It’s been three decades since Brevard County commissioners gave away a long-abandoned 1920s-era high school to a cultural organization, which, after a $1 million renovation, was renamed the Henegar Center, just west of Melbourne’s historic downtown on New Haven Avenue. Several incarnations later, Henegar became home to a community theater group that was at the brink of folding a couple of years ago.
That’s when former Riverside Children’s Theatre Director Hank Rion was hired as artistic director.
For the next three weeks, Rion and his full-time marketing director, Heather Mowad, will likely pack houses with a show never before staged by a community theater: the musical version of “Cry-baby,” the outrageous John Waters send-up of 1950’s teen love stories.
If attendance alone is sufficient measure, Rion, 44, appears to have succeeded in turning the struggling Henegar around. Next season for the first time he intends to hire a handful of professional actors and dreams of turning the three-story building into Brevard’s first professional theater, using the classrooms of the former school as an educational children’s theater, similar to Riverside’s scenario.
New, edgier shows are elbowing their way to the marquis, replacing the traditional musicals that are the principal diet of community theaters, including Brevard’s two other amateur stages in Cocoa Village and Titusville. Both of those theaters are strong competition for the Henegar.
Also this year, Rion inaugurated a New Works Playwright’s Festival, staging original one-act plays in the Henegar’s intimate upstairs theater. That stage, much as Riverside’s Second Stage black box theater, is the venue for straight plays including “Proof” and “God of Carnage” last season.
At the root of all the change, he says, is a new mission for the theater: “We don’t want to settle for the norm.”
That declaration was made on the eve of a major coup for Rion: the community theater world premiere of “Cry-baby,” a 2008 musical based on iconoclast John Waters’ 1990 movie (and Johnny Depp’s break-out role). That musical version, essentially shelved after a short run on Broadway but for one regional production, was stalked by Rion for a year until he finally got the rights – even as they were being transferred to the mammoth licensing machine, Music Theater International.
Scripts and scores arrived only two days before auditions.
“I had to run out quickly and get them printed and bound,” Rion says. And that panic didn’t include the 35-page document he drew up of discrepancies between the script and the score. “When I looked at it – I don’t know how else to say this, but I realized it was a hot mess.”
In essence, Rion says, Henegar became the “guinea pig” for a new version of the play, expected to become a staple of community theaters.
Rion’s extra efforts in recruiting his casts has driven an unexpected audience to Henegar. Last year, when he staged the 1930s Fats Waller musical “Ain’t Misbehavin’ “ he toured Brevard’s black churches to find singers for the all-black cast. That in turn brought in a new audience that came back to see “The Color Purple” this year.
With “Cry-baby” he’s hoping to bring in a much younger audience than that for traditional musicals. With houses now at a healthy 75 percent of capacity (the theater holds 500), he is overjoyed at the turnaround.
Waters has been called “the Pope of Trash.” Films like “Pink Flamingos” and “Hairspray” have become cult classics, and his “Polyester” was released in “Odorama,” with scratch-and-sniff cards for the audience. His casts (including for “Cry-baby”) included Patricia Hearst and the teen-porn star Traci Lords.
The show is hardly G-rated. But for the Melbourne production, Rion vowed to use as many actual teenagers as he could rustle up. That effort made an impression on Adam Schlesinger, co-writer of the score and bassist for the rock band Fountains of Wayne. He and David Javerbaum received two Tony nominations for “Cry-baby” (Best Musical and Best Original Score). Schlesinger has stayed in close touch with Rion during the show’s production; rumors flew before the opening that he would be present on opening night. Original Broadway cast members and, according to Rion, even John Waters himself have responded to the steady stream of Twitter updates put out by the media-savvy Henegar staff.
In the audience for one of those 68 Broadway performances was Hank Rion. Born in St. Augustine, he had moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He got some roles in national tours, and while he was there, earned a bachelor’s and later, a master’s degree. His dream, though, was to direct: After Riverside Children’s Theater, he ended up at the College of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City, NC, where he built up a fledgling drama department and ultimately became the fine arts department chair. Most recently, Rion taught at Satellite High School’s fine arts academy.
“Cry-baby” caught his eye just from its DNA. “I loved it because it was a John Waters thing,” he says of the Broadway version. “But I also saw what was wrong with it. I thought it was too big. The orchestra was too big and it needed to be a little more intimate.”
He never gave the show another thought until a year into his tenure at Henegar, when he happened to catch the original “Cry-baby” movie on video. “I thought, why didn’t anybody ever do the show again?”
Rion discovered the musical had been revived once: by an innovative theater in St. Louis called New Line. That production had also downsized the script and score, giving the show more focus, just what Rion had thought it needed.
“The Broadway producers wanted it big and flashy to compete with ‘Hairspray’ (another Waters film made into a musical),” says Rion. “But it’s not big and flashy. It’s social commentary on what was going on in between the classes in the ‘50s.”
Key to pointing up that old timey, small-town culture clash was Rion’s addition of a large ensemble of teenagers. “On Broadway the kids were all played by adult actors. I wanted actual kids.”
In a total cast of 32, the lead roles include Joey Paris, a trained firefighter and former high school football player in his first-ever stage or singing role. Paris was working at a café near the Henegar when Rion approached him about playing the lead.
Strikingly handsome with endearing dimples, Paris does a remarkable job in a challenging role and shows particular chemistry with his sweetheart, Allison, played by a considerably more experienced Gabriella Marchion, a transplant from California.
The role of Allison’s grandmother also gets a polished performance. It is played by a Vero Beach esthetician, Shane Frampton, a one-time professional actress with a degree in musical theater. Years ago, she performed off Broadway as well as on national tours.
Frampton met Rion in 1993 when the two auditioned at the Southeastern Theater Conference for roles in a production of “Cinderella” in Crossville, TN. The two stayed in touch through Facebook, and when Frampton moved to Vero, she went to see last year’s Henegar production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” which included a live orchestra, as does “Cry-baby.”
“It was the best community theater production I’d ever seen in my life,” Frampton says. “For me to go, ‘I want to be a part of this,’ I had to be really impressed.”
She went on to play in last season’s “Damn Yankees” and “Addams Family” and in “Snowfall,” a one-act play by former Brevard theater critic Pam Harbaugh that was part of the Henegar’s New Works Festival.
“Hank is a great director, and he’s got a huge vision,” says Frampton. “This has changed my life. I forgot how much I loved doing this.”