Cover story: Backstage story -- It takes, and makes, a community to put on 'Oklahoma!' Cover story: Backstage story -- It takes, and makes, a community to put on 'Oklahoma!' (November 16, 2005)

By Barbara Wood

Special to the Almanac

SCENE: The stage of Woodside High School's new Performing Arts Center, curtain call for the cast of "Oklahoma!" opening night, Friday, Nov. 11. The audience wildly applauds the production as the more than 50 cast members bow together, smiling widely.

SCENE: Backstage moments later, after the final curtain closes. Euphoric, exhausted cast and crew members applaud, whoop, hug and high-five one another. They have made it through opening night! The more than 120 people involved in this Woodside Community Theatre production breathe a collective sigh of relief.

SCENE: Earlier that same week, same stage. With no sets, no scenery and no costumes, the cast members, at least one in pajamas, practice their first run-through with the 28-member orchestra and a few props.

Backstage, Larry Laidlaw adds the finishing touches to the full-scale peddler's cart he has built from scratch, wheels and all.

The next night, as props, costumes and scenery are added, cast members sing while the crew adjusts the lighting. Behind the singers, Diane Carr perches on a scaffold, in the dark with only a penlight, stapling a second-floor curtain onto the two-story "farmhouse," which is the main stage prop.

In a back room, Deborah Rosas is directing volunteers on sewing machines to finish the costumes. Claudia McCarley, who plays one of the major characters, Aunt Eller, offers lessons in stage makeup to anyone who is interested. Linda and Steve Meyn try to figure out where to place the close-to-90 props used in the play.

Ray McNaughton, whose daughters Alanna and Devon are in the youth chorus, and whose wife Cynthia is helping with costumes and makeup, works on controlling the individual microphones each actor with even a line wears.

SCENE: George Sellman Auditorium, Woodside Elementary School, three weeks earlier. The "Oklahoma!" cast practices a scene on the gym floor. With the lead actors in costumes for the first time, scripts still in hand, and the half-built stage "house" for a backdrop, they run through the scene over and over with director Elena Mori.

SCENE: Woodside back yard, five months earlier. Co-producers Donna Losey and Mindy Bowles, Technical Director Mark Bowles, Musical Director Ruthanne Smith, Artistic Director Elena Mori and Orchestra Conductor Richard Gordon decide to make "Oklahoma!" the next production of the Woodside Community Theatre. They plan to stage it in the new state-of-the-art Woodside High School Performing Arts Center. The only catch is the expenses for the show will run at least $8,000 more than in the past, so up-front fundraising will have to be done.

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The production of "Oklahoma!" now mid-run in the new Woodside High theater is the culmination of the combined efforts of more than 120 people's skills and talents.

This Woodside Community Theatre production involved months of planning and rehearsal, and thousands of hours of hard work. For the majority of those involved in the production, the ones who won't receive a curtain call, the only reward for their missed sleep and prolonged effort is the satisfaction of being part of something bigger than anything they could do alone.

Without Mark and Mindy Bowles, "Oklahoma!" would probably not now be on stage. The two, who met decades ago while working backstage on a community theater production, decided several years ago to try to revive the Woodside tradition of community theater, started by the late George Sellman, to whom this production is dedicated. The goal, Mark Bowles says, was to put together "a group that has fun but also cranks out a good show."

They have now put on three shows in as many years.

The shows pool the talents and skills of a disparate group.

"We can't do a play," Mark Bowles says. "All we can do is stand on a street corner and say 'A play is going to be done here.'" The rest, he says, is up to those who contribute to the final product -- in this case a six-night run of "Oklahoma."

Those 120 people make up as varied a "community" as you might find anywhere. Cast members include second-graders and grandparents with ages ranging from 7 to 59, a venture capitalist, a loan agent, several teachers and many students.

The computer industry is well-represented, as is bio-technology. While most of the cast and crew live in Woodside or Redwood City, others come from as far away as Sunnyvale and San Francisco.

Two of the female leads are students -- Alicia Molin, who plays Ado Annie, is a graduate of Woodside High School who is now at San Francisco State, and Jamie Lease, who plays Laurey, is a high school student at Canada Middle College.

Claudia McCarley, who plays Aunt Eller, is a loan agent and bookkeeper from Redwood City who is onstage for the first time in 35 years, although she has done some off-stage acting in the meantime.

Diamond, who plays Jud, is a middle-school teacher and country music singer from Redwood City, while Danny Martin, who plays Curly, teaches preschool and children with cerebral palsy and sells fireworks from his home in Millbrae.

