An Act of Nostalgia

Hal Holbrook has performed “Mark Twain Tonight” from Broadway to Europe. He’s crossed the United States many times with the show since he debuted it in a Greenwich Village nightclub 45 years ago. But he’s especially looking forward to Saturday night’s show at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

Holbrook was one of the first performers to play the Plaza, within a week of its October 1994 opening.

“My stage manager and I went up when they were building the place,” he said the other day, “and we were asked to make suggestions about the placing of lights and that sort of thing.”

As it turned out, the suggestions were minor and few.

“They had conceived [the auditorium] very well, which is unusual for a theater these days--often, the functional aspect is secondary to the beauty of the auditorium,” Holbrook said. “[The Plaza] is one of the best-conceived theaters in the Los Angeles area.”

How important is the physical setup of a theater to what’s essentially a man sitting in and occasionally moving around a chair? More than one might expect, Holbrook says.

“We use more than 100 lights sometimes and sometimes have to drag every lamp in, the sound equipment, cable . . . it’s a mess. It’s an expensive proposition. One of the reasons I stopped playing the Music Center [in Los Angeles] with ‘Twain,’ about 15 years ago, is that it cost about $80,000 for three days before anybody started making any money. In the past 25 years, many of the theaters that have been built around the country are equipped properly--or close to it.”

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Still, Holbrook has strong feelings for some of the older theaters he’s played. “It’s something to know you’re standing on the same stage where Lionel Barrymore and Sarah Bernhardt acted or John Philip Sousa played.”

It was at one of those vintage theaters that Holbrook experienced a career-defining moment.

He’d been alternating performances of “Twain” with other acting jobs when he got a call from Universal Studios television, proposing that he star in a series, “The Senator.” It was 1969.

“For the first time, millions of people saw who I am; it was a breakthrough for me,” he said. How much of a breakthrough?

“I was playing a big house in Atlanta, and the promoter told me that for the first time he’d made my name bigger on the marquee than Mark Twain’s: People were saying that they wanted tickets for the ‘Hal Holbrook show.’ ”

DETAILS

“Mark Twain Tonight!” plays Saturday only at 8 p.m. at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza Auditorium, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd. in Thousand Oaks. Ticket prices range from $20 to $35 and are available at the Civic Arts Plaza box office or through Ticketmaster at 583-8700. For more information, call 449-2787.

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Hoagy Carmichael Revue: Tonight’s performance of the Hoagy Carmichael Centennial Celebration at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza is the first stop of a national tour, scheduled through March.

Carmichael’s name may not be as familiar as those of many other composers, but songs he wrote or co-wrote--”Georgia on My Mind,” “Star Dust,” “Lazy River,” “Two Sleepy People” and “Heart and Soul” among them--form a legacy that places him in the top echelon of his craft.

The show includes singers, a tap dancer and a 14-piece orchestra. Musical director Tom Fay has switched for decades between the musical theater and jazz; in addition to his solo projects, he worked for several years with both Benny Goodman and Gerry Mulligan.

“I think what strikes me most about Hoagy is how rooted in American jazz he was, much more than George Gershwin or Irving Berlin,” Fay said over the weekend from his New York home. “And he and [occasional collaborator] Johnny Mercer were the only two white songwriters who could really embody the Midwestern jazz of Chicago or St. Louis.”

DETAILS

“The Hoagy Carmichael Centennial Celebration” plays today only at 8 p.m. at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza Auditorium, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd. in Thousand Oaks. Ticket prices range from $20 to $35 and are available at the Civic Arts Plaza box office or through Ticketmaster at 583-8700. For more information, call 449-2787.

Todd Everett can be reached at teverett@concentric.net.