JOHN PROCCACINO, MIKE CRANE AND (IN THE PHOTO NEAR THE END OF THE ARTICLE) LISA BIRNBAUM IN THE LONG WHARF THEATRE PRODUCTION OF ITALIAN-AMERICAN RECONCILIATION. PHOTOS BY T. CHARLES ERICKSON.

If you don’t know Italian-American Reconciliation,  you really should. It’s one of the earliest and funniest plays from John Patrick Shanley, who’d been leading up to this 1986 success with such fractious Bronx relationship plays as the dramatic comedy Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and the comedic drama Savage in Limbo. Shanley went on to create the movies Moonstruck (strikingly similar to Italian-American Reconciliation) and Joe vs. the Volcano (completely different from anything else he’s ever written. Just a few years ago Shanley won a Pulitzer for Doubt. The Long Wharf Theatre production of Italian-American Reconciliation is currently in previews, and opens to the press May 3.

If you don’t know John Proccacino (at right in the photo above), you really should. Many of his stage credits may have been forged in the regional theaters of Seattle, but Long Wharf has had a line on him for many years, from Anne Meara’s Down the Garden Path to Dario Fo’s We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! to Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten and several others besides.

But if you do know Shanley’s play, and you are familiar with Proccacino’s amiably anxious acting style, you might find yourself wondering, who the heck does he play in it?

He plays Aldo Scalicki, a character described in the script as “an intense Italian guy, about thirty years old.” Proccacino’s intense and Italian, all right, but he was born in 1952. Last time he appeared at Long Wharf, in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia, he played a man who’d been married for decades. Time before that, in Craig Lucas’ Prayer for My Enemy, he played the father of a guy in his 20s. His most recent acting role, at the Old Globe in San Diego this past February, was as the neighbor Charley in Death of a Salesman.

And that, says the show’s director Eric Ting (who also directed Proccacino in Sylvia), is exactly the sort of Aldo he wanted. He and Proccacino discussed Italian-American Reconciliation over coffee at the Book Trader on Chapel Street (though Ting, who’s also the Long Wharf’s associate artistic director and a resident of downtown New Haven, also frequents JoJo’s coffee shop at Chapel and Park).

“The big conceit is that we’re setting it within the frame of the narrator, Aldo,” Ting says. What in most productions comes off as explanatory omniscient patter is, in the Long Wharf production, staged as a sort of flashback.

Ting can justify his concept several different ways. Though the play centers on the relationship between Huey Bonfigliano, his current girlfriend Teresa and his ex-wife Janice (whom Huey still pines for), Ting feels that the trenchant observations of Huey’s best friend Aldo make him much more than a supporting character. Ting points out that Aldo is the same age as Shanley was when he wrote the play, and at times seems to voice the playwright’s worldview.

Building the narrative around memories—memories which this production leads you to believe may have been altered or edited or reconsidered over time—gives Aldo a stronger voice.

Ting mentions “a line in Aldo’s closing monologue,” which Proccacino then proceeds to recite by heart:

The story I set out to tell was about Huey Maximilian Bonfigliano and me, an’ what happened to him. And I’ve told it. And I’ll probably tell it again and again, other nights, other places. ‘Til it’s done with being told. ‘Til I’m done with tellin’ it. Which may never be.

The storytelling approach also allows the production to be vaguely contemporary and also vaguely set in the 1980s, when the play was written. “There’s a dated quality,” Ting muses. “How do you make it immediate?”

Scott Bradley‘s set design doesn’t transport you directly to Little Italy, or to the Italian neighborhood diner/coffeehouse where Shanley’s script begins. It shows you Proccacino off by himself in an empty banquet hall, having just endured a long wedding reception. The walls of the hall are covered with photos of Italian-American families, real New Haven ones, lent to the Long Wharf by the sorts of folks who might well recognize themselves in this play. A press release from the theater back in March, soliciting not just photos but answers to the question “What does it mean to be Italian American today?,” noted that “nearly 20 percent of Connecticut residents surveyed in the 2009 U.S. Census said they had Italian ancestry, outpacing New Jersey and New York. … New Haven particularly was known as a nexus for Italian immigrants upon arriving in America.”