Doug Willbanks, a real estate agent from Woodside who performed in four of George Sellman's productions, plays Ike Skidmore.

Director Elena Mori is a drama teacher in Redwood City who began her theater career as a 4-year-old dancer.

Many of the cast and crew have been in all three productions of the revived Woodside Community Theatre, while others are involved for the first time or returning to theater after decades away.

The cast has been practicing as many as four nights a week since the second week in September. In the week before opening night, practices began on Sunday and ran until after 10:30 p.m. each night.

Mark Bowles figures that he, Mindy and co-producer Donna Losey have together put in the equivalent of 14 full-time work weeks on "Oklahoma!" since April.

Ted Sprague has not put in nearly that many hours, but without Ted you wouldn't have a production either. Ted pulls the ropes to open and close the main stage curtain, the only non-automated curtain in the new theater.

Ted says he volunteered for the backstage job so he could spend time with his daughter, Caroline, a second-grader at Woodside Elementary who is among the 25 children in the cast. Unfortunately, Ted says, he now mostly sees her from the wings while he is waiting to do his part.

Several other family groups are also involved in the production.

Alex Gifford and her three children, plus her brother-in-law and his girlfriend are all on-stage. Alex and eighth-grader Katherine, sixth-grader Marshall and second-grader Ellie are in the chorus; Ted Gifford plays the peddler Ali Hakim, and his girlfriend Yonitte Hindawi is a core dancer. Son Marshall is also on the stage crew.

While the schedule has been exhausting for the family, Alex plans to keep on doing community theater. "The year I will just jump for joy will be the year my husband decides he has time to do this," she says.

Alex says she planned to be in only one number in this year's production so she could concentrate on working with the children in the cast. But once rehearsals started she couldn't resist, and now's she's in three numbers.

What keeps bringing her family back, Alex says, is "all the camaraderie of the different generations."

Seven members of Woodside's Patrick family are involved in "Oklahoma!," but only seventh-grader LeeAnn Patrick is seen onstage. The fruits of the other Patricks' labors are visible, though.

Brothers Stevan and Akio built most of the sets, including the two-story farmhouse/smokehouse that dominates the stage. Steve's wife Tina helped with painting the scenery and stage sets while Akio's wife Karen worked on costumes and managing kids backstage. Tina and Steve's sons, Connor and Taylor, helped their dad and uncle build the sets.

Bob Sherman, assistant principal at Woodside Elementary School and a Woodside resident, has a cameo role in the production, dancing in one number with Woodside Elementary teacher Karen Peterson. "It's my first time in makeup," Mr. Sheman said.

Like many others, taking part in "Oklahoma" is a return to a theater past. Mr. Sherman was on the stage crew for "Oklahoma!" at St. Ignatius High School in San Francisco. "I dropped a bench on my foot and lost my toenail," he remembers, adding that he hopes to remain uninjured in this production.

Orchestra Director Richard Gordon got his start in George Sellman's community productions in the late 1980s with "Mame" when his wife, Deborah, volunteered him at an organizing meeting. "She said, 'We had everything we needed except an orchestra conductor, so I told them you could do that,'" Richard says.

Directing musicians to play in real time with actors on stage, he said, turned out to be "literally the hardest thing I had ever done in my life."

From the orchestra members to the audience and the stage crew, all agree that the new Woodside High School theater is amazing.

"It's spectacular. It's over the top," says Doug Wilbanks, who has performed in five previous Woodside Community Theatre productions in the gym at Woodside Elementary School, otherwise known as Sellman Auditorium. "You can act on this stage."

"We can do things in this theater that we would never consider in Sellman," Mark Bowles says.

The budget for this production is over $30,000, Mark says, with a goal of breaking even by selling tickets. "Making money is not our objective, and so far it's working out pretty well," he jokes.

With all that has gone into it, this production, has one more characteristic that typifies live theater -- by Sunday, when the show has ended and the cast and crew have cleaned up the theater and returned the props, scenery and costumes to where they came from, nothing will be left of "Oklahoma!" but the memories.
Barbara Wood is a freelance writer from Woodside. She is on the stage crew for "Oklahoma!" as she has been for the previous two WCT productions.
Tickets still available

Tickets are still available for the last three nights of "Oklahoma" on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, November 17-19, at 7:30 p.m. at the new Woodside High School Performing Arts Center, 199 Churchill Ave. The state-of-the-art theater holds 440 people in comfortable seats with lots of legroom and easy access for disabled theatre-goers. Tickets are $18 for adults, $15 for seniors and $10 for students, age 18 and under. Tickets may be ordered by e-mailing info@woodsidetheatre.org or calling the box office at 365-6404.

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