So hard to say goodbye

Ralph Renzi can be blamed for all the 50th anniversary hoopla around the Williamstown Theatre Festival, for he was the one, back in the sleepy summer of 1954, who decided that the northern Berkshires were destined to offer attractions beyond their “roadside stands retailing trinkets.”

A rich New York couple, the Clarks, already were building an art museum up the street to put their Renoirs out of the reach of a nuclear attack. So Renzi -- then news director of Williams College -- got on the case of a professor who each summer took students to Cape Cod to put on plays.

“I said, ‘Why are you out there when you’ve got this theater here?’ ” recalls Renzi, referring to the classically columned Adams Memorial Theatre behind the Dutch Ems of Main Street, across from a row of fraternity houses.

Of course, they might not be celebrating today had the initial plan of the professor gone through: David C. Bryant Jr. thought they might have a different New England college put on a show each week, drawing audiences of faithful alumni. They would import a touch of the big time by offering “gratuities” to leading critics, who would “hold seminars to critique the collegiate thespians.”

Fortunately, that plan gave way to another -- of mixing proven actors with young wannabes -- before the festival debuted in summer ’55. A fundraising drive brought $500 from a part-time resident of the town, Cole Porter. A 10-week season was plotted with a $21,000 budget and staff of 26, all put up in a fraternity. The first play, “The Time of the Cuckoo,” featured a local girl made good, actress Marcia Henderson, fresh off a series on the fledgling medium of TV, “Dear Phoebe,” with Peter Lawford. “The so-called stars were not real luminaries,” says Renzi, 83, “but to us they were.”

Their coup, though, was the hiring of an assistant director out of the drama program at Yale, Greek immigrant Nikos Psacharopoulos. When the professor departed after the first season, he was left in charge -- and with $256 in the bank account. Within a few years he had an apprentice program running (with actor-director Austin Pendleton among the first crew), had persuaded Thornton Wilder to play the stage manager in his own “Our Town” and had created an environment in which Oscar winners past and future such as Olympia Dukakis and Joanne Woodward would work for scale for the privilege of performing or directing works by Chekhov and the like.

Today, the Dutch Elms and fraternities are no more and the beloved Nikos is gone as well, having passed on after 33 seasons and a final production of “The Three Sisters,” with Christopher Walken, Amy Irving and Rob Lowe. Early benefactor Porter is long dead too, though his old summer home is on the market -- for $2.5 million. The festival once put on with a shoestring staff now uses an artistic army of 450 over the course of the summer

But they’re still attracting Oscar-caliber talent -- Marisa Tomei completes a turn in Noel Coward’s “Design for Living” this afternoon -- and they’re still doing Chekhov. “The Cherry Orchard” opens Thursday. So they may be allowed a little nostalgia in a festival that has launched many careers -- and marriages -- and thrived as the antithesis to the image of summer stock as the equivalent of beach reading.

Yet even as they prepare for the 50th anniversary bash Aug. 28, there is anxiety in the mountain air. For much is being lost, starting with the theater named for President John Quincy Adams. Also taking final bows is the man in charge, Michael Ritchie, who over the last nine years has expanded on Psacharopoulos’ legacy.

Ritchie will be heading west to take over the Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group, with its downtown Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre and the new Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. And if he has his way, he’ll be taking much of the talent of this place, and its spirit, with him.

‘Death by theater’

James Naughton was attempting “death by theater.” The Saturday was his last day at this year’s festival -- his 15th -- so he was cramming in stuff he’d missed, sitting in on a 2 p.m. rehearsal in a church basement (of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), then a 4 p.m. performance of a new play in the 99-seat Nikos Stage (“Rodney’s Wife,” with David Strathairn). Then came his own final performances, at 8 and 11 p.m., in “Cabaret & Main,” which for the anniversary season moved a festival sideshow -- a late-night musical revue -- onto the Main Stage.

The cabaret began in 1972, the same year Naughton arrived fresh off his Broadway debut, in O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Yet after doing Odets’ “The Country Girl” here, he didn’t come back for a decade. “I couldn’t afford to,” he says, explaining how he had a young family then and could hardly live in a dorm, but renting a house put him in the red. So in the summers following, he drove a moving van.

By 1982, he finally could afford to come back for “Tennessee Williams: A Celebration,” for which the playwright took up residence -- and drove Naughton crazy during the rehearsal period.

