THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604260227
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: RANDOM RAMBLES
SOURCE: TONY STEIN
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
``To be or not to be, y'all.'' Hamlet with a Southern accent. That, says Bill Blanchard, is the only way he could play the part. And while he's just kidding about hamming up Hamlet, he's serious about theater.
The stage bug bit him hard in 1980 - so hard that he's been acting and writing plays ever since. Like the dinner theater show he and a group called the Chesapeake Community Theater do each year for the Hickory Ruritan Club. This year's production, called ``Alabaster in Blue,'' happened a few days back. It was a comedy-drama about a rich old lady who gets murdered. Merriment amid the mayhem.
Blanchard runs A and B Cartage, a package delivery service, to pay the bills for a family that includes his wife, four daughters and a son. He's always loved to write, though. It started way back in the seventh grade at Great Bridge Junior High School, when he created a one-act play for an English assignment. He remembers the title, ``Ozark Pride,'' and the corn-pone style characters. It never got acted out, but his teacher liked it and encouraged him to keep writing.
Now let's fast-forward to 1980. Blanchard takes his kids to the old Chesapeake Little Theater to audition for a production of ``Hansel and Gretel.'' The location was that small building under the blue onion water tower on Kempsville Road. It's an American Legion post these days.
The lady mother-henning the show was the late Doris Sahr, a wonderful woman who somehow combined enough charm and determination to draw an acting performance out of a fence post.
She took a look at Blanchard and told him he was the wood cutter in the play. He figured his new-grown beard won her over.
Whatever the reason, Blanchard was scared stiff when the show started but hooked by the time it ended. ``Applause is addictive,'' he says.
That started him on a round of performances in community theater in Chesapeake and Portsmouth. In another play Doris Sahr directed, he played an Austrian mayor. He told Doris his accent was definitely more Blue Ridge than Alpine but she told him not to worry.
``By the time she got through with me,'' he says, ``my accent had at least gotten as far as Sweden, if not Austria.''
Blanchard has been writing and performing in the Hickory Ruritan dinner theater plays for about 10 years. He has a theory of what works.
``I enjoy entertaining people,'' he says. ``They're paying their money and for two hours they shouldn't have to worry about the house payment, the Virginia Power bill or sick Uncle Charlie.''
I heard another version of the theory 30-some years ago. A guy who ran a dinner theater in Norfolk said the secret of his success was ``Give 'em a good meal, a good laugh and send 'em home by 11.'' So the Hickory plays are light-hearted romps with some broad humor and a touch of slap-stick. They start about 8 p.m. and run about two hours. A lot of ham on the plate and a little ham on the stage. Welcome recipe.
But there's more to Blanchard's interest in the arts than the Ruritan romp. He's vice chair this year of the Chesapeake Fine Arts Commission and high on his wish list is a cultural arts center for the city.
Sure, we need schools and roads and drinkable water. A real city is more than bricks and mortar, though. If there is any place in our whole 353 square miles where there is a proper art gallery, recital hall or intimate theater, I don't know about it. It was that way when I moved to Chesapeake in 1971. It's still that way.
When the Chesapeake Humane Society put on a show in 1975, the only rehearsal hall we could find was an unused dairy barn with a one-holer for a bathroom. When the Legion post building was a theater, backstage was so cramped that it looked like a phone booth with delusions of grandeur. There was no curtain to raise and lower so the lights went out when scenes ended and you hoped the audience didn't mind actors scrambling in the semi-dark.
However, Blanchard and other folks interested in a cultural arts center know that money to build it isn't going to come from a municipal Santa Claus forking over a whole heap of tax dollars. That's why a group called the Chesapeake Consortium for Arts and History, chaired by Helen Spruill and Linwood Nelms, is looking toward the city's rapidly growing private business sector for possible help. ``The right people are in place to work on the project,'' Blanchard says.
It would be really nice to have a true cultural arts center out there somewhere between South Norfolk and North Carolina. Maybe Blanchard could even do a Shakespeare play, Southern accent and all. We could call it ``Bubba and Juliet.'' by CNB