Edwin Wald and Stephanie Rasco in “Bluebeard”
It was the beginning of our second season, and we were riding a “high” from having had several successful shows in our first season, both from an audience and a critical perspective. We confidently opened an unusual production of Tartuffe by Moliere, set in the South during the Reconstruction Era. And we waited for the crowds to come.
But they didn’t! People stayed away in droves. It was a shock to our system, and we hurriedly put our minds to a replacement show. It would be the first of only two times in our 30-year history when we closed a show before its scheduled end date. In retrospect, we were proud of Tartuffe and should have let it build an audience. But we were young and still learning how to run a theatre year-round, so perhaps we can be forgiven our gut reaction.
We had had such a wonderful response to our first Charles Ludlam play, The Mystery of Irma Vep, that it seemed appropriate to look in Ludlam’s repertoire for a suitable show. We found it in Bluebeard, a zany story about a mad scientist seeking to create a third gender, another horror spoof. There was a sort of crazy genius to the script that appealed to Kurt.
After a very tight rehearsal period, Bluebeard opened with a phenomenal cast under the inspired direction of Mario Cabrera, much to the gleeful horror of critics and audiences. Headlines said “Pegasus delights with depravity” and called the show “Delightfully bizarre”. Audience attendance was strong enough to extend the run three additional weeks.
The world has changed since we first produced Bluebeard, and so have we. We tried unsuccessfully to do a revival in 1993 and learned that when the director tells you he doesn’t think a script is funny any more, you should listen. So I doubt there will be another revival attempt. But for six weeks wonderful weeks in late 1986, Bluebeard made a lot of people laugh. And that was deeply satisfying.