Theatre El Dorado

For a good three decades, Placerville had a vibrant community theatre group known as Theatre El Dorado (TED).  The venue was an exhibit hall at the fairgrounds that was converted into a traditional proscenium stage.  Through the years the next door space was acquired as a storage and dressing room area and an adjunct building was built to house costume storage and a combination box office and concessions stand.  As a kid growing up I was in the audience quite a bit, but never enough.  Although I performed on that stage at age eight in the Placerville Children’s Theatre production of The Point, the first TED show I saw was Annie Get Your Gun and this was also the first live musical I had ever seen.  I credit that production with starting my interest in musicals.

In the beginning, there was not a lot of theatre going on in Placerville past what Jim Garmire at El Dorado High School was putting out.  After the old EDHS theater auditorium was demolished, Garmire was forced to consider alternate spaces for his productions.  This included a converted classroom on campus, the occasional use of the band room with its tiered floor meant for the orchestra, but suitable for audience seating and the fair grounds building that became known as the Discovery Playhouse in 1972.  Richard Harrison was the theatre professor for the American River College (ARC) campus made up of temporary buildings on the hill above the fairgrounds and began using the exhibit hall buildings for classroom and production space.  The fair manager, Cyril Hill, was a theatre enthusiast looking for ways to fill the empty halls when the fair wasn’t in operation and allowed for Garmire and Harrison to come in and build their productions.  So, EDHS and ARC took turns producing productions at the fairgrounds.  Starting in the big exhibition hall in the spring of 1972, ARC had You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown and EDHS had Brave New World.

The set up and breakdown required of productions in the main exhibit hall (the “garage” as Bob Hope once called it) was too much trouble and so Cyril Hill gave over the smaller hall across the walk way to the theatre folk and this was dubbed the Discovery Playhouse.  Adding to the product produced by ARC and EDHS, Ponderosa High School began using the space for productions combining high school and community actors with shows like The Boy Friend.  Garmire started producing shows with the same sort of casting mix such as Brigadoon and Lil’ Abner.  Harrison’s community projects included The Fantasticks and Comedy of Errors.  These community/student combo productions were actually developing the talent that was coming out of the woodwork of Placerville and so by 1977 Theatre El Dorado came into being.  ARC continued to use the venue for a while, including Pantomime ‘79 featuring a ten year old me, but the beginning of TED was the beginning of the schools going back to chiefly producing on their own campuses (see post “Little Theatre”).

The TED founders included Richard Harrison, Jim Garmire, Jim Orr, Lorene Davis, Charles and Margine Copeland, Russ Howard and Pete Miller as well as many others who were instrumental in all aspects of the rapidly growing community theatre.  Pete Miller was also my high school drama teacher for three years and Jim Garmire for one year.  Russ Howard was an English teacher at EDHS and had produced mysteries and light comedy plays during the 1960s when nothing else was happening in terms of live performing arts.  Credit for the first TED production goes to Charles Copland’s The Mikado.  Copeland was also the first TED president, though I remember him during my time as the guy who directed classic musicals once a year for the Mormon Church.  I remember his productions of The Sound of Music and The Music Man being very popular.  Jim Orr had a knack for getting really great performances out of people and generally inspired everyone involved with his productions to excel.  You always knew you were going to have an excellent experience, whether on stage or in the audience, with a Jim Orr show  (see post “InterArts,” for more on Jim Orr).

When I was in junior high school a large and formidable figure by the name of Scott Sherrill was hunting around the schools for a boy to play Patrick Dennis in Mame.  My mother didn’t want me to audition for plays outside of school because my grades were always in jeopardy.  At 13, my voice was transitioning and I was on the tall side, so I wouldn’t have passed as the 10 year old character anyway.  Ironically, another 13 year old, who still had an unchanged voice and was on the short side got the role.  I really enjoyed that production of Mame, though I was certainly jealous of that kid playing Patrick.  Auntie Mame was played by Georgette Barton, an English teacher at EDHS who was a very active member of TED and one of the most professionally polished musical actresses you ever saw.  There was a solid decade of regulars who really heightened the level of performance for TED from the late ‘70s through the late ‘80s.  A few other great productions that delighted me were The Robber Bridegroom, Joseph...Dreamcoat, My Fair Lady, Anything Goes, and Spoon River Anthology, a Jim Orr show that was also taken to the Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Festival in Scotland.

