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Gaslight Theatre

Tucson, Arizona
Tony Terry: Founder, Owner
Peter Van Slyke: Writes and directs the plays
Tom Benson: Writer and Scenic Designer
Glenda Pena: Marketing and Public Relations

Interview by Joel Dorr

Joel: Where did you get your keen business sense, Tony?

Tony: Just working. Just working. I’ve worked my whole life. I went away to work as a pot washer when I was 14 in Colorado at a guess ranch, and that’s how I found out about melodrama theatre was at the Diamond Circle Theatre.

Joel: That was the number one question on my list, like where did someone come up with melodrama.

Tony: Right. Where did that come from? Exactly. Well, we used to go to the Diamond Circle Theatre.

Joel: Where was that at?

Tony: In Durango, Colorado. So a short history on melodrama in the United States is the Mackins really, Dorothy and Wayne Mackin, both of which are dead now, they’re from Tucson. They started the Cripple Creek Melodrama. And that was kind of the resurgence, the rebirth of melodrama for entertainment.

Joel: Well, melodrama in the early days of theatre was the form of theatre.

Tony: But it was more serious, more like our soap operas.

Joel: Right. Exactly. It was like Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Tony: Exactly. And so they kind of brought that back. Cripple Creek in Colorado wouldn’t be here without the Mackins. They started this little, dumpy theatre in the bottom of the Imperial Hotel, and they got Danny Griffith, our piano player, and --

Joel: Well, I really -- That was the one thing I remember is how good he was. –

Tony: I tell ya, he was the king, and Bob Burroughs* was the director --

Joel: Really? He was the head of the Drama Department at the University of Arizona when I was in Graduate school there. He gave me the assignment as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for Rosemary Gibson in the Theatre History Department.

Tony: Really, I remember her.

Joel: Yeah, and he regretted it from the day I showed up. [laughing] Anyway, you were saying about Cripple Creek…

Tony: For many, many years. Dick Hanson’s directed. Tom Benson’s worked there. But there was a director by the name of Orvis Grout. And Orvis Grout and the Mackins started the Cripple Creek Melodrama Theatre back in the ’60’s. And that was really the beginning of the spoof melodrama thing coming back. They had -- The Drunkard had been playing in L.A. for years, but it really didn’t catch on. And so Orvis Grout and the Mackins kind of had a falling out. He left and went down to Durango, Colorado, and he started, along with the Bakers, the theatre down there, the Diamond Circle Players. And so then you had two Colorado summer stock melodrama theatres going--

Joel: For tourists.

Tony: -- just for tourists. And that’s what I used to see. We used to take our guests on Wednesday night at the guest ranch we’d take them to the melodrama in Durango. And so I would see that, my family would come up, and boy, the Koontz* Brothers were there, musicians. They were phenomenal, stand-up bass, two twins and a piano player. They were just tremendous. And they did a real stylized melodrama. And it was Orvis Grout’s style. It was kind of choppy and fast-paced and not funny. They had a few songs in it, but… they were --

Joel: I don’t like to compare your theatre it to melodrama.

Tony: It’s not.

Joel: I tell people, “This theatre is like doing Saturday Night Live skits. With music!

Tony: Exactly.

Joel: And dance and special effects.

Tony: Right.

Joel: Without guys stumbling over their cue cards.

Tony: Exactly.

Joel: It seems to me this is really a new genre of theatre. Kind of a PopDrama. So how did that come about?

Tony: Well, you know, I don’t like the melodrama that they did at the Imperial Theatre. I thought it was boring, but Dorothy Mackin, who was writing those things, she really wanted to recreate the turn-of-the-century melodrama. So she was honest to that whole genre and liked that. It was a snooze. You just sleep right through the thing. I mean, you’d see the senior citizens. They’d bring the bus tours in and I’m telling you, half way through they were, “Zzzzz.” It was like, holy cow. But I then saw the Diamond Circle Theatre and saw what Orvis Grout was doing, and that was kind of interesting, but it didn’t really do too much for me. And then I went to the University. I was in “Up with People.” I did PR in “Up with People” and that was great. So when I got out of that, I went to the University minoring in technical theatre. And because there weren’t many techies at that time, I was able through my freshman year become a stage manager and really got into it really much faster than it would have normally happened. So I just, I really enjoyed it. So I was kind of leaning towards that. I was still working at the hospital and doing my pre-med stuff. And a buddy of mine from Alaska called up and said, “I need a tour bus driver. Will you come up to Skagway and drive a tour bus?” I said, “I can’t do it. I’m right in my studies and like this. I can’t do it.” And so then he called me again about a month later and said, “Tony, I really need you to come up. I don’t have anybody.” And I said, “Well, Bob, how much does it pay?” It was like $1,500 a month plus room and board, plus tips. And I was starving. I was putting myself through college and I thought, “Man. Man, that’s great.” So literally a week later I left and went to Skagway and spent the summer driving a tour bus for West Tours. And so here I am in this little turn-of-the-century town -- I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Skagway…

Joel: No, but I have gone out with a few girls that were skags…[laughing]

Tony: It’s just like Cripple Creek or Old Tucson or Pinnacle Peaks, you know? Boardwalks, dirt road, just a little, quaint little western town, Gold Rush town. And the cruise ships that come into this town, and they dump off 600 people for the day, and I guess they could sleep 600, and so they would do it for the night also and -- Hey, Tom Benson, come on in.

