Summer Stock Memories - Part II

Posted by Bruce Miller
A kind commenter to a previous blog entry (My Lunch with Arthur Miller, August 12) inquired about the other actors who worked with me at Southbury Summer Playhouse. I don't know what happened to all or even most of them, but at least two of them were very talented and very successful. One of those two was a great friend of mine, so I’m eager to introduce him to you.

But let me mention first the one I didn’t know very well. He is the more “famous” of the two. Philip Anglim—some of you will know his name instantly—came in and out of Southbury during the summers while he was a student at Yale. A few years after Southbury, Philip went on to originate the role of John Merrick, The Elephant Man, both on Broadway and television, earning Tony and Emmy nominations for Best Actor. He later played the title role in MacBeth at Lincoln Center, and co-starred in the television mini-series The Thorn Birds. More recently, he created a very popular character on one of the Star Trek series.

My Southbury roommate, whom I obviously knew very well, was about ten years older than me. His name was Michael Connolly, and I thought he was a prince among men. I kept in touch with Michael up until his death in the late 80s. When Terry Burgler was Artistic Director of Allentown Playhouse after leaving TheatreVirginia, he hired Michael to play Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, and I went up to see him in the show. It was our last chance to be together.

When I lived with Michael, he was already very successful in regional theatres. About six years after our summer at Southbury, he finally had his break on Broadway. In 1977, Michael appeared in the original Broadway production of Otherwise Engaged, directed by none other than Harold Pinter. Michael followed that success with a flop, 1979’s Break a Leg, in which he had the chance to play opposite the incomparable Julie Harris, under the direction of Charles Nelson Reilly.

Michael’s next Broadway gig was in 1980. It was Tennessee Williams’ last Broadway play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, and Michael was cast opposite Geraldine Page under the direction of Jose Quintero. You can refer back to my earlier post (When Off Broadway Began, Barksdale was There, August 5) if you want to learn more about the history-making Williams / Quintero / Page triumvirate.

Sadly, Clothes was not a success, and Michael told me that Tennessee Williams was absolutely devastated by its failure. The moral of that story for Michael was, no matter how successful you are, it’s never successful enough.

His final Broadway years were good to Michael. As soon as Clothes closed, he was cast in the musical Copperfield, along with Richmond’s own Spence Ford. Copperfield provided employment throughout 1981, and as soon as it closed, Michael was cast as the first and only replacement in the role of “Venticelli” in Peter Shaffer’s smash hit Amadeus, under the direction of the legendary Peter Hall. Michael remained steadily employed with that show from late 1981 until 1983.

Amadeus was to be Michael’s last Broadway show. Throughout the rest of his life, he worked strictly in regional theatres until his declining health made that no longer possible. He died when he was about 50 years old.

People often ask me--shoot, I often ask myself--why I never sought to build a career in NYC. My mother was a native New Yorker, so the city never intimidated me. It's always felt like a second home. But I know that it was during my summer in Southbury that I decided to come back home to Richmond, and I think the main influence on that decision was my friend Michael Connolly. He was SO talented, and really successful, and yet he always lived from one job to the next, racked with insecurity. By allowing me to witness not only his success but also his emotional ups and downs, Michael helped me decide that what I really wanted was to have a fulltime job back home. I actually made the decision in the 12-hour car ride home at the end of the summer of '71. I've never regretted the decision, and never looked back.

The value of relating these “who worked with whom” actor stories, I think, is to let artists who are relatively new to this crazy career begin to feel how interconnected the national theatre community really is. The longer you’re in the business, the more you realize that it is a small world after all. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? In my experience, it’s more like three or four.

--Bruce Miller

My Lunch with Arthur Miller

Posted by Bruce Miller

Four years before Phil Whiteway and I started Theatre IV, I worked summer stock in Southbury, Connecticut. The year was 1971, and I had just finished my junior year at the University of Richmond. None of us knew it at the time, but many if not most of the wonderful summer stock theatres that had thrived throughout New England for over 30 years were on their last legs. After the glory days of the 40s, 50s and 60s, true summer stock theatres were fast becoming a thing of the past.

A true summer stock theatre—at least this is how it was explained to me—produced ten shows in ten weeks, or twelve shows in twelve weeks. During each one week run, the show ran for eight performances, opening on a Tuesday and closing Sunday night.

If you worked for an official straw hat theatre (named for the fashionable headgear that gentlemen donned when the temperatures began to rise), the acting companies were booked in. They brought their own costumes and hand props, and the theatre built the sets and provided lights and sound. If you worked for a summer stock company that wasn’t a part of the official straw hat circuit—the Southbury Summer Playhouse wasn’t—then you created everything from scratch and nothing was booked in. The actors were part of a rep company, half of whom did nothing but act while the other half acted occasionally and worked their donkeys off every minute they weren’t on stage.

