The Queen of the Night

Posted by Bruce Miller

Last night was a very rewarding Opening Night for Souvenir at Hanover Tavern. Many, many thanks to:

Debra and Jonathan for their terrific performances,
John and R. L. for their knowing stage direction, light design and musical direction,
Sue for her world-class costumes,
David for his masterful tech direction,
Slade for his invaluable electrics work,
Joe for his expert stage management,
Chase and Dee for their backstage magic, and
all the amazing theatre artists and administrators who are making this charming production possible.

This true story of Florence Foster Jenkins and Cosme McMoon is inspiring as it challenges our assumptions regarding what is art, which artistic performances have value, and who gets to decide.

As much as we in the audience find ourselves doubled over with laughter at Madame Flo (as Cosme calls her) and her vocal stylings that surely must be sending countless Pamunkey pups running for the hills, we simultaneously find ourselves falling in love with her confidence and generous spirit.

If none of this makes sense, then come see Souvenir, a delightful evening that takes you back to NYC during the glory days of American musical performance. When Cosme begins the show talking about Cole Porter, Elsa Maxwell and the Aga Khan, it took me back to the glory days of the original production of Randy Strawderman’s Red Hot and Cole in the mid-70s, when those same names were recalled on stage during the opening of that most famous of Barksdale world premieres.

If you would like to learn more about the real Ms Jenkins or Mr McMoon, you can sample their recordings at:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/recsradio/radio/B000003F97/ref=pd_krex_dp_001_001?ie=UTF8&track=001&disc=001

and/or you can read the transcript of a radio interview conducted with Mr McMoon in the early 90s in Berlin:

http://listproc.ucdavis.edu/archives/mlist/log0402/0004.html.

The photos used in this blog post are of the real Florence Foster Jenkins. To see Debra Wagoner’s gracious, hilarious homage to Ms Jenkins, buy your tickets to Souvenir today. Like Boleros for the Disenchanted, it’s not to be missed.

--Bruce Miller

3 Cheers for Stage 1

Posted by Bruce Miller
Our good friend and colleague Chase Kniffen announced today in the Times-Dispatch the founding of Richmond’s newest theatrical endeavor—Stage 1 Theatre Company. Chase’s new nonprofit venture will be mounting local productions of the latest and most adventurous musicals—the type of shows that make it onto a Central Virginia stage too infrequently. Stage 1 will also fulfill Chase’s long-standing dream to be an artistic director of his own company.

Stage 1 will begin this fall with an advantage that most new theatres don’t have—its own home facility. The new company will be located at 9130 Dickey Drive in Hanover County, in facilities that it will share with the current tenant, Shuffles Dance Center, directed by Peggy Thibodeau. Chase and the Thibodeaus (Thibodeaux?) are building a 99-seat intimate theatre that will perfectly suit the small, sometimes edgy musicals that comprise the centerpiece of the company’s mission.

Brand new musicals are not unknown in Richmond. Firehouse, of course, has an admirable history bringing new tuners to town (Bat Boy, Austin’s Bridge, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the current Reefer Madness), and over the years the Mill has produced acclaimed productions of Urinetown, Floyd Collins and Songs for a New World when all of those shows were hot-off-the-presses and generating lots of theatrical buzz. The Mill also produced the World Premiere of Two Bits by Tom Width and Paul Deiss.

Richmond Triangle Players has a strong track record of producing regional premieres of Off or Off Off Broadway musicals, too numerous to mention here. Both Triangle and the Mill will be bringing Altar Boys to Richmond next season in two separate (and probably very different) productions.

One of Theatre IV’s biggest hits, Quilters, was new and unknown when it first opened in Richmond in ‘86, and Blackbirds of Broadway and Four Part Harmony were well received World Premieres at Theatre IV’s historic Empire Theatre. Barksdale created and produced Richmond’s most successful World Premiere musical, Red Hot and Cole, with book by Randy Strawderman, James Bianchi and Muriel McAuley. In 2009, Barksdale will stage the World Premiere of Mona’s Arrangements, a new musical by Bo Wilson and Steve Liebman.

Violet, Oil City Symphony, Falsettos, Das Barbecu, and Weird Romance were all new and hip when they regionally premiered at Barksdale in the 1990s.