Some answers to the “What does it mean…?” question can be found in a Long Wharf lobby display. Others can be found onstage:

Listen, Huey, a lotta people have an expression of this problem. They had something horrible for a long time, and then they get away from it, and then they miss it. They want the horrible thing back. But only in the very very blindest stupidest way. This is where friends come in.

So, Proccacino is Aldo then. Which means the actor has to have a gun pointed at his kneecaps, right?

“Yes,” Ting laughs, “especially in rehearsal.”

John Proccacino knew Eric Ting thought he could nail this role—they’d discussed it for years, when Ting had pitched the show for previous Long Wharf seasons. But, the actor admits, “I had never done Shanley. I did not know the play. I started to kick around how to make this work as I’m not in my 30s. What makes it work, I discovered, is that Aldo breaks the fourth wall.” The very first scene in Shanley’s script, in fact, stipulates that the character “talks to the audience.”

“It works,” Proccacino continues, “so I can just be me. It’s fun revisiting moments when you were that age, with those who are that age.” (The actors playing Huey, Teresa and Janice—Mike Crane, Stephanie DiMaggio and 2007 Yale School of Drama grad Lisa Birnbaum—are all 20- or 30-something.)

“It’s not a family play, but it’s like a family play. They’ve got problems! Mental and emotional problems!”

“All the obstacles,” Ting interjects, “to finding love.”

“You come into adolescence and adulthood,” Proccacino says, “not knowing how to love. We’re trying to tell a story about that. Every character in this play has a rich history.”

Ting again: “There’s this whole idea of how people in a certain community communicate. Stepahnie DiMaggio, who plays Teresa, comes from an Italian family, and she has a reference for every question that comes up in rehearsals.”

Proccacino: “You can’t hold back with these characters. There’s nothing subtle about them. These people are not afraid to be alive. They’re not afraid to interact. They just say what’s on their mind.”

Ting: “That’s the secret to John Patrick Shanley’s long monologues. They have to be so long because the characters discover what they are saying in the course of speaking.”

Proccacino: “You have to learn them exactly. There’s a musicality in Shanley’s writing. His syntax is a little screwy. If you try to ‘correct’ that, you’ll hurt yourself, and you’ll hurt the play.”

The director’s and the actor’s banter starts to resemble the back-and-forth revelations in Shanley’s play—only nicer. And nobody pulls a zipgun.

Even with a key concept locked in just through the casting, it’s still taken some experimentation to nail the right tone, pace and style. Italian-American Reconciliation can been played heavily (it’s quite the emotional powderkeg) and it can be played extremely broadly (especially if those New York Little Italy accents get overdone). “We’re aiming straight down the middle,” asserts Ting. “As with when we did Sylvia, the right amount of time has passed” so that the audience won’t bring certain expectations and the company has room to reinterpret.

“Honestly, we have more fun in rehearsals…,”Proccacino begins, then turns to Ting. “You create a good room. You make it fun and comfortable for us to fail. That’s important in rehearsals, that you feel you can fail, that you can experiment. It’s been an awful lot of fun. I can’t wait to do it in front of an audience.”

The musical Memphis is set in Tennessee, obviously, but it gets around. Last year’s Best Musical Tony winner already has a Connecticut connection—co-producer Sue Frost, who used to work at Goodspeed Musicals, and director Christopher Ashley, a 1968 Yale grad. This weekend the show will fan out far beyond Broadway through that newfangled medium of film. A New York performance has been filmed, a behind-the-scenes documentary tagged on, and the results are being screened April 28 through May 3 at cinemas nationwide. Locally, that includes the Branford 12 and the AMC Danbury 16 cinemas, and (on May 3 only) the the Buckland Hills 18 IMAX in Manchester; a full list is here.

The novelist Harper Lee has apparently broken a 50 year silence and consented to be interviewed for a new biography of her by Marja Mills. Major international literary news sensation. So how’d you like to be the Boston Children’s Theatre company, sitting pretty with a new adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird slated for performances May 7-15? Mary Badham, who appeared in the film version of the novel, is slated to make an appearance during the run.

The Yale Dance Theater Pilot Program has nothing to do with flying planes, but it will exhibit some tricky lift-offs Saturday afternoon in Yale’s Stiles-Morse Crescent Theater (19 Tower Parkway, New Haven).

