8/17/09
I stopped by the theatre to pick up my reunion t-shirt. Then I walked along Electric Avenue and looked at the shops, some that were there when I was a playhouse actor and most that were not. In the gift shop next to the theatre I heard some people talking about JK Simmons and how he had been walking around town like anybody.
“Yeah, he’s one of us,” said one of the men.
Then they started to talk about his older brother David, “that big guy with the big voice”. He was a friend of mine when we were both still in Missoula going to school and involved with the Missoula Children’s Theatre and for the record he is the younger brother. During one pre-production build, I rode out to Lolo in a truck with David to pick up some lumber or piece of equipment for a show and as we drove past the McDonalds I read the sign announcing “Chicken McNuggets”. It was the first time in my life I’d seen those words and I laughed all the way to Lolo. Chicken McNuggets. Who thought that would last.
Who knew that 50 years after some college kids showed up to put on plays in the sleepy town of Bigfork, Montana, that the theatre would be the centerpiece of the town’s vibrant summer tourist industry. There was much praise for Don and Jude Thompson who have run the playhouse for most of it’s history, but also much praise and admiration for Bo Brown who started the theater company in 1960. He gave a lovely speech at the gala. I can imagine how inspirational and charismatic he must have been as a young man. When he was done after 8 years, he turned the theatre over to DT who with his wife Jude grew it too what it is today. For several years in the 1970’s when Jim Caron was in the company, actors who didn’t have anything better to do spend the winter with Jim and the Missoula Children’s Theatre Association. I was one of the kids they worked with back then. I talked my parents into taking me up to Bigfork to see the professional theater. We would camp and fish and in the evening my dad would row my mother and I and sometimes my sister to the dock at Bigfork and we would get out of the boat and go up the hill and attend the theater in the old building. (We bought the orange drink Bo Brown mentioned in his speech.) I would buy the program and ask everyone in the company for their autograph. Even 5-year-old Gavin Thompson who played the youngest Snow child in Carousel printed his first name over his picture in my program. He’s married now with children and a career in technical theatre.
The number of Bigfork Alumni still in the business is a testament to the quality of performers and technicians Don and Jude hired. Others have equally impressive jobs in academics and health care. At the party one actor was talking to a musician about a successful Broadway musical he had been in which had a group dynamic and creative smart caring people at the helm that had reminded him of the Bigfork Summer Playhouse.