By Cynthia Citron
VENTURA, California–Most women, when faced with a diagnosis of lymphoma, might be overcome by despair. But Cheri Steinkellner turned the experience into a one-woman musical monologue that became part of the Inner Voices series that played Off-Broadway at Primary Stages in 2010.
“The piece, called Mosaic, was a composite story—mine and a friend named Heidi Blickenstaff’s—about a blogger who chronicles her life story for her unborn child,” Steinkellner explains.
“I co-wrote it with Georgia Stitt, who wrote the music, and it was a multimedia production, really funny, really sad, and really hopeful.”
In the end, the hopeful side prevailed — it turned out that Steinkellner had been given a false diagnosis.
This wasn’t the first time that Steinkellner had used her own experiences in a theatrical production. During the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles she and husband Bill Steinkellner wrote a piece called Our Place together.
“It started out as an improv scene for the Groundlings,” she says, “but we transformed it into its own story and presented it at the Fifth Estate Theater, which was just down the street from the Déjà Vu Coffee House, if anyone remembers that.
“Our set consisted of two ladders and four chairs, but the show ran for months. It was our way of explaining to all our friends who had migrated to New York why we still lived in LA.
“The show was all about living in LA during the Olympics, but we treated the city like Grover’s Corners. We were looking for the values of a small town, as Thornton Wilder did in Our Town.”
It’s the same sort of aesthetic that she brings to her latest show Hello! My Baby, currently playing at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura.
Hello! My Baby is a joyful, optimistic, old-fashioned musical in the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney tradition, built around the music of Tin Pan Alley composers of the early 20th century and the song pluggers who helped propel their songs to fame and fortune.
Discovering that such songs as “Won’t You Play a Simple Melody,” “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” “If You Were the Only Girl in the World,” “You Made Me Love You,” and “Ain’t We Got Fun” were now in public domain and had no copyright restrictions, Steinkellner felt free to embellish the songs with some new lyrics and introductions that added to her story and the development of her characters
She built a romantic comedy around a series of these enduring songs. Some 22 players, guided by director Brian McDonald and choreographer Lee Martino, are on stage, including George Wendt as the maraschino cherry on top.
“The main character, Mickey McKee (Ciaran McCarthy) was originally patterned after Irving Berlin, who was an extraordinary song plugger,” Steinkellner says. “He knew a catchy tune when he heard one, and he could really sell a song.”
To sell the sheet music for a new song, Berlin was even known to sing the song in a Chinese restaurant for its patrons.
“When my youngest daughter Emma was in junior high, I directed the school’s production of Anything Goes, and I just loved the youthful energy they brought to the show. They made the songs new again,” she says.
“Working with young people made me aware of how small the list is of shows that they can do in school. It’s hard to find shows that have large enough casts for lots of students. It was a learning experience for me, and I became intrigued with the idea of creating a piece that they could do.”
And so, Hello! My Baby was born.
Steinkellner, who is “a third-generation Angeleno,” started out as an actress, then known as Cheri Eichen. After graduating summa cum laude from Occidental College, she played Barbra Streisand’s role in a production of Funny Girl and Frenchie in the Broadway national tour of Grease. With Vincent Price, she served as the spokesperson for the Movieland Wax Museum. She also played Tevye’s fourth daughter in the Fullerton Civic Light Opera’s first production of Fiddler on the Roof.
“I sang ‘Matchmaker, Matchmaker’ for my audition,” she says, “but I didn’t sing in the show. I was the one who carried the buckets and brought in the potatoes.”
And then she met Bill Steinkellner, “the funniest man I ever met,” she says, and she married him in 1982 (“but not for that reason”).
They met at the Groundlings and “he won my heart with the weird and off-the-wall stories he’d write on the back of postcards.” (He still writes them and posts them on his blog, Readings from Bill.)
She was still acting and he was writing, but “I was a faster typist than he was,” and so when he gave her a Laverne and Shirley script to type, she returned it, but not in the same form he had given it to her. “I thought I was just cleaning up the script a little,” she says. Which precipitated their first fight.
But he soon realized that they worked well together and they began to collaborate on such television series as The Facts of Life, Teacher’s Pet, Bob, Hope and Gloria, Who’s the Boss, Benson, The Jeffersons, and the major, award-winning Cheers.
They worked on Cheers together for seven years, from 1985 to 1992. It won the Emmy for outstanding comedy series in 1989 and 1991 and nominations in 1990 and ’92. Altogether, they won eight Emmys, three Golden Globes and two BAFTA awards for their combined work, and Cheers won a place on TV Guide’s list of the top three funniest episodes of all time for the episode “Thanksgiving Orphans,” which included a massive food fight.
“The network (NBC) and the studio trusted us,” Steinkellner says. “The executives, [Brandon] Tartikoff, [Grant] Tinker, and [Warren] Littlefield, operated with the philosophy ‘Hire the people you trust and let them do their job.’
“It was the best job in television—to write as funny, as well, and as emotionally as we could,” she continues. “And we stayed until we ran out of ideas. We ran out of life and we had to go out and live a little more. Now we could do another 10 seasons!”
Their next series, the animated Teacher’s Pet, won a BAFTA Children’s Award and an award as the best daytime TV series from the World Animation Celebration in 2001 and daytime Emmys in 2002 and 2003.
Their latest collaboration is Sister Act: The Musical, which opened at the Pasadena Playhouse in 2006, in London in 2009 and on Broadway in 2011. It was nominated for five Tony awards and five Drama Desk awards, and it’s still running on Broadway.
It’s a long way from her stint as the voice-over for Hank, The Cow Dog.
Hello! My Baby, presented by Rubicon Theatre Company. Plays Wed. 2 pm and 7 pm; Thur- Fri 8 pm; Sat 2 pm and 8 pm; Sun 2 pm. Through April 15. Tickets: $35 to $64. Rubicon Theatre Company, 1006 E. Main St., Ventura. 805-667-2900. rubicontheatre.org.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. She may be contacted at cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com