Author: Jonathan Shipley

It was no laughing matter getting Funny Girl onto a Broadway stage. The 1964 musical about the life and times of vaudeville legend Fanny Brice (currently on stage at Village Theatre starring Sarah Rose Davis) is now a classic, and rightfully so, but it had plenty of swings and misses along the way.

The show’s early days were filled with personnel changes and scripts written, rewritten and scrapped, and rewritten again. People were hired and let go, and hired again only to quit. Choreography was changed almost as often as choreographers; stars were considered and rejected. With all that tumult, it’s a wonder that Funny Girl ever got on stage at all.  

The musical is set in New York City circa World War I; the story is about the Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice (a real star of stage and screen at the time) and her relationship with husband Nick Arnstein (a gambler who saw the jail cells of both Sing Sing and Leavenworth in his lifetime).

The idea to dramatize their story started with Ray Stark, husband to Brice’s daughter Frances, who commissioned an authorized biography of his famous mother-in-law. He didn’t like the finished result and paid $50,000 to stop publication of The Fabulous Fanny entirely. Strike one.

Stark then turned to Ben Hecht (famed screenwriter of Scarface, His Girl Friday, and Notorious, among many others) to write a Fanny Brice biopic instead. Stark didn’t like Hecht’s finished result. Strike two. Nor did he like the efforts of the ten writers who tried to write the biopic after Hecht.

Finally, Isobel Lennart produced a script that Stark was pleased with, My Man, which he promptly sold to Columbia Pictures for a tidy sum. Brice’s life would hit the silver screen. But wait! Wouldn’t it be better as a stage musical?

After reading the screenplay, Broadway star (and Rodgers and Hammerstein favorite) Mary Martin contacted Stark with just such a proposal. Stark contacted infamous Broadway producer/impresario David Merrick, who suggested that Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim (creators of the 1959 musical Gypsy) tackle the adaptation. Sondheim, as legend has it, told Styne that he wouldn’t do a Fanny Brice story starring Mary Martin, because she wasn’t Jewish. Soon after, Martin backed out.

The long list of strike-outs continued, as name after famous name considered the project and then dropped it. Broadway director/choreographer Jerome Robbins and actress Anne Bancroft. Actress Eydie Gormé was in contention for the part of Fanny, but would only play it if her husband was cast as Nick. Carol Burnett turned the role down because she insisted it should be played by a Jewish actress. Then there was Barbra Streisand, who Styne remember from her earlier Broadway debut. Intriguing!

They’d found their Fanny, but the whole project was shelved as Styne worked on other material, and dusted off when the legendary Bob Fosse signed on to direct. He quit, and the project was put back on the shelf. Streisand didn’t want the new director, Garson Kanin, and wanted Jerome Robbins back! And, what? Kanin wanted to cut the song “People” from the show, even though Streisand has already released it as a popular single? Okay, the song stayed in.

The show hits out-of-town tryouts in Boston, where critics like Streisand but not the show. It’s too long. The libretto stinks. The New York opening was delayed four times as they worked out the script. It finally bowed on March 26, 1964 at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, directed by Kanin and choreographed by Carol Haney, with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill and a book by Isobel Lennart. And just like that, it became a smash.

“In a black sequined dress that clung to her thighs like a patch of lichen, she threw her head back, sang her heart out, and knocked New York on its ear,” Joanne Stang wrote of Streisand in the New York Times, following the debut.

Funny Girl was nominated for eight Tony Awards including Best Musical. (In one final strike, Funny Girl faced off against Hello, Dolly! and didn’t win one Tony Award because of it.) The cast album went gold. There was a successful run in the West End of London. A subsequent movie adaptation was the highest grossing film of 1968; Streisand won the 1969 Academy Award for Best Actress. 

Forty-plus years later, Funny Girl is still a smash. With classic songs like “People,” “You Are Woman,” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” Village Theatre will undoubtedly not strike out at all.

When the World’’s Fair came to Seattle in 1962, this corner of the Northwest finally landed on the international map. From April through October of that year ten million people, filled with space age wonder, visited this uppermost corner of the country. The Space Needle arose. The Project Mercury capsule that carried Alan Shepard into space was on display. The monorail, “the world’s first full-scale rapid-transit system,” took off. The World of Tomorrow exhibit, billed as a “21-minute tour of the future,” featured a giant spherical hydraulic elevator made of acrylic glass—called, fittingly, the Bubbleator. Count Basie performed; Lawrence Welk did, too. Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe paintings hung in the Fine Arts Pavilion. Ed Sullivan did live broadcasts under the Space Needle. Elvis Presley visited and made a movie, It Happened at the World’s Fair. More than 50 years later, Jim Lynch tapped into this pivotal period for his novel Truth Like the Sun, and Book-It Repertory Theatre jumped at the chance to bring his Seattle-centric work to the stage. 

“I wanted to write a novel that cut to the core of Seattle,” Lynch recently told Jane Jones, who adapted and is directing Truth Like the Sun for Book-It. “And the World’s Fair has always loomed in the recent past as this coming-out party for this young, ambitious city. The audacity of the fair is what struck me as quintessentially Seattle… so I wanted to mesh the fair with modern Seattle and see if I couldn’t come up with a storyline that could weave the two Seattles together into something illuminating.”

