Perhaps the first thing you should know is that the actor who plays Grandpa also plays Mrs. Devine. And that a great big Santa beard usually springs from his chinny-chin-chin — but, as a hirsute (that’s a fancy word for “hairy”) Mrs. Devine simply won’t do in “Fancy Nancy Splendiferous Christmas,” he made the noble sacrifice and shaved it off, all for the love of theater.
Orange County’s “Illustrator to the Stars,” Robin Preiss Glasser, practically screams with laughter as Grandpa/Mrs. Devine/actor Robin Walton adjusts his falsies and busts open the snaps on his shirt. It’s one of Chance Theater’s last rehearsals before the musical opened for its Southern California premiere Friday, Dec. 9 (it runs through Dec. 23. Nancy — aka Angela Griswold — is stuck in traffic between Los Angeles and Anaheim, so Preiss Glasser adjusts Walton’s white wig and pulls white strands from the outrageous excesses of his bejeweled butterfly sunglasses until — there! Just right.
Preiss Glasser envisioned — nay, invented — the entire Fancy Nancy universe, from the divine Mrs. Devine’s colorful muumuus and poufy “That Girl” hair to the adorable baubles-and-lace excesses of Nancy herself. It was shocking enough when the tomes (that’s a fancy word for books) Preiss Glasser illustrated with author Jane O’Connor spiked bestseller lists and spawned I-can-read series and sticker books and stage adaptations and ballets and even a Disney series. But, seeing the two-dimensional characters from her head morph into three-dimensional humans who sing and dance on stage right before her very eyes?
“It’s crazy,” Preiss Glasser said. “A dream I never knew to dream. That doesn’t happen. It was just the most ridiculous luck.”
Luck may be at play, but this success story is clearly a function of talent. Preiss Glasser’s drawings have always threatened to spring from the page and burst to full life — they “brim with comic detail and sparkle like a bauble from Tiffany,” Publisher’s Weekly once said. She has illustrated books for Lynne Cheney, Garrison Keillor, Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson, Elizabeth Garton Scanlon, Ann Patchett and New York City Ballet legend Allegra Kent. In the spring, a ballet book based on her own life — she was a soloist with the Pennsylvania Ballet before injury forced her to hang up her toe shoes — will be published.
I met her in 2006, when she was donating some of her artwork to charity and “Our 50 States” — her third book with the vice president’s wife — was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for kids’ books, surpassing the very first “Fancy Nancy,” which slipped to No. 2. She told me about how she was once a divorced mom of two young children saddled with tremendous debt and felt like a loser. She told me about going to meet Cheney for the first time and being asked, by a publishing bigwig, to pilfer paper towelettes emblazoned with the vice presidential seal from the Second Family’s powder room.
She later invited me to a “Fabulous Women” luncheon at her Irvine tract home, though neither of us remembers well who else was there, and have been wreaking havoc ever since. Like that time at the Moroccan restaurant, when the belly dancer was writhing past the diners and we decided to join her (much to our husbands’ mortification). Suffice to say that ballet and belly dancing don’t necessarily share a skill set, and journalism and belly dancing definitely don’t share a skill set. Still, it was one of the best laughs ever.
Preiss Glasser and her husband Bob Berman — a retired IRS lawyer, and the show’s executive producer — now live in San Juan Capistrano, which is a long way from Anaheim, especially at 5 p.m. on a weekday. They first came upon the Chance Theater when a law school friend of Berman’s took them to see “Jerry Springer: The Opera” — “And that was it,” Preiss Glasser said. “It was so over-the-top irreverent. I loved it.”
Chance cast its spell on Preiss Glasser and Berman, who’ve become devoted patrons.
“Why have I been schlepping all the way up here for the last 12 years?” she asked. “Because of the visceral energy at every performance. There’s something in the water or the air here — a sense that they’re going to fall off a cliff and die if they don’t do live theater, that it’s what keeps them alive, that they give every bit of themselves to it, down to their core. They erupt with passion. It’s the spark of life that makes me feel, every time, goosebumps. I scream. I applaud. I go out of my mind. This place turns me on in a way that more ‘professional’ theaters just don’t. Those are safer. Here, it’s just wild. That’s the juice of it.”
The affection is clearly mutual. Preiss Glasser is the sort of person who hosts tea parties with little kids, who gleefully signs books and autographs even when she’s “off-duty,” who allows folks from the theater to raid her home and carry off authentic memorabilia to populate the “Fancy Nancy” set, Chance managing director Casey Long said. Look closely and you’ll see, on the shelves of Nancy’s stage home, Preiss Glasser’s collection of tiny baby books, and tchotchkes, and a framed photo of her mother and father.
Her mom died in March. This way, Preiss Glasser said, her mom gets to watch the show.
For those of you who have been under a rock and/or haven’t had small girls for the last couple of decades, and thus haven’t read each of the 100+ Fancy Nancy books at least 20,000 times, “Splendiferous Christmas” details how our heroine saves up for an extra-special, super-sparkly tree topper, and how heartbreak ensues, and how she then finds the true meaning of the season.
“The innocence of it, the naivete — it just comes from such a wholesome, good-hearted place,” said music and assistant director Stefan Miller. “They realize, in the end, that the true meaning of Christmas isn’t the ribbons and bows, but the love that’s in your heart.”
The musical premiered in New York, and the New York Times said this: “The hourlong musical…has a dramatic tension….as well as a refreshing sound:…elements of swing as well as contemporary pop… Everyone learns the true meaning of the holiday…but what makes ‘Splendiferous Christmas’ winning is that it dares to be a little naughty as well as nice.”
That seems to be the forte of Walton. The kids may not notice how he changes from Grandpa to Mrs. Divine and back again myriad times in just a matter of seconds, but the adults sure will, and it’s funny. He must transform in a dark, claustrophobic sliver of space between the set and the wall, and when he doesn’t have time to insert Mrs. Devine’s falsies, he drapes a billowing feather boa where they would otherwise be.
Walton is a retired “digital evangelist” with Hewlett-Packard who said he holds seven patents and mounted actual shows at trade shows where the printer always saved the day. He has a son, two grandsons and a third on the way. “Everyone has an inner, fabulous self,” he said, flipping the pink feather boa around his neck. “It just took me 66 years to find mine.”
For tickets and more information, see www.chancetheater.com.
Source: Orange County Register
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