Remember The Cherry County Playhouse?

By Patrick Sullivan | April 29, 2017

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, summer in Traverse City was akin to the greatest episode of The Love Boat ever, thanks to a revolving door of television stars – some a little past their prime – who shined in performances at the Cherry County Playhouse (CCP).

Rita Moreno, Phyllis Diller, Florence Henderson, Gavin MacLeod, Don Knotts, Jim Nabors, Hal Linden, Robert Goulet, Bob Denver, Buddy Ebsen, Martin Milner, Vicki Lawrence, Dick Van Patten, Gene Rayburn, Abe Vigoda, William Shatner and Ted Knight were just some of the stars who appeared on the CCP stage in its last decade in Traverse City.

Those performances took place at the Park Place dome, slated to be demolished to make way for a modern convention center. Pre–deconstruction of the dome is scheduled to begin May 1, with demolition taking place later in the month. The project is expected to be completed by early June 2018.

In honor of the last days of the dome, Northern Express talked to people who were involved with CCP, a place where, according to one of the theater’s slogans, “the stars came out at night.”

Before the Dome
Before the dome was built, Cherry County Playhouse productions were staged in a red and white tent festooned with flags and banners in a parking lot across from the Park Place, where the Larry C. Hardy parking deck stands today.

Cincinnati socialite, soap opera star and Northport Point summer resident Ruth Bailey started CCP in the summer of 1955.

Bailey, who’d starred in the radio version of The Guiding Light, was a larger–than–life figure who ran her theater with an iron fist for its first 20 years.

“She would walk through the lobby and through the buildings and just create a storm – sometimes a hurricane, sometimes balmy,” said Joan Miller Oswald, who worked as a hostess at the Park Place when CCP was still in the tent (and who later rose up the ranks to become assistant manager of the hotel). “She had a demeanor that was just recognizable from the moment she entered the room.”

Bailey dressed like a movie star and carried herself with a kind of authoritarian self–assurance that seemed out of place in laidback Traverse City. 

“People would just step aside and let her through,” Oswald said. “[The feeling was,] ‘She will get what she wants, one way or the other.’ And she did.”

One–time CCP manager Phyllis Lesser Allen met Bailey in Cincinnati and was recruited to move north to work at CCP in 1974.

“I remember going to her house, which was just fantastic,” Allen recalled. “She offered me $50 a week to work in the box office at Cherry County. I threw my lot in with the playhouse; I knew I’d at least have a job in summer.”

Allen moved to Traverse City and took a job teaching drama in the off season at Traverse City High School. She recalled Bailey as an imperious, stern figure.

“She was a producer with her finger on every penny, and we thanked everyone profusely in the playbill for things they would give us, but we bought nothing, as I recall,” Allen said.

Productions moved to the dome in 1965.

In a 1964 playbill, Bailey announced the move across the street: “We will have a new home in an air–cooled molded plastic dome next to the Park Place Motor Inn. We will still have arena seating and seating capacity will be approximately the same. However, the seating arrangement will be different as will ticket prices, to offset the cost of moving. We will endeavor, however, to keep the increase as low as possible.”

With New Owners Comes a New Style
Bailey sold the theater company to comedian Pat Paulsen and television writer and producer Neil Rosen in 1975. 

In its early years, CCP had brought Broadway and film stars like Veronica Lake, Zasu Pitts, John Carradine and Burt Reynolds to Traverse City. Paulsen and Rosen increasingly brought more television stars because those were the people they knew.

Allen said Bailey sold the theater because she was nearing retirement age. “It had been 20 years for her, and most of her friends, like Vivian Vance, the stars that she had brought to the playhouse, weren’t doing summer stock anymore,” Allen said.

The change in management style was night and day.

“Neil was a wonderful, good and kind man; there could not have been a more opposite – I don’t want to say this because I don’t want to cast a bad light on Ruth Bailey – Neil was a really kind producer; he wanted everyone to be treated well, there was no doubt,” Allen said.

Take the time an actor (whom Allen declined to name) ushered a list of demands in the contract and expected a very particular and rare bottle of wine, a vintage that could not be found in Traverse City. Rosen had the owner of the Blue Goat drive downstate to find that bottle.

Allen recalled, “Neil would say, ‘Have you seen what he can do? Can you do what he can do? Have you seen anyone who can do what he can do? Well, that’s why he gets what he wants.’” Allen mused, “It was harder to keep money in control when you wanted to make people happy.”

Allen left CCP in 1980 to attend graduate school. Lured back in 1985 to be general manager, she worked in Traverse City for the next six seasons.