Tom: Did you save me a chair?

Tony: Sure, we’ve got a chair. We were talking about Skagway and how the cruise ships would dump off 600 people and there was really nothing for them to do. And so there I was as tour bus driver and I thought, “Well, geez, Melodrama,” which I had seen in Durango and Cripple Creek, “would be a perfect entertainment deal for these senior citizen tourists that are landing in Skagway and really nothing to do.” I think the radio went off the air at 6:00, and there was no television and just a little town. And so I came back here and I got together with Tom.

Joel: Are you from Tucson?

Tony: Yeah, I was born here, born and raised in Tucson.

Peter: We were in the same Boy Scout troop together.

Joel: No way.

Tony: We were.

Joel: Unbelievable.

Peter: In Tucson.

Tony: His dad was our scoutmaster.

Peter: That’s right.

Joel: Beautiful.

Tony: So then we came back here and I tried to sell this idea of let’s put together a theater and take it to Skagway, Alaska. And I don’t know how that transpired, but I talked a bunch of people into it. And Howard Allen, I don’t know if you remember Howard? He worked at the university at the time. They were all university students at the time.

Joel: Do you remember how much it cost for you to put that show together?

Tony: $10,000. Yeah, I do remember because I borrowed from my grandmother, really. [laughing] I borrowed $10,000 and with that $10,000 -- and like we always have, we built our own lights. I got the old No. 10 cans and we soldered on the gel frames and built our own dimmer.

Joel: Wow.

Tony: I mean everything.

Joel: So did you break even on that show? Did you make money?

Tony: Oh, no. In fact.

Joel: That’s quite a venture to take on for $10,000.

Tony: It was scary. So I get everybody up there and the summer before was fabulous. The weather was great. It was just like being in Colorado but on the ocean. It was great. And then the next year was just horrendous. Nobody had told me that Skagway means “Home of the North Wind.” And I’m telling you it was brutal. We put the theatre together, rented the big top tent. I thought, “This will work.” And we got up there and, man oh man, I’m telling you it was freezing. And they had an excursion train, a narrow gauge railroad, that Lake Bennett railroad deal. And what would happen is our whole audience would be on this train, and then the thing would break down. So we’d have to cancel our show. And that happened probably 10, 12 times.

Peter: Whole ferry system went on strike.

Tom: And the town actually had their own little show.

Tony: Right. Days of ’98 Community Theatre.

Tom: So it wasn’t like the town was helping us.

Tony: It was tough. After about two weeks I realized that we weren’t going to make enough money to pay the actors. So I went back to my friend and said, “Bob, can I drive a tour bus again?” And he said, “Sure.” So I started driving a tour bus with the cast up there. And it was great because I could get all my tourists on the bus, and we’d stop in front of our tent and I’d say, “You guys got to go see this show. These guys are great. You just can’t miss this show.” And then, of course, I’d be there selling tickets that night. [laughing] But it was wonderful. We had a great experience. I had to write home.

Joel: All three of you went up there?

Tom: No.

Tony: No. Just Tom and I.

Joel: Just Tom and you. Peter said, “I’m not going to Alaska.”

Peter: Well, we were talking about this the other day. I’m one of the very few people still around who has worked at all three Gaslights.

Tony: Right.

Peter: At the original one at Trail Dust Town with the tin roof that leaked when it rained, and it was deafening when 12 people used to show up for the shows in this first summer of existence.

Joel: How long did it take for you guys to start -- So you talk about the first one being a little bit rough over there [at the first Gaslight location] -- were you able to build up your clientele there? Did it take a while?

Tony: You know, yeah. Unfortunately, we sat, what was it, 106 at the first theatre I think --

Tom: If you sat people on the top of the bar.

Tony: And the problem was, we were there for three years, and we were selling out at the end of that three years, and yet we still couldn’t pay our bills because the volume wasn’t there. I think we were charging $7 a ticket. No, $7.95 and that got you dinner and the show.

Joel: Dinner and a show?

Tony: Dinner and a show. A steak at Pinnacle Peaks and the show.

