Ken Cusson, a big man with a fervent faith, a powerful bass voice and a sense of mission to the performing arts, admits he never thought it would happen the way it did. "I thought I’d be spending my days preaching and doing Sunday school classes. Never this - never in my wildest imagination!"

For Ken, the MAN-OF-LA MANCHA Impossible Dream has encompassed a career in stage magic, a large-scale Christian puppet ministry, acclaim as an actor/singer in works ranging from Broadway musicals to grand opera. And now he’s become artistic director of Salinas’s new Saltshaker Theatre. The deeper Ken Cusson commits to his Christian ministry, the more unexpected and varied the surprise theatre assignments he seems to encounter and conquer.

"Until about 1975 my experience of theatre was always playing trumpet in the pit. In Lawndale, the small Southern California town where I grew up, there were only two high schools, but we did two school musicals a year - and there was always a third summer musical organized by the parks and recreation department. I was always a little envious of those people up on stage; they seemed to be having more fun than I was. I loved coming to the actual play rehearsals and seeing what happened. But I never had the courage to audition or consider going up on stage.

"Part of it was a self-esteem problem. When I was ten I got so badly burned that it left scars, and I didn’t think anyone would ever want to see me on a stage. So I stuck to my trumpet. I did start doing magic, though. By the time I was in high school I was doing regular magic shows for birthday parties and Bar Mitzvas and Boy Scout jamborees as a sort of semi-professional."

It was joining the Salvation Army that led Ken Cusson into a new and riskier performance style that utilized yet transcended his skills in instrumental music and stage magic. "I was playing cornet and singing in the Salvation Army Songster Brigade when one of the officers in the local corps found out I was a magician and asked me to do something with the weekly Sunday School Assembly. . . Well, I attended it - and it was one of the most boring events I’ve ever experienced. I said to myself, ‘This has got to change!’"

And it did. Ken developed a Muppet style Gospel presentation with puppets, created a fifteen-foot-long, eight-foot-high puppet theatre and used a lot of rear view screen projections at a time when rear view projection was a major novelty. "I got the reputation of being the Captain Kangaroo of the Southern California Salvation Army," he explains.

While in training for full-time ministry as a Salvation Army officer, he met his future wife Ruth, who hailed from Salinas and was also in training for a Salvation Army commission. Ken’s commissioning ceremony coincided with the Southern California Salvation Army's 100th anniversary, bringing together four seminaries and four territories in a huge mass commissioning celebration in Kansas City. For him, the event had a double significance. It not only launched him into the ordained ministry, it also marked his debut as an actor performing in a scripted stage role.

Salvation Army Cadet Brigade Ken in back row on the left

"I was fine in rehearsal, but when I got up there to deliver the opening lines for the whole play - it was set in San Quentin prison, and there I was in full prison stripes - I looked out at an audience of nearly 4,000 people - and I was dumbstruck. Major stage fright! I forgot the lines that were an opening for the whole story. Dead silence while I stood there wondering what in the world I was doing up there. . . Then somebody standing about ten feet away whispered the first few words - and I ripped right into it, and everybody thought it had been just some big dramatic pause and - well, I was bitten. I knew I had to do more of this."

What followed for Ken and Ruth Cusson was a period of intense mission, much of it focused on the creation of new cutting edge performance pieces for the Salvation Army’s big youth ministry. As commissioned officers of the Salvation Army, they offered young audiences in Las Vegas, Santa Maria and the Hawaiian Islands popular and exciting evenings of puppetry, Gospel clowning and contemporary Christian music.

Things really took off with the creation of a unique new entity they called mime drama. Their group of musicians and carefully trained young mime artists toured the West and Southwest and were ultimately invited to perform in London’s prestigious Royal Albert Hall, where Ken also sang before thousands at a Salvation Army world conference. Through it all, he kept reading - every book and article he could get his hands on that dealt with directing, production, blocking, stagecraft - the nuts and bolts of theatre.

