"Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman"

Veteran tv actor Beverly Sanders plays the Help Line Lady

in this scene from “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” Episode 106

Calling Help on a Land Line:

"Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman"

by Jamie Jobb

"Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" crashed through the roof of our house like a chunk of lavatory ice dropped from a Jumbo Jet.  We weren’t the only ones shocked by this outrageous late-night tv show.  The year was 1976, back in the day of antennas and snowy signals.  Cable had just becoming available in San Rafael in cozy Marin County. We didn’t have it yet; this show forced us to sign up.

Suddenly a soap opera!  After the late night news on a UHF Channel.  With no laugh track, of course.  And very little sappy soapy organ music.  Just the dull fluorescent hum of studio wildtrack, perhaps a muffled cough or a crewman’s dumb stumble off camera.  Plus very strange storylines and a sudden silly cliffhanger ending every night.  Those of us raised on Saturday afternoon serials always appreciate a lame cliffhanger.

"Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" was a broadcasting breakthrough created by Emmy-winning producer Norman Lear (“All in the Family”).  After the major networks turned down his odd soap, Lear envisioned it running on his own late-night network that snubbed the three-network power structure (NBC, CBS, ABC) of the time.  

Lear's "network" had only one show, five nights a week, 30 minutes each night.  Every night it started the same way, with Mary’s mother, Martha Shumway (Dody Goodman, the Queen of Ditz) yelling deep into the night: “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman!”

In a time long before media turned social and scrambled itselves all aTwitter, Lear relied on word-of-mouth momentum to create an audience that understood his sensationally absurd satirical sendup of daytime soaps at night.

These included the dull thud of characters dropping dead to suit any sudden new gig elsewhere for an actor who then had to be “written out of the show” quickly.  “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” became famous for its ridiculous scenes involving the sudden death of a character.  Coach Leroy Fedders (Norman Alden) died in a bowl of chicken soup; Jimmy Joe Jeeter (Sparky Marcus) died in a tragic bathtub accident involving a live tv set.

Louise Lasser played Mary Hartman with an acting fanaticism unknown to tv before or since.  Indeed, Lasser’s acting career extended into her seventies and she taught the craft to young actors for many years.  

Lasser’s reputation as Woody Allen's co-star/soulmate/ex-wife helped quickly build a loyal audience for the show at the time.  But what propelled the word-of-mouth were the ridiculous plotlines and punchlines from the writers’ room of Gail Parent, Ann Marcus, Daniel Gregory Browne and Jerry Adelman. They made sure trouble was Mary’s “friend”, night after night.

Mary Hartman (Louise Lasser) calls Help Line

Woeful Mary's plight is complex to say the least: a neighborhood teenaged mass murder, hostages, slaughtered goats and chickens, a cop bound-and-gagged in a Chinese laundry, dismissed overtures to open marriage and self-help STET, getting brushed off by the free-love Lackawanda Institute and an eight-year-old televangelist, not to mention her personal responsibility for Coach Fedders’ sudden demise!  No ... Mary's troubles are so complex and all-consuming that she barely knows where to begin to ask for help.  And if that seems nuts, rest assured it is.  In her kitchen, prim Mary is calling the Help Line:

Mary:  “Hello, Help? … Help!”

Help Lady:  “I beg your pardon?”

Mary:  “I’m calling Help … “

Help Lady: “ … Ah … yeah, this is … The Help Line.”

Mary:  “Good … (quitely) … help!”

Help Lady:  “ … I understand that part.  What is your name?”

Mary:  “Oh.  Well.  My name is … Mary.”

Help Lady:  “Good!  Mary what?”

Mary:  “Ah … Mary Hartman.”

Help Lady:  “Ah!  What is your address?”

Mary:  “... don’t wanna tell you.”

Help Lady:  “Huh?”

Mary: “I don’t wanna tell you.”

Help Lady:  “OK, OK.  that’s OK.  What’s the problem?”

