know this and will be working, over time, on their restoration. Thanks.