“It was just a wonderful place to work and have a career,” Allen said. 

On to a Bigger Stage
There are big names that started out at CCP and went on to become stars, but Allen said there were also lots of people who spent summers apprenticing and went on to behind–the–scenes careers in show business.

“It was astonishing, and you have no idea how many people it affected,” Allen said. “So many people went on to have careers in theater because of Cherry County Playhouse.”

Some of the most notable individuals who interned at CCP over the years are Peter Bogdanovich, who apprenticed in 1955, Meredith Baxter and Bruce Campbell.

Another who got his start in Traverse City is character actor Dann Florek, who played Donald Cragen on NBC’s Law & Order. He came to CCP as a business manager in the 1970s. He took a small roll in one production and because CCP was an “equity” theater that only hired union actors, Cragen got his equity card, which opened the door to acting jobs in television.

“He was at Eastern Michigan, and he came to Cherry County Playhouse as a business manager and took his equity card to L.A.,” Allen said.

Phil Murphy, the executive director of the Old Town Playhouse, was hired in the late 1980s to supervise the apprentices.

He said he suspects many of the volunteers went on to careers in show business. The most notable from his era was Nick Demos, who went on to become a Broadway producer who won a Tony for The Frog Prince and who might win another for his current production titled Come from Away.

Nowadays, the Traverse City Film Festival has taken the roll of offering young people a start in show business. Allen said that happened to her daughter, who volunteered one summer for the TCFF, met her husband there and today works in public relations for the Film Society of the Lincoln Center and the New York Film Festival.

End of an Era
Summer stock theater is a relic of another age. Once common at resorts around the country, today there are hardly any left. Just one equity theater remains in Michigan, the Barn Theatre in Augusta, which stages a series of summer plays and musicals but doesn’t focus on attracting big names to star in them.

The kind of theater that Cherry County aspired to be no longer exists.

“Its time came,” Allen said. “It just became so expensive to produce theater. Ticket prices just didn’t cover it, and actors weren’t dependent on making this extra money in the summer.”

Today Allen is retired in Dayton, Ohio; it has been several years since she directed a play.

Summer stock’s days in Traverse City ended in 1990 after Rotary Charities purchased the Park Place and declined to renew CCP’s lease.

Rosen, who by then lived with his wife Joni on Peninsula Drive in Traverse City, wasn’t happy about that. He told a Record–Eagle reporter at the time that the theater company brought 25,000 to 40,000 people downtown each year in its nine–week season.

The problem was, the hotel wasn’t profitable, and Rotary needed to find ways to make it viable. One of those was attracting more convention and event business, something the lease with CCP prevented during the 10 busiest weeks of the year. 

With its lease up, CCP moved to Muskegon in 1991, filed for bankruptcy two years later, became a nonprofit and shuttered for good in 2003.

Summer stock’s days were numbered, anyway. Dan Truckey, director of the Beaumier Upper Peninsula Heritage Center and former director of the Grand Traverse Heritage Center, produced an exhibit about the history of CCP in 2006. He said there were fewer entertainment options in summer stock’s heyday and that people expected to see shows featuring stars when they went on summer vacation. As times changed, so did people’s expectations regarding what they wanted to do when they went on vacation.

Nonetheless, Truckey said there was something wonderful about Cherry County and the kind celebrities it brought to northern Michigan.

“The stars they were bringing in as the years went by, they were people who were basically on The Love Boat, you know?” Truckey said. “They weren’t getting film rolls; they weren’t getting star rolls in TV anymore.”

CHERRY COUNTY PLAYHOUSE SNAPSHOTS

Shopping with Phyllis Diller
When Phyllis Diller came to Traverse City in 1989, she just wanted to go shopping.

Former Cherry County Playhouse manager Phyllis Lesser Allen said it appeared at first that Diller might be a high maintenance guest, but she turned out to be the opposite.

“I have to say, she had a contract that we had signed that came with a certain kind of wig stand and stuff to be in her dressing room, but when she arrived she just said, ‘Where’s my wine bottle?’” Allen said.

What Diller most wanted was to go grocery shopping, something her celebrity life didn’t allow, so some of the props workers took her on a late–night trip to Meijer.

“She took a cart and filled it with things she hadn’t seen in years; she bought an entire load of stuff to take back to her grandchildren,” Allen said. “She said the next day it had been one of the best nights of her life, she enjoyed it so much.”

Oversized Personality
The only time former Park Place employee Joan Miller Oswald remembers a stronger personality than Cherry County Playhouse founder Ruth Bailey in Traverse City was the week that Eva Gabor came to town to perform in “Blithe Spirit” in 1981.

