A life filled with drama
Marcia Thomas has made theater happen from Jefferson to England and back again
JEFFERSON, Texas — With a theater education that dates back to at least the 1950s, Marcia Thomas may have learned more about music and the dramatic arts than many of her younger cohorts in the cause, but she’s not done yet.
Thomas, who grew up in Jefferson, lived for years in nearby Marshall, and even enjoyed a couple theater-rich teen years in England, helms the Jefferson Opera House Theatre Players as their president.
Soon, the theater troupe will hosts its annual, utterly unique fundraiser, Chocolate Sunday, at the Hotel Jefferson on April 18 with a 2 p.m. start. The event combines tasty food treats in the form of competing chocolate recipes with live musical performances, including show tunes by composers like Richard Rodgers and the team of Broadway geniuses Lerner and Loewe.
Chocolate Sunday is another iteration of the group’s more than three-decade commitment to bringing the arts to small-town Northeast Texas, and it gives Thomas another chance to pool the talents of area performers for a great show, a skill with which she’s intimately familiar.
“I’ve been involved with it since the very beginning,” Thomas said about the Opera House Theatre crew, having moved back to Jefferson with her husband right at the end of the 1970s. Eventually, she helped start the theater company here.
“I had been in theater most of my life, or some form of entertainment. Coming back over here was a little bit of a unique situation,” Thomas recalled.
Her mother, who had moved back with her husband to retire and lived in “the old home place,” Thomas said, persistently encouraged her to join them back in Jefferson, and finally Thomas gave in. At the time, there wasn’t much in the way of local theater.
“Jefferson, it had a little tourist trade, but it was sort of a trickle. The Pilgrimage thing had been going on since the late ’50s, and that was about the only one thing a year that they had,” Thomas said.
The Jefferson Pilgrimage, organized by the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club, features a look back at Jefferson of old with tours of historic homes. The idea back then was to open up some of the old homes in Jefferson to visitors.
“Jefferson never really changed. When the guys went away for World War II, nothing really changed. The same people lived in the same old houses,” Thomas said. The homes may not have been fixed up, but they had furniture from the 1860s, so the idea for this historical pilgrimage was born, she explained.
And in the early ’50s, Thomas spent a couple of years in England, living outside of London with her mother. She finished high school there and experienced an indelible, interesting introduction to the theater world.
“That afforded me a lot of opportunity to see theater and really get a bug going. I’ve always done it since I was about 3,” Thomas recalled.
She’d been staying with her grandparents in Jefferson, and she even had a high school sweetheart whom she was going to marry. But she left those plans behind, her mom dragging her to England.
“I didn’t want to go, but she said, ‘You have to go,’” Thomas said.
“I went over there on the Queen Mary. That was a good thing. That was a huge event. I just didn’t know what to expect. I hadn’t seen a ship like that,” she recalled, adding, “I grew up quick over there. You just grew. You get in a different culture.”
At 15 years old, she could ride the Tube across London. She wasn’t scared of anything. It was a wonderful experience, although she remembers seeing bombed-out places from WWII.
“Once I got over there, I forgot all about my boyfriend,” Thomas remembers. “I was engaged, but I sent the ring back. I decided I had to stay over there, which was a wonderful situation.”
She had two years of school to finish, and she traveled around Western Europe while she was waiting to restart her education. She experienced other cultures, and her career as a musical comedy performer was kindled.
“It was a great introduction to life and the world,” Thomas said. She took private lessons, studying theater, singing and dance. “English are very big on the arts, and they always have been. Every little community has a little theater and they have maybe several dance studios.”
Her vocal coach had also worked with Betty Hutton, an American actress who appeared in such films as “Annie Get Your Gun” and “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” during the 1940s and ’50s.
Thomas recalls attending an audition along with several hundred people in an old, grimy theater in London. She signed up for it. It was like a cattle call, she remembers.
“I sang a song from ‘Guys and Dolls,’” Thomas said. “I had been to see that on the West End of London and I loved that show.”
After she sang, she was asked — by someone in the dark audience — her name. Then she was asked where she was from.
“Here’s where I made my mistake. I said, ‘I’m from Texas,’” Thomas recalled, mimicking a dramatic East Texas drawl. “They said, ‘What?’”
She explained she was living in England now, but they thought she was Canadian. She didn’t have a work permit, which ultimately proved to be a problem.
