Fresno Loves Me Redux

This afternoon I got a call from my friend Nick Z. who lives in Portland. I knew him back in college and he has gone on to be a successful playwright, among other things.

He wasn't calling about anything theater related, but rather because I had seen his post on Facebook requesting people to purchase raffle tickets for his son's private school fundraiser. I was happy to jump in with the chance to help a friend. Besides the first place is a trip to Hawaii, one of the few states of the Union I haven't visited yet. I had a chance to go there many years ago in college, and foolishly didn't go. I told Nick that I intend to get to Hawaii in 2012, and it would awesome it were free.

He asked when I was coming back to Portland and I told him I intend to be there sometime in Spring, but I'm not sure when. I told him that I was planning to be there after heading down to Fresno again, as I wanted to see a friend of mine there in a new show.

Since Nick is a theater professional, I entertained him to no small measure by my stories of being entangled with the amateur theater community of Fresno, and how I had become an acting coach helping Rick to perfect his Gary Cooper imitation, something I blogged about a couple months back.

"The director of the show even started asking me for advice," I told him. This part I didn't blog about. It's a fun story.

The show that my friend Rick had an interesting history. It turns out that the original director of the show was a local Fresno guy who had gone to New York and made it big directing Broadway musical shows. His specialty was choreography. The locals had brought him back in order to direct a show in his hometown, but for some bizarre reason, they made him direct Stalag 17, which a serious drama about American prisoners in a German prison camp in World War II.

Moreover, the returned local guy directed the show only through rehearsals and up to opening night. After that, he promptly returned to New York and left the show in the hands of a local woman with the strict stipulation that nothing about the show be changed. He enforced this stipulation by review of nightly video feed of the show to New York.

The whole weird situation left no small amount of grumbling among the cast. By far the strangest part was the curtain call at the end of the show. Instead of a straight conventional bow, the cast came out onto the stage area of the black box and then, spread out among the cots and tables of what was supposedly spartan prisoner barracks, launched into a chorus-line type dance routine, with both the SS Nazis and the American prisoners pretending to march happily together and doing several awkward leg kicks. Tick warned me about it in advance, yet nothing could prepare me for how absurd it looked when I saw the first time.

I should mention that every night I went to the show, I sat in back near one of the stage entrances, all by myself, mostly because I'm claustrophic and like to spread out. I noticed during the second night that the replacement director sat only a few feet away from me and one row down. I could tell it was her because of red hair, and the fact that she was taking notes during the show.

After the Friday night show, I told Rick that the dance-number curtain call was the stupidest thing I had even seen. He told me that the grumbling was getting worse and worse each night among the cast at having to do it. "You gotta get them to change it," I told him. "It's the worst thing about the show."

On Saturday night, the last night I went to the show, I noticed the director sitting near me again. At the end of the show, I was prepared to see the same absurd Nazi-American dance number, but instead the cast came out and performed a simple conventional bow to the audience. Something had changed.

As the applause died down and the actors left the stage, I waited for everyone to leave, as I usually do. The director stood up in her house and walked past me. As she did, she asked me directly, "So did you like the curtain call tonight?"

You could have knocked me over with a feather. What the hell? Why was she asking me that? "Oh yes, much better," I said.

Outside in the alley I asked Rick what had happened. He said that before the show that night, the cast had risen up and finally demanded that to the replacement director change the curtain call, and she had agreed, notwithstanding orders from New York.

So it didn't have anything to do with me at all. Just a coincidence that the director had asked me that. She had obviously seen me sitting there on previous nights.

Just a coincidence...

Meanwhile Rick has started rehearsals for Crimes of the Heart. It opens a couple days before New Year's Eve. I'm looking forward to seeing him on stage, and to being back in Fresno, where Rick said that the folks in the company still ask about me, and where somehow I have become a theater guru.