“The most glamorous star was Eva Gabor. She had four dogs, maybe five dogs, and she kind of gave Ruth Bailey, I don’t want to say a sort of run for her money, but she could create quite an audience,” Oswald said.

Sunday brunch at the Park Place was a big deal at the time, and when Gabor arrived with her dogs, people were aghast. Gabor apparently thought she was entitled to dine with the canines in the Montmorency Room.

“There were folks who were pretty upset that she thought she could bring her dogs in here,” Oswald said. “I believe – I’m not sure on this – I believed she compromised and brought only one dog, which she held in her arms as she went through the buffet.”

Carol Burnett also had that ineffable star quality that attracted attention, but in Burnett’s case, she was sweet and kind and didn’t behave like a diva, Oswald said.

Stars at Sun Perch
When the stars came to northern Michigan in the 1980s, they stayed at Sun Perch Condominiums in Leelanau County.

In 1981, Deb Callison was manager of Sun Perch. That was where comedian Pat Paulsen stayed with his wife all summer and it was where the actors used to stay when they came to Traverse City. The only one who didn’t stay there, Callison said, was Eva Gabor, who stayed put at the Park Place. For the others, the pretty setting in the woods near the Timberlee ski hill and the outdoor pool made for a nice place to spend a week.

Callison remembers telling the housekeeping staff to ask guests to purchase laundry detergent from the office and not to use a box of detergent that was in the laundry room. One day she heard a housekeeper yelling at Richard Thomas, who played John Boy on The Waltons, not to use the soap. Next she heard another maid say, “Missus is fighting with John Boy over the laundry soap.” Callison thought that was hilarious.

There were also surreal moments, like when Abe Vigota came to have a cup of coffee with her each morning or when William Shatner checked in and introduced himself.

“He said, ‘Hi, I’m William Shatner,’ and I said, ‘Like I don’t know that.’ We had a laugh about that,” she said.

Bruce Campbell Doesn’t Like the Hobnobs
Evil Dead and Burn Notice star Bruce Campbell included a whole chapter in his autobiography on the summer he spent in Traverse City.

In his book If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B–Movie Actor, Campbell summed up his take on summer stock theater from the vantage point of his work as an unpaid teenage apprentice for the Cherry County Playhouse in the summer of 1976: “Summer stock, I realized, is where prime–challenged thespians spend their twilight years parading in front of retirees every week.”

Campbell was there to meet and learn from the stars. Allen Ludden, he said, asked to borrow a pen one day and then proceeded to write his lines on props around the stage so that he could jog his memory throughout the performance, a technique Campbell adopted when he later starred in a television show.

Campbell also learned something about the hierarchy of show business. He kept a diary that summer, and one entry read, “We worked our bunzolas off again today – hauling wood, platforms and just good old junk to our storage area so we can have a clear rehearsal hall for the stars – big deal! I am getting progressively angrier at these ‘hob nobs’ when I think of all the work we do for them – for no pay – experience is what we get and brother – that we are! Well, I suppose if I ever become a hob nob, then I can look at the work done for me and really appreciate it – I shall, I hope. If I don’t, I will be too ‘hob nobbish’ to care, I guess – let’s hope not...”

Pat Paulsen’s “Tragic Performance”
Pat Paulsen, a comedian who became famous for his appearances with the Smothers Brothers and his comedic campaigns for president, was irreverent and self–effacing as the owner of Cherry County Playhouse, as evidenced by his bio from a 1978 program in which the Washington state native concocted a fictitious back story:

“Pat Paulsen was born on the island of Rodos (Rhodes) in Greece. His father, Myorkos Paulsen, ran a little outdoor amphitheatre where he produced Greek tragedies. Pat used to hang around with a friend of his, “Comedicles” Johnson, and try to convince his dad to do more amusing plays. Pat would get tired of always watching death, rape, pestilence and the other plots that the Greeks thought were fun.

“Unable to make changes there, he sailed the Mediterranean, ending up in Traverse City, Michigan. Once in Traverse City, he was able to purchase the Cherry County Playhouse. Now Pat has the opportunity to present theatre–goers with plays that he hopes will entertain and take their minds off the daily troubles of life. Once each summer Pat himself appears in a fun–filled play. In last summer’s appearance, a reviewer said of Pat’s performance…‘Paulsen has not forgotten his early beginnings in Greek theatre. His performance was tragic.’”

Much of the information in this article came from material provided by Amy Barritt, special collections librarian at Traverse Area District Library.