Mary:  “Actually I don’t know if I could talk about it?”

Help Lady:  “Is it suicide?”

Mary:  “Oh no!  If I’d wanted to kill myself I wouldn’t have called the Help

Line.  I’d just stick with Information.”

Veteran tv actor Beverly Sanders played the Help Line Lady in this scene.  Sanders was born in Hollywood and destined for a long career as a tv actor herself.  This episode, No. 106, aired on 31 May 1976.  The eight-minute clip of the scene is worth watching (see “Mary Hartman on You Tube” below).

The show wasn't always funny as these episodes played out slowly.  Some scenes were brutally futile fare for the tame late-night home entertainment of this time before HBO and VCRs.  The daily episodes were cranked out fast and furious with lots of fumbling on set and off.

Although “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” only lasted 16 months, the DVD of the program is a daunting Everest of episodes, a total of 325 twenty-two minute segments.  It was a time-consuming show in 1976-77, Norman Lear's bastard child of Theatre of the Absurd on late-night tv!  Recall that only a decade before, Lucille Ball could not say the word “pregnant” on her program!  The word was too hot for tv.

It’s best to watch “Mary Hartman” in pairs of episodes over several months to keep from getting overwhelmed and needing to call the Help Line your own self!

“Mary Hartman”

DVD Links

The 2008 Louise Lasser interviews/comments in the box set offer a real actors workshop of insights into how she did that tedious work.  Serious actors looking for inspiration should look no further … Lasser is a gifted actor/teacher, full of insight.  Here she sums up Mary:  "Mary was a survivor in a world that might not be worth surviving in."

Lasser on Mary's battle with Perfection, based on her wardrobe:  "You can't be that symmetrical with her braids, her little optimistic shoulders ...  You can't be symmetrical anywhere in any world ... but she doesn't know that."

Get the DVD box set here:

http://www.shoutfactory.com/product/mary-hartman-mary-hartman-complete-series

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/tv-on-dvd-complete-mary-hartman-1.6515662

“Mary Hartman”

on You Tube

The "Chicken Soup" episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jpfconAdU0

Calling for Help on a Land Line:

http://youtu.be/8yRtzEca-mY

EVERY EPISODE of the series:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWAByUodiGr04MNheXGsZt1SQt8pQy-pJ

Haunted Windchimes

Haunted Windchimes: Out With The Crow

Haunted Windchimes:

Rocky Mountain High Harmonics

By Jamie Jobb

“Haunted Windchimes” is one crooked handle for the fantastic Colorado string quintet that played Armando’s twice this year.  Their name may imply breezy new-age chamber music, but the band don’t play that stuff in Martinez.  They ain’t playin’ spook-fairie dance numbers neither!  

Their gritty heart-felt tunes are hard to describe actually, grounded as they are in the Rocky Mountains where folks tend to get lofty views. And speak their minds.

We could call their music “bluegrass” perhaps, at least in their original number of players (five) and most of their instrumentation (ukulele subs for fiddle).  But sometimes their odd toolbox makes them sound almost like a jug band.  On any given tune, they may employ melodica, tambourine, harmonica, concertina, banjo ukulele, soprano ukulele, baritone ukulele, toy piano, or kazoo.  But no jug, not yet.  

Much like bluegrass, their firebrand mountain music is founded simply on precision picking and upbeat harmonics.  So what if their mountains aren’t those dissected plateaus surrounding Appalachia, where authentic bluegrass traces its musical roots all the way back to Celtic highlands of yore.

All four current band members write tuneful honky tonk lyrics unsung by the likes of Bill Monroe.  Lurking under their soothing string phrasings, unleashed lines get littered with a “bottle of jack” here, a “dynamite stogie” there, a grown man pleading “don’t take my baby away”.

