In August, the Springfield Muni Opera will stage West
Side Story. Directed and choreographed by Anna Bussing, the Broadway classic will
play  August 7-8, 13-15 and 20-22. (Curtain
at  8:00 p.m.)

Muni
put on West Side Story in 1977, and I was backstage on opening night in my disguise as a reporter. It
was a pleasurable assignment, in spite of Illinois’ August weather, and I met
many lovely people, only a few of whom, unfortunately, are named in the text.

Also unfortunate is the fact that we
cannot reproduce the photographs by our Jesse Ewing that illustrated the story.

So. . . curtain up!

An hour before curtain.
Backstage is already filled with people. The stage itself lies athwart the
bottom of the Muni Opera hollow, its superstructure painted black, a square-rigger
stranded on the hillside.

Behind it is a small
square. On to the east are two dressing rooms, painted bright red; to the west
stands a scenery shop. In between there’s a patch of grass. Farther away,
hugging the edges of the compound, are rest rooms (marked “Guys” and
“Dolls”) and the mobile home belonging to the resident caretaker.

The director strolls
among the cast and crew. He’s Thayne Erney, a counselor at Springfield High, a
Muni and Theater Guild regular. He’s drinking Dr. Pepper from a can. He’s
worked on the show four or five hours a day, sometimes for as many as seven
days a week for the last eight or nine weeks. A few years ago, a Muni member
calculated that a typical Muni director spends nearly 500 hours getting a play
in shape. His job is finished now. He says everything is ready, that the show
is good. He does not look nervous, but he rarely stands in one place for long.

Erney scans the bustle
backstage. People con­stantly come up to him, congratulate him, ask him
questions, complain. He shows a visitor around the set, including Muni’s newest
addition, a $21,000 costume and props building that was paid for in part with a
$10,000 chunk of Mayor William Telford’s share of the city’s community
development funds. In 1953, when the Muni needed a backstage building, it
bought a twenty-eight-year-old railroad boxcar, took the wheels off and parked
it behind the stage.

On the surface this
opening night is not much different from the forty-two other opening nights at
Muni since the group’s reorganization in 1965. But tonight there’s a
determination that’s unusual. West Side Story, the updated Romeo and Juliet tale
about gang rivalry and love in New York, is a difficult show to do—hard to
play, hard to dance, hard to stage.

For the better part of
two decades Muni has shied away from Story, afraid to risk embarrassing
themselves. There are people who think the show is still beyond the reach of a
small-town company, even a talented one like the Muni. Erney and the roughly
100 people who’ve worked on West Side Story want badly to prove them wrong.

Some of the players are
venting opening-night nerves in talk—talk that comes in short, fast bursts and
bounces from one subject to another.

“I just lost a
false eyelash!”

“Did you see the Tonight
Show last night? Charles Nelson Reilly gave us a plus last night. Really! He
said Naughty Marietta was good, but West Side Story was safe.”

“I think I’ll do it
without a shirt.”

“If you do, you’ll
have to make up your whole body.”

The stage itself looms
over a broad concrete apron that separates the stage from the grassy patch
behind it. A makeup table perhaps twenty feet long runs the length of the
stage’s backside. It is lighted with a single row of tightly spaced light
bulbs. Every seat at the table is occupied, so latecomers have to bend down
over the shoulders of those already seated to see into the mirror. Eyebrows are
touched up; hair is sprayed. The damp evening air quickly takes the starch out
of the finely sculpted 50s-style hairdos sported by the Jets gang members; the
Sharks’ hair is greased back and is impervious to weather. They comb it
constantly. Nerves, maybe. Or an unconscious manifestation of character.

Half an hour till
curtain. Dancers silently practice steps, spinning down the walks connecting
the backstage buildings, softly counting off cadences to themselves. Others
study lines.

Jane Kahn, stage
manager, leans over the railing that keeps careless troupers from falling off
the stage onto the apron below. “People,” she calls, “according
to the sign-in sheet some of you aren’t here.” She calls roll. “Alice
Havey…Marcia Heroux…Mary Jamison…Bobbi McKinney…” Everybody’s
there. No one, including Kahn, expected them not to be.

