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Greasepaint, Bats, and Seasoned Hams: A Celebration of the Jacksonville Theatre Guild

2014 · Nichols Park Pavilion, Jacksonville, Illinois

Greasepaint, Bats, and Seasoned Hams was Ken Bradbury's affectionate memory revue celebrating the Jacksonville Theatre Guild, staged as a fundraiser to help the beloved community theatre — by its own president's account "hanging on by its toenails" — rekindle its fire. As Ken explained in his program note, the show was never meant to be a chronological history of the organization. "Besides," he wrote, "history is much more interesting when told as a story rather than a list. So these are our stories."

The script was assembled from dozens of interviews and written recollections gathered from the Guild's actors, directors, costumers, and tech people, past and present. Out of those pages came a parade of true and gloriously theatrical moments: a hapless IRS agent drawing the longest laugh anyone could remember, an ambulatory biscuit can that rolled Noises Off! to a standstill, a paper liberty bell dropping at the feet of Harold Hill mid-scene, a folding army cot collapsing under Ben Franklin in 1776, and the elaborate booby-trapped mansion of Something's Afoot in which the entire cast had to die — including Katie Phelps being swallowed whole by a specially built vase that then burped. As Ken put it, "reality is heightened when you're onstage… small incidents loom large when you're standing in front of 200 people," so the audience was asked to forgive the storytellers if their imaginations ran a little imaginative.

For all its laughter, the evening reached for poignancy too — the friendships made across generations, the shows that raised money to start a soup kitchen on the north end of town, the actor who found his best moment singing "Shipoopi" surrounded by dancing teenagers, and the cast of Godspell moved to real tears at the Last Supper. It was, as Ken intended, a celebration: "Listen, remember, enjoy… celebrate!"

Musical Numbers

Drawn from the Guild's decades of productions, the revue featured songs the performers had made their own, including:

Cast

Production Notes

The Jacksonville Theatre Guild traces its roots to 1973, when it was organized as Summer Theatre '76 and staged Cactus Flower at the Nichols Park Pavilion after Illinois College declined to host plays on campus. The group took its present name in October 1979 and has performed at the Sophie Leschin Building since 1980, acquiring its Theatre Business Office at 210 West College in 1999.

The idea for the show began in early 2014, when a fine-arts consultant working on a new facility met with Guild president Katie Phelps and suggested a fundraiser "led by a guy named Ken." Ken proposed a memory show built from the Guild's own stories — a project he trusted Katie to see through where, in his long experience, so many other organizations had dropped the ball. "So on this first day of February, in the year of our Lord 2014," he wrote in his journal, "we begin."

Performances were given September 19, 20, and 21, 2014, at the Park Pavilion in Jacksonville, Illinois, with Stephanie Soltermann at the piano. Dozens of community members — "The Conspirators," as Ken called them in the program — contributed the memories that made up the script, among them Bob Crowe, Bill DeFrates, Roger Deem, Cathy Doyle, Bailey Brammeier, and many more spanning the Guild's history.