20 Questions with Tom Heppler

Tom Heppler is currently appearing as Marcus Lycus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Spokane Civic Theatre (through Sunday). He works as the administrative assistant to one of the executive VPs at Sterling Bank.

{ Bobo note: After a whole series of e-mail snafus and malfunctioning tape recorders and -- oh, you know, just life getting in the way -- this interview is finally appearing, four months (!) after I first sent questions to Tom. So you'd better enjoy it. Or else. }

What’s your first theatrical memory? What show made you think, “I’m impressed by theater”? And what (different?) show made you think, “I want to get involved in doing theater”?

In 1976, I saw my first real show. We had season tickets to the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, and we saw A Chorus Line. I was about 20. We got the better of the two casts that were doing the national tour at that time — in L.A. and San Francisco, we got Donna McKechnie. My sister and I sat in the third tier, way up high, and I was blown away. My sister said, "I don't know what was more fun — watching the play or watching you.

What kind of theater did you do in high school? And in college?

I was going to community college in the Bay Area and doing a business major, but I kept switching to the theater classes. And my report card came home and my father asked, "What the hell are you doing?"

I knew I wanted to major in theater. I checked out Sanford Meisner, Lee Strassberg -- and they only sent two students a year

Well, I didn’t get that, but I asked the instructor, could you get me in the summer class at the Neighborhood Theater, a six-week summer program. And for the full year, I got in myself. I was 22.

I liked the Playhouse: it was three hours of acting, an hour and half of voice.

I had gotten into UCLA and UC Irvine and Juilliard, but that experience is what made me into an actor. It was a two-year program, and they cut from 100 kids down to 25. Well, I didn’t make the cut. That’s when I learned that theater is political. But there were amazing people in my class: Amanda Plummer, Chris Noth....

So you went from not seeing or doing much theater at all, to seeing Chorus Line in ‘76, to attending community college in the Bay Area and going after theater full-bore.

I told my parents I was leaving and was going to New York. I was naive and stupid. I had never been in a big city. I was in telephone sales -- I was in school from 9 to 6, and then I would work from 7 to 3 in the morning.

How could you work in the middle of the night?

It was all time zones.

Other than theater, what are your hobbies?

Gardening. I have five acres up by Mount Spokane High School.

What’s coming up now?

Not much. [laughs] My trees are going up. But even though I’ve lived up there for 10 years now, the coyotes and the moose and the deer — they scare me.

And I do woodworking I restore furniture, but I haven’t had much time for that lately. Just for stuff around my house.

You have tremors, shaky hands. What’s your diagnosis and prognosis?

I’ve gotten so that when kids ask — and kids do ask — I tell them it’s because I eat too much Jell-o.

And their eyes get big, and they’re satisified with that.

It’s just a family characteristic that comes from my father’s side of the family. Sometimes I make it do that for a character I'm playing, and it's funny — sometimes onstage, they won't shake when I want them to, and I have to make it work.

Most inspiring place you’ve visited outside the United States?

Venice, Italy. It's incredibly charming. Like the Bay Area, it's all built on landfill. There are entire towns built on piers that are still there after hundreds of years. All the first floors are shut off because of flooding. The people are beautiful and the city was amazing, but very dirty.

My favorite place right now ... next October, I'm going to Egypt to cruise up the Nile, a 17-day cruise. I've tried going to Egypt three times before, but the State Department shut down the visas.

Why the interest in Egypt?

It's where civilization started. I've always been fascinated to see that part of the world.

Let's change topics. For someone in your life, you’re not as good a friend as you should be. For some other individual, you’ve been a really good friend. Discuss.

Well, I have very few friends but quite a lot of acquaintances. I think of friends as the people who, when you really need something done right now, they'll come over. I have friends I've known for 25 years, and I have friends I've known for six months. It's just a bond that you get over time.

Who’s your hero? Do you have any former heroes who, for you at least, have fallen off their pedestals?

"Heroes" -- I don't really like the term. I mean, these sports people or actors or politicians, and everyone regards them as heroes ... I just don't get it. Anybody can be a hero in the situation -- the mom who lifts the car off the kid.

What mildly (or wildly) popular activity, sport or pastime holds just about zero interest for you personally? Why?

I'm not much into sports. I just find it boring as shit -- all those egos running around on that little field.

Tell me a little about Harding in Cuckoo’s Nest. Your performance is wonderful. What discoveries about him have you made in rehearsal? How much has the part been cut for the one-hour competition version?