But many new shows never make it here, and now, with Stage 1 devoting itself solely to new musicals, that’s about to change. Chase’s first season includes “tick, tick … BOOM!” by Jonathan Larson of Rent fame (Nov 7-22), Children’s Letters to God (a family offering from Feb 6-21), Normal (a show Chase has been dying to direct, Apr 3-18), and Summer of ’42 (Jun 19-Jul 11).

We wish Chase and his new company all the best, and can’t wait to buy our season tickets. For more info, call 427-7548 or visit http://www.stage1va.org/.

--Bruce Miller

Broadway Stars with Barksdale Roots

Posted by Bruce Miller

I wrote a couple weeks ago about accompanying my daughter and three of her high school friends on a Broadway weekend, and I promised to return to this topic soon to discuss the shows we saw. Tonight’s blog entry is about the first musical of this fall’s trip – The Phantom of the Opera.

Phantom may be the longest running show in Broadway history, but I’d never seen it before last month. I hadn’t even seen the movie. When I go to New York, I almost always choose plays and musicals that I think we may produce one day in Richmond. Because of Phantom’s reliance on a huge production, it never made my list.

So it was a thrill for me to see it with my daughter and her friends, three of whom were also seeing it for the first time. The arrangements of the music and the relative simplicity of the special effects (by 2007 standards) reminded us that the show originally opened in London in 1986. But the classic story, the haunting melodies and the solid production values still captured our imaginations.

The most exciting aspect of our visit with the Phantom, at least for me, was the chance to point out proudly to my four teenage charges the two Phantom cast members who have strong roots with Barksdale and Theatre IV – Kris Koop (pictured below and to the right) and George Lee Andrews.

Kris moved to Richmond immediately after graduating from Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in 1987 to work as a touring actress with Theatre IV. She couldn’t have been nicer or more talented. In 1988, she starred as Cinderella in our first production of that Rodgers and Hammerstein classic—our first major musical in the historic Empire. Later that year, she joined Barksdale’s cast of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and toured with Joseph when it left the Tavern for other venues around the country.

Since 2001, Kris has understudied Phantom’s female leads, and she's played Christine and Carlotta on several occasions. It’s an ideal, top-of-the-heap Broadway job. When not filling in for one of the two leads, Kris appears in the ensemble.

Kris is perhaps most respected in Broadway circles for the leadership she has provided to the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS fundraising efforts. She began volunteering for BC/EFA as soon as she moved to NYC. She and her husband, Steve Ouellette, House Manager at the Neil Simon Theatre, live in Queens. When she finally got the call that she was cast in Phantom, she was working fulltime at BC/EFA, and she still works there today. One of her special projects has been pulling together The Phantom Cooks, Part Deux, the charity cookbook that thus far has earned over $80,000 for BC/EFA.

Everyone in the Theatre IV and Barksdale family should be so proud of Kris and her exceptional Broadway accomplishments both onstage and off.

George Lee Andrews (pictured in his Phantom costume to the right) has been in the cast of Phantom since its Broadway opening in 1988, almost 20 years ago. Guinness, literally, is taking note. Today he plays the role of Monsieur Firmin, one of the two new owner-managers of the Opera House.

Ten years before George began his record-breaking run in Phantom, he played Cole Porter himself in the ill-fated Los Angeles professional premiere of Barksdale’s mega-hit, Red Hot and Cole.

And George’s Barksdale connections don’t end there. Hannah Zold (pictured to the left), who appeared at Barksdale and Theatre IV most recently in Into the Woods, The Wizard of Oz, Mame, and The Full Monty, has been close pals with George and his daughter, Shannon Lee, since Hannah and Shannon worked together in The Lost Colony in 2002. Lee is the actual family name; Andrews was added as a stage name. When Shannon Lee married one of Hannah’s best buds from college, Aaron Galligan-Stierle (who will be playing Papa Who in Broadway’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas once the strike allows him to), papa George Lee officiated at the wedding ceremony and Hannah Zold was the soloist.

The photo to the right is of Hannah Zold (leaning in from the right) and Jennings Whiteway in the Barksdale lobby during Hannah’s visit to Richmond a couple weeks ago. The weekend after this photo was taken, Hannah was back in NYC, hanging with the Lee clan, including her Phantom pal George.