I didn’t tread the boards of the Discovery Playhouse again until I was a senior in high school.  It was the ‘85–‘86 season and Scott and Penny Sherrill devised a musical revue called Lights Up.  Lucy D’Mot, another great TED contributor, wrote the title song and made up an accompaniment of canned music with Don Geraci, the resident drummer and sound wizard.  TED usually had live bands, but since this revue was an original creation, there weren’t ready to go orchestrations to rent from a licensing house.  Lucy and Don laid in multiple tracks to create a colorful arrangement, but the show itself was a bore––at least so my friends all told me.  They seemed to feel the group numbers were entertaining enough, but the sea of solos in-between were static.  We had a choreographer who seemed to know her stuff, but disappeared on us after a few early rehearsals.  Scott and Penny Sherrill ended up choreographing all but two numbers themselves, which amounted to grapevine left and grapevine right.  Every costume was done in gray and burgundy––an attempt at unification that just became monotonous.  Scott Sherrill was heard saying, “I think we’ve got a damn good show!” every chance he had, but that was his job.  A cute little ballet trained dancer named Lara Barden and I were the teens of the production, but we weren’t given anything to do past adding to the chorus numbers.   Still, I had a great time doing the show and learned a lot of musical theatre material from that production.

I immediately followed Lights Up with an EDHS production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and then hopped into another TED show called A Christmas Radio Show 1944.  This was a variation on a Christmas reader’s theatre show that had become a TED tradition called Gift of Words.  This time the idea was that we were in a studio giving a Christmas Eve radio broadcast during World War II.  I was cast as a teen studio office boy and did very little radio work, but enjoyed the process and the recreation of the world of old time radio, which had been an interest of mine for a while.  There was a local AM radio station that used to play vintage radio programs on Sunday nights and I was usually tuned in.  Don Geraci built all kinds of sound effects props so that we could give an authentic radio drama.  The live audience got to see all the period detail come to life and a radio audience could listen in and let their imaginations transport them back to 1944.  TED had performed a radio drama a season before with War of the Worlds for Halloween, so the Christmas show was a logical next step for the concept.

As I was finishing my undergraduate studies at CSUS where I had transitioned from a focus on performance to a focus on directing, I proposed a production of the original 1904 stage version of Peter Pan.  This version is very rarely produced in the US as the 1954 musical adaptation basically took over as the version.  However, the nonmusical play is full of interesting material that was cut for the musical to make room for songs. I was intrigued by this script and had been dying to see a production of it for years.  As is usually the case, in order to be able to see a production of a rare play that fascinates me, I usually have to arrange to direct it myself.  Peter Pan at TED marked the beginning of a series of projects I have done based on my great desire to go back in time and see long lost productions of note.  This was in 1991 and since I was familiar with all the better talents that usually made the best TED productions, I was able to gather a great crew to help make the magic happen.  Due to the success of that production I was asked to take over direction of Ah, Wilderness! two seasons later when the original director had to drop out.  This was fine with me, for I had already put the play on my personal wish list, so I dove into it with fervor, again gathering all the folks who helped me on Peter Pan to make up the production staff.

Peter Pan and Ah, Wilderness! had scenery designed by TED’s stalwart of set design, Mark Haney.  Mark Haney was a professional stagehand and scene shop carpenter at CSUS and worked as a local jobber on Music Circus and Sacramento Community Center Theatre productions.  I knew him from CSUS and since he had been the regular Technical Director for TED for years I naturally asked him if he wanted to design Peter Pan.  I brought him a script and a simplified flying plan I had found in an old theatre tech book to show him my idea of how we could fly the show.  He immediately thought that it would be more fun than anything he’d done in a while and didn’t hesitate to agree to support the project.  TED required a director proposing a production to assemble a staff as part of the proposal, so having Mark Haney on board and convincing the board that it was possible to stage an effective Peter Pan in the Discovery Playhouse was key to getting the project accepted.  Mark also worked back stage on a national tour of Peter Pan with Cathy Rigby shortly after TED accepted the play into their season.  This lucky break became very instructive towards all the little problems and ticks of staging Peter Pan that one just doesn’t know to think about until you’re quite deep into the project.  So, after working on the national tour production, Mark came up with a scale model for the TED production that was simple and operational and would utilize the turntable that was still in place from a few seasons before.  I say “simple,” but that is a relative term, for no production of Peter Pan is simple.  With all of our careful planning I was quite worried during the final week when all the tech was coming together.  So many elements and people had to work together to make the magic happen and I don’t think I saw it happen smoothly before opening night.

