Irma la Douce plays Mon., April 19 at 7:30 pm. Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale; 818.243.ALEX (2539) Silent auction 5:30-7:30 pm. Second show Apr. 25 at 3 pm. Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. Visit the box office or call Ticket Master at 805.538.8700.
In 1960, a play about a poor law student who tries to buy the time of a prostitute, all of her time because he’s jealous of other men, opened on Broadway. Irma la Douce premiered in Paris in 1956 and ran for four years. On the West End in London, it kept audiences coming for three years, over 1,500 performances.
Roy Leake
But in New York, it managed only 524 performances. That makes it the perfect show for Music Theatre Guild, or MTG. As company member Roy Leake, Jr. puts it, “We do little known, or lesser known, musicals that have golden nuggets in them. Sometimes they’re shows with structural flaws; sometimes, they’re shows with a few really great songs but not a great book.”
MTG offers up Irma la Douce Monday evening, April 19, at the Alex Theatre in Glendale and Sunday, April 25 at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. In the starring roles of Irma and Nestor are Robin DeLano and Dan Callaway. In other leading roles are Chuck Bergman, Christopher Carothers, Steven Hack, Joe Hart, Michael Kostroff, Brandon Michael Perkins and Jeffrey Polk. Also featured are David Holmes, Roy Leake, Jr., John Massey, Jr., Barry Pearl and reprising his role from the original Broadway production, Rudy Tronto. Irma la Douce is directed and choreographed by Roger Castellano with musical direction by Ron Colvard.
You might not think an original cast member from the Kennedy-era New York run would be an MTG member, available, and willing to appear in the show again. “Willing? At my age,” says Rudy Tronto, who almost 40 years ago played the tax inspector and the stuttering deputy attorney, “it’s not easy to find outlets for my talent, if you want to call it that. I’m grateful. I think they liked me in Lucky Stiff. I played the dead guy.”
How does an audience come to love a dead guy? “It’s all in the body language,” he deadpans.
Music Theatre Guild began about 15 years ago as living-room readings. Friends of actors began asking if they could attend and, soon, no one’s living room was large enough. MTG continues its living room series for new works today.
Once out of people’s homes, the company moved to the Pasadena Playhouse, then moved again, over a decade ago, to the Alex Theatre.
Michael Kostroff
“Part of the fun for me is the insanity,” says MTG member Michael Kostroff. “There isn’t time to do what we do. It shouldn’t work but it does. The stage reading contract with Actors’ Equity gives us only 25 hours to work on lines, our lyrics and to rehearse choreography. The final weekend before the performance is this crazy blitz for five hours a day. I always laugh at people doing their first MTG show because they go crazy. On the Sunday before our [Monday night] shows, you think ‘This cannot work! We’ll all be humiliated and kicked out of show business!’ And then theatre magic happens.”
“It always comes off far better than it has a right to,” adds Leake.
“We also have to hold on to our books,” says Kostroff, “except when we dance. Equity makes an exception,” he says, to keep actors from falling on their faces.
The shows are choreographed, within reason. “And we spend next to nothing on sets,” notes Leake. “It’s all about the material. And it’s so much fun discovering material that’s been buried for a long time.”
He remembers a few shows he’s not been particularly fond of, “but seeing them done this way, I’ve discovered new things about them. Lil Abner is a good example. There’s a more subversive level of humor in it than I realized.” Quite by design, he says, “We do shows most folks have never heard of or, if they have, only know a song or two. This gives audiences a chance to see them in ways they’ve never seen them before.”
Take 1933′s Roberta, for example. Leake recounts comments he heard from audience members. “Comments like, ‘I never would’ve seen this show if you hadn’t done it.’” In Roberta‘s case, the songs “Yesterdays,” “Something Had to Happen” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” are ones that withstand the test of time, regardless of the script.
“Several years ago,” adds Kostroff, “we did It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman and I heard my favorite comment ever: ‘What a terrible show! I loved it! I never had more fun in my life!’”
Leake says, “In its day, it was a little ahead of its day. Within a year or two the Batman TV show came out. It is as silly and stupid as it could possibly be but it’s delightful. We said, ‘This is a stupid show. Let’s just embrace it and let it be stupid.’ And it was a ball.”
Jennifer Gordon and Michael Kostroff
MTG has a committee that selects which musicals to perform. “One of the best things about MTG, and one of the most problematic,” says Leake, “is that we are company-run. We try to make sure everybody is okay with everything we do.”
Kostroff interrupts. “Actors really aren’t good at running things.”
“Right,” says Leake. “We get confused a lot. Somehow we’ve gotten through 14 years. We also have a board of directors that functions, mostly, as a….” He searches for the right words, “as a board of directors. Thankfully they’re mostly not actors.”