It’s great to be able to remind the teens who are forging their first associations with the Barksdale and Theatre IV families in 2007 that many of the major theatre artists in today's national headlines are also a part of the historic Barksdale and Theatre IV clans.

To view a 2004 video of Kris and George and their Phantom cast mates, visit http://www.broadway.com/gen/Buzz_Video.aspx?ci=502222.

All of us have reason to be proud and to celebrate the phenomenal success of two great Barksdale and Theatre IV alum – Kris Koop and George Lee Andrews.

--Bruce Miller

Femme Fatale / Femme Fantastique

Posted by Bruce Miller

As we prepare to open The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, the latest production in Barksdale’s ongoing Women’s Theatre Project, I’m revisiting the four remarkable women playwrights whose work made it onto the Barksdale stage between 1953 and 1962. Last week I profiled Nancy Mitford (see Barksdale’s First Woman Playwright – Nancy Mitford, Sept. 6). This week, I introduce to you a second woman author who is now remembered as a feminist pulp fiction pioneer and the author of the glitzy showbiz story of Cole Porter’s final musical for film or stage.

VERA CASPARY (1899 – 1987)

It took help from my pal Jackie Jones and the Boston Public Library to find the handsome photo of Vera Caspary that is pictured to the right. And then it cost me $20! But it's worth it to know that Ms Caspary will now show up on Google Images for the first time because of this blog.

Unlike Diana Mitford, Vera Caspary wasn’t famously wealthy, glamorous or socially connected. Yet she danced around the edges of some of the more important events and celebrated people of her time, and emerged as one of the most progressive and successful woman authors of the 20th Century.

Vera Caspary was born in Chicago in 1899. She grew up in a middle class neighborhood next door to Ferdinand Barnett, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and their four children. Mr. Barnett was a lawyer and the founder of Chicago’s first black newspaper. Ms Wells-Barnett (pictured to the left) was a nationally prominent journalist and anti-lynching activist.

A former slave, Ms Wells-Barnett was sought out as an impassioned speaker for civil rights, both in the United States and abroad. She founded the first African American suffragist organization, and was a founding member of the “Committee of 40,” a group of national activists that evolved into the NAACP. Within two years of joining she left the Committee because she felt they were not revolutionary enough.

Vera Caspary was completely taken with her next door neighbors and their progressive politics. At the age of 17, Ms Caspary left high school, took a secretarial course and began earning her living writing advertising copy. She soon felt unfulfilled by this position, and turned her attentions to writing fiction addressing serious social themes.

Her first novel, The White Girl, concerned a black woman from the South who tries to pass for white when she moves north. Her second novel, Thicker than Water, focused on a Jewish family from Chicago. Her first play, Blind Mice, told the story of Chicago’s young working women who lived together in Rolfe House, the low income residence where she herself resided. Blind Mice was not commercially successful, but it took Ms Caspary to Broadway just as she was entering her 30s.

Paramount optioned Blind Mice, reset it in New York City, and filmed it as Working Girl in 1931. (A still from the film is pictured to the right.) Clearly ahead of its time, Working Girl is a subversively funny film laced with an ironic view of marriage, work and class. Film scholar Judith Mayne calls it "perhaps the most daring and innovative film Arzner (the film's acclaimed woman director) ever made." Using this as her calling card to Hollywood, Ms Caspary next wrote the story and the screenplay for The Night of June 13th, a romantic murder mystery of sorts that became her first real commercial success.

In many of her books, especially those from the late '30s, Ms Caspary's heroines were career women, or women attempting to juggle romance and independence, very similar to her own situation. In 1943, Ms Caspary’s career took a giant leap forward when she wrote the novel Laura, which was licensed by 20th Century Fox and turned into a movie by producer and director Otto Preminger. Laura marked a return to the hard-boiled romantic mystery genre of her first success. The novel and the movie were so popular that Ms Caspary soon thereafter co-authored with George Sklar a stage version for Broadway. The play was a hit in both New York and London. It was this stage version of Laura that was produced by Barksdale in 1958, starring Burt Edwards, Bernard Schutte, Jay Lundy, Pete Kilgore, Helen Jervey and Muriel McAuley.

