As the curtain prepares to rise on a regional premiere of the musical “The Witches of Eastwick,” the formerly all-volunteer theater at Melbourne’s Henegar Center has attracted another local talent to its growing roster of paid professional actors. Playing the role of Alex – the role Cher played in the movie version – is Beth McKenzie-Shestak, a former South Beach model and New York actress who grew up on the Treasure Coast and trained at the Burt Reynolds Institute.
Today, McKenzie-Shestak, married with two small children and living in Vero Beach, performs in and choreographs the long-running dinner theater shows of Jon Putzke’s Theatre-Go-Round. With near-fanatical concern for organization, she juggles not only family but rehearsal schedules that so far have dovetailed neatly between the two distant stages.
Then again, that kind of jiggering has been drilled into her since childhood.
The daughter of theater veterans Faye and Neil McKenzie, who once owned a theater in Orlando called Stage 75, Beth and her parents were living in Stuart when she got her first paying role at age 7, as Baby June in Riverside Theatre’s “Gypsy!”
She continued to perform at Riverside until middle school. Then, in high school, she got a job at the Burt Reynolds Institute for Film and Theatre, now the Maltz Jupiter.
A member of the Youth Actors Guild there, she “basically lived down there,” she says, understudying shows, running the sound and light boards, and helping with costume changes during performances.
Through those connections, at 15 she signed with a Miami modeling agency, landing a two-day, $2,000 shoot for Nivea that had her face on billboards across Belgium. Graduating a year early from high school, she earned an associate’s degree at Indian River State College, then headed to Philadelphia to finish a BFA in musical theater at the University of the Arts.
Then came the stint in New York. “I was terrified,” she said of living alone in New Jersey. She worked as a bartender two nights a week to pay the rent while she auditioned. In her three years in New York she won roles as Agnes in “Agnes of God” at Chelsea’s Meisner Theater, and had the title role in the world premiere of “Agrippina” at Studio 54, in its brief incarnation as a theater. Before that, she played in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” at the Prince Theatre in Philadelphia.
While in New York, she met her husband Tim Shestak, then a stand-up comic, and now a restaurant general manager. Together they came back to Florida, settling first in Stuart, where Beth became resident choreographer at a startup theater group called Shilo Productions; it staged shows like “Aida” and “High School Musical” at the Lyric Theatre. Ten years ago, they moved to Vero, following her parents’ move. She began teaching children dance at Riverside, and soon joined Putzke’s dinner theater.
In all of that travel, McKenzie-Shestak had never been to a production at Melbourne’s Henegar Center, a half-hour drive away.
Then, last March, she saw “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” a musical comedy directed by Vero’s Ben Earman. It featured Shane Frampton, a longtime professional actor and close friend of Henegar’s artistic director, Hank Rion. Frampton began appearing in a number of Henegar shows, then got hired by Putzke for Theatre-Go-Round.
Rion had the lead in “Nice Work,” a rare stage appearance that showed off his considerable talent as, among other things, a tapper.
Written by Joe DiPietro and filled with Gershwin tunes, the 1920s-style comedy was hardly an example of the kind edginess that Henegar displayed with “Cry-baby the Musical” the year before.
That production was a U.S. premier for a community theater and Rion worked for more than a year to get the rights to it. The stage version of John Waters’ 1990 movie “Cry-Baby the Musical” was a huge hit for the theater and another bead in a string of flashy shows. The year before that, Rion served up a saucy “Spamalot.” And for his very first show with Henegar in 2013, he staged “Spring Awakening,” a rock musical about the sex lives of 19th century school boys. Every show sold out.
“Witches” follows September’s “Hand of God,” a darkly sexual comedy involving hand puppets; it opened on Broadway just last year. “Venus in Fur” played in February in the Henegar’s upstairs theater. The year before that, Rion staged the “The Color Purple,” and in 2014, “Vagina Monologues.”
“The Witches of Eastwick: The Musical,” like the non-musical movie, is based on the novel by John Updike. It’s about three women friends with a powerful and mysterious bond that allows them to dispatch with the devil when he comes to town.
“You root for the witches in this show,” says McKenzie-Shestak. “We’re not the toil and trouble type.”
Originally produced by Cameron Mackintosh in 2000 in London, the musical didn’t premiere in the U.S. until 2007 and ran only a few weeks in a theater in Arlington, Virginia. The Washington Post review praised it as delivering “more of a kick than the wispy 1987 film.” Some predicted a Broadway run but the closest it came was a northeast U.S. premier at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine two years ago.
McKenzie-Shestak predicts there will be a number of changes made during the rehearsal period, with the play essentially still in development.
She’s made a point of sectioning off her script and learning her lines as she learns blocking and music. That way, if there are changes, she can layer them onto what has already become “muscle memory,” as she puts it.
One song she sings has just been added to the show – it has never been sung before, a prospect that excites her.
“Every witch has a solo, and my song is brand new. I love that. There are very few times especially in live theater that you really get to originate something. Typically, you’re doing shows that have been done for years. To have the opportunity to be a part of something that is brand new is really exciting.”
Typically, actors in musicals learn their parts from cast albums. But there is none for “Witches,” at least not of this version. Instead, McKenzie-Shestak has had to record her lines and songs on her smartphone. “A lot of the cast is doing the same thing,” she says.
“There’s a small part of me that thinks if this is recorded the next person doing research might see what I did and try to recreate it. That’s really exciting. And it doesn’t come often.”
