Friday, July 16, 1999

Love of the stage led to 27 years in community theater

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BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Walt Luthy as Col. Thomas McKean in 1776. (Saed Hindash photo) | ZOOM |

        Walt Luthy is not a psychotic killer, but he played one onstage. This is the real Mr. Luthy: a 56-year-old married father of two grown sons. A banker-turned-video producer. A good-sized fellow with an even larger laugh. And a Delhi Township man who for 27 years has enjoyed acting in community theater.

        Years ago he had the lead in a play called The Sound of Murder.Apparently, he did a fine job with the psychotic killer part, because audiences hated Mr. Luthy (pronounced Well, not him. They hated the character he was playing.

        He remembers one particularly tense scene in which a police officer held a gun on him, and Mr. Luthy's character urged him to pull the trigger.

Everyone has a story worth telling. At least, that's the theory. To test it, Tempo is throwing darts at the phone book. When a dart hits a name, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if someone in the home will be interviewed. Stories appear on Fridays.

        And he remembers a woman in the audience standing up and screaming for someone to shoot him.

        It was beautiful timing, because — bang! — that was when the gun went off.

        “I flipped over a banister and landed on my face,” Mr. Luthy says, “and it was all I could do to keep from laughing my butt off.”

        It was the same every night. “When I got shot,” he says, “the audience applauded.”

        Mr. Luthy loved it.

        His interest in community theater began 27 years ago with a suggestion from his wife, Janet, that he get more involved in church activities. At the time, their church had a theater group.

        He had almost no acting experience, but he auditioned and won a part. Eventually he and Janet — who enjoys working with costumes and props — gravitated to other community theater groups, including The Drama Workshop and Mariemont Players.

        At the outset, acting was a nice change of pace for Mr. Luthy, who spent 18 years in banking before getting into the video production business; his company is called Eldor Communications.

        “Being a banker was OK,” he says, “but it's very rigid and structured, and there's not much leeway. My bent was to be a little wacko at times, and I found (acting) was a perfect outlet for that.

        “You could do all kinds of different things, and be all kinds of different people.”

        He particularly enjoyed being Max Prince, the lead character in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, a play about comic Sid Caesar and his writers. The role was “an actor's dream,” he says, because of the range of emotions it required.

        Plus, he got to perform much of the show with his pants off.

        “It was hard to invite friends to come see him in his underwear,” Janet says, smiling.

        Recently, Mr. Luthy got a rare chance to perform for pay. He portrayed Col. Thomas McKean in the Downtown Theatre Classics production of 1776. It wrapped up a 15-performance run Sunday in the Aronoff Center's Jarson-Kaplan Theater.

        Stage fright has never been a problem, Mr. Luthy says, but years ago he did experience an onstage lapse when he suffered a mild seizure while singing a duet. Looking into a stage light apparently triggered it.

        He faded out mentally for a minute or so. His partner didn't know what was happening.

        “She had her fingernails embedded in both my arms. I think she drew blood. She was really upset with me,” Mr. Luthy says, laughing.

        By the end of the song, he had recovered enough to blurt out a final “Laaaaaa!”

        He knows now never to look into the lights. But he still enjoys performing under them.

       

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