Truth Like the Sun is Lynch’s third novel, a political thriller firmly set in those two Seattles—the glory of the 1962 World’s Fair and the glory of 2001, in the gold rush technology boom times after Microsoft’s ascendency. The story is that of fictional Roger Morgan, a mastermind who brings the fair to Seattle, eager to make the city famous. The novel, and subsequent theatrical adaptation, blends that time in his life and forty years later when he’s running for mayor in hopes of bringing Seattle back to its former glory. Gumming up the works is an eager reporter, Helen Gulanos, who is looking into Morgan’s career to see who he really is and to see where his power comes from.

“There is much marveling to be done as Truth Like the Sun unfolds,” wrote The New York Times. The Dallas Morning News called Lynch’s work, “taut and accomplished,” while The London Independent raved, Lynch is “a consummate stylist.”

No one hailed the work louder than Book-It, which quickly snapped up the rights to produce the work on stage. “You write about our region and community from an insider’s perspective,” Jones recently told Lynch in an Encore Arts Program article. “You’re local… and your narrative really suits the Book-It style… You write people we either think we know or want to know.”

Book-It is staging the production about the World’s Fair at the Seattle Center, itself created for the World’s Fair. Adapted from the novel by Jones and Kevin McKeon, it stars Chris Ensweiler as Roger Morgan and Jennifer Lee Taylor as Helen Gulanos. The cast also includes Northern Exposure alum Cynthia Geary, McKeon, and Chad Kelderman, amongst others. “Putting the fair on stage has probably been the trickiest,” Jones admitted. “We have a cast of 15 and are representing an event that drew 115,000 people a day at closing. But we like challenges, and a lot of really smart artists are spending a lot of time making those impressions.”

Book-It has long been impressed with Lynch, a former Seattle Times reporter and current Olympia resident. With Truth Like the Sun up and running, the company has officially staged all three of Lynch’s novels. His 2006 debut, The Highest Tide, is a coming-of-age novel set along the tide flats of south Puget Sound. Book-It staged it in 2008. Border Songs, about a border patrol agent along the rural western end of the U.S.-Canada border, was published in 2009, and won the Washington State Book Award for Fiction. Book-It staged that production to rave reviews in 2011. And now, running on stage through May 18, is Truth Like the Sun, another Lynch play that places him firmly on Book-It’s theatre map. There, right next to the Space Needle.

“Everyone starts out a stranger,” says Allison Strickland, a lead actor in Taproot Theatre’s new production, In the Book Of. “To people. To places. To experiences.” Stranger no longer to Seattle’s theatre scene, Strickland is eager to share to audiences this rarely seen play, written by John Walch and directed by Scott Nolte.

For those unfamiliar with In the Book Of, it’s based loosely on the Book of Ruth, a slim book in the Old Testament. It centers around Lieutenant Naomi Watkins (Strickland, and her Afghan translator Anisah, played by Carolyn Marie Monroe. They’ve both lost husbands in the war. “Without giving too much away,” Strickland gives away, “Naomi ends up briging Anisah back to her small town in Mississippi.” It’s there that they both encounter love, healing, and, Strickland says, “What it truly means to embrace life in all of its ups and downs.”

Strickland, who has performed as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Seattle Shakespeare Company and as Rose Rose in Book-It Repertory Theatre’s production of The Cider House Rules Pt. 2, is performing for the first time in her life on Taproot’s stage. “It’s been a great process and, honestly, they’re some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. They make sure you feel like you are part of their family from day one.”

The role hit her before she knew it. “It came out of the blue, really,” Strickland says. Some mutual friends put Scott Nolte in touch with her. “I came in to read for him and a couple of days later I got the job!” She’s happy to have taken it. The most rewarding and challenging aspects of the role are one and the same. “We have a great military consult for the show named Erik. Through his stories of life in and out of battle, it’s made me realize what an honor it truly is to tell the story of so many servicemen and women.” She’s proud of her small part in recognizing the hard-working members of military. “We see them. We are grateful.”

What’s next for Strickland? “I can’t really say much but it’s pretty wild!” Suffice it to say, she’s currently doing some motion capture work with green screens and body suits for a video game still in development. Such is the life of an actor: a stranger in a strange land, until it’s not so strange anymore. 

“What I love about Seymour,” says actor Joshua Carter, currently starring in Little Shop of Horrors at ACT Theatre, “is the fact that he’s a comedic character that people invariably love who murders two people and allows the world to end.”

Seymour, of course, is the lead character in the show, a hapless florist shop worker who raises a plant that feeds on human blood. Little Shop is billed as a “comedy horror rock musical,” by composer Alan Menken and writer Howard Ashman. The musical, in turn, is based on a low-budget 1960 horror film of the same name, directed by the legendary Roger Corman.

The show is weird, what with a sadistic dentist, doo-wop singers and, oh yeah, Audrey II, that giant man-eating plant that talks and sings. It’s just the sort of show Carter loves. “Getting to play all that juicy drama while making people laugh and being a little silly? That’s a gift.”