Our ten shows at Southbury in the summer of ’71 were Arsenic and Old Lace, Barefoot in the Park, Boys in the Band, Bus Stop, Cactus Flower, The Mousetrap, See How They Run, Under the Yum Yum Tree, West Side Story, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? At least that’s what my fading memory tells me they were. I was the props master for all ten shows, I helped out with any and everything else as needed, I played a lead in See How They Run and tiny supporting parts in Arsenic and Cactus.

The work was grueling, pretty much 9 a.m. until midnight or 1 seven days a week. Our only off time was Wednesday from noon until 6, when about 12 of us would pile into two cars and drive into NYC to buy standing room tickets to a Broadway hit. There was no TKTS booth, but standing room cost only $3, if memory serves.

I had the time of my life!

Even in those days when summer stock theatres were still fairly plentiful, jobs were hard to come by. You more or less had to know someone. I knew my college roommate and best pal Rick Gehr from Binghamton, New York. Rick knew his high school buddy Richard Ebeling, who had somehow managed to get a job at Southbury in 1970, and was not returning in ’71. Ebeling put in a good word for Gehr, and Gehr put in a good word for me. Rick Gehr and I took a bus up to Southbury to interview and audition with the producer, W. Thomas Littleton, and we both were cast.

We were paid $75 a week, and each of us paid $25 a week to rent a bed from Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, who owned a big white frame house about ten minutes up the road in Woodbury (pictured to the left). If we wanted to eat dinner at the Andersons, that was an additional $3 per meal. All in all, we scraped by.

I have a million stories, but one of my favorites involved Arthur Miller, who lived about 8 minutes away in Roxbury. That's his house in the picture to the right. Early in our 12-week contract, one of the locals drove us around to visit the houses of the famous people who were our neighbors in the Litchfield Hills—Arthur Miller, Alexander Calder, Jerzy Kosinsky, William Styron, John Updike, Richard Widmark, Sylvia Sidney, etc. Today you can add Dustin Hoffman, Frank McCourt and Stephen Sondheim to the list.

When we got to Arthur Miller’s house, I was stunned to see that his mailbox had Miller written on it in big block letters just like my parents’ mailbox at home in Virginia. I made them stop the car and take my picture next to the mailbox. I have no idea where that photo is today. Behind and to the side of Miller's white frame house is the studio he build in the late 40s, pictured above and to the left. It was in this studio that he wrote Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and most of his other great plays.

Anyway, one day I was taking a lunch break from my desperate search for free props, and I sat down at the lunch counter at Canfield Corner Pharmacy in Woodbury. I was sitting by myself eating a sandwich when a man in his 50s sat down on the counter stool next to me. The man who ran the lunch counter came over and said, “Hello, Mr. Miller.” I looked up, thinking he was talking to me, and wondering how he knew my name. It was instantly obvious from his gaze that he was talking to the fellow sitting next to me. I glanced over just long enough to realize that the man sitting five inches from my elbow was none other than the legendary Arthur Miller himself. He ordered a corn beef on rye, and we sat there silently until both of us had eaten our sandwiches and he went on his way. I never had the nerve to say anything, but I tried to soak it all in as much as I could.

Last week, I took my family back up to Southbury, Woodbury, Roxbury and Washington CT. Washington made the list because it’s the neighboring town that served as the inspiration for Stars Hollow on one of my family's favorite TV shows, The Gilmore Girls. The interior and signage of Crossroads Cafe, the diner that served as a model for Luke's on The G G, are featured in the photos to the left and right. As you can see, the church is across the street in Washington just as it is in Stars Hollow.

Unfortunately, the barn that served as home to the Southbury Summer Playhouse was torn down decades ago, but we still had a grand time visiting my old haunts.

While there, we stopped in a framing shop in Woodbury to ask for directions to Alexander Calder’s house, and met with a lovely young lady who asked if I knew Bill C. Davis. I told her that I’d just met him at the world premiere of Austin’s Bridge at the Firehouse in Richmond, and that he seemed very nice. Turns out she’s his hiking partner, and he now lives in that part of the world as well. She told me that he really is the nicest guy in the world, and asked me all about what I thought about Austin’s Bridge. I shared my opinions, and referred her to my earlier entry in this blog.

It was a great trip, and a wonderful chance to remember again my lunch with Arthur Miller.

--Bruce Miller