Publicity Article:

A THIRTY YEAR RUN
Backstage at DLO - by Hal Gelb

Originally published in Diablo Magazine, March, 1990. Reprinted by permission.
The article was written in recognition of DLOC Thirtieth Anniversary.

The Diablo Light Opera has been staging musicals and operettas as a community theater for thirty years. Produce Grete Egan, director/choreographer Rhoda Klitsner and actor Bill Disbrow, the three members sitting opposite me, have put in a total of eighty years with DLO, hoofing and singing, building props, painting sets and dispatching press releases.

Thirteen years is a long run for a nonprofit community theater, much less a professional theater. Only a hand full of Bay Area companies have been around two decades, and of those, only one, the Dramateurs in Lafayette, is still under its original stewardship. Producing plays is time consuming, unprofitable and emotionally demanding - burnout goes with the territory.

What drives these people, I wonder, to throw themselves headlong into their work, devoting countless hours when they could be relaxing or making more money at Carl's Jr. "It's a labor of love," claims Klitsner, who has been with DLO since 1961.

She beams like a proud parent as she reels off the theater's accomplishments. DLO was the first community theater in the nation to do Annie and the first company in the area to stage Fiddler On The Roof. and Oliver. DLO was in the vanguard of light opera companies, reviving operetta when it became too expensive to stage professionally. And it hasn't shied away from staging demanding musicals like Evita and La Cage aux Folles.

It was their production of Sound of Music that opened the Civic Arts Theater in 1965, even before the permanent heating system was fully installed. (The audience was asked to attend in black tie and blankets.) Jill Whalen, Gavin MacLeod's daughter on The Love Boat, was an understudy in the 1976 production, and Michelle Folger, DLO's Evita, went on to sing the role in the national touring company.

'The company has grown tremendously since its initial effort thirty years ago, when Egan, her attorney husband, and Hal and Ilene Zuckerman joined with other UC Berkeley glee club alumnae and produced The Pirates of Penzance at Las Lomas High School. For that production, which ran two performances, twin pianos provided all the accompaniment, tickets went for $1 each and the whole budget was about $500.

In those early days, when Diablo Light Opera and the Dramateurs were the only theaters east of the hills, it was beg and borrow. Materials were rescued from the scrap heap. Sets were built outdoors ,and more than once DLO watched helplessly, as rain sent rivers of color cascading over lovely painted backdrops.

Back then, lack of a permanent rehearsal space transformed DLO into a troupe of traveling players moving from living rooms to basements to high school auditoriums on a daily basis. Onstage fiascos were common: Dishrow's pants (now he's able to laugh) fell down on opening night of Naughty Marietta. In Kismet, five burly chorus members marched onstage only to lose one of their number to an unlatched trap door.

Naturally, production costs run considerably higher today. Musical accompaniment has swollen to the size of a Broadway pit orchestra; costumes are numerous and expensive. (One gown in Die Fledermaus sported eighty yards of trim and a thousand silk flowers.)

But, unlike most theaters, Diablo Light Opera has never been in hazardous financial health. From DLO's Pleasant Hill headquarters I can almost see the not-so-pale envy of other nonprofit theaters glowing in the fading afternoon light as Egan informs me that the company supports itself almost entirely through ticket sales. Klitsner believes they may be one of the few nonprofit theaters in the country - perhaps the only one - to purchase their own rehearsal studio/set and costume shop primarily on the strength of box office receipts.

Egan laughs, "Our first production of (the perennially successful) Fiddler on The Roof made the down payment on the building. Our second renovated the bathrooms."Their move next vear to the new 800-seat Regional Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek will provide even greater opportunity for growth (although DLO fears it will also bring pressures to unionize).

A key component of DLO's good health is time and labor donated by a small army of dedicated supporters. In most small theaters, two or three martyrs end up doing everything. But DLO can count on anywhere from thirty to fifty people helping out. And, Egan boasts, she can get half a dozen volunteers to come down and paint in a matter of minutes.

Our conversation underscores the immense pool of time and labor - everything from painting and hammering to singing, dancing and directing - that each production requires. Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondolier's, which opens in March at the Civic Arts Theater at Del Valle, will rehearse three hours a night, two or three times a week for three to four months on top of a day spent teaching, or working on contracts.

Why do they do it? A few members of the company were theater professionals who gave it up for family and finances but are unable to get greasepaint out of their bloodstream. Klitsner was a New Yorker who moved here when her husband, an actor and singer, got his teaching credential and they had a child. Before that, she danced on television and appeared in a number of Broadway shows, including The Shoestring Revue.

"Everyone in the cast -- Bea Arthur, Dody Goodman, Artie Johnson, Dorothy Greener, Chita Rivera -- became famous, except for three of us," she says with a hint of regret, adding, "I became famous in Walnut Creek."

Others in the company, like Disbrow, a retired purchasing agent for Chevron who has spent years working in community theater, have never performed professionally. For them, singing and dancing is a creative outlet, an alternative to steady diet of their daytime career.

Backgrounds and experience may vary, but all love stirring the passions of a spellbound audience as they're transported to a different world. "A standing ovation," Disbrow says crisply, "There ain't nothing like it in the world."

The feeling extends backstage, as well. "First you hire the director, then you put the cast with it," says Egan, who herself puts in about thirty-five hours a week producing. "And it builds and it builds. And you worry and fret. And you haul and carry. That curtain opens on opening night and the orchestra starts and you can't believe what euphoria that is."

Beyond the predictably rewarding applause and sense of achievement, the camaraderie in the company keeps its members involved, year after year. "Seeing the bonds people develop working together in a show," says Klitsner, "is as meaningful as anything I've found in my life, outside of family."

"Sometimes it's stronger than family," Egan adds.

Listening to them talk, it seems that what Egan describes is family, in the real sense, "If someone's sick or gets a divorce," she says, "we're a support system. We help that person through it or encourage them to do something to keep their mind busy, or we visit them in the hospital." She add, "We love each other.