This is the fifth one I've done. For a competition show, the director cuts it down, then runs it, then cuts it down some more. It usually takes three cuts to get it down to its essence.

Then you have to learn all the lines again, sometimes from a different point of view, because the dialogue that supported that transition earlier is not there. So you come up with different character choices.

I never audition for a show that I don't want to do.

For example, I auditioned for Harding while I was in costume and makeup for Ali Hakim upstairs in Oklahoma! But I just wasn't getting it. I wasn't focused. And it wasnt until the third time that it clicked. Yvonne even said to me at one point, I didn't think you were going to get it.

Diana let me read for both parts in Lonely Planet. That's the only show in which I've kept open, doing and changing things all the way through. It was never dull.

React to the following in whatever way you see fit, Tom.

Bowen’s reviews are too long. They’re too snooty. He plays favorites. He has little understanding of Aspects A, B and C of theater. He shouldn’t single out individual performers for criticisms. He’s too easy to please. He’s way too negative. He fixates on little details. He talks too much about theater in the abstract. He has a funny mustache. He’s too bald. I don’t like the way he breathes.

Oh, reviews ... everybody says they don't read them, but they read them.

It's just your opinion, or Jim [Kershner]'s opinion.
It's odd, in no other profession do they have anybody reviewing them publically.

But it's all just part of the gig. I don't take them that seriously.

Another sticky wicket – this time, about this very blog. What’s your reaction to the following?

Comments on this blog go through me. I reject about 10 percent to 20 percent of them. My criterion: If a comment is purely negative and personal, it doesn’t get in. If, however, it’s critical of an individual but also raises a valid opinion about a show or a performance, then I allow it to be posted. For technical reasons and for the foreseeable future, apparently, anonymous commenters on this blog (as distinct from the Inlander Website in general) will be able to remain anonymous and won’t be required to register with a traceable pseudonym like “Spokane Theater Nut.”

I don't like all the negative comments on the blog. People are uglier when they're anonymous. They'll always be competive. There will always be jealousies. But I don't like it when they get into the personal stuff. I mean, Are you really gonna go there? And besides, if you don't like the personality, you can still like the work. Actors are very egotistical and very insecure ...

... no?!

And sometimes, we don't edit ourselves [laughs].

But I don't read the blog much. I don't have a computer at home, and I'm on the damn thing all day at work, so I don't really care. We all rely too much on technology.

Think of “funniest backstage moments that I’ve experienced or witnessed in Spokane theater.” Now spill. (You can leave names out of it, but we hope you won’t.)

In Death of a Salesman, I was playing Bernard, and I had a lot of downtime. So I’m down in the dressing room, eating tortilla chips, and I hear Melody [Deatherage] over the intercom, and I realize, ‘Son of a bitch, that’s my cue!’ So I haul ass upstairs, and I make it exactly on time. And Melody gives me my line, and when I start speaking to her, I start spitting tortilla chips all over the stage.

Was it so the audience could notice?

No, I don’t think so. But Melody sure noticed. And I’m thinking, ‘What are you gonna do to hide it?’”

... to be continued ... (as you can probably tell from the formatting alone, assembling this interview has been a bear ...)

review of *A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum*

on Spokane Civic Theater's Main Stage through June 14

They only get one actual rimshot from the drummer in the band. They could have gotten 50: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is filled with giggly sex-farce jokes of the ogling kind.

Since its premiere back when JFK was president, Forum has featured the ogling and chuckling of middle-aged men, appraising the girlie-girls while singing early Stephen Sondheim songs. The suits are eyeballing the secretaries. It’s like Mad Men, musicalized and in togas.

Fortunately, the Spokane Civic’s Forum (through June 14) has Jerry Sciarrio in the central witty-slave role of Pseudolus. Sciarrio trips and skips and grimaces, always improvising, always calculating. His arms are crossed in consternation, then he beats himself in frustration; his fingers quiver whenever he’s hatching a new scheme. With his quick-thinking, forehead-slapping, twisting and turning antics, Sciarrio’s Pseudolus is so inventive, so out there in out-thinking his simple-minded masters, that it’s just a delight to observe him. He appeals both to the brain and the funny bone.