Peter: I remember when I worked there it was $5 a ticket, and children were free.

Tony: That’s right.

Peter: The first summer there.

Tony: That’s right.

Joel: No wonder you guys didn’t make any money.

Peter: No. [laughing] [crosstalk] I got paid for it.

Tom: We ran shows, five or six months.

Joel: How long do you run a show now?

Tony: Five. Well, we do five shows a year, so we do it about ten weeks.

Joel: So really for a guys who’s just starting out -- Let’s say a young guy wants to start a dinner theatre. What would your advice be -- I shouldn’t, I probably should go by my questions because my attention deficit will have you guys jumping all over and we won’t make any sense of this, but –

Tony: That’s okay. You’ll fit right in.

Joel: I know. A lot of people in theatre are like that, aren’t we. What would you tell them starting out? What have you learned from these three different places to the place where you’re at now because from what I hear you guys are almost sold out every night. Is that true?

Tony: We are. It’s a beautiful feeling.

Joel: How long has it been like that?

Tony: Oh, years now. We’ve been sold out almost every night for probably 10, a good 10 or 12 years.

Joel: That’s amazing.

Peter: We were lucky though. We had some very strong, very supportive press.

Tony: Yes.

Peter: Two very powerful critics in Tucson.

Tony: That could have killed us at any time. [crosstalk] Micheline Keating* and John Peck*. Both of them were just great. Micheline Keating’s* no longer alive, but John Peck’s* still in town, and I’m telling you without their nurturing in the beginning, we would have had a tough time.

Peter: Well, and also the consistency with Tom’s sets, which are a huge ingredient in the shows. [crosstalk] But also the actors.

Tom: I think we both have an eye for quality, and Tony wants quality up there.

Tony: That’s right. Well, you have to, you know?

Peter: It’s self-indulgent.

Tony: I was explaining to you before that I’m kind of the business guy; they’re the artistic end; and I think we work well together and we can -- There’s a good check and balance system in place. I think most theatres that go out of business have an artistic guy in the business seat, and that just doesn’t work. It just, it doesn’t work that way. We have got to be really the only for-profit theatre in the entire state -- that’s been successful.

Joel: What do you attribute that to, Tony?

Tony: The consistency of our performances, the family environment that we provide, and people know what to expect when they come to us. People will call up and they’ll say, “Geez, I want reservations for May,” or “I want reservations for next Saturday.” They’ll book their reservations and then they’ll say, “Oh, by the way, what’s playing?” Because the “what’s playing” isn’t what it’s about. It’s the whole atmosphere. They come here, they know that they’re going to be entertained. They know they’re going to laugh. They know that their kids can come or their grandparents can come and they won’t be offended, and they know that they’re going to get their money’s worth. That’s what we’re all about.

Peter: Yes, we try to make ourselves laugh, and we try to enjoy it, but it’s like we know what works, we know what they like, we know what they want to see. And any time in any show, and I’m not saying that every show is successful as another one, but the ones that aren’t as successful, you realize, well, you forgot the basic premise. You forgot that they needed to be entertained. You forgot that this had to happen. The forgot, you know, “boys meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” has to happen at every show. So you go back to the drawing board, and that’s the hard part. Also, you’ve got the show up, and now you’ve got to start from scratch again. I mean starting from scratch, we do it here 11 or 12 weeks.

Joel: So let’s go back to that question I was going to ask you a minute ago. What do you tell a young group or some guys just like you guys are, the U of A, who say, “You know what? I think I’m going to start one of these melodrama houses.” What would you tell them to help them keep from floundering and get off to a good start?

Tony: You know, I mean, location’s important. Your construction costs now with all the building codes are scary. You know, we were lucky. We snuck in. We built this theatre ourselves. We built all three theatres ourselves.

Joel: Wow.

Tony: I had one carpenter that we hired, Bo, and Tom designed it.

Joel: Wow, that’s impressive, you’re a licensed contractor?

Tony: Yeah. So I got a contractor’s license and then -- So we were able to cut all of those costs. So all these tables we built ourselves.

Joel: Really?

Tom: Well, that’s also the advantage of starting small and growing the business. I mean, to open today with a theatre this size –

Tony: I don’t know how you could do it.

Tom: Without a proven track record.

Tony: Plus, we’re not dinner theatre, you know? It worries me when you say, “How do you start a dinner theatre?” Well, I say you don’t start a dinner theatre. I think you lose in dinner theatre. You either lose on the dinner or you lose on the show. And that makes ticket prices --

Tom: Well, there’s such a history of lousy theatre at dinner theatre—

Tony: Well, it just makes the ticket price too expensive.

Tom: Bad connotations.

Tony: Buffet dinners that are just lousy. But people here have the option.

Tom: Exactly.

