‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ ’ Has Helped Keep Ex-USIU Student on Stage

Valentine’s Day seems an appropriate opening night for Broadway veteran Terri White in the Fats Waller revue “Ain’t Misbehavin”’ on the Lyceum Stage.

Not only has the show been a labor of love as well as her bread and butter for the last decade, but it has given her a chance to give some of the love she has received back:

* To her mother--former bandleader Gertrude White--who used to serenade her to sleep with Waller’s “Mean to Me” on her trumpet. Her mother, whom Terri White said she always thinks about when she sings this song, will have a chance to hear her daughter sing to her when she flies in from Palo Alto, Terri’s hometown, to see the show Saturday night.

* To Waller, whose work has given her employment when there were few if any roles for black musical theater actresses on Broadway.

“To think that we are celebrating someone has done so much, after having such a hard life and dying at such a young age--42--is exhilarating. I feel I’m out to teach people something and give them a good time at the same time,” said White on the phone from her Brooklyn apartment.

* To her alma mater, United States International University, which she left after a year and a half of study in the early ‘70s to take on her first Broadway role in “Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

“It’s kind of like, I left you guys and I didn’t get my BFA, but I’m here and I’m proud that I’ve been able to stay in the theater. I learned so much there (at USIU): how to run a spotlight, work in the costume department and to build sets. It was an exciting place, always buzzing.”

White got her first big break in the orchestra pit at USIU.

She was playing the bassoon during “The Music Man,” starring guest artist Charles Nelson Reilly. She passed the time between numbers by doing a Jerry Lewis routine from “The Nutty Professor” in which she would crack up the musicians with pantomimed antics. She also cracked up Reilly who told her she should be on stage and not below it.

Reilly meant what he said. Long after she was sure he had forgotten about her, Reilly called her to tell her that Joseph Papp was looking for a black actress for “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Reilly set up the audition, and she got the part.

That part led to others, including both the original Broadway version of “Ain’t Misbehavin”’ and the revival, as well as “Barnum,” “Bubbling Brown Sugar,” “The Club” (a Tommy Tune tap dancing extravaganza for which she won an Obie) and “Welcome to the Club.”

Although she started out as a dancer, her career took a primarily vocal turn after “The Club,” when her legs gave out and she had to get a plastic hip and kneecap.

This run of “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” produced by Charles Duggan through March 4, will mark her first return to San Diego since her undergraduate days. The show’s next stop is Japan and then San Francisco.

Despite having already given upward of 3,000 performances, White said the show is still fresh for her.

“I love it or I wouldn’t be able to do it,” she said. “Having been raised by Fats Waller music, it’s something I’ve always enjoyed tapping my toe to. It’s like going into dreamland, listening to all that. Although we’re sweating at the end of the show, I’m always still ready to party.”

White also likes being employed--which she said is a challenge for all black performers and those of a generation like her mother and father--hoofer and singer Bill White.

When she turned 10, her mother became a librarian and her father, who died before her first Broadway show, became an assistant soccer coach, both at Stanford University.

Part of what finished her parents’ big band and vaudeville careers was Elvis Presley and the onset of rock ‘n’ roll, White said. That makes it especially sweet for White to see her parents’ music--Waller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Eubie Blake--come back into fashion.

Another reason they left the business was their desire to provide financial stability for her and her brother, a musician who played her mother’s trumpet when he portrayed Louis Armstrong in “Legends.”

While it isn’t easy for White to find parts on Broadway, with the preponderance of nearly all-white plays and musicals such as “City of Angels,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Into the Woods” and “Anything Goes,” she made the decision not to marry or to have children so that she would have the freedom to carry on her parents’ dream of making it in show business.

“I feel like part of the reason they had to quit was because they wanted to raise a family properly. They had to have a check every week,” White said.

When her mother sees her in a show, “she looks at where she could have been or what she had. Every time I do this show, it brings out the reminiscing,” said White.

“I’ve been trying to talk her into taking the trumpet back up again. You can see that emptiness of the music missing from her heart. I’d like to see her get that sparkle in her eyes again, that sparkle that she gets when she comes to see me perform.”

If her work is a continuation of her parents’ dream, so is her way of working.

“I remember when I was 12 or 13, I was competing in a horseback riding contest. The horse stepped on my foot and smashed my ankle and the doctor said I needed a cast. My mother said, no, you have a dance competition tonight. They taped up my foot and I did my tap dancing. I got first place and I came out to get my award on crutches. That’s the kind of training I’ve had.

“They trained me to get out there and give the audience everything you have. Every person who has paid for a ticket is there for his first time, so you make it like your first time. Every time I say I’m ready to give this up, my mother says, ‘No, you’re not, it’s in your blood. Do the show. Attack it like a bull.

“Whenever I show up at the theater, I think of my parents and what they taught me. I think of the music I was raised with, the audience who are seeing this for their first time, and I make it as if it’s my first time that I’m sharing with them.”

It was that determination and dedication that Jack Tygett, the head of musical theater and associate producer at USIU, remembers best about her.

“She was so outstanding,” Tygett said on the phone from his USIU office. “Her presence on the stage was so dynamic. She sang with a gusto, she moved with a gusto, she had an elan that made her stand out. She was one of the people who was dependable--a solid character from the word go.”

Even though it’s not easy for White, despite her credits and hard work, to keep financially afloat, she said she doesn’t regret any of her choices.

“I’ve only got work until the end of April,” she said. “I don’t know what the rest of my life will be like. There’s a fear of not knowing where the next check is coming from. It’s a guessing game. It’s scary. But it’s been that way for 20 years. And it works.

“There’s just that enjoyment of being able to express yourself. You may have a bad day, but it stays out the door when you go into the world of theater. There’s no better place than that, I’m sorry.”