Three artists who found fame after honing their craft at the century-old Omaha Community Playhouse are returning for centennial season events.
Two-time Tony Award winning singer-actor Norbert Leo Butz (“Rent,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” “My Fair Lady”) got his professional start in OCP’s now defunct Nebraska Theatre Caravan. He will perform his “Broadway, My Way” revue Feb. 1 at OCP, joined by Omaha native comedian, playwright and fellow alum Pat Hazell.
John Lloyd Young, a Tony (“Jersey Boys”) and Grammy winner who resided long enough in Omaha with his military family to play Young Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol,” headlines the April 5 Century Gala.
It will be the first time back for Butz and Young, who appreciate being part of a rich legacy.
Young enjoyed learning from OCP legends Dick Boyd, Mary Peckham and Charles Jones.
“It was a really great way for this Air Force kid to get involved in the community and whet that appetite for wanting to do it when I got older,” he said.
He’s far from the first or last for whom OCP served as a proving ground and launching pad. Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire started there in the 1920s and ’30s, respectively, after it formed in the early 20th century Little Theater movement. They soon found Broadway and Hollywood success. Other notable stage-screen talents who followed them from here to stardom include Jim Mulholland, Lenka Peterson, Julie Wilson, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Terry Kiser, Dick Christie, John Beasley and Greg Ryerson.
Butz, Hazell and Young continue a tradition of coming back to give back. Fonda and McGuire returned in 1955 to lead the cast of a benefit production of “The Country Girl” to raise funds for construction of the current Cass Street facility. Jane Fonda made her stage debut in that show.
For Butz, intersecting with OCP again is a nostalgia trip hearkening back to his early ’90s Caravan Midwest tour of “A Christmas Carol.”
“I was 23 years old and contracted to play Young Scrooge,” Butz said. “Two weeks before we were supposed to go out on tour the guy playing Old Scrooge dropped out, and they asked me to move into the role. What?” After being assured he had the range to pull it off, he said, “I jumped right in. It was so much fun.”
Playhouse co-artistic director Susie Baer Collins, who was a director and actor there at the time, said, “Norbert was truly someone special. He was amazing.”
For Butz it was a wild ride.
“The first stop of the tour was my hometown of St. Louis at the big Fox theater. My whole family got to come and see me. An amazing experience.”
Things got off to a bumpy start.
“For my first entrance I’m counting money at a desk,” Butz said. “I had to push out this little unit with wheels on the bottom. Well, I must have made a wrong turn because a fly (wall) came in, hit me top of the head and knocked me out cold for a full three to five seconds. I got up with a throbbing headache and jumped back into the scene. No one ever saw it. I had a lump the size of a baseball the first couple weeks of that tour.”
He was impressed by the Playhouse’s willingness to stage edgy work in its small studio theater. “I remember those productions as being really formative for me.”
His Caravan experience was even more memorable.
“We went around in a van and a set truck and played ‘gymacafetoriums’ all over western Nebraska into South Dakota into rural Iowa,” he said. “It was the first time I got paid to perform and I thought I had really made it. We stayed in lonesome, forgotten hotels and motels. Sometimes at local ranchers’ houses.
“We would pull into these towns of 400, 500, 600 citizens and handle the sets, costumes and props ourselves. We did a kids show in the morning – an original musical version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ – an abridged version of Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ for high school kids and then the full production of ‘110 in the Shade,’ the musical. One piano, seven, maybe eight actors.”
He was also in ‘110 in the Shade’ on OCP’s mainstage. Visiting actors got matched with Omaha hosts. He resided at the home of widow Ethel Cart.
“I stayed in the upstairs spare bedroom of her very modest house,” Butz said. “She was very kind to me. Every morning I’d come down and she had filled a bowl of bran flakes and a glass of orange juice. If I didn’t come home at night she’d be all worried. We kept in touch for a couple years. I was so grateful to her. I thought, wow, this is how this theater has kept on going for all these years. People open up their homes to actors and pitch in to build sets. That’s how it’s been done I suppose – volunteer by volunteer.”
“Absolutely, that’s the spirit of community theater,“ said Collins.
Paying his dues there, Butz said, built his chops. He gravitates to artists with the same background.
“You just know the people who came up doing community and regional theater – they’re no bullshit workmanlike actors, even if they’re making millions of dollars,” he said. “It’s always the ones who come up with a community ensemble based ethos that really get the work done.”
Growing up in Omaha, Pat Hazell came of age at the Playhouse “seeing shows” (his parents were season subscribers), taking classes and, like Hank Fonda decades before, building flats and painting sets. He got hooked early. By the time he was an established standup comic and comedy writer, he stretched himself in the drama “A Few Good Men.” He won the lead and OCP’s best actor award.
“I got the full-on Playhouse experience – rehearsing and performing with local community members and interacting with the audience,” he said. “I was doing something that wasn’t my profession like a lot of folks who perform there do.”
He’s also done a lot of producing at the Playhouse. He brought his own “Bunk Bed Brothers” there and was amazed OCP’s tech crew realized the hydraulic floating bunk beds he envisioned. He pushed the limits more for “My Life in 3D” with a three-story brownstone setting whose lower levels disappear into the stage to put the audience on the same level as his apartment. OCP designers“ worked it out.
It was Hazell, now a producer, whom Butz turned to to help conceive his solo show. Hazell serves as emcee.
“I try to straddle different types of music – show tunes, rock ’n’ roll, punk rock, the blues and a lot of other styles of music, including my own tunes,” Butz said. “Pat had some really good advice on blending these different musical personalities and I’ve just come to really adore him and think of him as a mentor.
“I have a lot of fun revisiting some shows I’m known for, including ‘Wicked.’ There’s a couple of my original compositions I like to do.”
Collins said generational talents like his only come around so often but “brilliant theater makers do keep showing up” there. “Just when you think, oh well, there’s no more new actors in Omaha, I’ve seen every one of them, I’m surprised all over again.”
Coming back for the centennial is a full circle moment for the special guest artists.
“Omaha has such a soft spot in our hearts,” Butz said. “I remember just loving Omaha. It’s kind of a sibling city to St. Louis. An old city, a great place.”
So when the opportunity came to repay the place that sent him on his way to regional theater and eventually New York, he was all in.
“I just felt this would be fun,” Butz said. “Pat will tell some stories, I’ll sing some songs, and we’ll celebrate the Playhouse together. I’m sure the memories will just come flooding back. I’m really looking forward to it. I can’t wait.”
Young, too, appreciates the opportunity of reliving the start of it all and what it meant to him.
“I developed habits there that I carried all the way to Broadway,” Young said. “Involvement in such a place at such a young age can plant seeds that last an entire career.”
He finds it surreal that at the Gala he will perform numbers from “Jersey Boys,” the show he originated on Broadway and that the Playhouse just finished its own production of.
“To sing some of that I think could be pretty exciting for both me and the audience,” he said. “There’s no danger in not getting your ‘Jersey Boys’ fix.”