A Shark wanders
nervously. His caramel-colored makeup only partially hides a case of acne. Like
the rest of his gang, he wears a black jacket made of cotton rather than
leather—a happy adjustment to the original costuming, considering the muggy
heat of Illinois Julys—emblazoned with a bright orange “S” on his
back. He munches popcorn and speaks to no one.

The Jets are the white
gang. They wear white jackets. Many are blond. Their hair, though combed in an
approximation of 50s punk, is not greased down; Tony, the ex-Jet hero, sports
an unmistakably 70s-style razor cut. The Sharks, the Jet’s Puerto Rican
antagonists, are dark-haired, punkier, dressed in black—distinctions that
border on racism. One doesn’t need a program to tell the heroes from the
villains. Backstage, curiously, the Sharks and the Jets rarely mix, sticking
with fellow gang members.

“Fifteen minutes to
vocal warmup.”

Roberta Volkman is the
vocal director. She’s a music teacher for District 186. Like most of the
production staff, she will spend the evening out front watching the show with
the rest of the audience. This is her third Muni show. It is, she admits, the
first time she’s felt nervous. “Everybody said we couldn’t do it,”
she says. It is a phrase heard again and again backstage. “My
obstetrician—even he asked, ‘Do you really think you can do it?’ while he was
examining me. I mean, after that, we just had to do it to prove
ourselves.”

There is enough
hairspray in the air backstage to attract flying insects, hundreds of them. They swarm crazily, white in the
light, like windblown snow.

After the “Dance at
the Gym” number, Brian Pier, “Diesel,” talks. He’s done several
Muni productions, including one stint as set designer for Bye Bye Birdie. Like
just about everybody in the cast, he’s wanted to do Story for a long time. The
father of somebody in the cast made a videotape of a rehearsal and it’s
scheduled to be shown in a couple of days, so the cast can see what they look
like onstage. Pier is looking forward to it. “We’ll be on a TV show, you
know,” he says, drawing a TV screen in the air with his hands.

On the benches
backstage, people talk.

“I could use a
bottle of wine right now.”

“She’s really
‘Maria.’ isn’t she? Offstage, too. So shy.”

“The gym dance was
aborted. That really steams me. What are those guys getting paid for? After
nine weeks they won’t do what we want them to do.”

“It’s going pretty
good, I think.”

One of the girl dancers
chats for a moment. She’s already changed for the ballet that opens Act II;
until then she has nothing to do. She’s wearing leggings to keep her legs warm.
She doesn’t have an important role, she says, sounding disappointed, though
“I helped paint the graffiti on the scenery. Did you see the ‘Class of
’58’ up there? I did that.” The conversation takes the inevitable turn.
“Everybody said we couldn’t do it—the people at Muni, the audiences.
People don’t know what kind of talent there is in Springfield. In the arts, I
mean.”

Intermission. Twenty
minutes.

The backstage area fills
with people—Muni officials, well-wishers, fans, relatives of the players.
“Tony” signs autographs for a couple of girls. A Shark passes through
the crowd in hot pursuit—Act I finishes with the frenetic “Rumble”
and it’s still muggy out—of a lemon shake-up; as he passes people he says
“Excuse me” in a Puerto Rican accent. The word backstage is that the
show is playing well.

Act II starts. Back at
her bench, Anybodys sits with Robert Levine, whose character, the Shark leader
Bernardo, died at the end of the first act. Anybodys gives a small salute when
the sound comes up signaling the start of Act II, then looks at Levine.
“Wadda you care? You’re dead.” Levine says nothing. He’s playing a
recorder. When the loudspeakers plays ‘I Feel Pretty,” he plays along.
Nearby, David Shipley who plays the Jet “A-rab,” mimics the number
being played out front. His partner is a blond girl, noncast. He dances, she
sits, silently mouthing the words coming over the speaker—”I feel pretty
and witty and gay”—singing into a fragment of mirror Arab borrowed from
the now-vacant makeup table. She frames her upturned face with her hands. He
compliments her with a bow. They laugh.

