Let‘s Put on a Show

June 7, 2006

Dan Truckey, executive director of the Grand Traverse Heritage Center, is putting on a show this summer in Traverse City. The museum on Sixth Street at Union offers artifacts from the Cherry County Playhouse which were discovered by Truckey in his many historical excavations.

NE: How did this exhibit come about?
Truckey: I’d been doing some research on the Park Place Hotel and I came across this stuff on the Cherry County Playhouse and found that it had a fascinating history, especially in the summertime (the Park Place Dome was the last venue for the Cherry County Playhouse). There were a lot of famous stars who appeared here, like Joe E. Brown of “Some Like It Hot.” Endless celebrities, especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s with a lot of television personalities. They’d be here for a couple of weeks rehearsing and then perform for 10 days. It was a packed season with six or seven shows.

NE: How did the summer stock movement in theatre get started?
Truckey: It developed out of the stock traveling companies of the 19th century. They would have a stock group of plays that they’d perform on tour. Its hey-day was in the 1920s and ‘30s and it was most common in small towns like New England vacation areas. Broadway was on hiatus in the summer back then because there was no air conditioning, so that’s when the summer stock season began.
Before the TV and film stars started to latch onto summer stock, it was driven by young, professional actors and there was a lot of innocence behind it. It was like, ‘Hey, let’s put on a show!’ It was a huge part of the theatre world.

NE: How was the Cherry County Playhouse established?
Truckey: Ruth Bailey started it. She was an actress connected to soap opera, especially radio, and she moved here to live at Northport Pointe.
Traverse City changed because of the playhouse. It was a nice, quiet summer community, but when the playhouse came it brought a lot of excitement to town. And it brought a lot of famous actors and actresses. Some were on the downside of their careers, such as Veronica Lake, who was married here. And some were on their way up, such as Burt Reynolds, who performed here in the ‘60s. (Reynolds went on to establish a community theatre in Jupiter, Florida, possibly influenced by his summer stock experience).

NE: Does summer stock theatre still exist today?
Truckey: It still exists; there’s one in Augusta, Michigan called the Barn Theatre. They have a professional crew, but the actors are almost all students.
Summer stock started dying off because it became too expensive for locals to pay for Equity actors (members of the actors’s union). The Cherry County Playhouse moved from Traverse City to Muskegon in 1990 and it closed in 2000.

NE: What was in it for the actors?
Truckey: I think that for the TV personalities, they were usually on a summer hiatus, so it was work. Maybe they did the same show at three or four places that summer.
Also, there was a legitimacy to theatre; people working in television wanted to get into films, so they wanted to get some theatre experience on their resumes.
Plus, it was a chance to be a star again for some actors. People were not so faded from the scene in Traverse City. Veronica Lake would have been a big deal here, but past her prime in Los Angeles.