Zele Cafe: Aspen Community Theatre Loves Mike Monroney

October 23rd, 2007 at 07:02pm Zele Community Table 117

Zele Community Table
October 16, 2007

Mike Monroney
Director, “She Loves Me”
Aspen Community Theatre

Michael Conniff: Happy birthday! How does it feel?

Mike Monroney: It feels for the most part pretty good. It’s certainly a lovely day here, the last day of a month that began with my mother’s birthday: September 15 to October 16.

MC: Are your parents still alive?

MM: Both are still alive in Arvada, but they’re not doing particularly well. My mom is 77, my father is 81.

MC: Did you grow up in Arvada?

MM: Yes. Arvada is one of those places you’re bored you’re living there, then later you realize how lucky you are to have grown up there. It’s quiet, white, middle-class suburbia. Great schools, with great music and theatre programs. I feel very lucky, Both my parents were musicians.

MC: Working musicians?

MM: Yes. My father taught high school and played stand-up bass in a jazz combo. My mom taught piano and played violin in county symphony. The met in a music program in Kansas, in Wichita. It’s a story they love to tell. They were in different practice rooms, playing back and forth, speaking musically before they met.

MC: Do you play an instrument?

MM: Trumpet. They tried me on piano and started me very young. At the age of 4, I had to turn to the audience and ask my Mom to show me where Middle C was. That early failure prompted me to go back. The last time I played I was living in Vail. They needed a player for the pit of “West Side Story.” That part is a bitch.

MC: Where did you go to school?

MM: Occidental College in California where Barack [Obama] went. I got a degree in speech and drama, a program that’s now called theatre arts. I liked being up on stage. I did plays in elementary school.

MC: Which one?
MM: A little one-act play “Book Story” about a kid who doesn’t like to read and goes into the story and meets the characters.

MC: What did you like about it?

MM: I don’t know if I was looking for approval, applause, or if it just felt good. I was reasonably good but raw. I was lucky getting in a fairly high-quality theatre program. I was in rehearsals for a show the week I got to college. I got right into it.

MC: For some people it’s a way to prove yourself. Or making believe you’re somebody else.

MM: I think there are a lot of people who need it for ego’s sake, they need the approval. But it’s really fun. I’ve been lucky. I feel like I never had dreams of stardom or making it big. But I wanted to work in it, in places where I could have a quality of life.

MC: Like Aspen.

MM: I ski bummed here the winter I got out of college but didn’t get involved in theater. Then I worked at the Crystal Palace in 1982.  And I worked in Boulder’s Dinner Theatre. I did shows off and on for several years. All musicals.

MC: Do you like doing musicals?

MM: I actually prefer non-musicals. It’s easier for me because I can sing. There’s more paying work.

MC: Like the Crystal Palace.

MM: I remember the first solo I did there. It was a take-off from “A Chorus Line” called “Nothing” about Morales, a theater professor who keeps trying to tell the actress to be an ice cream cone, and “I felt nothing.” A music professor complaining about a student who has a heart attack and died.

MC: Did you keep working in theatre?

MM: I moved from Boulder to Vail and worked in a dinner theatre club for three years before I moved back to Denver. Then I came to 35th Anniversary of the Crystal Palace on July 12, 1992. In a simple conversation with Mead Metcalf, the owner, I said: “If you ever have an opening I’d come here.” This will be my sixteenth winter. I didn’t work the summers for the first two years. I would wait tables. After a few years, I had to work my way back in. I don’t think I would ever consider myself the most featured performer there, but the most satisfying thing for me was writing songs.

MC: Can you give us an example?

MM: “Viagra.”

MC: Can you hum a few bars?

MM: It’s a patter song. It had a lot of words, a guy in a tuxedo dancing the tango. I saw it on opening night. I’ve written  a couple of shows for Jeannie Walla on special occasions—I did annual hospital variety shows and birthday shows with intimate information totally personalized.

MC: Were you ever a ski instructor?

MM: I’ve never taught skiing. That will be what I do when I retire. I’ve directed to supplement the Palace work. I directed three shows for Theatre in the Park. This is my fourth show for Aspen Community Theatre. I’ve also done shows for friends in other towns.

MC: There’s an active theatre scene in the Roaring Fork Valley.

MM: Incredibly active. There are so many more theatre groups in the valley between here and Glenwood than there used to be. Some of them have to be considered professional. It’s actually astonishing when you look at the number of talented people who call this valley their own.

MC: Did you ever think about going to a bigger market, going to Broadway.

MM: In my case it might have been a lack of ambition. I call it a healthy attitude. In 1984, I took three months off from Boulder and I went to New York City for a month and stayed with friends, I was 29, did auditions, went to shows. What I found is that the people I went to school with had narrowed the focus of their life so intensely—your focus is getting the job. That’s not what schools teach you to do. They enjoyed their lives and they were disillusioned because of that tunnel vision. They were getting out every day to audition for every movie, every play, every commercial. Those people enjoy the stress they’re under, their sense of self. I think it would have been self-destructive for me.

MC: Are your friends still in the theatre business?

MM: Some of them are still in the theatre. They’ve done Broadway shows, been in movies. One was from the Crystal Palace, Taylor Nichol. You see him all the time. And I had a very close friend in Boulder who went on to work in New York. He became disillusioned. He said: “You need that constant striving and even when you get to the top level, people find other ways to be frustrated.” It’s human nature. You hear the same complaining. It’s the same as a community theater production.

MC: The Aspen Community Theatre seems to have a lot of talent to draw on.

