Evelyn Rudie, one of Santa Monica Playhouse’s artistic directors, started performing at age three. Chris DeCarlo, her other half at both the Playhouse and in life, began performing at age four.
Questioned about what took him so long to catch up to her, DeCarlo replies, “Oh, I’m following in her footsteps. I’m still trying to catch up.”
Their individual and collective credits indicate they’re leading in the arts community far more than following or playing catch-up with each other or anybody else. Check out those credits for confirmation. Rudie earned an Emmy nomination at age six for the lead role in Eloise on Playhouse 90, where she acted alongside Louis Jourdan, Hans Conreid, Charles Ruggles, Inger Stevens, Mildred Natwick, Kay Thompson, Ethel Barrymore, Monty Woolley, Conrad Hilton and Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom. She didn’t win that Emmy, but she secured her star at the corner of Hollywood and Highland on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and went on to appear with dozens of other luminaries in film and TV before launching a 40-year career at the Playhouse.
Chris DeCarlo (left) as famed Yiddish author Sholom Aleichem; Evelyn Rudie (right) in "Stepmother " 1990
In those same 40 years of acting, directing, writing and teaching, DeCarlo performed on three continents in approximately 10,000 performances. He played such historic figures as Chekhov, Moliere, Mark Twain and most prominently Sholom Aleichem over 5,000 times in 28 years in a quartet of plays centered around the Yiddish humorist’s career, with a fifth play now in the planning. The city tapped him to serve a nine-year term on the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
Before any of this could transpire, however, these two had to meet. They take turns telling the tale.
DeCarlo: “At 17 I decided I wanted to become a professional actor, although I had no idea what that meant. I came to the Playhouse with a friend and met the founding artistic director, Ted Roter, who was a Holocaust survivor from Europe. I saw a production of No Exit here which was so fantastic I was hooked for good. I started taking Ted’s classes. Then Vietnam came along, which interrupted that.”
Rudie: “I absolutely, completely remember the first time I saw Chris. I had come to the Playhouse as a student but later than him. He was in Vietnam then. But on his first night back he came down to class again to reconnect. I was on stage doing an exercise. I’ll let Chris tell what happened next.”
DeCarlo, on observing Rudie in one of those moment-to-moment exercises in which partners critique each other with uncensored candor, remembers, “They were saying a series of not nice things to her. I went up, looked her right in the eyes and said, ‘You are a beautiful person.’ I still feel that way.”
Evelyn Rudie and Chris DeCarlo in their first show together, "Love Merchant" 1972
Rudie: “After class my father picked me up. I introduced them. On the ride home my father said, ‘That is a nice young man.’”
They married on August 24, 1970. Three years later, they took over artistic leadership of the Playhouse. “In 1973 times were rough financially,” DeCarlo states. “Ted was burning out after almost 13 years running the place. He was single-handedly making most of the decisions even though we were trying to help as much as possible. Then a company came along wanting to use our facility to screen some adult films during the day. Evelyn and I had just started teaching classes with young people. I told Ted, “There’s no way we can screen adult movies in the same building we’re teaching kids.’ He said, ‘We need money. Do you want to take over the theater and buy me out?’ We looked at each other and said yes.”
Rudie: “We scrounged around and raised half the money in a week. He let us pay the other half over the next year. We had the good luck that the actors in the company stayed with us.”
Core members of the acting troupe in 1973, the year Evelyn and Chris took the helm as Co-Artistic Directors. (bottom to top left): Jody Prusan, John Waroff , Cheryl Goldman; (bottom to top right): Sophia Gruskin, Don Zipperman, Cheryl Jennings; (center) Chris DeCarlo , Evelyn Rudie
One suspects luck had little to do with it, considering the opportunities extended to those actors over the years. Under the couple’s leadership the Playhouse has staged classics from every generation and genre and claims 500 world and American premieres, providing those actors numerous chances to practice their craft. They also continued their work with young people. Over the decades they co-founded Actors’ Repertory Theatre (or ART), the Young Professionals’ Company, the Mobile Touring Project, the Schools Theatre Excursion Project and the American Cultural Youth Ambassadors.