Haunted Windchimes sing to extremes, but their stark words are often cloaked under soft sonic blankets. “Say Yer Sorry” is one slick number sung down the barrel of a gun: “gave back yer diamonds / took back my bed / drink a little whiskey / clear my head”.  “Little Box” is a wonderful set-herself-free love song with loopy refrains: “I’ve been workin’ on a sweater / that you surely won’t adore.”  We might as well call the band “Soft Jalapeno Tacos”, although that name is probably taken already.  

The band can’t change the name now that they’ve had guest slots on “A Prairie Home Companion”.  Garrison Keillor correctly claims the group is “popular among the gray hairs, green hairs, purple hairs and all over.”  Keillor certainly knows gray hair, having announced in July that he’s retiring next year.  That’s a good thing -- now the man can really slow down!  

With their second live album recently released, this Colorado band won’t be slowing down anytime soon.  Like many groups, they’re best appreciated when heard live on stage where you can watch their fingers.

* * *

Haunted Windchimes are Chela Lujan on banjo; her brother Inaiah Lujan on guitar, banjo and toy piano; his wife Desirae Garcia on baritone ukulele and kazoo; plus the soulful mountain bluesman Mike Clark on mandolin, concertina, harmonica and guitar.  Sean Fanning who played upright bass, melodica, tambourine and ukulele left the band mid-year, but the Chimes continued to tour without him.  

Like any good bluegrass band, all of them sing sweet front-porch harmony.  Clark also has his own independent singer-songwriter career but tours with the Chimes and is integral to their success.  The unique grit of Clark’s voice grounds the band, but it seems Inaiah Lujan is the group’s reluctant leader with his own fine singing style. Both men are savvy songwriters who obviously enjoy the rock-solid support of their fellow players, particularly Lujan’s sister and wife who, in addition to their own songwriting skills, bring a true taste of Appalachia to their high-altitude harmonies.  

I grew up in the Allegheny/Appalachian region, so my ears know such things.  As kids we heard this haunting porch music when we were playing “in the hollers” -- the “hollows” being the sharp valleys that count for “canyons” in those so-called “mountains” back east where “Flatt and Scruggs” was must-see Saturday afternoon TV.

Sing Out magazine lauds Haunted Windchimes’ “rustic honeyed harmonies” which clearly flow from the feminine side of the band.  More than just sisters-in-law, Chela and Desirae intuitively grasp how to conjoin voices into that sacred stratosphere of unvarnished country singin’ … I tell ya what!

Oh yes, and did we mention the songs each woman writes tend to scatter a certain poetic pixiedust uncommon to this planet?  Listen to Desirae’s “Little Box”, “Giant” and “Your Song” then hear Chela’s “Sea Bride”, “There She Waits” and “Little Bones” … You’ll hear the picture.  Whip-crackin’ very short-and-not-so-sweet stories, really.

Basing themselves at the foot of the Front Range in Pueblo Colorado, the Haunted Windchimes trek along with the best of the burgeoning Rocky Mountain music scene which includes inspired bands like The Railsplitters, Ragged Union and The Shook Twins (see sidebar below).  

We’re blessed to have a small club like Armando’s give Martinez audiences opportunities to see talent like this up close and personal.  We’re glad the Chimes keep coming back … and next time I’m bringing my kazoo.

* * *

New Mountain Music

Available on Line

Haunted Windchimes is one of many modern mountain bands pushing boundaries of bluegrass in the 21st Century. Someone curious can really get lost on line looking into these groups, but somehow they’ll begin to find you once you start looking for them. More than a few local musicians sense a renaissance among young players inspired by other young artists on You Tube to bend-and-blend musical styles. Here’s a few more mountain bands you can discover on line.  Jump to this link for list:

http://jamiejobbbackstagepass.blogspot.com/2019/08/new-mountain-music.html

"Let Me Hear You Smile" - Part Two

From left: Willy Farmer (Wayne McRice) looks out bay window while Neil Heywood (Sal Russo) and Hannah Heywood (Sheilah Morrison) know truly scary is The Dark outside that window.  The actors are dressed as kids throughout the last act of “Let Me Hear You Smile”, a regressive play which flopped on Broadway in 1973 but was a crowd-pleasing success in Martinez. 
Set design by Diane McRice, costumes by C.C. Cardin, directed by Helen Means.  [photo by Jamie Jobb]