The second act goes
smoothly. It’s much shorter than the first. “Officer Krupke” earns
cheers from the audience, something that gives some of the players an almost
giggly pleasure. As the end comes closer there are fewer and fewer things that
can go wrong and tension is easing rapidly. There are hugs and handshakes
backstage. Everyone smiles. On­stage, a duet between Maria and Anita,
Bernardo’s girlfriend goes well, the taunting scene in Doc’s drugstore passes
without mishap, as do the climactic shooting scene—the blank gun fired to everyone’s
relief, the last potential mechanical miscue—and finale in which Tony’s body is
carried offstage by members of the temporarily reconciled gangs. A short chorus
of “Somewhere,” a bow and it’s over.

At the end the applause
is loud. A few cast members peek out front, and word of what they see spreads
through the backstage like a fresh wind. “They stood up! Standing
ovation!” Players run down the ramp offstage with the news. A few of them
start clapping, for the audience. The reviewer from the Journal-Register will
say that the demands of the play were “admirably met,” something that
the audience, talking with the cast over punch and cookies at the traditional
first nighters’ party, will soon also tell them. But the cast and crew, though
grateful for the compliments, don’t need anyone to tell them what they now,
after nine weeks, finally knew for certain—that they’d done the show and they’d
done it well and   everybody   knew it.

The (big) business of running Muni

 The
Springfield Municipal Opera Association is big business. Since 1965, the
not-for-profit corporation has staged musical plays at a fifty-five-acre site
near Lake Springfield. Since it gave birth to its first production—”Music
Man” —the company has produced forty-two plays, sung and danced for
thousands of central Illinois theater fans and established itself as one of the
area’s most popular and ac­complished amateur theatrical companies.

The success of the
present Muni is the more remarkable because summer musical theater is an idea
that has been tried before in Springfield and failed. In the 1950s the original
Municipal Opera staged several operettas at the lakeside site. But the group at­tempted—unwisely
as it turned out—to pay its performers. The company went into the red. in one
year losing more than $30,000. By 1956 the Muni was “not dead, but
dormant,” as one press account phrased it.

Muni’s lease with the
city was due to expire in 1965, when the theater site would revert to the city.
Hoping to forestall that loss, local theater people in the summer of 1964
decided to give Muni another try. A fund goal of $25,000 was set—the amount,
they guessed, it would take to fix up the now-weedy and dilapidated theater—and
plans made for a production of “Bye Bye Birdie” to be presented at
the Douglas Park bandshell. The show was a hit, and the next season found the
Muni reinstalled at its lakeside home.

Since then Muni has
grown into what is perhaps the largest ama­teur theatrical group in the state.
The 1965 season saw two plays produced; by 1967 they were ready to stage three
per summer and. by 1972. four. Unlike its predecessor, Muni pays no one except a
handful of union musicians and electri­cians. All proceeds go into the
production; acting, directing, sets, costumes, makeup, ticket sales, site
maintenance—all these jobs are done by volunteers, either members of Muni or
cooperating community groups.

Audience response has
been good. As many as 6000 people have paid to see a Muni production
(“Fiddler on the Roof” in 1971), and one night more than 1300 crowded
in to see a single perfor­mance. Even using volunteer help, the budget for a
four-production Muni season runs to $70,000. The group is managed by an
eight-member board which is assisted by a twenty-six member Board of Managers.
If past seasons are any guide, by the time the 1977 season closes with “My
Fair Lady” in August, an estimated 500 persons will have contributed in
some way to the Muni.

The growth of Muni is
reflected in its physical expansion. In addi­tion to the stage, the group
boasts a $20,000 lighting system, a new $21,000 costumes-and-props building, a
ticket/refreshment building (which replaced a rented tent), plus dressing
rooms, a scenery shop and more.

—J.K.Jr.

This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2015.