Tony: People in Tucson don’t want to spend $30 on a ticket. They’ll come in and they’ll spend $15 to see a show, and you give them free popcorn and they think they’re getting a deal, good value for the money. And then if they want to get pizza and whatever else we sell, great. And then that works for us; it works for them. That choice is there.

Joel: Right.

Tony: And when you have a dinner theatre, and you got a $30 or $40 ticket, wow, that’s tough. Plus one of the biggest advantages we have is that we don’t pay royalties.

Joel: That’s one of my questions on my list is down the road that has to be a huge savings.

Tony: It is. The one time that I can remember that we almost went out of business was when we did “Little Mary Sunshine.” And we messed up in two places. Number one, we didn’t have any Olio* acts with it or vaudeville acts at the end because Little Mary is a two-hour show or whatever it was, three-act show. And number two, we have to pay Samuel French the royalties to do it. And I’m telling you, wow, I was paying off Samuel French for a year and a half I think after that deal. That was -- It was really, really scary. And then it dawned on me in a very crucial way that I can pay a director or a writer to write a show, have that in my arsenal so I can produce it in the future at no cost. That author can then go sell that if he wishes at another theatre because it’s still his, and we both win. And so we started doing that. So we started paying our authors. Didn’t you write our first show?

Peter: No

Tony: I mean, Mike Maines did.

Peter: Well, how I got started writing shows I was supposed to direct “Zorro.”

Tony: That’s right.

Peter: And Mike Maines was supposed to write it. Then you came to me two weeks –

Tony: And he was in California, right.

Peter: Two weeks before we started rehearsal, and they said, “We don’t have a script.” And I was like, “Well, I guess I’m going to have to write a play.”

Joel: Oh, man.

Peter: Sixty plays later.

Joel: Really? [laughing]

Tony: But that’s the deal. If you calculate it, most theatres have to pay royalties, and it’s $100, $200, $300 per night that they have to pay royalties. I play a blanket ASCAP/BMI fee.

Joel: That was one of my questions because I’m hearing some songs up there on the stage, it sounded like -- Obviously, you just changed the words.

Tony: Under the BMI and the ASCAP license.

Joel: How much does that cost you a year, do you know?

Tony: It’s $1,200 I think for ASCAP, and BMI is 7 or 8 I think.

Joel: And that basically is the right to play those songs?

Tony: Exactly. And that covers our restaurant and the diner, which is nice.

Peter: I may get this story wrong and Tony can correct it, but the first time they came around wanting to charge us a fee, Tony didn’t like the bill and refused to pay it.

Tony: Yeah.

Peter: And they just went away for a couple of years and then came back with something reasonable.

Joel: Really?

Tony: Because they didn’t know what to do with us, they wanted -- They said, “What’s your seating?” and “How many nights do you have this?” And they plug into their calculation. And we’re an aberration. We’re much different than any other venue that they have, so I wasn’t about to accept them handing me a bill that was exorbitant. So we did dodge them for quite a few years.

Joel: And finally caved in, huh?

Tony: Well, because it’s reasonable.

Tom: Does anybody ever say no? Tony’s not afraid to say no.

Joel: I want to ask you a couple of things Tony just -- And again, if I step over a line or you can’t -- We’re about business. We’re trying to help people start businesses, so –

Tony: Right. Exactly.

Joel: For this theatre, now you said you kind of got under the codes because you did the work yourselves. Can you tell me like what did this facility cost, and then for you guys doing renovation, what do you think you spent?

Tony: Boy, it’s so hard when we opened, we weren’t ready to open and we probably spent -- But it used to be a movie theatre. And so we came in a did the demolition ourselves and we built it up to code, I’m just saying we saved the money -- because we did it ourselves. But we probably spent, well, we built the restaurant at the same time and we built that from scratch.

Peter: Borrowed from Dr. Steve.

Tony: $50,000 from him, so we probably spend $100,000. But that was --

Joel: To renovate you mean?

Tony: Yeah.

Joel: After the purchase of the land?

Tony: Exactly. And that was 14 years ago.

Joel: That’s not bad.

Tom: We bought six new lights.

Tony: Right. That was it.

Tom: Big, big guns because we didn’t have anything --

Joel: So on that thought with building the pizza place and café next door --
That intrigued me when somebody told me, I think it was you, Tom, said last night that the reason you decided to build the restaurant was so you could feed your actors because you had to feed them anyways.