DeCarlo explains, “All these projects grew out of our work here on site to reach out nationally and internationally. It’s basically the same work. We don’t concentrate on it 24-7 but I’d say at least 18-7.”
“That’s right,” Rudie agrees, “I had such a blast as a child actor working with people like Robert Stack and Lauren Bacall [in The Gift of Love]. It was a wonderful time in my life, and my dad was savvy about not letting me get carried away or growing a fat head. A lot of young people in the business were not so fortunate. That’s why I do the work I do. I want to promote the good side of this business and protect kids from the bad side.
American Cultural Youth Ambassadors host 30 students from Japan’s Model Language Studio at the Playhouse in Santa Monica for a one-week 2008
“With our Cultural Youth Ambassadors we established a sister company in Japan and another sister company in England. We can take our work there. They can bring their work here. Our Schools Theatre Excursion Project allows us to go into schools or have classes bussed to us. Our focus is always on the work but different aspects of the work.”
DeCarlo adds, “Kids in our workshops come to a place where they can express themselves in an unlimited way, whether they be punkers, overachievers, jocks or whatever. They’re in an environment where they establish trust among themselves that empowers them to solve problems in their everyday lives in more mundane situations. We’ll get feedback from somebody who took a two-week workshop with us 20 years ago and who says how much it impacted their lives. This has literally happened hundreds of times.”
Cammy Truong with students after a performance of "Cinderella" 2001
Rudie admits, “With over 50,000 students over the years, it’s impossible to track each one of them, but I’d say the kids who stayed for more than one class average as high as 50 to 70 percent who became either artists or educators.”
DeCarlo adds, “We’re getting children of our previous students. That’s starting to happen now and how exciting is that.”
Ted Roter founded the company in 1960, which means it enjoyed 50 years of continuous operation in 2010. DeCarlo and Rudie decided quite naturally on an anniversary but with a twist. Rudie elaborates, “We planned a 24-month festival to commemorate ourselves so even though we’re now in our 51st year, we’re still celebrating our 50th. We call it the 50th anniversary part two. We’ve attracted a lot of people who have never been here before. We offered two weeks of free attendance to help those who couldn’t afford a ticket.”
Serena Dolinsky as Cracked Marguerite in "Dolls! Not Your Usual Love Story"
They put up a West Coast premiere and a world premiere in part one of their anniversary and are now opening another world premiere for part two. They call it Dolls!—Not Your Usual Love Story, with book collaborated on by DeCarlo and Rudie, lyrics and music by Rudie and Matthew Wrather with direction by DeCarlo. It carries the tag line “A cheerfully mysterious, unexpectedly amorous musical unveiling of the remarkable secret life of the dolls we left behind.”
They trace its genesis thus. Rudie: “In our 2002 summer stock young actors workshop we began to reflect on how as adults we let go of our childhood sometimes unnecessarily. There was a dentist who shared our building. He’d come out in the afternoons on occasion and join in on some of our theater games. His wife would come out and say, ‘Steven! You’re a grown-up! Stop that! Come back to work!’ But he wanted to play. At least for a little while. It encouraged us to develop a piece on the humanity of what happens when we leave behind our youth to embrace all our adult responsibilities. That led us to think about the dolls we once played with but later discarded. What would they think about what happened to us?”
Jessica Erin Bennett as Trixter and Annie Mackay as Katy in "Dolls! Not Your Usual Love Story"
DeCarlo: “It forced us into a meditation between what we choose in life and what we’re given. We realized that archetypes in society with all their values and perceptions mirror the dolls and toys we play with as children.”
Rudie: “So we researched, compiling lists and lists, asking ‘What was your favorite doll as a kid?’ We got answers like, ‘I had a beautiful porcelain doll. I got mad one day, threw it down and cracked it.’ That doll became one of our characters.”
