Marilu Henner returns to Bucks County Playhouse (virtually) to give theater enthusiasts some stories
Twenty years ago, at Christmas with visiting family in tow, Marilu Henner, starring in “Annie Get Your Gun” at Philadelphia’s Merriam Theater, decided to tour a little and landed in New Hope.
Among the sights that resonated was the Bucks County Playhouse, which she says was in disrepair but looked as if it was steeped in tradition. Henner made the pronouncement, “I am going to play here someday.”
She did, twice, opposite Marsha Mason in “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” in 2013 and with author Christopher Durang in “Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike” a year later.
The successful stints led to a relationship with the current producers who have brought a refurbished BCP back to the glory of the days when it hosted the theater’s top stars and was the world premiere stop for several plays. Henner is now one of the Playhouse’s artistic advisors. She was host of the theater’s gala last season, and Sunday, plays another interesting role.
Unable to present shows, but wanting to stay in the public eye during the current quarantine, the Playhouse has been streaming a 7 p.m. Sunday night series called “Playhouse Live!” in which artists, like Henner, tell stories or perform.
On a May 31 edition, Henner entertained with memories of her childhood which included her mother running a dancing school in the garage and a beauty shop in the kitchen of their Chicago home while her gay uncle gave art lessons upstairs, some to nuns from the parish school next door.
This Sunday, Henner, known widely for TV roles in “Taxi” and “Evening Shade” as well as her appearances on “Dancing with the Stars” and “Celebrity Apprentice,” relates her experiences with the show “Grease.” Although she was not in the original Broadway cast, she was in the first-ever production in a converted Chicago trolley barn, hit the road with the first national tour, including a January 1973 stop at Philadelphia’s Forrest Theatre, and moved into the Broadway show in 1974.
That national tour cast turned out to be pretty illustrious with Henner’s “Taxi” co-star, Jeff Conaway, playing Danny Zuko, and a young and striking John Travolta, who Henner calls “Johnny,” as Doody, not to mention twotime Tony winner Judy Kaye as Betty Rizzo.
During a telephone conversation from her L.A.-area home, where she is quarantining with her husband, a son, age 26, her brother, and his two children, ages 5 and 7, Henner shared most of what she plans to say on Sunday’s show.
I won’t steal her thunder by telling all, but some high points are irresistible.
“Because my mother had a dancing school,” Henner said, “theater companies from all over Chicago would call her when they needed kids for one of their shows. My Mom would stand in front of a group of us and say, ‘I need 12 kids for ‘The King and I’ or I need two kids for ‘South Pacific,’ and I’d always be the eager kid waving my hands and saying ‘Pick me, pick me.’
“I was picked and by the time I was 15, I’d played in most of the community theaters of Chicago. In one production of “The Boyfriend,” one of my fellow performers was Jimmy Jacobs, who worked during in the day in advertising.
“Jimmy’s about 10 years older than I am, but we become friends, and one day he calls and says, ‘Henner, I wrote his show that is having a production, and I need you to be in it.’ That’s how I got to be the first person to sing ‘Freddy My Love’ on stage.
“‘Grease’ was much different in that first production from the show that played on Broadway. We were more raucous and directed to be rude to people in the audience.
“A few years later, I’m in college and up to my neck in papers, ‘Grease’ is a hit on Broadway, and I get a call from Jimmy. ‘Henner, we’re doing a tour. I need you to come to New York and audition tomorrow and go into rehearsals the next day.’
“I made a million excuses, but in the end, because of where my car was parked, I went to New York and began the career that goes on to this day.”
On Sunday’s “Playhouse Live!,” Henner will fill in several blanks and probably talk more about Mr. Travolta who was involved with “Grease” long before the 1978 movie in which he plays Zuko, and Conaway supports him.
Henner’s stories are legion, and she tells them with the zest you’d expect from one of six children who always had to figure out how to get some attention.
She includes these in a cabaret act she last performed at Below 54, a club under New York’s famous Studio 54, March 4, a week before Broadway’s lights went dark to guard against COVID, but in time for Alex Fraser, BCP’s producing director, to see it and book it to come to New Hope.
The quarantine intervened. Henner is in California. Fraser is in New Hope. Thanks to technology, Henner can preview her show, “The Music and Memories of Marilu Henner,” via her stories on “Playhouse Live.”
“Memories” are among the things for which Henner is famous. She is known for her ability to recall her entire life and has written about her gift and some of the reasons for it in some of her 10 books. (An eleventh is on the way. It has to do with the quarantine, but Henner wouldn’t say more.)
One great Philadelphia memory is from the consecutive years she did “Grease,” then “Over Here” with Travolta and The Andrews Sisters, here.
“The shows were in different theaters, but near them there was a fortune teller in one of those storefronts that make you wonder how a psychic can afford the rent. On a lark, some of us from ‘Grease’ went in, and the fortune teller was very general, things like ‘you live with people’ and ‘you were born from a woman.’ She’d go through a string of these and then say you had a curse but not to worry because she could remove this curse. She said she didn’t want money, but we should go to the grocery store and bring back some spaghetti and tomato paste, carefully warning us ‘not to get the cheap kind, but to buy Contadina,’ and that would do it.
“Apparently she did not have that good a memory because when I went back the next year with friends from “Over Here,” she went through the same routine, except she must have wanted Chinese food that day because that time the curse would be lifted by getting her some chow mein.”
Henner has three more weeks in quarantine before she heads to Victoria, British Columbia, to shoot a new season of her Hallmark series, “Aurora Teagarden,” in which she plays a real estate agent and mother to Candace Cameron Bure’s title character, a librarian interested in murders.
Besides Henner, this week’s “Playhouse Live” will feature New Jersey’s John Tartaglia, who would be directing the show that made him famous, “Avenue Q,” at BCP, as well as Alex Fraser, executive producer Robyn Goodman (who I saw perform off-Broadway), and producer Josh Fiedler. “Playhouse Live!” is produced by Michael Traupman and Jeremy Ehlinger.