Tony: Pretty much. Well, that’s how I got in the pizza biz. Over at Tanque Verde at our second theatre, we were becoming more and more popular. And I knew that if I added a second show on Friday and Saturday that we could make some money. So I went to the actors who were used to doing five shows a week, and I said, “Look. I’ll buy you pizza between shows if we can go and do two extra shows, seven shows.” And so we had a Pizza Hut across the street, and so I don’t know how long it was maybe a couple months that I was buying the pizza from Pizza Hut. I’d run over in between the deal there and it just dawned on me, “I get I can buy a pizza oven for how much it’s costing me to buy the pizza from Pizza Hut.” So I went and bought a used pizza oven and we stuck back in [telephone ring] one of those spaces we had. [Telephone ring] So, anyway, bought a pizza oven. Had a friend who worked next to a Dominos, who went and spent some time at a Dominos learning how they were making their pizzas, came back. We started out buying frozen dough, making the pizza and just doing it for the cast. And then I thought, “I bet I could sell this to the audience.” We started selling it to the audience. People started asking, “Hey, do you deliver?” “Yeah, sure. Where do you live?”

Joel: So now you have like five of them or something like that?

Tony: Yeah. We’ve got six of them now. And so George and I, who still works for us, he would deliver and I would make the pizzas and then we were in the pizza biz.

Joel: So, okay. So now you built up this pizza business. So is that how the expansion in the costume business over here actually got started, too?

Tony: Well, it all had it’s progression, you know? The first thing that I got into was ice cream. And I thought, “Geez, I got all these people sitting in there, I bet you I can sell them some ice cream.” So we went and bought a little freezer, and my first malt machine, and we stuck it in our box office where we sold the tickets. And so we’d scoop and do cones and shakes, and I would write on the wall every time we sold a shake. Well, hatch marks so I knew when I paid off this $200 malt mixer. And so we were in the ice cream biz. And then we got into -- We always had popcorn, free popcorn. Then we got in the pizza biz. And then we had a lot of groups coming in, a lot of senior citizen groups that just weren’t into the pizza deal. So I thought, well, “We need something that really caters to our bus tours and things like that.” So next door we leased a space and did the Gaslight Family Dining Room. And back in California they had a concept called The Big Yellow House. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but it was a buffet family style where you get a platter of chicken, a platter of potatoes, and your family would sit at one table and pass it around and that was it. So that was the Gaslight Family Dining Room, and we did that for I don’t know how many years, couple of three years.

Joel: So you had a little restaurant-type thing?

Tony: Right. We had a restaurant right there so they could book it before hand, and George was a cook.

Tom: Only for the show.

Joel: Oh, you only did it for the show?

Tom: We usually do an advanced, and we had 30 dinners that night. We just about killed the reservation [inaudible] 30 dinners because we knew exactly how many chickens to cook and --

Tony: Right. So we were in the restaurant biz, but it really wasn’t theatrical enough.

Tom: I think the salad bar was probably the killer.

Tony: Right. The salad bar was a difficult deal.

Joel: Those are always -- I hear that everywhere.

Tony: Salad bar is terrible.

Tom: Only because it’s open for like an hour a night, and keep it stocked.

Tony: Yeah.

Joel: So you’d strictly have this just for the show.

Tony: On a nightly basis for the show, exactly. And it worked out pretty well. But then I thought it wasn’t theatrical enough, so I thought, “I bet a ’50s diner would be great.” And just I did for the theatre, I then went wherever I could find a ’50’s diner. I looked in California, Texas, Colorado, wherever I could drive to, and I’d go and steal ideas. Everything I’ve done I’ve stolen, absolutely everything. It used to be “search the world and steal the best.” That’s been my motto for years. So I would go and research the diners and the melodrama theatres before I started the theatre, and I’d steal what I liked and come back and put it in.

Joel: And this was the first ’50’s diner right here?

Tony: No, over on Tanque Verde we had one. So it was called Little Anthony’s diner back there. And we came up with that ad, a cook that used to say, “Little Anthony’s on the warpath,” meaning me. So that’s how we came up with Little Anthony’s. It just happened to work out with the rock group.

Joel: And that replaced the other --

Tony: That replaced the Gaslight Family Dining Room. And that was it. We were a diner.

Joel: And then that was open all day though, not just during shows?

Tony: Yes. In the beginning it was just open in the evening and then, you know, we expanded into lunch and then we got into a lawsuit with our old landlord. We had a great landlord. She sold the business or the whole building to a new guy, an out-of-state landlord, and they started passing through property taxes. And they came to me, and even though my lease was written in stone, I had a rent schedule, they raised our rent. I was just a little guy and I didn’t know how to fight these guys. And so we paid it for a couple years and then I started researching it thinking, “You know, they can’t do that.” And I went down and I found out that they were actually passing through the property taxes from an adjacent parcel to all of us tenants, which they can’t do. And so we took them to court and, thank goodness, won. So we won, what did we win? Seventy-five grand. And, of course, that went right into this [the current theatre].