DeCarlo: “Developing this play gave us a chance to rediscover our humanity. We can enjoy the wisdom without suffering the consequences. Any artistic arena and all art forms allow us to do that, but I think live theater does it best. For me especially I look around and listen to all the young people we come into contact with and their fresh, uninhibited views on life. I let that filter through me. One of the things I brought back from Vietnam was a desire to never violate humanity again where good people end up doing terrible things. The plays Evelyn and I create we hope revitalize discussions. We’re not necessarily preaching, but I hope we can provide the sort of ideas that an audience will walk away and say, ‘I never thought of it like that.’ If we do that, we’ve fulfilled a worthwhile artistic mission.”
William Schallert and Sandy Kerns in "Aspirin and Elephants" 1989
Rudie: “When Chris and I sit down to write a new play, we look for a large theme, but we also ask ourselves, do we have the actors to pull it off? Sometimes we know within five minutes that we don’t. We go back and forth between the philosophical and the practical that way, but we never discard an idea entirely. We log them all in our computer files. If it doesn’t work now, maybe someday we’ll look at it again and it’ll leap out at us how to make it work.”
A perfect example of this kind of serendipitous discovery centers around the new musical the couple is developing called My Father’s Trunk, inspired literally by the trunk Rudie’s dad left her when he died. Rudie’s grandfather, Rudolf Bernauer, wrote librettos for The Chocolate War and May Time among others. Her father, Emery Bernauer, wrote 60 shows and over 600 songs in 1934-1937 for anti-Hitler revues at the Tuschinski Cabaret in Amsterdam.
The Company in the 2010 world premiere of "Moonlight Madness-Happily Ever After"
Rudie says, “When my dad passed in 1996, I found this trunk with the songs he had composed, official government documents and all manner of material relating to those days. It was fascinating to see what he and my mother went through back then. I used to play in this same trunk when I was little. I just thought then it was lots of paper and pretty pictures. Now it resonates on a whole new level. I want to shape this into our new world premiere. When? It will be ready when it’s supposed to be ready.”
They meanwhile are concentrating on the continuation of their anniversary celebration leading toward their second half century of continuity. They have nine dolls on stage in their new show to dress up the occasion and one set of dolls from days of yore that occasionally pops up to rekindle a pleasant memory or two. Those are the Evelyn Rudie Paper Dolls published in 1958 by the Arthur J. Saalfield Company, one of the largest publishers of children’s materials in the world at that time.
Evelyn Rudie and Chris DeCarlo in "Backstreet" 2010
Rudie recalls, “Saalfield sent a team to my house for a photo shoot. They shot pictures of every single outfit I owned. To this day I get students coming to me saying, ‘Look what I found on eBay,’ and holding up a 50-year-old paper image of myself.”
With part two of the Santa Monica Playhouse anniversary ongoing and their own personal anniversary arriving in a little less than three weeks, Chris DeCarlo and Evelyn Rudie are all dolled up for a dramatic dalliance.
**”Moonlight Madness,” American Cultural Ambassador’s, “Cinderella” and “Aspirin and Elephants”photos by Cydne Moore
“The Great Fair Sholom Aleichem,” ”Love Merchant,” “Early Years,” “Author! Author!” and “Dear Gabby” photos by Emery Bernauer
“Backstreet” photo by S. Dolinsky
Dolls!—Not Your Usual Love Story, Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 4th Street (between Wilshire and Arizona) one block east of Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica. Fri-Sat 7:30 pm, Sun. 6:30 pm; Aug 6—Sept 25. $26 general admission; $22.50 for students, teachers, seniors and members of the military; special discounts for groups of eight or more. 310-394-9779 x1. http://SantaMonicaPlayhouse.com By public transportation: take the Santa Monica Blue Bus or the LA Metro Rapid #720, exit 4th and Wilshire.