The event is not a full-fledged dance concert but an intriguing “lecture/demonstration” regarding the seven-member undergrad troupe’s attempt to reconstruct Twyla Tharp’s legendary 1971 dance Eight Jelly Rolls. (The photo here is of the original Tharp company premiere.) Eight Jelly Rolls was set to the seminal jazz strains of Jelly Roll Morton (who was later to have a Broadway musical, Jelly’s Last Jam, based on his life) and reportedly also inspired by the silent film clowning of Buster Keaton. It’s traditionally been danced by groups of three to six women, but is more about its flexible modern dance/ballet crossover style than about any strict structural framework. Eight Jelly Rolls was Tharp’s first attempt at synthesizing jazz and dance, and led to a slew of other ambitious dances directly inspired by American popular music. Less than a decade later, she was known for such diverse choreographic projects as the movies Hair and Amadeus and the musical Singing in the Rain. In recent years, Tharp has set dances to the Billy Joel and Frank Sinatra catalogues. The originality of her interpretations is what continues to distinguish her work, and it all started with Eight Jelly Rolls. Details on the Yale project here.

Elm Shakespeare has measured its resources and knows what it will perform for its 16^th season (which, since they occasionally did more than one, has yielded over 20 shows).

It’s the tricky, creepy yet enchanting Measure for Measure, to be performed August 18 through Sept. 4 in the company’s accustomed environs of Edgerton Park. Details here.

What a splendid choice, especially following upon last summer’s equally ambitious pick: The Winter’s Tale. Measure for Measure doesn’t come up nearly often enough. I’ve seen it only twice—in an extraordinary Mark Rucker production at Yale Rep and a horribly misguided one at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, both in 1998.

KATHLEEN MCNENNY AS CHARLOTTE AND STEPHEN WALLEM AS BOB IN CHRISTOPHER DURANG’S BEYOND THERAPY, AT WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE THROUGH MAY 14.

PHOTO BY T. CHARLES ERICKSON

“I really love this play,” Westport Country Playhouse associate artistic director David Kennedy shares. The play is Beyond Therapy, and our analysis begins promisingly.

“I’ve always liked Durang’s sensibility,” Kennedy continues. “I was exposed to him when I was fairly young. He’s very much a staple on college campuses. I’ve read him since I was 18. 19, but never even directed a scene of his.” That changed this month. Beyond Therapy is in previews now and opens Saturday at the WCP. Tickets and more info can be found here.

When John Rando, who’d been announced to direct Beyond Therapy as the opening show of Westport Country Playhouse’s 2011 season, had to bow out just weeks before rehearsals began, Kennedy took the opportunity to final direct a play by the daffily deep Durang, the Yale School of Drama alumni (from the same glorious era as Wendy Wasserstein, Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver) whose other works include Betty’s Summer Vacation (seen at Yale Rep in 2002), The Marriage of Bette and Boo, ‘dentity Crisis, The Actor’s Nightmare, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, The Idiots Karamazov, Christopher Durang and Dawn and dozens of others. (He’s done a lot of one-acts).

The Durangian comedy complex can be diagnosed as anywhere from absurd to insane, but Kennedy says it’s crucial to ground the craziness somewhere. “In rehearsal, we’ve been trying to monitor and be a touchstone for motivational behavior,” he says, in the manner of a therapist. “The throughline is this couple, Bruce and Prudence. You live vicariously through them. You form an attachment to them that grounds all the anarchic silliness.

“There’s not a lot of physical shtick. It’s not a real sight-gaggy play. The first scene is set in a restaurant, with people eating and talking. The more you work on it, the more the play seems in keeping with Oscar Wilde or Joe Orton—writers who wrote incredibly deep comedies.”

If you want to see how possible it is to do Beyond Therapy very badly, you need only rent the Robert Altman film adaptation, which moved the essential New York surroundings to Europe and revved up the slapstick to unreal proportions. According to Kennedy, “The film is very different. Durang says there’s no psychology in it. Just people acting crazy.”

These actors Kennedy cast for this production certainly aren’t of the garish-mugging knockabout variety. They include WCP veterans Jeremy Peter Johnson (who did the musical She Loves Me for the theater last year) and Nicole Lowrance (David Copperfield back in 2005) as Bruce and Prudence, Trent Dawson (from TV’s As the World Turns) and Kathleen McNenny (the Broadway regular known in Connecticut for her Candida at Yale Rep, her Rosalind at the Long Wharf, and her Gretal in The Good German at WCP) as their respective therapists Stuart and Charlotte,  Stephen Wallem as the bisexual Bruce’s lover/roommate Bob and Nick Gehlfuss as Andrew the waiter.