I also had C. Willard Haynes on board, who had done lighting design once before at TED, but who was regularly the staff technician at CSUS.  He looked at the project as the kind of creative challenge he couldn’t refuse.  Willard was also a genius at building special lighting effects from scratch.  Pete Miller signed on as “Assistant Director” and generally staged the battle scenes, though his main purpose was to serve as a kind of assurance to the TED board that a 22 year old director would get this crazy project to opening night.  Although not a musical, the play does have some musical requirements and so I asked Lorna Perpal, the choir teacher at Ponderosa High and a regular TED player, to be vocal coach.  My composer friend Jason Schafer wrote some incidental music and a lullaby (whatever was used in 1904 was unavailable) and Don Geraci and Lucy D’Mot arranged and recorded all the underscoring we needed.  The flying, sword fights and set changes all need music or the show is pretty flat.  In this way the musical version is actually better.

Peter was played by my college chum, Scott Hamilton, who was 24 at the time, but physically convincing as a teenage boy.  Although there was a tradition of casting female stars as Peter, I wanted to cast an actual boy since I wasn’t going to be worried about a star .  But, Peter is a big and complex role and I wanted someone with experience as well, so Scott was perfect and we went into the process advertising him as pre-cast.  He was on hand to read with all of the auditioning Wendies and Captain Hooks and made a fine real life leader for our Lost Boys who were between the ages of 8 and 14.  The first flying rehearsal bruised Scott pretty badly––not because he was flying into the scenery, but because the harness was binding.  He went to a sports shop and bought some padding to make the harness more comfortable and at any rate, he wasn’t in the sky during a performance as much as at a rehearsal when we were doing the same flying sequences over and over.  The kids who had to fly seemed to simply delight in the whole thing and never complained about the harness bruising them.  Opening night the pulley broke during the “Marooner’s Rock” scene and Scott fell out of the sky, but not too far as he landed on a set piece of a rock a few feet below.  Still, the sight of him falling was shocking and the audience collectively gasped.  This was right before the end of the first half and so we had the intermission to figure out what to do before the next major flying would happen.  When I got back stage to check on him, Scott and the stage manager were already working out a plan of action for the second act.  Between that performance and the next, all the flying apparatus was reinforced and tested and we never had another flying mishap through the rest of the run.

Ah, Wilderness! was the last time I worked on a TED show and utilized a lot of the staff members who had worked on Peter Pan.  I was very entrenched in Sacramento area theatre shortly thereafter and driving up the hill just became unnecessary.  I saw a few more TED shows over the following years, but the original members were fazing out and the new folks were somehow not living up to the same standards of earlier years.  TED served me in the best way it possibly could, for it gave me some opportunities to build my directing resume that helped me to work my way into Sacramento’s theater scene.  I will also say that there was no community theatre in Sacramento that was as well organized as TED and when I agreed to be on the board of the Lambda Players in downtown Sacramento, I helped to advance that organization mainly based on my knowledge of how TED was organized.   However, by the end of the 1990’s, TED was falling apart.

One of the final key players of TED, Lanny Langston, who was in Peter Pan as a pirate, started the Imagination Theatre with Peter Wolfe, generally producing children’s theatre and family oriented productions starting with a production of Grease at the Shakespeare Club.  Between 2000 and 2002, TED dissolved with members establishing a short-lived replacement company known as the Motherload Performing Arts operating in the Veteran’s Hall next to the fairgrounds.  The fairgrounds management asked Imagination Theatre to occupy the empty Discovery Playhouse and so the new group took over the venue in 2002.  I’m sure they are still dealing with having to project their lines over the car races at the next door track––an unavoidable nuisance and characteristic of TED productions.

All good things must come to an end, or so they say, but I mourn the loss of TED for Placerville’s sake.  The young energy that started TED hung in there for thirty years, more or less, and as with any business (a community theatre is indeed a business), it is imperative that new young talent is cultivated to take over as the old guard steps down.  This didn’t happen with TED and so now it is gone.  After twenty years the Lambda Players in Sacramento dissolved as well and I’m sad for that too.  An interesting connection to those two groups is that one of the last productions I worked on for Lambda Players had music performed by Don Geraci and Lucy D’Mot who I had worked with at TED on Lights Up, Christmas 1944, Peter Pan and Ah, Wilderness!  So, this is my eulogy for the late great Theatre El Dorado of Placerville.  It was a useful organization that gave pleasure to everyone.

Peter Pan at TED in 1991