“I was doing Brick in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ and ... we’d be sitting in the Williams Inn having a drink and [actress] Carrie Nye, who knew him, would say, ‘Come on over and join us,’ and I’m going, ‘This is cool, I’m talking to Tennessee Williams.’ So he looked at me” -- Naughton mimics the syrupy Southern voice -- “ ‘Who do you play?’ ‘Brick, Tennessee.’ ‘Oh, that’s good, good.’ ”

Two nights later, however, Williams again asked what character he played.

“This happened three or four times,” Naughton says, until opening night, when he did a scene from “Cat” as part of a collage of Williams’ works. Then he walked into the cast party “and Tennessee, he looked up, and reached back, grabbed me by the hand, ‘You’re Brick! You nailed him to the wall!’ ” Later, Williams summoned him onto a porch and asked, one theater guy to another, “So what do you want to do, baby?” Six months later, the great playwright was dead, and Naughton was left with a story to tell for a lifetime.

That also was about when he got goaded into singing “Pennies From Heaven” at the cabaret that at first was staged, after hours, at local restaurants. You might see Richard Thomas do a song, then Ann Reinking an impromptu dance. The Williamstown festival gave that Broadway star her first chance to choreograph and direct -- much as the cabaret showed Naughton he might have a future as a smooth baritone.

“The first night I got up, I took a bottle of beer on stage,” he says, only to have a fellow actor remark, “That was good, but the next time I’d like to see you do it without the beer.” When Naughton’s agent heard him, he said, “You know Jimmy ...” and by the end of the ‘80s he’d won his first Tony Award for the musical “City of Angels.” He won his second in 1997 playing lawyer Billy Flynn in “Chicago,” another song-and-dance role.

He was singing twice this night as part of the anniversary season cabaret that had a large revolving cast including an original “Cats” star, Terrence Mann, TV’s David Hyde Pierce and Dana Reeve, who met her husband in 1987’s cabaret. Well before he became Superman, Christopher Reeve was an apprentice in Williamstown.

About midnight, Naughton serves up a rollicking “I’ve Been Everywhere,” Hank Snow’s tongue-twisting ode to life on the road, “Been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota....”

An hour later, near the end of a long day, actor Tim Daly performs a send-off to their departing leader. “I have the Williamstown blues,” he sings. “Yeah, Michael Ritchie’s leaving town ....”

He’ll have to think big

For stage manager-by-training Ritchie, no longer a boy wonder at 46, weekends like that are a trial run for Los Angeles. Moving the cabaret to a conventional stage from its home of recent years -- a converted church -- is a reminder of the challenge in taking any show to a larger house, as he soon will be doing with the 1,600-seat Ahmanson and 750-seat Taper.

Ritchie decides that the experiment here was a “mixed bag,” allowing more people to see the musical revue but costing it “this ineffable quality that comes with cabaret, which is intimacy.”

The production in Williamstown’s 99-seat theater offers a different reminder. Ritchie may have made his greatest mark in the 20-year-old Nikos Stage, where he has invited playwrights such as John Guare and Paul Rudnick to try out works in a low-risk setting. No reviews are allowed for shows in the downstairs theater, where the audience sits amphitheater style over the stage.

Many of the new plays have gone to New York, and acclaim, and writer-director Richard Nelson already has a city run lined up for “Rodney’s Wife.” It’s set in 1962 Rome, where a fading American film star is making a spaghetti western while his daughter and second wife make eyes at each other. One plot point has resonance for Ritchie’s next act: The film star cops out of his Italian movie when a better offer comes from Hollywood.

Ritchie understands that his success at getting name performers to commit to five weeks in the Berkshires during the moviemaking off season may not be easy to duplicate in Hollywood’s backyard, where his theaters will go year-round and require longer runs. “Are they going to want to invest 10 weeks out there in the middle of the winter?” he asks. “We’ll see.”

But he is not a fretter. For the moment, he has a season to complete -- and family to cheer on.

Williamstown has a distinguished history of nepotism, providing jobs or internships for children of board members and theater luminaries, including the daughter of the man Ritchie will replace in L.A., Gordon Davidson. Even the daughter of festival regular Blythe Danner, one Gwyneth Paltrow, wangled her way on stage. Ritchie was hesitant to follow the tradition when he became the WTF’s producer, though his wife, Kate Burton, had already worked here as an actress. Director Nicholas Martin says she “purposely took small parts” that first season, playing a maid in his production of “The Royal Family.”

This summer?