Ken and Ruth would return to Salinas from time to time, so when they ended their official connection with the Salvation Army in 1995, it seemed right to settle back in Ruth’s home town. They worshipped for a while with the local Salvation Army, but then decided to move to First Baptist, where Pastor Ken Feske wanted help developing an after-school program for kids at risk of dropping out of school. The result was a youth activities program and center called LIFE - Life Is For Everyone. It established an official link between the First Baptist Church and Washington Middle School, Salinas, starting with ten Washington students who were judged to be potential dropouts but in fact continued on to high school graduation. When the center and the program had to close down due to changes in California State funding, Ken found himself with afternoons and evenings free for developing his own performing skills.

H.M.S. PINAFORE

Ken had a surprise call from Rose Kingsley of the Opera Institute of California based in San Jose. She’d heard him sing at a Christmas Eve service and wanted him to take on the small but important bass role of Captain Zuniga in a production of CARMEN. When he hesitated because of supposed problems with his singing voice, Kingsley replied, "I’ll deal with the voice problems, you take on the role."

Singing in grand opera - another key part of Ken Cusson’s Impossible Dream - was all of a sudden happening. A central role followed in a simplified version of “La Boheme” staged at San Carlos Mission, Monterey. Ken responded to a another challenge - this one from his daughter Kathy. "She said she’d audition for a school production of LES MISERABLES if I’d answer an audition ad for H.M.S. PINAFORE at the Wharf. I’d never auditioned for anybody, so - more major stage fright, just like Kansas City! But I walked onto the Wharf stage, sang ‘This Nearly Was Mine’ - and they stood up and cheered. . . They wanted me, scars and all! I was amazed."

Singing roles followed in OKLAHOMA!, THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE and THE MIKADO at the Wharf, HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING at Western Stage and PacRep’s productions of Disney's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and JOHNNY GUITAR. “I worked my tail off but I loved every minute of it.”

OKLAHOMA! with daughter, Kathy

THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE

Meanwhile, at church, there was the almost year-long preparation required for STREETS OF BETHLEHEM, a massive re-creation of the Nativity scene and story which draws thousands of viewers to First Baptist Church in Salinas in the weeks before Christmas. "For a church to pull off that huge production over a period of fourteen years is absolutely incredible," Ken comments. "Hundreds of people taking part, just one night of tech - and somehow it always works."

BETHLEHEM sorcerer

For Ken, it didn’t just involve playing the role of a Bethlehem sorcerer. There was the daunting task of keeping a traditional story intact but changing the script and blocking so that each year’s audience, old or new, always finds new and spectacular innovations in the presentation. So with all of this, plus individual acting/singing to work on, he didn’t immediately warm to an unexpected proposal from Pastor Ken Feske. He wanted Ken to become artistic director of a full-fledged theatre company at First Baptist.

"I wasn’t at all sure, but he laid in on the line. He said, ‘God has called you to do something that can reach out into this community and show them that the church is an open embracing place where families and individuals can go and find positive nurture. We can’t do that if people are not willing even to walk into the door.’ I was challenged and intrigued - and so I agreed to take it on."

UNCLE PHIL’S DINER

The result has been Saltshaker, a name that echoes Jesus’s description of his followers in Matthew 5:13 as "the salt of the earth." Premiere production was a successful version of the musical HONK, based on the Hans Christian Anderson story of 'The Ugly Duckling." Light-hearted dinner theatre pieces like UNCLE PHIL’S DINER and MURDER IN THE MANOR have built up a faithful clientele. This year’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s CINDERELLA was sold out for all six performances. The aim from the start has been not to present overtly religious work but to provide "something people can count on as positive and affirming. . . "

CINDERELLA

Asked what was next for Saltshaker, Ken came through with a Back Stage scoop. "No other publication knows it yet, but because I worked with Stephen Tosh and Walt deFaria at PacRep we’ve been offered the world premiere of a fully staged version of a musical Steve and Walt did in a concert version five years ago. It’s THE BORROWERS, based on that wonderful series of children’s books. I was excited but not sure at first whether I could agree. I wondered if Saltshaker could pull it off technically - having to combine the normal-sized residents of the story with the tiny-sized people living in the walls and woodwork of their house.

"I mentioned my problem to a guy at church named Duane King, and he told me he’d worked for three years with Disney, specializing in oversized props. Well, I couldn’t believe it! And practically the next day he was showing me amazing sketches of exactly how we can do the show in a two-to-three-hundred seat venue like First Baptist."

Luck? Coincidence? Ken Cusson would probably call it grace - and more salt for the shaker.