Durang consulted with Kennedy during the pre-production and rehearsal process. Kennedy’s previous production at Westport, Dinner With Friends, also found him getting advice from its playwright, Donald Margulies. “We’ve exchanged emails,” Kennedy clarifies regarding Durang’s involvement. When John Rando couldn’t get around his scheduling conflict, and I stepped in to do it, at that point David proved very helpful to me. He was open and accessible—not in the room or anything, but he definitely has been a presence.”

With Dinner With Friends, Kennedy was able to set his production in the present day with very few alterations to the 15-year-old script. Beyond Therapy, he decided, can’t be removed from the early ’80s neurotic New York City milieu in which it was written. “In my conversations with Donald Margulies, we realized it wasn’t long enough since the 1990s to make [Dinner With Friends] a period piece. But Durang, on his website, writes about why updating [Beyond Therapy] doesn’t make much sense. It’s of its time, and you can’t take it out of that time. There are too many pop culture references—you pull on that tread and the whole garment begins to unravel.” On the more universal side, Kennedy deems the play “a timeless take on an American romantic comedy formula that’s been around for years.”

David Kennedy has a second directing task at the Westport Country Playhouse this season, staging the work of another writer (this time a dead one) whom he’s long admired but never had a chance to direct: Tennessee Williams. In preparing for both Beyond Therapy and his August production of Suddenly Last Summer, has Kennedy come across Durang’s scathing one-act parody of Williams, “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls”? “Well, it’s a loving parody. I don’t think you could write something like that without admiring Williams. But both Durang and Williams are larger than life, just… grand. It’s easy with both of them to go too far. I’m taking them both with the utmost seriousness. The important thing is to find that style.”

“Look, I told you already. There’s no room.”

“But you used to do a full-page preview of every tour we’ve brought through here since—gosh, at least two editors ago.”

“I know, like 80 years. But we just don’t have the space anymore. We gave away a coupon booklet with the paper yesterday, and the booklet was thicker than the paper.”

“You do still have a Sunday arts section, though, don’t you?”

“Not like we used to. We took out one of the comic strips and put it there. It has to be a pretty big arts story to get picked up these days.”

“What was it last Sunday?”

“Somebody bombed the museum. So that was like our fine arts story for the month. Lucky for you, you’re in theater. So what’ve you got?”

“I won’t waste your time. I might be able to get you God.”

“God?”

“I’d just have to check his schedule.”

“Is he in the production?”

“He was in the original cast, of course. And he’s consulting. This is completely off the record, you didn’t hear it from me. But if ticket sales are slow, he may make appearances in a few cities.”

“Has he toured here before? I can’t remember.”

“Yes. I think this would be his second coming.”

“Still… huh. I think I could find a few columns for an exclusive interview with God.”

“Actually, it would have to be a conference call. Is that all right?”

“Man, I hate conference calls.”

“It’s all conference calls with him, I’m afraid.”

“Well, the editors should go for it anyway. Our Sunday arts section is right next to the church news.”

“Doesn’t church news run on Saturdays?”

“We don’t actually put out a Saturday paper anymore. Nobody’s really noticed yet.”

“I know what you mean. We pretend to have Thursday night performances, but we really don’t. Our subscribers only want weekends. Look, I know what you’re going to say, but this is my job and I have to ask: You don’t think this is worth a front page? An interview with God?”

“Well, it is timely, with the show in town and all. I could… no, I just remembered. That’ll be our Summer Calendar issue. Picture of a big ice cream cone above the fold.”

“I understand. Inside’s fine. Shall I go ahead and set it up?”

“We can make tentative plans, sure. But, as you know, lots of stories fall out at the last minute.”

“I’ll take my chances. You’ll love talking to him, I’m sure. There are some conditions, though.”

“Hmmmm. Like…”

“He’ll only talk about the show. Nothing about his personal life.”

“How about his son? His son’s done this show too, right?”

“I wouldn’t mention the son. I don’t really know, but I think there’s some friction there.”

