Tiny Turnouts Fail to Faze a Disney Devotee on a Mission

The performance stage isn’t easy to find, tucked away as it is upstairs from the delicatessen and down the hall from the bowling alley.

So it was a good five minutes past show time when a theatergoer walked up and found the star standing outside the door to the empty theater.

Was that a look of delight on Francis Creighton’s face? Or despair?

“Come on in. I’ll start now,” he said. “No, no, it’s OK. I’ve performed for one person before.”

In Creighton’s view, the one-man show must go on--even for a one-man audience.

It’s been that way each Sunday afternoon for more than a year as Creighton has doggedly staged a 50-minute production called “Walt and Me.”

Featuring puppet characters, dancing and music, the show is a bizarre salute to Walt Disney.

Part of the bizarreness is the fact that Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters are missing. So are the familiar Disney songs and movie tunes. Never uttered, in fact, is the name “Disney.”

Disney corporate lawyers won’t let him use any of those, Creighton says.

No matter. He slips toy rabbit and pig puppets on his hands and slaps public-domain music in a tape player during the show to get around that obstacle.

He’s obsessed with Walt Disney’s image, he says. “I feel my old friend Walt Disney has been maligned.”

And that’s why he spends $30 to rent the 32-seat theater every Sunday at 3 p.m. And why he waits at the door for his audience to come.

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Creighton was 5 when he met Disney in a brief encounter at the 1965 Disney Co. stockholders meeting. Creighton was there, he says, because his parents had given each of their children 30 shares as a gift.

“I asked him how the stock would do. Mr. Disney predicted that it would split, which it eventually did. I asked him if there was ever going to be a Disneyland in Russia, and he said they were thinking about it,” he recalls.

The pair chatted for five or 10 minutes, according to Creighton, who speculates that Disney singled him out because he was the only child in the crowd of investors. It would be the only time the two ever met.

But Creighton, now 38, never forgot the moment.

He says he came to admire the politically conservative tone of Disney’s cartoons and to appreciate what he describes as Disney’s unfailing support of Sen. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

As he grew older, Creighton worked as an aide to former Rep. Barry Goldwater Jr. before becoming a radio announcer and part-time television and commercial actor. These days he lives at his parents’ Hidden Hills home and supports himself as a substitute teacher.

He decided to pay tribute to Disney after reading Mark Eliot’s critical 1993 biography, “Walt Disney--Hollywood’s Dark Prince,” and learning of a Canadian play that portrayed Disney as a gun-waving drunk.

“Walt and Me” was a more ambitious production when it made its debut last October at a Woodland Hills theater. It featured a cast of five and included actresses portraying Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth.

But it cost about $1,000 a week to produce.

Creighton turned it into a one-man show when the first theater closed and he relocated to the Lionstar Theatre at 12655 Ventura Blvd. in Studio City.

“The puppets replaced the actresses,” he said.

Although the rented stage can be difficult to find, its location does have one advantage. Some Sundays, Creighton says, he goes downstairs to the bowling alley and its adjoining video arcade and recruits an audience.

Admission is free, although he asks for donations that he passes on to the Barbara Sinatra Prevention of Child Abuse Fund and two other charities.

Audiences were bigger during the summer--”lots of grandparents and their grandkids came,” Creighton says. Things are slower now.

“Let me get started,” he finally says. He rushes from the theater to his car and returns with several plastic shopping bags filled with props.

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“Walt and Me” opens with Creighton portraying a gyrating Elvis Presley presenting Disney with an Academy Award. On stage, Creighton puts on a phony mustache to change himself into his Disney character to accept the trophy. And the frenetic play is on.

In short order there are depictions of Disney as a youth and as a World War I soldier--Creighton wears a doughboy’s helmet for that scene. He traces Disney’s move into animation, his ambition to direct, how one of his cartoon characters is stolen by a rival studio, the birth of Mickey Mouse and the arrival of the talkies.

Through it all, the D-word is never uttered.

“Steamboat Willie,” the predecessor to Mickey Mouse, is “the rodent character from the boat powered by steam” in Creighton’s play. “Snow White” is the movie about “a lovely young girl and seven midgets.” Mickey Mouse is depicted by a hand puppet Creighton calls “Mr. O’Rabbit.” A puppet called “Sen. McPig” is shown questioning Disney in a scene depicting the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The show ends with an anti-smoking message (Disney suffered from lung cancer) and praise for Disney’s perseverance.

The production has been reviewed once in print. It’s “a weird 50-minute homage that approaches folk art in its sincerity and primitive execution,” summed up the L.A. Weekly.

Creighton is undeterred by that. And by empty seats.

“As long as there’s one person in the audience, I go on,” he says. “I don’t give up.”