Old News: RFH’s ‘Damn Yankees’ Summer Theatrics

Leave Lola and the Devil out of it. Whatever RFHers want, RFHers get …

And, back in the summer of ’75, they wanted summer stock theater. And they got it — a brutally fun load of it crammed into five dramatic dancing, singing, acting weeks among RFHers.

Summer theater was a hopping, happening thing nearly, ahem, about 50 years ago in the Rumson-Fair Haven area. Not only was RFH doing its own brand of demanded summer stock, The Barn Theatre was down the street on Avenue of Two Rivers and packed them in for at least two shows a summer. The Barn kept it up, but RFH’s summer stock only lasted a couple of summers. Memorable summers. There were productions of Damn Yankees and Carnival. Later, summer theater came to Tower Hill Church for one summer with a production of Carousel. We’ll get to that next time.

And we remember, because we (all five of me) were there.

Yes, for a very brief stint, students were doing the summer stock thing in the sweltering RFH auditorium for countless hours a day packed into five weeks of rehearsals. The usual, for the spring musical, was three months of 2 1/2 hour-a-day, depending on your role, rehearsals. But the five-week challenge was met with grandeur. Cool? No. Hot. There was no AC back in the RFH theater days of the crusty dinosaur.

Those five weeks full of sweat, smelly greasepaint and roaring crowd fun all in the name of skill honing, or getting, culminated in a first “stock” production of Damn Yankees that opened on Aug. 1, 1975. The very big show ran for two capacity crowd nights, that Friday and Saturday. Yes, that would be 48 years ago. Ouch. That hurts this cast member like the heat wave’s scorch. Heat be damed like the devil in the show, though, back then the cast was young, agile and resiliently enthusiastic. Daily five-hour daily rehearsals and marathons on tech week? No sweat. Really.

Why did they do it? Well, again, students, alumni wanted it and the producer and director, who were RFH’s musical and stage directors, Paul Grammer and Ed Varian, obliged. The school year musicals were so popular and competitive that the summer session, so to speak, gave an encore.

The Damn Yankees cast of not-so-much-thousands was comprised of 19 alumni and 64 students. That’s 83. “I did this just for the fun of working with the high school people,” then Rumsonite Bob Petillo said in a story in the Register on July 28, 1975, written by none other than RFH alum Blair Kamin, now a Pulitzer Prize winning writer.

Casts back then at RFH, even during the school year, were always that big or bigger. Nowadays, the casts are half or less than half that. But the enthusiasm and love of theater remains a Tower Player tradition.

There is no summer stock in the area these days, but we hear Tower Players are still playing. One, Gemma Formisano, is interning at Count Basie Theater and appearing in cameo roles in the shows there. Another is rehearsing for Spotlight Players’ August production of The Prom. Others are doing every little and big thing to keep their love of theater and music alive. And it lives, even as the large , bright spotlight decades back fades to a pin spot in the recesses of a Tower Player’s mind.

Some things don’t dim, though, like the words and choreography to those classic songs! And there were some good ones in Damn Yankees — (Ya gotta have) Heart, for one. And who could forget (certainly not this old Tower Player) the rousing opening song Six Months Out of Every Year.

The cast could probably cobble, hobble and croon together a senior staged version from memory, but who wants to see that? Ahem. We may surprise you, but reliving it with an old record player, good RFH friends and cocktails may have to suffice. Thinking revival, though, there is air conditioning at RFH now. There’s that. We’re just not as well-conditioned. It’s a pretty good bet that the cast actually remembers … in any event, or opening night.

But, never mind the rousing chorus numbers. Let’s talk that iconic Gwen Verdon number in the show — Whatever Lola Wants. That’s what’s going on in the featured Register photo. The leading unrelated Smiths — Rumsonite Dana Smith, as Lola, and Fair Havenite Dane Smith, as Applegate (the Devil) — are rehearsing the number.

Nothing like a trip to hell in a locker room in the sweltering summer heat of a high school theater with the devil and his temptress. Hey, ya gotta have heart!

And heart is what the production had. A lot of it, even if at least one in the cast, RFH alumnus Butch Lehman was quoted as saying he summer stocked it in ’75 because “besides giving me something to do, it keeps me out of the bars.”

There’s that. Hey, the cast may have been young, but most were just too tired to party after those rehearsals.

So, curtain up and cheers to RFH summer stock times and those Damn Yankees!