“Let Me Hear You Smile” Again:

“Dancin’ on this Earth for a short while”

by Jamie Jobb

second of two parts

“Oh very young, what will you leave us this time

You're only dancin' on this Earth for a short while … “

When Cat Stevens wrote those lines in 1974, little did we know his lyrics 40 years later could introduce so splendidly “Let Me Hear You Smile”, the 1973 play which reopened the Martinez Campbell Theater season last weekend amid published reports implying the theater was closed.

This is an odd-duck dramatic farce about time marching backward and people acting their age accordingly (we’re talking about the show, not inaccurate press reports).  We can thank Campbell’s media wizard Randall Nott for applying Cat Stevens’ clip so well to the soundscape for this strange story which strains to move forward while fighting back the Wheel of Chronos.  

Playwrights Leonora Thuna and Harry Cauley never heard their audience smile when their work opened on Broadway, so they knew they had a flop.  After opening night, The Biltmore Theater shut down the show and the pair never wrote again. Their play was not the problem.

That one-night-flop dropped at the feet of famous young actor Sandy Dennis, miscast as Hannah Heywood.  Dennis was only 33 at the time.  That lead role required a mature actor who could age on stage regressively during the three acts from retirement to middle age to kindergarten.

Clive Barnes’ review in The New York Times said the young actor had "three chances and she missed every one of them.  All she was was sweet and smiling Sandy Dennis, fondling her mannerisms as if they were precious jade."  

More known for her movies, Dennis had won an Oscar seven years earlier for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” -- not a Tony for that play.  Was Sandy Dennis renowned for her comic chops? Holy Hades, no!

The hilarious Sheilah Morrison is Hannah Heywood in the current Onstage production. A stage veteran who has worked both coasts and the Midwest, Morrison has the true comic moxie necessary to inhabit such a verbally nimble, physically demanding stage role. Sandy Dennis at 33 must have had no clue what to do with Hannah, whom Sheilah serves here with relish. And salsa!

Morrison is a veteran player in her prime who thinks on her feet so she may intuitively commingle other actors, particularly the two men sharing stage with her in the Martinez production, Sal Russo and Wayne McRice. This is the trio’s first time working ensemble, let’s hope they get another chance on stage together soon.

Sheilah’s nimble stage skills became clear in a frozen moment of tech rehearsal last week when she and Russo had to quickly self-correct a glitch in their blocking for a pair of first act scenes.  Sal suddenly dropped character as husband Neil Heywood and said to Sheilah, who dropped her Hannah, “Wait … we’re off.”  

The actors realized they had jumped lines, perhaps ten pages forward in the script, to another point near the end of the first act, when the two had another similar moment on the very same spot on stage.

Many actors recall their lines based on footwork, precisely where they are on stage in any given moment.  When Russo stopped, both actors glanced down at their feet and immediately realized what they’d done.  Morrison said “we’ve blocked both scenes the same way!”

Like trained ballet dancers, the actors retraced their steps back to the point of beginning.  There they quickly reblocked the first scene so their footwork wouldn’t stumble their lines over similar steps in the second scene.  That self-correcting maneuver took less than five minutes of rehearsal and was something to behold, although no audience would ever know it.

Wayne McRice, who plays Hannah’s little brother Willy Farmer, is an absolute crack-up here as an eternally-lit-wisecracker with “a party going on in his head.”  McRice has the good sense to keep the slapstick within his lines.  

His character, youngest among the three, is a postal worker who retired first among them only to bury himself in National Geographic trivia which he spouts at random, much to the consternation of his never-wanna-quit hero and older brother-in-law Neil Heywood (Russo) whose family home is the setting for their “intercoursing” story. That term sprouts to life in the last act when Eros slumbers into these old kids’ imagination.

