Tuesday, November 09, 1999
Playwright fans more 'Smoke on the Mountain'
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Alan Bailey has a message for Playhouse in the Park master's degree candidates: Walk into producing artistic director Ed Stern's office, tell him to hand over a rehearsal hall and your fellow actors because you're going to put on a show.
That's what Mr. Bailey did when he was an intern, a couple of decades back, at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J. His bosses were so impressed by his nerve, or maybe his naivete, that they did it. Five years later, they called him up and commissioned him to create a show. That show became Smoke on the Mountain.
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IF YOU GO
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• What: Sanders Family Christmas: More Smoke on the Mountain.
• When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 5 and 9 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday through Dec. 23. There is no performance Thanksgiving Day. There are additional performances at 8 p.m. Nov. 22 and 2 p.m. Dec. 1 and 23.
• Where: Playhouse in the Park Shelterhouse, Eden Park.
• Tickets: previews (through Wednesday) $26.50; tickets $33.50-$41.50. Any unreserved seats are half-price when purchased 11 a.m.-5 p.m. on the day of the show at the Playhouse box office or the PNC Bank Tower Tix booth.
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Smoke, with its mix of roof-raising song and down-home comedy, was (and is) wildly successful with audiences worldwide, including its 1993 run at Playhouse in the Park.
Now Mr. Bailey and co-creator Connie Ray have a sequel, Sanders Family Christmas: More Smoke on the Mountain. It plays through the holidays in Playhouse in the Park's Shelterhouse. Mr. Bailey directs.
“It really does all go back to that internship,” Mr. Bailey says, clearly bemused by the course of events.
Nobody expected Smoke to have a future, he explains. He and Ms. Ray envisioned a musical comedy about a family of gospel singers in economically depressed 1938, a little family feudin' along with keeping the faith in the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church somewhere in the North Carolina hills.
A native of Macon, Ga., Mr. Bailey grew up in the Baptist Church and on gospel music. He got his first taste of testifyin' as a child, when he'd visit his grandparents and attend church in their small North Carolina town. Those services were a lot louder and more participatory than back home.
Mr. Bailey wanted to do a show about it. He was writing shows, he laughs, before he ever saw one.
“I never saw a play until I was a senior in high school. Where would I see a play in a small town outside Macon? We all watched TV variety shows. I learned from The Carol Burnett Show. I started out writing sketches.”
He became a theater major at the University of Georgia and later Ohio University, where he met Ms. Ray, at one time a Playhouse intern herself.
He was living in New York when he started work on Smoke. He couldn't find a gospel or bluegrass radio station, which didn't help with his research.
Some songs in the show were there because that's what Mr. Bailey could find and get permission to use. He found a lot of the music, like “I'll Never Die, I'll Just Change My Address” in bargain sheet music bins at Tower Records in New York. He had his mom send all the old records in the family collection. He got a lot of refusals from music publishers.
That hasn't been a problem for Sanders Family Christmas, whose 31 songs include traditional gospel and bluegrass, carols and some original songs, including a couple by Mr. Bailey and Ms. Ray.
Sanders Family Christmas is set 31/2 years after the action of the original, on Christmas Eve 1941, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Sanders family scion, Dennis, now a reverend, has enlisted in the Marines and is getting ready to ship out.
If there was going to be a sequel, Mr. Bailey says, “one of the earliest things we knew was that we wanted to set it at the advent of the war. It always seemed obvious.”
Too, he says tongue-in-cheek, “at the end of Smoke, they all learned to listen and love and learned how to live together. Three and a half years is just enough time for all that to fade a little.”
The big surprise of Sanders Family Christmas, he says, is that “it was a lot harder than we thought it would be. Smoke went together in a month. We thought, "we know the characters, we know the structure' ” but they found it “hard to honor people's expectations and our own expectations.”
The show was supposed to be ready last Christmas. Mr. Bailey ended up calling several theaters to say it wasn't ready. They've got it right now, he says.
Returning for the sequel from the original Playhouse production are Don Bryant Bailey, David Hemsley Caldwell and Richard Glover. Constance Barron, Jonah Marsh and Dionne McGuire Gardner are from the recent off-Broadway revival. B. Hayden Oliver rounds out the cast.
Do they look like a family? “I will confess to a little hair-dying,” Mr. Bailey says dryly.
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