His best bits involve silly vaudeville steps with three Roman soldiers. He prances, they prance; he skips, they skip; he executes a five-step Lindy Hop, they fall all over themselves. Literally. It’s intricate, funny stuff for which choreographer Suzanne Ostersmith deserves credit along with the swift-footed Sciarrio. He’s so good that — given his previous seasons’ Nathan Detroit (in Guys and Dolls) and Sgt. Luther Billis (in South Pacific) — Pseudolus feels like the role that Sciarrio was destined to play.

There are other delights as well. Robert Wamsley as Senex — with a reprieve from his domineering wife and a real chance at a beautiful young virgin — is delightfully light on his feet for “Everybody Ought To Have a Maid.” The moments when he’s joined by one, two, three other men — all reveling in harmless fantasizing about the good life — is delightful. Wamsley’s confused sidelong glances during the father-son confusions of “Impossible” enlivened even that less memorable song.

For the sake of the Big Reveal — uncovering David Baker’s exceptional set — director Diana Trotter pays the price (yes, it’s in the script, but let’s have some fun) of isolating Sciarrio and the three overacting Proteans in front of the curtain.

It’s a small-scale, slow opening to what eventually builds into the raucous, energetic and justly famous opening number, “Comedy Tonight.” Why not party from the get-go?

Baker’s colorful and detailed set, evoking antiquity with just a dash of the cartoonish, is worth the surprise. Roman statues loom above slanted roofs, striking the right mix of distinguished and loony.

Gary Pierce has spent years mugging on local stages, but now he has found the role that’s actually suited to them — and it’s a guy named Hysterium. Who runs around in drag. A lot. Frantically. With his eyes bugging out.

Nonetheless, Pierce has some masterful moments: a drawn-out double-take when the mast ... mistress? unexpectedly returns home, along with the entire “dead bride” and macho soldier sequence. (It’s complicated.)

And it’ll be interesting to see if a couple of promising newcomers to Civic — Callie Bley as the airhead, Lauralynn “Lulu” Stafford as the shrewish wife — will reappear in other, less broad roles.

All their antics are in the service of har-har titillation. In the early ‘60s, when being labeled a “fairy” could be a career-killer (or worse), tension over gender roles led to guffaws of release every time a man in drag or a bossy woman showed up. Today, lots of folks have figured out that sexuality’s a continuum, that gender roles aren’t rigid: less tension, less humor.

But c’mon, a man in drag is always funny.

Yes, indeedy, though telling the same joke three times to make sure that we get that the blonde is an airhead? Not so much. These gags aren’t just old, they’re fossilized.

The best laughs arrive when cast and script turn ironic. Being “Lovely” may be all that Bley’s Barbie-doll character can manage, but Sondheim’s swaying tune sheds its condescending tone and revs up the laughs when it’s reprised by Sciarrio and Pierce, who has circles of rouge on his cheeks because he’s wearing a bridal veil. And when Sciarrio is confronted with the gee-whiz enthusiasm of the young male lead (who’s named Hero and played by Jesse Ward), his sarcasm mocks musical-theater conventions. (As the braggart soldier, Shawn Hudson has great fun with self-mockery too.)

Half a century later, I guess we’re less patriarchal and more ironic. But as the audience left the theater after the show, I wasn’t the only one humming about four of Forum’s catchiest tunes: “”Comedy Tonight,” “Lovely” and “Everybody Ought To Have a Maid.” And still laughing over the madcap goofiness of the final door-slamming sequence that Trotter had engineered.
The Civic’s Forum was an often entertaining production of an often behind-the-times musical.

*A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum* -- Philia, Hero, Hysterium and Pseudolus

at Spokane Civic Theatre's Main Stage, May 15-June 14, 2009
directed by Diana M. Trotter
www.spokanecivictheatre.com
325-2507

[photo by Josh Smith -- in back: Callie Bley as Philia and Jesse Ward as Hero
In foreground: Gary Pierce as Hysterium and Jerry Sciarrio as Pseudolus ]

Opened on Broadway 47 years ago this week with Zero Mostel as Pseudolus and Jack Gilford as Hysterium.
Jerome Robbins, of course, is the one who insisted that the show needed a rousing opening number -- which inspired Sondheim to write "Comedy Tonight."
Based on three plays written 2,200 years ago by the Roman playwright Plautus.
Erich Segal wrote translations of Plautus -- his translation of *Miles Gloriosus,* for example, appeared in 1969, the year before *Love Story* (the novel; the Ali McGraw-Ryan O'Neal movie appeared in '71); Segal continues to this day as a classics scholar.
All three actors who have played Pseudolus on Broadway (Mostel '62, Phil Silvers '72, Nathan Lane '96) have won the Tony for Best Actor.
The 1966 film was Buster Keaton's last; he played Erronius. Michael Crawford (as in Phantom)) was Hero. Mostel and Gilford reprised their stage roles from four years before. Michael Hordern (distinguished British actor, played King Lear and Prospero in the BBC Shakespeare series of 1978-84) played Senex. But the movie cuts Pseudolus' song "Free," which he sings right after making the deal with Hero and falling out of a tree. The movie, in fact, cuts much of Sondheim's score.