Her family also had to return to the States — in the summer. “It was hotter than Hades here in July, I remember that, because I had been living in the colder climate of England and I had to get accustomed to it,” she recalled.
Her girlfriends took her on a drive around town. While cruising and happening upon the location where the boys hung out, he ran into her old boyfriend. They saw a movie that night. By September, she was married.
“That pretty well took care of my career at that point,” she recalls.
While married and raising children, Thomas did theater when the time and the situation allowed, such as a show at Marjorie Lyons Playhouse at Centenary College, the lead
“It (theater) transports the mind to another place. It opens up so many things in your psyche. It’s a lifelong learning education, is what it is. It’s been a great opportunity to me.” —Marcia Thomas
role in “The Boy Friend.” Combining child rearing and theater was tough to do.
“I tried to do mostly around the Shreveport area because there was nothing in East Texas, I mean there was nothing here. Eventually that all kind of evolved into just being a singer,” Thomas said. She joined a combo group that played gigs at venues like the officers club at Barksdale Air Force Base — standard, contemporary songs and bit of jazz.
“Really, my voice is more suited to more musical comedy. I’m a lyric soprano,” Thomas said. They played dances, not concerts. She enjoyed doing it, and then had an opportunity to perform the lead in a musical in Dallas.
Returning to Marshall, she kept singing and organized a small theater, doing plays and musicals as they went from venue to venue.
“That kind of satisfied me to a degree,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t going to go anywhere by sticking around East Texas. You just can’t make it that way. I learned to enjoy what I had right then.”
She stayed in Marshall for roughly two-and-a-half decades before her mother’s entreaties lured her back to Jefferson, where she ultimately lived in a building — two stories, a wrought iron balcony and a New Orleans style — that had been in their family since the 1920s.
Eventually, they moved in and she got that itch to do theater again.
“I just needed to do it at some point,” Thomas said. “I just thought, ‘Why don’t I do my own theater right here?’ I turned my downstairs living room into my living room theater. And I opened with ‘The Belle of Amherst.’”
That play is based on Emily Dickinson’s life as a monologue that includes Dickinson poems. Thomas learned it over two months, having never done a one-woman show before. A local ladies’ club was invited to attend the opening night to gauge interest, but four inches of snow fell.
“All the ladies called me at the house and they said, ‘Are you still going to have your show tonight?’ I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I certainly am and my husband will come get you.’ So he did,” Thomas said.
By the late 1980s, she was asked to organize a community theater, and Thomas finally relented with the first show in July of 1989, “Hello, Dolly.” Thus, Jefferson’s Opera House Theatre Players was born.
“Our little group has done practically all of the great big musical classics. We’ve done them all really. We’ve done ‘Mame,’ we’ve done ‘The King and I,’ we’ve done ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ we’ve done ‘Music Man.’ We’ve done any number of the classics,” Thomas said. They even did a “Showboat” production, despite it being a large, challenging production with set changes and more.
“If you can do a production of ‘Showboat,’ you know you must have something. You’re doing something right,” Thomas said.
She remembers staging “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” with their own version of it, which was supposed to be PG rated. She thought it would be a moneymaker on a Mardi Gras weekend because of its popularity, funny story and great music.
They performed it at the library after she promised they’d be careful about the language and on-stage antics. “We did a bang-up job on it, too, and it was our version,” Thomas recalled.
Then came the final performance, however, and, as she explains it, lips were a bit looser with the language. Four-letter words returned, and Thomas credits “a bit of hooch” sipped between scenes.
“We all about died,” she said, recalling, also, that the word “Whorehouse” couldn’t be used on the sign outside.
Despite such wild, amusing moments, Thomas has enjoyed bringing theater to Jefferson. She’ll keep on doing it.
“The whole thing is rewarding to me. It’s rewarding to me personally because I love it. It gives me an opportunity to introduce other people to theater, and I honestly believe that young people, especially, need this in their lives. They need the arts in their lives,” Thomas said. “There’s so much realism and so much stress, and it’s been getting worse and worse the last 40 years or more.”
She puts it this way: People need the relief that theater can bring. She marvels at the hard work area performers show in live theater. She hesitates to call them amateurs and savors the ability to cast good people in their roles. She’d like to see more theater in the schools, too.
“To me, nothing beats a good theater performance,” Thomas said, adding of this wonderful medium’s importance, “It transports the mind to another place. It opens up so many things in your psyche. It’s a lifelong learning education, is what it is. It’s been a great opportunity to me.”