WORLEY TO UNCORK BERLIN’S ‘CALL ME MADAM’

Jo Anne Worley, who uncorks Irving Berlin’s “Call Me Madam” on Thursday at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, laughs at the memory: The last time she played Pasadena, “They asked me not to come back.”

It was 1958, and she was a student at the Pasadena Playhouse, where, she deadpanned, “I learned how to fence and make up a resume. I got in trouble violating the 11 p.m. curfew because I used to sneak out of the Playhouse dorm windows and then scale a wall to make a run for the Chef’s Broiler on Colorado Boulevard.”

Now, with a well-carved niche in musical theater over a 30-year career that ranges from Los Angeles’ “The Billy Barnes Revue” to “Laugh-In” and to opera, the full-voiced Worley is finally legit in Pasadena as she prepares for a 10-day run with the new California Music Theatre.

Worley has performed often on local stages, but this occasion carries an edge of anticipation. “Call Me Madam,” a beguiling 1950 Berlin classic that never achieved blockbuster status, was written specifically for Ethel Merman and has remained indelibly linked with her (though, ironically, Dinah Shore cut the show album). It ran a year and a half on Broadway and has never been done to death.

How does Worley feel about taking on the ghost of Merman?

“I’ve played other roles that were written for Merman,” she said, “ ‘Gypsy,’ ‘Anything Goes,’ ‘Girl Crazy,’ ‘Annie Get Your Gun’--good lady parts. The reason ‘Call Me Madam’ hasn’t been done a lot is because the role is difficult to cast.”

The “role” was inspired by brash society hostess Perle Mesta (who was Harry Truman’s minister to Luxembourg when the musical hit Broadway). Few other musical actresses have tried it and Los Angeles, in fact, hasn’t had a major production of this show since 1965--and then it was still Merman, reprising her character of Sally Adams at the old roundhouse Valley Music Theater.

Martha Raye played the “hostess with the mostest” in tent shows in the ‘60s; Helen Reddy did it last year in Sacramento. Hitting bottom, the last local production was a dismal 1971 small-theater venture.

Worley was serving tea over the tile kitchen counter of her Toluca Lake home, which she shares with actor husband Roger Perry and her beloved and behugged Cari, a schipperke Belgian boat dog. Occasionally, she burst into a lyric from “Call Me Madam,” once sending a bar of Berlin’s “Can You Use Any Money Today?” sailing through the house and out over the family pool. The one incontrovertible fact about Worley is her volume of sound--that bell-ringing diction. When she was starring in “Billy Barnes’ People” in New York in the early ‘60s, she said, drama critic Walter Kerr “did three paragraphs on my mouth.”

Indeed, her chief signature is vocal. Who can forget her cackling cracks about the chicken on “Laugh-In”? As with so many others on that show, it represented Worley’s “fork-in-the-road time.”

But the live stage, better than TV or the movies, has more ripely captured Worley’s talents.

She is disarming and affable on the subject of self: ‘I really have equipment for the theater,” she said. “I’m tall, broad and a lot of people think I’m loud. I am!”

In fact, when she was growing up in Lowell, Ind., living with “all those God-fearing, prayer-school Worleys,” her voice was too loud for the church choir. “My elders told me to just mouth the words to the hymns because I sang too loud.”

A few years later, she was booted out of the Lowell High School Glee Club “for being too glee,” Worley said, chortling.

The highly reputed drama department at Los Angeles City College lured her to Hollywood in 1957. Her stage debut followed two years later as “The Talking Lady” in “Laff Capades of 1959” at the La Grande Comedy Theater on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood.

In those days, much of what little theater Los Angeles had was strung along La Brea Avenue and Cahuenga just off Hollywood Boulevard, at such houses as the Music Box, the Las Palmas Theatre and the La Grande. Worley played them all, often for nothing, sometimes for $5 a week. It was here that she found life after Pasadena and also, so to speak, her voice.

She “audaciously” auditioned for a singing role in “Brigadoon” at the Music Box, which led to a voice teacher (Vivian Long) whom Worley credits with much of her success. A few years later she was understudying Carol Channing in “Hello, Dolly!” (1964) in New York.

The “Call Me Madam” staged by the California Music Theatre’s artistic director Gary Davis is the original version, with President Truman intact as the character Harry in the show. Later productions tried to keep up with new Presidents, which accounted for an “I Like Ike” number and, later, a book built around L.B.J.

Worley, who two years ago created the straight dramatic role of the Russian poetess Boris Pronin in the Mark Taper’s “The Beautiful Lady,” is working on plans to stage “an evening of Merman” songs and memorabilia, but nothing is set.

Next Monday the composer of “Call Me Madam,” Irving Berlin, will celebrate his 99th birthday. And Worley and husband Perry will have a celebration of their own: their 12th wedding anniversary.