“We’re featuring a little nepotism,” Martin says with a laugh. Burton was in the opening show on the Nikos Stage, sang in the cabaret and then played Queen Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by Martin. And in that show “we’re throwing caution to the wind,” he added. “All of the Ritchies are in it, except Michael.”

Son Morgan, 16, is a full apprentice this summer while daughter Charlotte, 6, played the youngest of the faeries.

Martin, who heads Boston’s Huntington Theatre, wanted the production to embrace “the Williamstown family” too, so he cast actors who had worked their way up from the student ranks, such as 10-year festival vet Christopher Fitzgerald, who took a leave from Broadway’s “Wicked” to play the mischievous Puck.

The staging opens not in Athens but with an “Entering Williamstown” sign, then the familiar columns of the Adams Memorial Theatre, which becomes the setting for Shakespeare’s play within the play. And at the end, after Oberon’s speech blessing “this palace, with sweet peace,” Puck rides off atop ... a wrecking ball.

They will be demolishing the facade to make way for a $65-million dance-theater complex next door, financed in large part by investment banker Herb Allen, who has a hilltop home here. Though the festival’s new leader will have a slightly larger (550-seat) main stage, there’s apprehension among WTF insiders and even some anger. That stems from the architect’s plan to tear down the small Nikos Stage and move the experimental productions to the stage upstairs. That theater will be shrunk to 250 seats, but it will be hard to duplicate the intimacy of the 99-seat layout below.

It’s often hard to believe what audiences get down there for $24. After the play set in Italy is a new musical by Michael John LaChiusa (“The Wild Party,” “Marie Christine”) called “R shomon,” based on the stories that inspired the classic Kurosawa movie about varying perceptions of reality. The sets are minimalist -- a Japanese screen, a stark chair and table, a few reeds -- for the show set in Japan, a police interrogation room and Central Park, and the themes difficult to grasp for some of the tourists who manage to get tickets. But who is singing for them in that cozy space? Audra McDonald, one of the most riveting performers on Broadway today.

After the show, some wander to a nearby hotel, where a lounge singer is trying to do Jimmy Buffett but barely croaking out the notes, a reminder of the entertainment they might more rightly expect in the middle of nowhere.

Planning for the end

“It’s a bittersweet evening,” says Steve Lawson who, in his 31st season here, is writing the gala, “the last performance in that theater.”

There will be excerpts from works of four festival favorites -- Williams, Chekhov, Shaw and Arthur Miller -- performed by a cast including Naughton, Burton and Alec Baldwin. The festival’s board also hoped to use the gala to introduce Ritchie’s successor but has not yet agreed on a candidate, one reason for the summer’s tension. The finalists are rumored to include Naughton, Hartford Stage artistic director Mark Lamos and a few others, and the choice is not a casual matter to regulars such as the combustible comedian Lewis Black, who was little known when Ritchie asked him to emcee the cabaret nine years ago. Now Black is a regular on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” but still comes here to front the revue and teach stand-up to the apprentices -- though he threatens not to return if Ritchie’s second-in-charge, Jenny Gersten, doesn’t get the top job.

“She’s bred for this,” he says of the associate producer, whose father is Bernard Gersten, executive producer of the Lincoln Center Theatre.

Whether or not Ritchie’s successor is in place, the gala will suggest a guiding credo for Williamstown’s next leader.

“Nikos used to say there was this ancient Greek saying, but I always thought he’d invented it,” recalls Lawson. “He’d say, ‘If the monastery is good, there will be plenty of monks.’ If the theater is good, people will come.”

But the departing Ritchie may make his successor’s life more difficult by wooing to L.A. some of the people he has nurtured here, such as directors Martin, Scott Ellis and Darko Tresnjak.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a group who say, ‘OK. Done. Next....We had our time there,’ ” Ritchie says. “I wouldn’t feel that was poaching.”

As he sees it, those who take over will have to focus on the future and not let the “magic disappear” in a place where a deli names sandwiches after favorite summer performers. They have to avoid being overly nostalgic for the old house, he says, or “it could develop a sense of the museum, that its glory is all about the past

Self-satisfaction is a worry shared by the visionary of 1954. Ralph Renzi has enjoyed the current season, especially with his grandson among the apprentices. But he was down in Sheffield the other day and came away gushing about the Barrington Stage Company’s “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a new musical by “Falsettos” composer William Finn.

“It’s hilarious,” Renzi reported -- and got better reviews than Williamstown’s first offerings of the season. “We missed the boat there,” he said.