Russo and McRice previously appeared together in the Onstage hit “Motor Trade”. Here director Helen Means has wisely cast them for their opposing so-called somatotypes: endomorph Russo a hale, husky man who could have been coach’s choice for pulling guard on a football team.  McRice, an ectomorph, looks more like a baseball player, all sprung tight and ready to recoil as a shorter Hunter Pence. (Come-on Giants!)

In their few scenes together Russo and McRice are terrific and we hope other directors will cast them as opposed forces again in an offering up to Ares.  

C.C. Cardin’s costumes greatly enhance the regressive timeline and back-flippant humor of this work, so when the characters become kids in the final act, they look like children from photographs at the-turn-of-the-20th-Century: all knickers, suspenders, pigtails, summer prints, Navy Blue suit with white tie. Cardin’s costumes fit the physical demands of these tough closing scenes with obviously retired adults dressed as kids from 1904, allowing everyone to act accordingly.  

 

Diane McRice’s deep-set stagecraft also plays a key role, particularly for its open understated utilitarian layout.  It’s a wide drawing room with sparse furnishings that change as the acts change and, stage right, a stained-glass framed bay window known for its “flashing”! (See the play to get that pun about aptly named “Willy”.) But what makes her setting work for the pseudo-farcical action is the wide columned archway in the center of the room which leads to three exits: upstairs, the kitchen, or the front door.

As each character wants out of that front door at some point during the play, McRice’s design and Nott’s lighting eliminate the need for actually showing any doors at all, which allows “the dark” or the distance outside to creep into the room for deep effect in the final act.  Diane has crafted a nifty retooling of the traditional three-or-more-door sets that true farce demands.  Solid stage doors are difficult to build to withstand the constant battering of that kind of play, which this isn’t.  McRice was again aided by Claudia Gallup and Russo in construction.

When Means began developing this text with her actors, she was uncertain whether it would resonate with Baby Boomers old enough now to vaguely remember the 20th Century. Furthermore, she points out “when we started working on it we didn’t know if we’d be able to perform it anywhere.”  (See sidebar: “Campbell Squatters?”).  After two performances last weekend, she’s now convinced the play does resonate today; she heard her audience smile!   

Opening night’s Campbell crowd was lively, although it tended toward retirees and others who can relate directly to the play’s odd timing.  However, the handful of younger folks there seemed to enjoy the night as well, particularly the punchlines.  

In the lobby after the show, each actor admitted being quite surprised at the sustained laughter which built in the house throughout the evening.  They know that’s something quite rare for opening nights where glitches can sprout hitches, and Pan runs flat out of Puck.

Any weakness in this Campbell production lies not in performance but in the text, which might have been miraculous had it come from the pen of Herb Gardner (“A Thousand Clowns”) instead of two courageous playwrights who never got another opportunity to stage a flop -- or a success.

***

NOTE: Last week’s review of “Let Me Hear You Smile” detailed the play’s forth-and-backtracking storyline but those opinions were formed in research and rehearsal.  That review was rushed into print, as the play had yet to open; it will run seven more shows over the next two weeks.  This further review is based on the company’s first costumed rendition of the work before an audience last Saturday.  

“Let Me Hear You Smile” is NOW CLOSED

* * *

Campbell Squatters?

Onstage back on stage

Anchor tenant Onstage Repertory may be “squatting” at the Martinez Campbell Theater for its current production, “Let Me Hear You Smile” which runs through Sunday September 6.  

A renegotiated sublease with City of Martinez had yet to be completed when scenery went up and tech rehearsals began late in July.  The lease for the building had termed out in June after a year of stalled negotiations.  Amended extensions of the original 2005 lease and sublease were adopted at last week’s City Council meeting.