Laura had several elements that seemed to come from Ms Caspary's life. The heroine, Laura Hunt, works as a secretary at an advertising agency, but has some daring and ambition. With some unexpected help from columnist Waldo Lydecker (played by Clifton Webb in the film, pictured in the bathtub above and to the right), she becomes a top executive. At the same time, Laura is forced to balance her professional and personal life, a situation with potentially lethal consequences. In the 1940s and still today, the character of Laura was and is the "quintessential femme fatale."

Shortly after the success of Laura, Ms Caspary co-authored the screen adaptation of her hard-hitting feminist crime novel, Bedelia, which was filmed by John Corfield and Isadore Goldsmith, an Austrian-born producer who became Ms Caspary's husband. Bedelia is considered by many to be the original "black widow" crime story. In 1948, she wrote the screenplay for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's movie, A Letter to Three Wives, which was another huge hit for the studio.

In 1950, the right-wing journal Counterattack issued a pamphlet-style book called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. Because of her commitment to Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the early civil rights movement, her authorship of several plays and novels dealing progressively with women’s and other social issues, and her marriage to a left-leaning Austrian who left his homeland to oppose the Nazis, Ms Caspary was included among the 151 actors, writers and other arts professionals identified in Red Channels as communist sympathizers. No evidence against her was ever asked for or collected, nonetheless, being named in Red Channels effectively placed Ms Caspary on the Hollywood blacklist.

During the years of the blacklist, she continued to write crime novels with strong women at their center. She also wrote a story about three gorgeous showgirls and the man who connected them with each other.

In the late 50s, Gene Kelly expressed interest in making a movie musical based on this story. Cole Porter (pictured to the left) was asked to write the score. This was to be Cole Porter’s last musical for film or stage. (He wrote Aladdin for television one year later.) The musical film was called Les Girls, or Cole Porter’s Les Girls in the United States. It included the Porter standard, Ca C’est L’Amour. This was the haunting love song that, decades later, Muriel, Randy Strawderman and Jim Bianchi picked for Bricktop to sing to Cole in Act II of Red Hot and Cole.

Today, Ms Caspary’s hard-boiled and yet romantic crime novels (such as Laura and Bedelia) are still in print and selling better than ever. New generations grant these classics considerable acclaim as early examples of feminist pulp fiction. Their paperback covers today (see Bedelia to the right) are reminiscent of 1940s Sam Spade. Also, the Academy Award-winning Les Girls was recently released on DVD as an example of the final years of MGM’s reign as the world's foremost producer of entertaining musicals. Outshining Gene Kelly, the real stars are the film's three leading femmes fantastique: Mitzi Gaynor, Taina Elg and Kay Kendall.

We will be selling these works of Vera Caspary along with the works of our other featured women authors in the lobby throughout the run of The Member of the Wedding. Her classic works are as fresh today as they were in the 40s, and are well worth your consideration.

--Bruce Miller

Red Hot Coffee and Cole

The intrepid Barksdale Bifocals Theatre Project crowd held their June lunch meeting last Friday, and the program focused on "Video Memories of Red Hot and Cole." Original Cole company members Phil Whiteway and Bruce Miller shared fond and hilarious memories of this legendary production with a rapt audience of about 40 theatre lovers, including Lyde Longaker (costume designer for the original Cole) and Helen Levinson (homeowner of the site where much of the original script was written).

Perhaps the most fun was had watching video clips of the Tenth Anniversary revival of Red Hot and Cole that was presented in partnership by Barksdale Theatre and Theatre IV in 1987 at the historic Empire Theatre, fourteen years before the two nonprofit theatres entered into the current strategic collaboration that we all now enjoy. It was this major revival that lured representatives of Music Theatre International down to Richmond, and that encouraged them to include Red Hot and Cole in their catalogue, enabling theatres all around the world to produce this wonderful musical in the intervening years.

A final film clip included a short segment of very dimly lit and wavering footage from the 1978 extension of the original production at Hanover Tavern. Sadly, this already decaying recording (now transferred onto a permanent DVD) is practically all that remains of the films taken of the original production. All of Barksdale Theatre’s video and audio documentation disappeared sometime prior to July 2001.

Bruce put out a plea to one and all asking anyone who had copies of video or audio archival tapes of Barksdale productions prior to that date to please donate them to the Barksdale Theatre archives at the Library of Virginia. He added that the theatre staff would be very happy to facilitate such a donation, giving the theatre opportunity to make a copy to keep in the “in-house” archives for future programs such as this one.