“I noticed that they never appear together.”

“I know. He did a voice-over in one of Jesus’ things, but they worked separately.”

“Well, I can’t imagine what I’d ask him about besides the show, in any case.”

“That’s what I thought. I’ll call his people right now.”

“And I’ll  need art. Got any hi-res photos you can send over to production right now? That would help me pitch this thing.”

“I don’t have a headshot of him, but I have some wonderful paintings and drawings.”

“Nothing that’s going to be in an ad, OK?”

“I think there’s lots to choose from. I do have group shots of the cast.”

“Who else is in it?”

“Well, there’s this one guy in the chorus. He went to school around here, I think?”

“Local boy? Why didn’t you tell me in the first place? Scrap the other thing. I’ll talk to that guy!” (Yells across room: “Hold the ice cream cover!”)

1. Michael McQuilken and Chad Raines, who played bandmates in McQuilken’s rock musical Jib, hope to form a band in real life. Both are graduating for the Yale School of Drama next month. Both are looking to do theater things in New York, but Raines—who was a New Haven resident for years before hitching his star to Yale, and who has raised a family and a band (the awesome The Simple Pleasure) here, won’t be leaving town right away.
2. There is another drummer named Michael McQuilken, who is no relation to the Yale Michael McQuilken. (“He’s at michaelmcquilken.com. I’m michaelmcquilken.net,” says the Yale one.)
3. Rebecca Henderson, who plays Eva in Autumn Sonata, did not known how to play piano before this show, and mastered the Chopin piece she plays solo in the show in a matter of months.
4. Director Robert Woodruff has a long gray ponytail that isn’t really noticeable in photographs of him.
5. Those opening receptions at heirloom (the restaurant at the study) really do run hot or cold. I’ve been to some pretty spare affairs there, but this one was spectacular, foodwise. Dips and dumplings and breads and salads and brownies and chips and little sweet sugar-covered cone things… Really makes you sad it’s the end of the Rep mainstage season.
6. Michael Attias (in photo above, from the All About Jazz website) guaranteed that he won’t be doing anything at the Rep next season. A pity, but let’s count our blessings. Attias was a musician/actor in Woodruff’s production of Notes from Underground. Then he returned as translator and soundscaper for another collaboration with Woodruff, on Battle for Blacks and Dogs. I remember interviewing him and the show’s dramaturg, Amy Boratko, at the Book Trader Café just before Black and Dogs premiered. The Rep’s 2010-11 season had just been announced, and Boratko and I were prodding Attias to be a part of Woodruff’s Autumn Sonata, which he hadn’t even heard was happening. Next thing you know, he was composing an original score for the show. At the party, I asked Attias if he’d been holding back on us during that interview. “No!,” he grinned. “I really didn’t know.” We’ll miss our encounters with Michael Attias—he’s not one of those hermitty theater homebodies; we’ve run into him at coffeeshops and the Yale Cabaret—and we’re hopeful that if the Rep doesn’t have him next season, perhaps Firehouse 12 (another place he’s played in town) might.
7. Or, we can always go find Michael Attias—or Michael McQuilken, or Chad Raines—playing in New York.

John Moauro has been in the tribe of the Broadway revival of Hair since it was just a hippie- jacket fringe affair. The long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, knotted, polka-dotted, twisted, beaded, braided, powered, flowered and confettied, bangled, tangled, spangled and spaghettied “tribal love-rock musical” rolls into Hartford’s Bushnell Theater April 26 through May 1.

This isn’t Moauro’s first brush with Hair. He had played the role of Claude in a college production at Kent State University, then that same role twice in regional theaters. Then, just months after he moved to New York, Moauro lucked into a tribe role in a 2007 concert version of the show. The New York Public Theater had arranged the concert to mark the 40^th anniversary of its original groundbreaking Off Broadway Hair. The success of the three-night, low-cost, high-energy concert inspired producers to take a shot at a full-scale revival—a faith-leap of Aquarian proportions, since a 1977 Broadway Hair revival had run only 43 performances, and the show’s legacy has largely become limited to European tours and college productions.

Yet director Diane Paulus’ nostalgic yet aggressive and activist overhaul did the trick. By emphasizing its ever-timely anti-war and community-organizing themes, Paulus proved Hair’s worth as an eternal parable of overlooked and misunderstood factions of society fighting for what they believe in, and getting proven right pretty darn often.