But the day after Council met, a legal issue surfaced regarding viable corporate status of the building owners regarding a corporate name change which jeopardizes their ability to enter into valid California contracts.  City officials anticipate correcting the contract problem at future Council sessions.  Meanwhile the show goes on at the Campbell.  

With a three-year sublease due to start in September, Campbell manager Mark Hinds expects many companies other than Onstage to vie for spots on the theater’s tight calendar.  During the last year of the lease, the theater was occupied 280 nights, with a total of 125 performances before live audiences.  

Other groups that have used the Campbell include Bay Area Stage Productions, Pittsburg Community Theater, Dragon Viper Cobra improv, Women of Words Productions, Hearts for Drama student group, illusionist Timothy James family magic shows, Bill Chessman’s Live Radio productions, as well as one-time performances by Will and Debi Durst’s traveling Year-End Stand-Up comedy team, Hometown Hero Joe DiMaggio’s 100th birthday celebration in November plus two spectacular solo shows by talented female vocalists Jené Bombardier of Martinez and You Tube sensation Amy Walker who launched her international stage tour at the Campbell in January.

Cultural cross-fertilization with wide-ranging community involvement is something the now defunct Willows Theater Company publicly promised but never could deliver in Martinez. After that popular troupe succumbed to harsh economics, the City accepted a proposal from Onstage which became “houseless” when its Pleasant Hill theater was condemned in 2008.

Unlike the Willows, Onstage has been willing to share the Campbell with other performers and companies, although sometimes that has meant schedule conflicts. After the lease snafu gets corrected and word spreads that the intimate 99-seat theater is no longer dark, Hinds expects to be hearing from groups who’ve used the space in the past, as well as new performers needing a stage.  Or as Hinds, ever the showman, likes to put it “We ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

[published in The Martinez Tribune - 28 August 2015]

"Let Me Hear You Smile" - Part One

Randall Nott returns to the booth at Martinez Campbell Theater which reopened

in August with “Let Me Hear You Smile” a time-shifting comedy

from Onstage Repertory Theater [photo by Jamie Jobb]

“Let Me Hear You Smile”

Recalling Storyback Writers and Broadway Flops

by Jamie Jobb

first of two parts

More than a few writers have supposed fictions based on reverse aging -- as if authors, hurling thunderbolts like Zeus, can magically reroute The Arrow of Time. Instead of “backstory” they tell “storyback”.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of a man whose life ran backward in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”.  T.H. White imagined Merlin the Magician turning forever young in “The Once and Future King”.  W. P. Kinsella’s novel “The Iowa Baseball Confederacy” fantasized a backwards plague of 40-day extra innings of Biblical proportions, as if baseball weren’t plagued enough!

Beyond printed pages, life-on-rewind stories may be plotted on screen as well. “Slaughterhouse Five” offers a supreme example of time-shifted filmmaking, that picture itself based on Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel wherein “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

But what about crafting counterclockwise fiction in an actual play performed on stage?  With actual actors living actual moments of their own lives actually becoming someone else up there; obeying unbreakable laws of physics, not to mention those ever-sinking sands of time? Holy Psamathe!  (Google her, if you dare.)

Playwrights Leonora Thuna and Harry Cauley greatly simplified production demands for their 1973 play “Let Me Hear You Smile” by limiting their purposely backdated three-act storyline to only three characters.  Sandy Dennis, James Broderick and Paul B. Price filled those roles for eight previews at New York’s 650-seat Biltmore Theater before opening night on January 9, 1973.  The play closed the next day.

That ill-fated Broadway production split the regressing age difference for the characters by casting youthful middle-aged actors ranging 33-42. It flopped.  When Onstage Repertory’s Artistic Director Helen Means resurrected the play to reopen the 99-seat Martinez Campbell Theater, she chose to cast more seasoned players, “retired people”, not only to challenge the performers but also to stay within the confines of the play’s reverse chronology. They end up three very young oldsters in the final act.