Joel: I’m going to ask you some questions since we’ve got these guys here, [inaudible] look at the artistic group. What decisions, what do you guys, when you’re going to select a show what do you guys decide other than what, some -- Is there any criteria for what you’re going to do the show about or what kind of music, or the themes, etc.?

Tony: The first deal when we select a show is that I kind of take a look at what seasons we’re doing. We always do a western in this slot, in our January/February slot.

Joel: Why is that?

Tony: Well, it started when tourists would come to town to Tucson. Winter visitors come to town.

Joel: Old Tucson.

Tony: Exactly. So you got give them a western. So we’ve been a western at this slot for 28 years.

Tony: And our Christmas show we always do a little bit more family, Christmas-oriented shows. So that gives us two slots that are always nailed in. And then Pete’s real good. He knows what movies are playing and what’s coming out. So he’ll say, “Well, geez, this movie’s coming out this summer. How about if we time a show to coincide with that, see if we can ride on their coat tails a little bit.”

Peter: What actors are available.

Tony: That is a big deal.

Joel: Really?

Tony: Absolutely.

Peter: Who’s signed? Who’s going to be here? What can we do? Because that defines so much. What kind of music do you select to fit there range.
Joel: Do you sign them before you decide on the show?

Tony: Sometimes. We try to get as many on a year contract as we can.

Joel: Really? For a full year?

Tony: A year contract, and they’ve got health insurance, 401K.

Joel: Can we talk about salaries, what do actors get paid here?

Tony: Well, it depends. The longer they work here, the more they’re worth to the company. And so they get a raise, small raise, every returning show. And so we range from $25 a show to $80. $100 with the musicians.

Joel: Okay, so it just ranges. But if they’ve been here a while they can get health insurance; is that how it works?

Tony: Exactly. Health insurance and a week’s paid vacation, 401k plan.

Joel: That’s excellent for a smaller theatre.

Tony: But so you figure it out. I mean, how many shows do we do a year? We do 500, probably 600 shows a year. It’s got to be 550 shows a year that we do. And so if they’re making $80 or $100 a show, that’s a good paycheck.

Joel: Do you rent out the facility here?

Tony: We’ve got two children’s theatres that are in this theatre that we rent to. One on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. One on Tuesday, Thursday.

Joel: Rent them to do shows or to rehearse?

Tony: They have their shows and their rehearsals here. And I charge them a per-rehearsal rental of what is it, $15, $20?

Glenda: $25.

Tony: $25 to rent it for the day. And then when they do their show, they pay us, what is it, $300? Yeah. $300 and they get lights and sound with that. They have to pay the technicians separately, but we take the food and beverage, which is nice.

Joel: A very good deal for everyone.

Tony: So we’ve got that. I mean, this place is booked all the time, all the time. We started the Monday night concert series.

Joel: I saw that.

Tony: Which is just phenomenal. Everybody said Monday night wouldn’t fly, and yet I’ve got five kids, and I know that there’s not a very nice place to go see different entertainment with a family that’s not smoky or a bar or whatever. So we started the Monday night concert series and it’s really taken off. We’ve been doing it now, for what, three or four years?

Glenda: About four years.

Tony: And we’re full most of the times. And we’ve got magic nights, and Dixieland bands and Big Band, and we’ve got a Latin group coming in this week, this Monday.

Tom: This December we just wore out the front of the house staff with the children’s theatre and the Christmas shows and things.

Tony: And our added shows.

Tom: Doing three and four shows every day of the week.

Joel: So going back to my question that you squirmed around a little bit there, which is okay because if it ever gets to a point here where you don’t want me to publish it, just tell me.

Tony: I didn’t do it on purpose. I just didn’t remember it.

Joel: So, yeah, that’s because you’re ADD like all artistic directors. [laughing] So the question is when you’re mounting a show here because you got, obviously you got to work on the music, you got to work on everything. So what does it cost you approximately, but let’s break it down now because you brought up a good point. You reuse shows. So what is the difference between a show that you’re reusing like this one to mount it versus a brand new show?

Tony: Not a whole lot, not a whole lot, honestly, because the bulk of your expense in mounting a show is the labor. And so you’ve got to rebuild stuff anyway. Your production week expenses is high, overtime during production week, your seamstresses, your costume designers, all that stuff, it’s high. So, you know, I don’t know. We probably spend I would say $50,000 to $80,000 putting a show together.

Joel: Really? Each time you do a show?

Tony: Yeah, I think so. Well, if you’re adding in rehearsal pay, cost of your director, choreographer, musical director. I don’t know -- Have you been over to the costume shop and seen that over there?

Joel: I’ve just saw the outside of it. So you employed them over there?

Tony: Exactly.

Joel: And they also work on this show?

Tony: Exactly.

Joel: Great idea.

Peter: We have to make at least two costumes per show.