The show, co-produced with the 5th Avenue Theatre, has already been gifted with rave reviews and Carter couldn’t be more pleased. “Seymour is one of those roles I’ve wanted to play my whole career.” His career in Seattle’s theatre scene is certainly on the rise. He appeared recently in Spamalot at the 5th Avenue Theatre, Mary Stuart at ACT, and has returned from the first national tour of the Broadway hit Once. What’s next for him? He doesn’t know. “Performing Little Shop has been an absolute dream and it’d be a shame if I missed the fun because I was worried about what’s next.”

And so, the present: The main role in a beloved musical comedy. “It’s Faust… with an R&B plant. Seriously.” That’s why the story and the show have stood the test of time, and become a cult favorite. It’s a timeless story, Carter believes, because we all do things for immediate short-term gain without worrying, or even thinking about, the long-term effects of our decision. “We’ve all figuratively sold our souls at some point in our lives. It’s a universal and constant struggle.” That universality connects audiences to Seymour, no matter how many bad things Seymour does. “On top of that,” Carter adds, “It’s just so darn fun!”

Fun, indeed. But it’s a tightrope, oftentimes, for revivals to cater to fans of previous iterations while still keeping the show fresh. In the case of Little Shop, there are plenty of previous iterations to contend with. There was Rick Moranis as Seymour in the 1986 Frank Oz movie. There was the original 1960 movie, where a young Jack Nicholson had a role. There was the original 1982 off-Broadway show starring Lee Wilkof that won awards including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical. “Approach it,” Carter says, “as if it’s never been done before. The folly comes from an attempt at recreation.” By doing it fresh regardless, like in this new production, Carter believes there are new discussions and new discoveries. “It makes the production thrive no matter how many times people have seen it.”

It thrives. With a cast that includes Jessica Skerritt as Audrey, Jeff Steitzer as Mushnik, Eric Esteb as the puppeteer of the plant, Audrey II, and Ekello J. Harrid, Jr. as the voice of Audrey II, the show is full of singing, sweet romance, and murder.

“It’s fun to perform it every night,” Carter says. “I wouldn’t trade a second of it.” Neither would audiences watching Little Shop of Horrors.

For actor Connor Toms, playing infamous literary Doctor Victor Frankenstein is a piece of cake. “All you have to do,” he says, “is live in the mind of a sociopath for two hours a night.” Toms is tackling this demanding role as the lead in Book-It Repertory Theatre’s well-received production of Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus. “Only in theatre,” Toms says, “does someone get the opportunity to be an obsessive genius without literally creating an atomic bomb or a new strain of smallpox or something disastrous like that.”

Frankenstein, for those who may not have read the original book by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, isn’t the monster, and certainly not the cartoonish green one we know with the bolts in his neck. No, Frankenstein is young doctor Victor, the man who creates the monster. The novel was published in 1818 when she was 20 years old. The novel deals with monumental and everlasting themes: Is there a God? What happens after death? What is life? Who, in the end, is the monster, the doctor or the creature he created?

“The problem” Toms says of producing work as recognizable as Frankenstein, “is that there are so many unfortunate pre-conceived notions about Frankenstein and artists have to battle with the clichés associated with it or are forced to try and create something new from it.” Fortunately for Toms, and the rest of the cast and crew, they were dealing directly with the source material. “With that,” he says, “one only needs to tell a story.”

Book-It is different than many other theatres in that it preserves the author’s exact words—everything heard on stage is taken directly from the original page. “The glory of Book-It,” says Toms, “is at its most fundamental and basic concept, it’s a vehicle for storytelling. Book-It succeeds in affecting us at our most primitive levels of attention. We all want to be told a good story. It’s great to perform under that conceit.”

The production, which also stars Jim Hamerlinck as the monster and Sascha Streckel as Victor’s love interest Elizabeth Lavenza, is far from disastrous—it’s received largely glowing reviews. It also marks an important transition for Toms himself. “When I heard that Book-It would be doing an adaptation of Frankenstein, I jumped at the chance to audition,” he says. But he never thought he’s land the part of Victor. “It’s a gigantic role and my graduation from young dude to leading man has been rather protracted. I’m very grateful for [director] David Quicksall’s faith in me.”

There’s no question that Toms is officially a leading man. He commands the Book-It stage for nearly the entire length of the two-plus hour production. At turns serious, funny, loving, frightening—it’s a lot for one actor. “The ability to show a disturbing range of emotions is so exciting,” Toms says. “From joy to rage to despair and back again. It’s an exhaustive blessing.”

In addition to becoming a leading man, Toms is also becoming a bit of a workhorse within Seattle’s acting community. Right before taking on the role of Victor Frankenstein he was in Seattle Repertory Theatre’s production of The Hound of the Baskervilles. He will soon be seen, with his wife and fellow actor Hana Lass, in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Until then, he will spend his evenings in the skin of a sociopath, who, Toms says, “goes down a serious rabbit hole every night. We’re all pretty blessed performing.” And audiences are blessed to see Toms perform.