A virtual theatrical archaeologist, Means is known for digging up long lost nuggets. This one is a particularly tough nut to crack from the inside out.  By the third act we know she’s onto something with her casting to extremes.  Resurrecting this obscure failed play makes sense as it can resonate to Baby Boomers now old enough to provide an appreciative audience for it four decades later.

“Let Me Hear You Smile” begins with the three characters battling retirement and forgetfulness as they turn 70, then it progresses to their 40s when they’re more memorable but almost menopausal, before ending with the trio entering grade school at the turn of the century -- the 20th Century. None of them speaks as an adult in the final stanza. Sound vaguely familiar?

Means has cast three very gifted Onstage veterans clearly capable of physically time-shifting themselves right before our very eyes.  Sheilah Morrison plays forever kindergartener Hannah Heywood who fears her “gray skin”.  Wayne McRice is Hannah’s goofball third-wheel brother Willy Farmer, a fountain of National Geographic facts with all the ambition of Peter Pan.  Sal Russo is her never-retiring hardware husband Neil Heywood who heeds the advice of his grandad’s watch: “We mustn’t look at the time … just listen.”  

It’s an oddly funny yet cryptically moving dramatic work with lines like that resonating across these acts run in reverse, as each character takes a turn trying to run away from home.  Perhaps the play, set in the same parlor room, was too ahead of its time to make sense in 1973?  Certainly, it’s a tough absurdist text tanned by its own age, and straddled as it is somewhere between Eugene Ionesco and Neil Simon.  But this cast seems up to the facelift this show requires for the 21st Century.   

Morrison, locally known as a Vagabond Player, appeared in that company’s “Steel Magnolias” as well as “Tough Love” at Center Rep.  She’s also performed in Chicago, Miami and New York, most recently joining Means in “Ladies Quintet” which ran Off Broadway this summer after playing the Bay Area for many years. Knowing how to toe the fine edge between funny and poignant, Sheilah is a delight here in this very demanding and physical role.  

McRice has worked with Diablo Actors Ensemble and has appeared in past Onstage productions of “Smoke and Mirrors”, “Modern Wooly Mammoth” and “Weekend Comedy”.  An Onstage regular, Russo was last seen as Player Two in last year’s hilarious hit sleeper “Shipwrecked” as well as “They Knew What They Wanted” and “Motor Trade” where he worked with McRice.

Solid acting can’t mask every progression in a flashbacked ensemble show like this. It also takes a talented team designing, building and dressing the stage, along with someone in the booth systematically scattering sound and light.  At its former venue, the Old Schoolhouse in a Pleasant Hill residential neighborhood, Onstage Repertory crews often were cramped for space, particularly on those works with large casts and tough tech demands.   

Seasoned patrons of the venerable community theater company, now in its 38th season, have come to appreciate what it can accomplish in a storefront theater downtown. Odd, because the building previously was an auto parts store located across the creek from a functioning vaudeville house with a fully rigged fly system, that 1922 architecturally-designed theater recast in 1998 as an office building for public defenders. And Dionysus be hanged!

For their first production under its new sublease with City of Martinez, Onstage also relies on a trio of backstage stalwarts with lots of experience running the Campbell.  Each member of that crew has won Shellie Outstanding Contribution Awards in the past: C.C. Cardin (honored in 2012), scenic designer Diane McRice (2002) and tech wizard Randall Nott (1994). Those annual “Shellies” have recognized talented Diablo Valley community theater volunteers since 1980.  

* * *

“Let Me Hear You Smile” IS NOW CLOSED.

[published in The Martinez Tribune - 21 August 2015]

LINKS:

http://www.galateanplayers.com/LQNYC-Press.html

http://www.lesherartscenter.org/uploads/4/2/1/6/42161477/winners_27.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psamathe_(Nereid)

http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=3167

http://www.playbillvault.com/Show/Detail/1551/Let-Me-Hear-You-Smile

http://www.amazon.com/Sandy-Dennis-Broderick-Preview-Playbill/dp/B00W8A7SQE