Tony: Yeah. Because of the understudies that we have. We’re up to nine shows a week now.

Glenda: That’s the minimum that we’ll do is nine shows a week.

Joel: So how many understudies do you have?

Tony: In this show? What do we have? Three, right?

Peter: Well, it varies. [laughing]

Tom: There’s somebody covering every role.

Joel: So here is a question my father had about last nights show, “Are they really screwing up their lines or are they just having fun with the script?” because there was a little of that last night.

Tony: You know what is amazing, and really, a lot of it is. What’ll happen is that they will do the show, and Joe or Armen or somebody will come up with an ad lib and they’ll throw it in. And if it works, it sticks; if it doesn’t it’s out. And they really --

Tom: You wish.

Tony: I wish. You’re right, they keep hammering it. Most of them, most of the guys that have been here for years can make those decisions and they can keep in good ones. And the whole secret is when you leave here you go, “Oh, man, they just screwed up,” and “That was funny and look how they covered it.” Well, that same screw-up’s in every night.

Joel: Right. That’s what I was curious about because I swear you get the biggest laughs came from what people thought were screw-ups.

Tony: Absolutely.

Joel: Well, here’s a question and something I’ve thought about over the years because melodrama has a connotation, and theatre people love to snub their nose and act like it’s not an art.

Tony: We get snubbed every day.

Joel: Right, sure. So would it be possible to take shows like these somewhere and not even call it melodrama and just say that it’s --

Tony: No. You have to call it melodrama because really the booing and the hissing and the cheering --

Joel: That’s true. They love that.

Tony: -- that’s an important part, but I like to consider us a musical comedy theatre –

Joel: That’s what I think it is.

Tony: -- with a melodrama framework. And that’s what we are. And that’s why I think it works, you know? And sometimes this happens and sometimes it doesn’t, but I draw the line -- I hate going to a melodrama theatre where the guy comes on in black and they “boo,” and the guy comes on in white and they yell. That’s not what we’re about. Hopefully, we have some sort of character development. Hopefully, they care about that character enough and, hopefully, it’s not just that cheesy melodrama stuff. Hopefully, it goes deeper than that. Hopefully, the audience if going, “Wow! That’s a clever song,” or “Wow! That guy can really sing,” or “Wow! That story makes some sense.”

Joel: Well, I think that’s what you hit on earlier. It’s the continuity of everything.

Peter: And I think the fact that we do involve music, there’s a discipline that all of these performers have to be able to handle things --

Tom: They have to sing, dance, and act.

Peter: ?? that I think audiences recognize and respond to.

Tony: But hopefully when they leave here they go, “Man, that was fun.” Boy, that would be easy to do, you know? Because we want to make it look easy. And really nobody understands, even our critics, and it’s always something that’s bothered me for 28 years, is that they don’t understand how hardworking these guys are. It’s unbelievable. Oh, you guys, from writing the show, from the concept to casting to writing to rewriting. We’ve got a small amount of time to do this thing in. We got to pay the mortgage, so we can’t close for two weeks like a non-for-profit theatre can close. We’re done. We close on Saturday; we open on Thursday. That’s it. And so we have that short amount of time to put the show on. It’s unbelievable the amount of time that goes into it. We design our own costumes. We sew our own costumes. The music is rehearsed. Our choreography is new. I mean, everything. It’s an unbelievable amount of work.

Joel: So you don’t close at all, and then how long is your rehearsal time?

Tony: Four weeks plus tech week. So four and a half weeks. And they rehearse during the day, so the actors that we have, some of them have part?time other jobs, but the majority of them are full-time here, making a living wage.

Joel: That’s great. So your recruitment of actors is just within the city and within who you know, right? Or do you have open auditions?

Tony: We have open auditions. Like the gentleman that’s playing Cisco now, he was in L.A. How long’s he been in L.A.? Two years?

Glenda: Five years.

Tony: Five years, that many? He was with us before and he came back. And we just had an actress in our Christmas show, Karen Hendricks, who’s just fabulous, who came back just for the Christmas show. She’s back in L.A. So we try to bring them back.

Peter: We get them sent over from the university.

Peter: They have a really strong musical theatre group.

Tony: Well, we try to keep a core. We try to keep a core of roughly half the cast that’s been here.

Tom: Like five.

Tony: Yeah. But then particularly now that they’re getting a little bit older, we want to keep bringing in the fresh, young faces, the energetic people. It’s hard for the actors to learn our style.

Peter: It takes two productions.

Tony: Because they get out there and they really over act and they do the bad melodramas deal for a while, and that’s really hard, hard to get out of that.

Joel: That’s a thing that I think was very enjoyable watching the actors because there’s a fine line between being just relaxed up there and having fun. Like Armen obviously loves to have a good time.

