BROADS CAST — Ivonne Coll, June Gable, Barbara Niles, and Leslie Easterbrook at rehearsal for “Broads! the Musical” at the El Portal Forum Theatre in North Hollywood. Photo: Cynthia Citron
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By Cynthia Citron
NORTH HOLLYWOOD – “I’m just blown away to see how theater in LA has changed in recent years,” June Gable said. “It’s expanded, and there are so many new young actors.” “I consider residents of this neighborhood very lucky,” added Leslie Easterbrook.
June, Leslie, and I were in North Hollywood, sitting in the lobby of the El Portal Forum Theatre with the two other actresses, Ivonne Coll and Barbara Niles, who are their costars in the world premiere musical Broads!, written by Jennie Fahn and Joe Symon, which opens here on February 19th. For four women who had never met or worked together before, they exhibited a remarkable warmth and camaraderie. “We‘ve only spent five weeks together in rehearsal, but I think of them as my best friends,” Barbara said. “It’s sweet,” Ivonne added, “like a nice lollipop.”
All four women have extensive acting and singing credits and all four are beautiful. They’ll need a ton of makeup and wigs to portray the elderly “broads” of the Millennium Manor Retirement Village! Elderly ladies with spunk, though, as they struggle to put on a variety show in the Village clubhouse. Ivonne Coll, in fact, was Miss Puerto Rico in 1967. Is that beautiful enough for you? She has appeared on Broadway in the Tony-nominated Chronicle of Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare on Broadway, and Goodbye Fidel with Jane Alexander. She also played the grandmother whose grandson had swallowed her rosary beads on the final episode of ER.
June Gable, who has been taking care of her parents on their farm in northeastern Pennsylvania in recent months, was in LA last year when she read for the part of Elaine in Broads! She previously starred on Broadway as Googie Gomez in Terrence McNally’s The Ritz and was nominated for a Tony for Candide. She was also nominated for the London Drama Critics Award for Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and won an OBIE for The New York Shakespeare Festival’s A Comedy of Errors. But she is probably most recognizable as Estelle, Joey’s agent on Friends.
Leslie Easterbrook starred as Sgt. Callahan in Police Academy and five of its sequels, and created the role of “Bunny” on Broadway in Neil Simon’s California Suite. A graduate in music from Stevens College in Missouri, she concentrated on opera. “You have such a unique quality to your voice,” Barbara commented. “Did you ever break a glass with it?” “No, but I shattered a light bulb once,” Leslie responded proudly.
Barbara Niles also studied singing at Boston University and played Mary Magdalene in the first Broadway revival of Jesus Christ Superstar. Barbara’s Jewish mother was a bit appalled at this casting, wanting her to play “somebody Jewish,” until Barbara reminded her that Mary was Jewish. And then, to her mother’s delight, she played Annie on Broadway in Oy Mama, Am I In Love, a musical with the songs performed in Yiddish, “even though I don’t speak Yiddish,” she noted. “I had to learn Yiddish when I played Molly Picon,” June piped up.
“It was one of my favorite roles. We did it off-Broadway, and did one performance just for Holocaust survivors.” In her next role, she added, she’ll be playing the death-obsessed poet Sylvia Plath. “We’re quite diverse,” Barbara continued. “We’ve all done Shakespeare and the classics, but what binds the four of us together is that as we age our purpose is each other. Friends are the glue that holds people together.”
“People don’t want to age,” June noted. “But the four women in Broads! have accepted the aging process in an energetic way. They’re not afraid.” Although there is a downside, she added, referring to the first lines of one of her solo numbers in the show: “Days can be lonely the moment I wake/ Starting anew can be more than I can take.”
“Depression can be overwhelming,” Leslie agreed. She spoke of her parents, who had been failing, but “woke up” when they joined an assisted-living community. “The possibilities offered there made them radically change their attitudes,” she said.
As the discussion turned to the acting process Leslie commented, “You find a way to like and dislike every character you play. And you have to act with the people on stage with you. If you act for the audience, you’ll never be any good. You want to change the atmosphere for the actors, not the audience.”
Ivonne, who studied with Lee Strasberg, added, “You want to move people’s mind, heart, and spirit. It’s about believing in an imaginary character and being true to what the writer and director have said.”
“That’s why the director is so important,” Barbara put in. “He’s the one who says, ‘You think you’re giving me blue. So why am I seeing red?’ And then, when you do something that gets raves, he’s the one who tells you what you did.”
The director for this current production is Jules Aaron, the recipient of multiple awards for the more than 250 productions he has directed around the country.
“To attract the director’s attention, you have to do something outrageous,” June said. When she auditioned for the part of Joey’s agent on Friends, a role that she played for 10 years, she first auditioned as herself, which apparently didn’t work. So she came back in a fat suit and a Dolly Parton wig and put out her cigarette in a corned beef sandwich—and got the part.
“If that woman were ever my agent, I’d give up acting now!” Barbara commented. “I don’t get victim’s roles because of my size,” Leslie, who is tall, noted. But, speaking of being outrageous, she told of her favorite role, as Desiree in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.
In a scene where Desiree confronts her lover, “I played it topless,” she said. She was wearing a robe and she opened it so only her lover could see her, but, she said, “I can’t tell you the freedom and power—and embarrassment—I felt.”
Ivonne Coll’s favorite role was as Mother Courage, which she played at the La Jolla Playhouse and at Berkeley Rep. “I was on stage for three and a half hours,” she said. “Meryl Streep did it back east for four and a half hours,” she added.
“The reason Brecht is so challenging is that his plays are presentational. You can’t emote.” The hardest moment was “delivering a silent scream when her son dies,” she said. Coll, who majored in psychology at the University of Puerto Rico, “never thought I’d be playing a German in a German play.”
“It’s so fun to be ugly, to be evil,” Leslie said. “Playing Mother Firefly in The Devil’s Reject changed my career. She was so evil that even the devil wouldn’t take her.” “That’s certainly casting against type,” Barbara noted.
Having these four extremely talented actresses playing four old women in a retirement home is also casting against type and will certainly challenge their “elderly” skills. But however it goes, you can be sure that these four ladies are up there having a ball!
Broads! the musical will run Thurs.-Sat. at 8pm; Sun. at 2 pm (and Sun. at 3 pm on 2/21 and 28, 3/7, 14, 21, and 28, and 4/4) through April 4 at the El Portal Forum Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Call 818-508-4200 for tickets.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World