FATTHUMB OF THE OPRY
Harry and June Fromm of San Jose are the powers behind Monterey's newest full-time theatrical enterprise, the Barbary Coast Theater. The company will celebrate its first anniversary of local performances on February 24th. That's when a San Jose cast came to Monterey in 2001 to present GONG WITHER WIND - a broad parody of a widely known movie classic of the sort that had long been standard fare at the Fromms' New Almaden Opry House in the San Jose area. The earlier run of GONG had been cut short when Santa Clara County decided to take over the Opry House along with all its historic surroundings in the Casa Grande Mansion in New Almaden. Harry and June set out on a statewide search for a new venue - a search that ended at the GroveMont Playhouse on Hoffman Street, which had recently been vacated by Unicorn Theatre.
While the imported version of GONG WITHER WIND was being performed, Barbary Coast held its first Monterey area auditions. Local actors and entertainers began playing roles, though Harry and June Fromm still hold onto a sprinkling of loyal Opry House veterans willing to commute in from Santa Cruz and the South Bay. "I never worked so hard in my life in getting it all ready," June Fromm recalls. "I'd end the day too tired to do anything else - even eat. You just crashed into bed and started in again first thing the next morning."
 GIZZARD OF OZZ |
The job was to transform the Unicorn Playhouse into a Turn-of-the-Century cabaret and barroom. Audiences are seated at checkered-cloth tables in front of a small stage. They come for dinner if ten or more make advance dinner reservations with the box-office. Once tables are filled (for food or just to watch) overflow patrons sit in the old Unicorn audience tiered spaces on refurbished church benches. So come early and avoid a hard wooden pew! Even non-dinner customers are supplied with bowls of popcorn, plus lots of encouragement to boo the villain, cheer the hero and weep for the misused heroine - but not to pelt the cast with popcorn pellets.
If all this conjures up an image of the kind of historic frontier meller-drammer served up at California's First Theatre, think again. "We do comedy- melodramas," June explains, "but they're contemporary - usually based on some well-known movie or stage piece. . . When I tell local people what we do are spoofs, some of them actually don't seem to know what that term means. Can you imagine? How else could you describe it?" - "send-up" probably comes closest. Show titles give an idea: THE PURSUIT OF AN INN-DECENT PROPOSAL, FATTHUMB OF THE OPRY and the current GIZZARD OF OZZ. The satire is broad, raunchy and laced with a lot of slapstick. It's more like fare for a men's club smoker or pre-wedding bachelor party than an evening out with the kids or your maiden Aunt Edna.
Barbary Coast tends to set its sights on the tourist trade. "We've got three military men in our current show," June says. "One is an Army Major, one is a Navy Lieutenant and one is a Marine Captain. I'm just awed at the way they all three climb out of uniform and any kind of brass-hat dignity and go out on Cannery Row before every Friday night show to hand out fliers. The fliers help - and the tourists also read about us in 'Go!' When they show up, they have a wonderful evening."
"We're never dark," Harry says. "While one show is on, we're rehearsing the next. So, while we're still running THE Gizzard, we're rehearsing for PANAMA ROOT CANAL." ROOT CANAL has a more political slant than most Barbary Coast productions. Set in Cuba, it features a villain named Noriega and his mother, who leads a revolutionary army of one man. "Our stage is small," Harry Fromm explains. "Others in the cast of characters include a parrot named Lucy who is carried around by her owner, a guy named Ricky." ROOT CANAL is also slightly off the beaten track for Barbary Coast in being the work of an outside writer, Steve Petulla. Harry Fromm himself has created all the other scripts since 1989. He says he writes with an eye to quick rehearsal, minimal scenery and a high degree of flexibility from actors prepared to face a lot of on-the-spot audience feedback and participation. "You always have that dress rehearsal feeling that 'this is never going to work.' Then the actors get that opening night rush of adrenalin that produces a big explosion of fun for them and for the audience."
 GIZZARD OF OZZ |
June manages box office and props and costumes. "Harry is the thespian, singer, writer," she insists. "I'm off stage - except that night when I had to go on with script in hand after one of our leads phoned in - at a quarter to eight! - to say she wasn't coming. Can you imagine? We have understudies, but you've got to give them more than fifteen minutes' notice!" Barbary Coast Theatre philosophy calls for a lot of doubling of parts. That way the cast are able to fit weekend performances around other scheduled obligations as they negotiate trade-offs with their counterparts.
The metamorphosis of the Hoffman Street Playhouse continues, so June showed me not only the front-of-house changes but the major revamping that has been done on the backstage area. The former Unicorn greenroom just to the right of the front entrance, for instance, is being fitted out as a Stage Door Antique Shop. Unicorn's spacious scenery building area near the Lighthouse Avenue end of the building has gone - in a storm of sawdust, according to June. The area now houses two neat rows of dressing/make-up tables and lines of ceiling level costume racks that can be raised or lowered with the tug of a rope. Barbary Coast goes in for very simple sets. Period furniture and props are set and struck quickly in front of standard backdrop interiors or exteriors. But the underlying send-up atmosphere demands a big range of costumes and a lot of "spoof" props, and these June has lovingly organized and catalogued for quick use. She points with pride to a special rack of authentic period costumes donated to the theatre by the San Jose Historical Museum, where June used to serve as a docent. She then offers one of her carefully ticketed prop boxes for inspection. It is labeled, "Instruments of Torture, Murder and Mayhem." These tend to get drawn, brandished or cracked rather than used, since "we don't go in for a lot of on-stage killings," according to Harry. As in Greek tragedy, victims and villains at Barbary Coast usually end their lives off stage as screams, pistol shots or blood-curdling sound effects.
It all began back in the early sixties, when Harry started acting in shows at the Opry House, part of the Casa Grande Mansion in the mining town of New Almaden. The Opry House was part of a home and entertainment center for the manager of the Quicksilver Mines, which continued to produce mercury ("quicksilver") well into the 20th Century. In 1989, Harry and June took over management and operation of the theatre and its company of local performers. Much of the repertoire of comedy-melodrama now happening on Hoffman Avenue dates back to that period.
"From the start, we operated on a shoestring, and that meant avoiding payment of royalties," Harry recalls. "They say 'Necessity is the Mother of Invention,' so I began to turn out scripts that would allow actors to take on roles without too long a rehearsal period and often to rehearse parts in one show while they were still appearing in another." Double casting of major roles has usually worked well. But June's eyebrows still rise as she recalls that last-minute no-shows have pulled others besides herself away from one established job and into the spotlight. Waving the photograph of a guy in drag she says, "When it happened again, he had to go on. . . Believe me, in this business, you have to be adaptable. There's no room for flakes!"