By the way, what are all those silver trailers I see parked in the lot outside.


Tony: We use them for special events. A lot of special event caterings and we’ve got a series of six trailers that we use.

Joel: That was one of my questions here, but what the heck do you use all those for? Are they like for fairs and things?

Glenda: The trailers are built with Tony’s specifications for everything.

Joel: Pizza kitchen.

Tony: Yeah. Three of them have actual ovens in them. And so we’re the only place in town that can go and cook pizza on site.

Joel: And what do you use that for?

Tony: Well, tonight we’re at Sahuaro High School doing 1,300 ice cream sundaes. Yesterday we did -- We’re the only pizza vendor in town that can do a kosher pizza. And so yesterday. This big market. Yesterday we were at Tucson Hebrew Academy cooking kosher pizza. Tonight we’re at the Tucson Community Center. We cook pizza for all of their events down there out of one of our trailers. So we have the Icecats, which is a hockey team. And then Ice Cats tomorrow night. We’re doing Junk for Jesus which is an organization that auctions cars. So we do their car auction once a month, and that’s tomorrow morning. What else do we have tomorrow? Oh, that’s right.

Glenda: Harley Davidson.

Tony: Harley Davidson we’re doing their car show. We’re doing the Tanque Verde soccer tomorrow morning. And then –

Glenda: Icecats.

Tony: Icecats. And then Sunday I don’t think we have anything. Oh, that’s right we’re at the Solano International Raceway.

Joel: So you have ovens and freezers in them for ice cream?

Tony: Everything, yeah.

Peter: See, we’ve got it easy. All we’ve got to do is walk in and put up a play. All this stuff, all the logistics of doing all those kinds of events is --

Tom: First you got to get a staff together.

Peter: You got to have people that show up.

Joel: So you just bought a shell? Tony: Well, you know, I started this thing -- There was a radio station in town, a 50’s radio station that was thinking about buying an Airstream motor home and turning it into a 50’s, rolling 50’s diner kind of deal for their radio station. And so they brought one in from out of town, and I was advertising on the station, which was probably about ten years ago, and I went down to see it. And here’s this Airstream RV that they have ripped everything out and put in stools and black and this -- And I thought, “Boy, that’s a great idea,” and here I had a 50’s diner. And so I started looking at the smaller Airstream trailers, and I ended up buying one for $3,000. And we gutted it, and that was our first concession trailer. And we just started doing soccer matches --

Joel: How much did it cost to put this stuff into it?

Tony: Oh, gosh, not much. A couple hundred bucks. All we did was put stainless steel tables in it and an ice bin, and we were in the concession biz. And so it just grew from there. And then we got the bid to do the pizza at the Tucson Electric Park for their first year Diamondback spring training. They didn’t have any gas available in their building, and so I thought, “Well, geez, I’ll just stick one of my ovens in a trailer.” And so I bought a big white trailer, 20 foot long, and that was our first cooking trailer. We did that for a season and it just kind of took off from there.

Joel: Wow. And so do you actively go out and buy and look for things to sell, or do they come to you now?

Tony: They come to us now, which is good because we’re overbooked.

Joel: And so since you steal everything --

Tony: Right.

Joel: -- did you steal the recipe for your pizzas? [laughing] I read where you were four years in a row running best pizza. Is that something that developed or --

Tony: Well, yeah. I mean, like I said, when we were first starting the pizza biz we were doing frozen dough, and then we came up with our own deal. And I had a kid working for me that was working at another place, and he said, “Here, use this yeast,” and we just kind of fine-tuned it ourselves.

Joel: I’m going to ask you three the same question. What is the biggest obstacle or the biggest whatever that comes up for you on a daily basis in your job? What is the one thing that might jump out at you and you go, “Oh, crap. I gotta deal with this.”

Tom: Oh, f___ I can tell you one thing because we have been doing this a lot all week.

Tony: Can you say that on tape?

Joel: Sure. I just can’t write it. [laughing]

Joel: Okay forget that, I don’t remember if you ever answered this question earlier, so I’m going ask you again, because I finally found out where it was at on the list.

Tony: Sure.

Joel: Some young guys out of college are going to start a theatre somewhere.

Tony: Right.

Joel: What do you guys tell them besides trusting each other and -- Is there anything business-sense wise that you can try to get across to them that maybe would help them to miss some of the mistakes that you guys made.

Tony: Well, you’ve go to do your research.

Peter: We don’t make any mistakes.

Tony: But you got to do your research. You have to do your research. Find out what you want to do first, and make sure you have a passion for it. Because if you don’t a year or two years, six years into it you’re going to be going, “What the heck am I doing? I’m still working so many hours and ...” You’ve got to find something that your passion will carry you through on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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