Pseudolus is the laziest slave in Rome. He yearns to be "Free." When Senex and Domina leave town, Pseudolus gathers that their son Hero has the hots for the virgin-among-courtesans next door, Philia. If Pseudolus procures the girl for Hero, can he gain his freedom? Well, there are a few complications along the way.

The two houses next door belong to Marcus Lycus, the pimp for a house of ill repute, and Erronius, who's out wandering around and looking for his long-lost son and daughter.

Philia has been promised to Miles Gloriosus ("braggart soldier"). So Pseudolus convinces Marcus Lycus that Philia caught the plague in Crete -- she really needs to be sequestered over at Hero's house. But Marcus Lycus insists that Philia ultimately belongs to the army captain.
So Pseudolus concocts a story about how Philia has died of the plague -- which requires him to get her a sleeping potion that will mimic death. Then Philia and Hero can stow away on a boat and be together. Pseudolus gets a recipe for a sleeping potion from Hysterium, the head slave; all he lacks is a key ingredient, mare's sweat.

But then Senex returns home unexpectedly, and things get complicated. For reasons too complicated to go into, Philia throws herself at Senex (thinking that he is the army captain), and he's only too happy to play along; Senex decides to take a bath in Erronius' house, just before the latter returns from his wandering; Erronius is convinced that his own house is haunted, and so Pseudolus sends him on a wild goose chase all around Rome, just to be rid of him.

Miles Gloriosus turns up to claim his bride, which causes Pseudolus to impersonate Marcus Lycus and come up with a not-very-good lie. The army captain gets suspicious, and Pseudolus looks to be in a really tight spot. When Domina shows up, worried that her husband Senex might be engaging in some hanky-panky, she disguises herself in a virginal white robe and veil -- just like Philia, and just like Hysterium, who's in drag because ... oh, just go see the show.

*A Funny Thing ..." at the Civic: cast list

*A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum*
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart

Directed by Diana Trotter
Musical direction by Scott Miller

with Jerry Sciarrio as Pseudolus
Gary Pierce as Hysterium
Robert Wamsley as Senex
Lauralynn "Lulu" Stafford as Domina
Jesse Ward as Hero
Callie Bley as Philia
Tom Heppler as Marcus Lycus
Shawn Hudson as Miles Gloriosus
George Morrison as Erronius
Todd Kehne, David McCarthy and Shawna Nordman as Protean
Rachel Ewing and Jessica Shirley as the Geminae
Jess Liles as Gymnasia
Leah Dach as Vibrata
Rachel Packard as Panacea
and Kim Kromholtz as Tintinabula

May 15-June 14 at the Civic
Tickets: $26; $24, seniors; $16, students; $8, student rush
Visit www.SpokaneCivicTheatre.com or www.TicketsWest.com or call 325-2507 or 325-SEAT.

*A Funny Thing* at IBDb.com is here.
The Zero Mostel production opened in 1962.

[ image: from digitalsheetmusic.com ]

*Forum* auditions, March 22-23

*A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum*

Try out at the Civic's Studio Theater on Sunday, March 22, at 6 pm or Monday, March 23, at 6:30 pm. (Callbacks: Tuesday, March 24, at 6:30 pm. Rehearsals will begin on Wednesday, March 25.)

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Burt Shevlove and Larry Gelbart

Directed by Diana Trotter

Roles available for a dozen men and a dozen women.
Cold readings; Also perform a verse and a chorus from a contemporary musical. Please bring your own sheet music. An accompanist will be provided.

Performances: May 15-June 14

Featuring the unforgettable tunes "Comedy Tonight," "Lovely," and "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid."

Of COURSE you know that Zero Mostel and Nathan Lane starred as Pseudolus in the '62 and '96 Broadway productions. But to find out who starred on Broadway in the rather ill-fated '72 production, go here.