“That first concert was rehearsed for under a week, then performed for three days,” Moauro marveled in a phone interview last week. “That was all the job was supposed to be. Since then, there’s been almost no downtime. My life since 2007 has been Hair, Hair, Hair.”

Moauro (who’s the red-headbanded guy in the photo above, brandishing the “I Saw God…” placard) was on Broadway with the show for two years, then traveled with the rest of the first Broadway cast to London. When the show went on tour, much of that initial cast was up for this next adventure.

“There are eight of us who were part of the original concert that are on this tour,” Moauro told me in a phone interview last week. Some who began as “Tribe” have since been promoted to lead roles such as Berger (the charismatic, misogynistic tribal leader), Claude (the conflicted Aquarian faux-Manchesterite who gets drafted midshow), Jeanie (the environmental activist who puts ther “Air” in Hair). “A few joined us in London who are on the tour,” Moauro continues. He himself understudies Woof, and occasionally gets to sing “Sodomy.”

“It’s a real family relationship we’ve built,” Moauro says. As in Hair, that family has to make do with a lot of different short-term homes. “We have to change our blocking for every venue we go into. Blocking-wise, it’s changed a lot. The staging can also depend depending on the cast. But the script, songs and the order are all the same.”

Following a month of rehearsals in New York, the Hair tour prep shifted to the old-school environs of the Shubert Theater in New Haven, where sets were constructed and technical details hammered out. It’s been said that if you can do a show at the small-for-musicals Shubert, you can do it anywhere. The Shubert’s three successful performances of Hair last October were dubbed “previews’; the opening of the tour was in Washington, D.C. and the stop in Hartford this week is the official first Connecticut engagement of Hair’s first national tour.

The Bushnell stage dwarfs the Shubert’s, and when the Hair hippies rush pell-mell out into the audience (as they frequently do—Berger’s out there from the show’s first moments) the cast’s rapid-fire reckoning of how much space and time they have to run about before regrouping back on stage must resemble thoughts that go through the heads of a scrimmaging football team. “It’s all about timing, making the right plan,” Moauro acknowledges. He’s aware of the looseness which distinguished performances of Hair back in its original Off Broadway run in the late 1960s. (For the most artful rendering of the show’s backstage excesses, read original cast member Lorrie Moore’s 1974 memoir Letting Down My Hair.) “In the original, they might decide who played which part depending on who showed up,” Moauro explains. “Girls played boy’s parts. Our show is different in that respect. Surprisingly, for the most part, this is a musically theater-trained cast. Almost everybody is trained.”

Moauro’s favorite numbers in the show, however, seem to be the least restrained, most improvisational ones: For “Hair,” we’re jumping around, running into the house, touching people’s hair, going crazy. I love doing “Aquarius,” the show opener, because it’s the first time you get to see the tribe. We show the audience that we are one. Then, the end of the show, “Let the Sunshine In, is just so beautiful.”

There have been plenty of varying Hair styles, Hair extensions and Hair-raising adventures in the show’s nearly 45-year history. But that aforementioned sense of family permeates Hair like shampoo. “The creators, the original cast—they’ve all been so supportive. They’ve all come to see the revival. We did a special performance for alumni. Jim Rado has always been affiliated with us, and is always checking in.” Rado, of course, is a co-creator of the show’s and its first Broadway Claude. He co-wrote it with Gerome Ragni (who originated the role of Berger, and who died in 1991) and composer Galt MacDermott. MacDermott has also been known to visit productions of the show from time to time; he consulted on a highly respected production at Bridgeport’s Downtown Cabaret Theatre in 2004, directed by the show’s original dance director Julie Arenal.

What keeps the show fresh is that, despite its age, it remains confrontational and unpredictable—and so do its audiences. “The hardest thing about doing the tour can be meeting different audiences every week. In New York, it was a regular theater audience, so excited to just be there seeing the show. In other cities, we don’t always know how they will react to the subject matter. Some audiences are really reserved, and some are climbing on the chairs with us.”

A 95-year-old Baron Bean strip found on a website devoted to the works of Krazy Kat kreator George Herriman. (A complete run of Baron Bean, 1916-17, was published by Hyperion Press in 1976.)