Category Archives: Lamplighters

It’s Curtains for Diablo Theatre Company

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Curtains, the final collaboration of legendary John Kander and Fred Ebb (Rupert Holmes came in to finish the show after Ebb’s death), is finally taking a Bay Area bow.

Diablo Theatre Company (formerly Diablo Light Opera Company) opens the show tonight (Feb. 12) at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, where it runs through Feb. 28.

A combination backstage musical meets murder mystery, Curtains won a Tony Award for its Broadway leading man, David Hyde Pierce, who played Lieutenant Frank Cioffi, a Boston homicide detective investigating the death of a musical theater diva.

Here comes the judge

Curtains 02In the DTC production, Oakland’s Tom Reardon plays Cioffi, and that right-side-of-the-law sleuth isn’t too far removed from Reardon’s actual day job: he’s an Alameda County Superior Court judge.

Reardon (right) has performed with a number of Bay Area companies, including Contra Costa Civic Theatre. He previously appeared in DTC productions of Peter Pan (he was Captain Hook in 2007), and last year he was Henry Higgins in the Lamplighters production of My Fair Lady.

So how did the Hon. Tom Reardon make the leap to song-and-dance man?

“For many years I have sung with a small group of friends for charitable events.” Reardon explains. “We sing the Broadway songbook and call ourselves the Broadway Babies. But, it wasn’t until four years ago that I first had a stage role. A friend was in need of men for the ensemble of Anything Goes. I turned up to help him out and somehow was given the lead in the show. And the rest is East Bay community theater history.”

Reardon adds that he’s been “fortunate to have played some great roles in a short time.”

Super conductor

chad runyon 1Former member of the Grammy-winning ensemble Chanticleer, Chad Runyon (left) is playing several roles in DTC’s Curtains. He’s conducting the orchestra and he’s playing Sasha, the Russian conductor for the show-within-the-show, Robin Hood.

And he does it all without leaving the orchestra pit.

Runyon, a Danville resident, spent 10 years exploring some of the greatest choral music ever written with Chanticleer. Since he left the group, he has continued recording and also teaches, conducts and has been vocal director for DTC since the company’s production of Thoroughly Modern Millie three years ago.

For Curtains, Runyon has had to brush up his Russian accent.

“I have the added challenge of keeping the ball rolling in the actual show,” he says, “working with our wonderful pit instrumentalists and singing actors. It will be a fun challenge, and the show will be lots of fun for the audience. Sort of a blend of Oklahoma!, Sherlock Holmes and Mel Brooks.”

Here’s the trailer for the show:

“Curtains” Trailer from Diablo Theatre Company on Vimeo.


FOR MORE INFORMATION

Diablo Theatre Company Diablo Theatre Company’s Curtains runs Feb. 12-28 at the Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. Tickets are $29 to $42. Call 925-943-7469 or visit www.lesherartscener.org or www.diablotheatre.org.

Lucy Simon’s `Garden’ grows

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Lucy Simon and I have something interesting in common. We both saw our first Broadway shows at the St. James Theatre. Hers was Carousel. Mine was The Secret Garden, which just happens to have a score by Simon.

During previews for The Secret Garden, which opened in 1991, Simon recalls standing backstage and feeling overwhelmed to be in the same theater where she fell in love with musical theater.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she says on the phone from her New York home. “I remember thinking, `My God, this is so surreal.’ ”

Simon would go on to receive a Tony Award nomination for her musical work on The Secret Garden, which won Tonys for Marsha Norman’s book, Heidi Landesman’s set and Daisy Egan’s performance as young Mary Lennox, the hero of the story.

More than 15 years later, the show, which received some scathing reviews, has proven to be something of classic. Community theaters produce it often, and here in the Bay Area, there’s a Secret Garden sprouting somewhere every season.

This season, it’s Lamplighters Music Theatre producing the musical with an orchestra performing the original-score orchestrations (a first since the Broadway production). The show opens today in San Francisco and continues through Sunday, Jan. 20, then moves to Walnut Creek for performances Jan. 31 through Feb. 2.

The Secret Garden marked the first Broadway score by Simon, the older sister of pop singer Carly Simon, though she had worked for years attempting to turn Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series into a musical.

“There were always book problems,” Simon says of the musical that never came to be. “It’s hard to do something so episodic. And it was my first time. Some of the songs were terrific, and I’d like to be able to use them in something.”

Simon, whose father Richard was a co-founder of publisher Simon & Schuster, was surrounded by music throughout her childhood. With sisters Carly and Joanna, who became an opera singer, Lucy would sing three-part harmonies. Even simple requests such as, “Please pass the milk,” would be sung.

Lucy and Carly teamed up in the ’60s as the folk duo the Simon Sisters, and Lucy later struck out on her own as a singer-songwriter.

Looking back on her duo days, Simon says she admires the harmony.

“If you listen to those recordings, you can still hear those harmonies in my music and in Carly’s music. I can think of two of my songs, including `Wick’ from The Secret Garden, that were influenced by those harmonies from when we were teenagers.”

After taking time off to have two children, Simon attempted to revive her singing career, but when she got up on stage, she remembers thinking: “This doesn’t feel right. I’m a mother now.”

But music had always been a significant part of her life, and she realized that the songs she liked to write were the ones that told stories — not about herself but about other people. That led her to musical theater, where she was able to write for a whole cast of characters.

“When I compose, I use my voice, so when writing for characters I had to expand my range, especially for the male characters,” Simon says.

Having been a singer, Simon says composing with her voice, as opposed to on a piano or a guitar, for instance, was a natural.

“I understand the value of having the right note on the right syllable with the right expression,” she says. “I guess my strength is being able to translate emotion into music.”

Since Secret Garden, Simon has been hard at work on a musical version of Doctor Zhivago, which had its premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse and is now slated for production later this year in London.

She’s also re-teaming with Norman on a musical adaptation of Wuthering Heights called Heathcliff.

Why does Simon put herself through the rigors of creating musicals?

“I can’t but do it,” she says. “I have to write. I have to sing. I have to make something. Whether it is ever heard or not, well…, maybe The Secret Garden will be the one everyone will know, and people will ask, `Whatever happened to Lucy Simon?’ But that’s OK. Secret Garden has gone out into the world very nicely. It’s my love child and is precious to me. I feel it was a gift given to us that we now give back to the world.”

The Secret Garden is at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., San Francisco, this weekend. It moves to the Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek, Jan. 31-Feb. 3. Tickets are $11-$46. Call 415-978-2787 or 925-943-7469 or visit www.lamplighters.org.