INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — There was a time when the theater wunderkind on the island was named Jon Putzke, staging blockbuster musicals including “The King and I” and “South Pacific” at the only professional theater in town.
Putzke, with a degree in theater from Indiana University, came down with his wife and son to take the job in 1981.
With wife Marg working costumes, he staged major musicals with professional actors in the oceanfront hotel now known as the Surf Club.
Today, 31 years later and only a causeway away, Putzke is taking his latest venture, “Theatre-Go-Round,” to Joey’s Bistro at Three Avenues.
Opening Sunday with a tribute to the music of the 1970s, a cast of three female singers with what Putzke describes as “paper-thin harmonies” takes on the tunes of Cher, Donna Summer, Tina Turner and Abba.
With red velvet chairs, twinkling track lights, serious sound system and center dance floor, Joey’s was designed as a late-night dance club.
To Putzke, it says Chicago, where he and his wife saw plays together from the time they could drive, heading over from New Buffalo, Mich., where they grew up.
“I’ve had my eye on this place forever,” he says. “The first time I saw it, I thought, this would make a perfect dinner theater.”
Theatre-Go-Round, with its troupe of a half-dozen local actors, has had something of a vagabond existence since Putzke started it four years ago.
Originally at the restaurant of the Best Western near I-95, it eventually found a home at a city-owned property near the airport that had housed a Mexican restaurant.
The group moved again last summer to the Elk’s Lodge. Putzke’s last show there wrapped up in March.
From the hotel dinner theater and a brief stint producing at Riverside Theatre to opening his own dinner theater, Encore Alley, Putzke persevered here largely for the sake of his son, Brandon, in elementary school when the family arrived.
Now 40, Brandon is the music teacher at Liberty Magnet Elementary, director of the drum line at Vero Beach High School and a professional drummer with Old Barber Bridge, a local band. He has even played in the pit at Riverside.
In 1981, Putzke was recruited by the Musicana Dinner Theatre chain to do musical revues at the hotel, newly converted from a Ramada Inn into a Sheraton Resort.
Musicana, a family operation based in Cocoa Beach, got its start in Vero in 1975.
By the time he arrived, it was mounting shows in Indian Harbor Beach, taking them south to West Palm, and then to Vero.
Less than a year into his job with Musicana, the owner of the hotel decided to take over the dinner theater operation and stage full-blown plays, Putzke says.
He offered the director’s job to Putzke.
For the next four years, he staged major Broadway musicals as well as plays including “Little Foxes,” “Nicholas Nickleby,” and “The Rainmaker.”
With the help of tours stopping on the way to Disney World, the house stayed full for shows Tuesday through Sunday evenings with two matinees.
Putzke cast his shows through auditions at the Southeastern Theatre Conference. He also used local actors, including a newcomer from New York, Alan Cornell, who played the lead in Putzke’s “Brigadoon.”
Cornell, a talented freelance set designer and director, came to Vero in 1983 to oversee productions by the Vero Beach Theatre Guild, at the time the resident company at Riverside Theatre.
A year later, in 1984, Cornell came to see fellow Guild employee Donna Roberts in a Putzke play. He then learned the hotel had sold and the dinner theater was closing.
That left Putzke with a full summer season already cast – including “A Chorus Line” and “Two by Two” – and no place to perform.
“He said, ‘Come do it at Riverside,’ ” recalls Putzke. “So I rented the theater and staged the shows, and they were packed houses. ‘A Chorus Line’ was held over an extra week. It was the first time, to my knowledge, that other than dinner theater there had been summer theater in Vero.”
That year, Putzke produced a series, one Sunday a month, of both musicals and serious drama, including “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Educating Rita.”
Among his stars were Dee Rose Imbro, drama teacher at Vero Beach High School, and Eileen Loughran, another acclaimed local actress.
It was a heady time for Putzke.
Now 64, he had staged plays since his junior year in high school, when he and his then-girlfriend, Marg, borrowed a boat barn emptied of its boats in summer and put on plays in the resort town of New Buffalo.
Both went on to major in theater at college, coming home each summer to stage their season.
The start of his tent-show chops came when a tornado blew the boat barn down after their sophomore year in college; they moved to the American Legion post.
The couple married in 1969. The day after their honeymoon at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, they renegotiated with the owners of the rebuilt boat barn.
This time, instead of hiring actors, they held auditions for 30 high school theater kids, renting a motel to use for housing.
The troupe staged a show a week.
“It was the summer of our lives,” says Putzke. “Somebody just got a Facebook page going for it, and we’re talking about doing a reunion.”
For the next four years, they ran a dinner theater in a restaurant, and then in 1974, started work on their own theater.
“We built it from the ground up,” says Putzke.
The theater ran under the “guest star” system where major actors played in a cast of local and regional players.
Eventually, it was clear that a year-round theater wasn’t going to make it in a Michigan resort town.
Marg Putzke had a sister in Fort Pierce whose husband owned a restaurant. He offered Jon Putzke and job and they and their 9-year-old son moved south.
“I wasn’t here a month before the Musicana job happened.”
What really made a name for Putzke was an even more adventurous undertaking.
When Cornell and the board of Riverside Theatre decided to upgrade their productions to include only Equity actors, the amateur Theater Guild had to move to a new location.
So Jon Putzke leased the building in Miracle Mile that now houses the Vero Beach Book Center’s children’s store, and created Encore Alley, a 144-seat theater. It ran from 1985 to 1989.
“People still rave about the shows we did,” he says, reeling off hits including titles racy for the 1980s like “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”
When the theater finally closed, Putzke took a job as office manager of a print shop in Fort Pierce, then for a year and a half, went north to manage Chicago’s Drury Lane Dinner Theatre.
He came to Vero and for the next 13 years managed a Catholic bookstore in the K-mart plaza.
“The only time I did theater was when it itched,” he said.
There were a couple of plays a year at the Theatre Guild, and on summer weekends, he directed a Shakespeare festival in St. Augustine.
Finally in 2007, the itch erupted full bore, and he opened Theatre-Go- Round.
Opening night at Joey’s is actually Sunday afternoon – the dinner theater crowd likes to be home by dark, he says.
Seating is at 4 p.m. with cocktails until 5, then a four-course dinner. The show begins at 6 p.m.
The cast includes Eleanor Dixon, a barrier island resident who is involved in the music at Christ Church; Shamara Turner who works as a nurse’s aide at Oak Harbor, and Beth McKenzie- Shestak, who teaches at Riverside Children’s Theatre.
Tickets for dinner and the show are $45. A seat at the bar is $22.50. The show continues every Sunday in May. Call (727) 252-9341 for reservations.