MM: I think so, but every community theatre might say that about themselves. Part of it is I like to believe in Mr. Metcalf’s 51 years, the number of people who have chosen to stay here certainly gives us a solid base—but conversely in “She Loves Me,” I have two Crystal Palace alumni and that’s it.

MC: When will the Crystal Palace close?

MM: At the end of the winter season. Performer-wise, there are sixteen people, then there’s also support, kitchen and so on. It’s a lot of people. The majority of us are trying to look at it not as maybe the beginning of something else. Some of us might choose to stay together and organize something. At this point, we don’t know. The current buyer just switched. I don’t even know who it is. We look forward to entering into a discussion.

MC: Why did you want to direct “She Loves Me”?

MM: I’ve done this show. I did it in summer stock at the Paul Bunyan Theatre in Bemidji, Minnesota.

MC: Have you had the chance to perform and direct it?

MM: No. This is the first time for me to direct it. It was so long ago that I was in it. We did it with a small cast on a very small stage. The director came from the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre in Minneapolis, the largest dinner theatre complex in the country. I had a really good director.

MC: What have you taken from that production?

MM: I don’t think I’ve incorporated anything. It was a long time ago. Plus I played one of the more minor roles in the show. It was a plum of a role.

MC: What was your role?

MM: The headwaiter played by Ed Foran in our production. I had to talk him into auditioning.

MC: He played the inn-keeper in “Fiddler.”

MM: When I found out that Aspen Community Theatre was going to present their show, I realized, partly because of the size of the stage at the Wheeler, that they wanted to do something smaller than usual. It’s the perfect show, charming, intimate, it takes place in a quieter, softer, more elegant age.

MC: When?

MM: Mid- to late-1930s in Budapest—the last gasp of that elegance before World War II and then the Cold War snuffed it out.
MC: It’s the same story as “You’ve Got Mail” with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

MM: The musical is based on the play “Parfumerie.” The first re-telling of the story is “The Shop Around The Corner,” starring Jimmy Stewart and Maureen O’Sullivan. Then that movie was turned into a musical “In The Good Old Summertime.” It’s in my Netflix queue. Then “You’ve Got Mail.”

MC: What’s the plot?

MM: The confusion is there’s this perfume shop in Budapest. A new employee talks her way in even though they don’t need a new clerk, and steps on the toes of the new manager. They take a strong dislike without realizing they’re secret pen pal lovers.

MC: How did that happen?

MM: They answer a “Lonely Hearts Club” ad.

MC: Why does this story have so much appeal?

MM: The universal message is don’t judge a book by its cover. It takes more than a pretty face to fall in true love. You really need to know somebody. This couple truly knows each other. They’ve been able without the hindrance of the physical world, through their letters, to form a strong and close bond.

MC: At what point do you realize they’re writing to each other?

MM: Probably about a quarter of the way into the story, each character is singing the letters the other has written. They’re singing the same words. Georg is the first to discover it to his huge dismay. They set up a blind date in a classy restaurant and she’s supposed to have “Anna Karenina” and he has a rose in his lapel. He actually comes to cancel the date because he quit or was let go at work, so he sends his friend to tell her he’s not going to show up. His friend discovers it and tells him and he can’t believe it’s this woman that he hates. He initiates the conversation with a woman he hates.

MC: How many people in the play?

MM: Twenty or so. The orchestra has fifteen or fourteen pieces with Wendy Larson conducting. There are seven or eight solo roles—eight. And then an ensemble.

MC: Was it a tough play to cast?

MM: There were some broken hearts. There were a couple of lead roles I could have cast twice over. I hurt some feelings—friends of mine, actually. The deciding factor was the chemistry between the two people who happened to be married: Jon and Nikki Boxer. They are trained opera singers. Nikki played Maria in “Sound of Music.” Jon’s done some acting and he’s sung in concerts but I don’t think he’s done a role on stage. They’re still very much in love.

MC: What was the criteria for selecting them?

MM: You always want your leads to look good together, to match and balance, and Jon and Nikki did all that work together. They had that at the audition. The funniest part is Nikki is a much faster study than him. He takes it well. I still don’t know them very well but they’re terrific. Disciplined. Prepared.

MC: What’s different about directing community theatre?

MM: No question you have to be patient. Some are there for the first time. I know one for sure this is his first-time ever on a theater stage. There are highly divergent experiences. The first thing we do is have an extremely long rehearsal schedule. At Bemidji, we put it up in ten days. We get essentially six weeks here and two weeks of music rehearsals.

MC: Is it harder to direct a musical?

MM: Because I have a vocal background, I’m a good vocal coach. Lucky for me, Paul Dankers did a great job doing the vocal rehearsals. During that first two weeks, you try and introduce as many elements as you can, but you also don’t ask too much. You want them to have a firm foundation in learning the music as they start to perform it. You add elements of character. Georg and Amalia’s relationship, we know from the moment they meet they can’t stand each other, and if that’s the only level we play, than falling in love is not believable. A good trick I learned back in college, whenever you play something on stage, the exact opposite is true to some degree. So what I find is the believability in the love from the first moment. That’s where you start getting depth. If you’re attractive, it makes you madder. So you get into a cycle. Some people call that sub-text, but it can be totally unrelated. Finding that out is a big part of it. Is there a specific moment when the audience knows it? I want the audience to subconsciously pick up on that the first time they meet.

MC: What happens when they first meet?

MM: Georg grabs her arm to steer her out of the store. That moment is there even if it doesn’t register. A recognition.

MC: Anything like that ever happen to you?

MM: I had people I cared about that I ended up hating. I’ve had people where that energy from physical attraction couldn’t overcome our personality clashes. That can be exciting—but not necessarily exciting.

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