They say timing is everything, and MTG succeeds when timing has worked against Broadway producers. Says Leake, “We did Fade Out, Fade In which was originally up against Hello, Dolly! and Funny Girl. How could it do well? Next year, we’re doing Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus which opened around the same time as Oklahoma! All everybody wanted to see was Oklahoma! But, the funny thing is, after that, every musical had to have a ballet. One Touch of Venus (with lyrics by Ogden Nash) got Agnes de Mille to do not one, but two, ballets. It also made Mary Martin a star. These are shows that could have been huge hits but became obscure because they opened at the wrong time.”
Stuart Ambrose
Stuart Ambrose has performed in two MTG productions and recently appeared as Miles Gloriosus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with Michael Kostroff at Reprise. “I did Do Re Mi with Michael at MTG and I believe it originally came out the same year as Guys and Dolls. It would be interesting to know what the history of the show would have been if Guys and Dolls had not come out. They’re similar types of stories. And we’ve come to know decades later that Guys and Dolls was a great show but that doesn’t mean Do Re Mi wasn’t.” It just didn’t sell as many tickets.
Given MTG’s talent pool, it isn’t surprising they sell $30-40 tickets. As Kostroff puts it, “We’ve got three women who played Christine in Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, cast members of Forever Plaid and Tony nominees. We get together because of the love of the art form and just having the opportunity to honor these hidden treasures.”
Some shows, however, really aren’t meant to be done again – at least, not at MTG. Leake recalled a show that was considered when he joined the group six years ago, Something’s Afoot.
“Kevin McMahon, one of our board members, said it wouldn’t be a good MTG show. It’s very dependent on props, like blow guns, and without them, there’s no show. I accepted that. Then Michael said to me a couple of years ago that we should do Something’s Afoot and I said, no, and told him all the reasons why. He said nonsense.”
Kostroff jumps in. “I said we can describe it, we can be creative.”
“So I said, let’s read it and what we found out was Kevin was right,” remembers Leake. “It’s pure farce! It’s slamming doors. It’s nine people carrying telephones. We can’t do that because we can’t carry our books and telephones at the same time.”
“But some of what we do best is problem-solve,” Kostroff interjects. “For example, Superman had to fly and so our director found a stuffed Superman, put him on a pole, someone waved him around and the audience went nuts. We make light of the fact we’re production light and that brings some of the most fun.”
William Martinez, Stuart Ambrose and Lisa Picotte
“I love the feeling you get when you devote a piece of your life to something larger than yourself,” says Ambrose, who was a theatre major at Emory University. He is a generation younger than Kostroff and Leake, and is not referring to theatre. “My generation is incredibly self-centered but I think we’re starting to wake up. There are lots of us finding ways to make service (in all its various forms) a significant part of our lives.”
Ambrose is, after a decade in the Marine Reserves, a Lieutenant JG-02 with the U.S. Coast Guard. He returned last July from a deployment in Kuwait. “We were there to make sure nobody attacked our cargo ships that are bringing all the supplies for our Marines and soldiers and airmen and sailors. And specifically to prevent attacks like the one on the USS Cole in 2000.”
Despite 10 years with the Marine Corps Reserves, Ambrose never was deployed. “It was ironic, that upon joining the Coast Guard, I was in the Middle East in a matter of months! God has a sense of humor.”
And, while the tall and stately Ambrose is drawn to theatre (he understudied Lancelot in the national touring company of Camelot with Michael York), he is committed to his military career. “My commitment technically is another several years but it’s irrelevant to me because I’ll stay in until I retire. Thankfully, I’ve been slowly starting to fuse the two worlds with Coast Guard public affairs – I assisted them with some voiceover work on public service announcements.”
Part of Leake’s and Kostroff’s public service, they say, is producing an MTG podcast which is available on the company’s website (www.musictheatreguild.com). And, when Kostroff isn’t working in television (Sonny With a Chance; The Wire), he’s kept busy helping to organize Monday night’s second bi-annual silent auction. “We’ve got a lot of theatre memorabilia and other fun items up for auction before the show,” he says. “In honor of Irma la Douce, we’ll do up a French boulevard, hopefully with accordion music.”
It’ll be a scene Rudy Tronto will well remember. “I used to speak French fluently,” he says. “And I’ve visited all the places we talk about in the show.” And, he will have an occasion to use steps he learned as a dancer in Broadway’s Can-Can than occasion to keep his eyes closed as a “working stiff.”
Feature image of Kevin McMahon and Roy Leake, Jr.
Article by Steve Julian
