The last time Hank Rion and Ben Earman worked together, Ben was 12, in a play Rion was directing at Riverside Children’s Theatre.
Sixteen years later, the tables are turned – and had moved 40 miles to the north. Earman, who went on to earn a degree in theatre at the University of Tampa, taught high school drama and has a spot on the board of the Vero Beach Theatre Guild, is now directing Rion, the artistic director of Melbourne’s Henegar Center.
Rion is playing the lead role in “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” a spoofishly lavish, loveable show filled with the songs of George and Ira Gershwin. Rion plays a witless and unsuspecting playboy who falls for a bootlegging tomboy who has stashed cases of booze in his basement.
Rion, a veteran tapper at 45, seems born to the role of Jimmy Winter, and that probably made things easier for Earman, who is 28. Nevertheless, Earman had to rein in his one-time superior in rehearsals, who not only wanted to correct the cast but cut up with it.
“Of course!” Rion freely admits. “Are you kidding?”
It’s Rion’s first break from directing in three years. And they have been intense years: Henegar Center has moved to the fore of Melbourne’s community theater scene (there are three in Brevard County), drawing particularly positive notice with its community theater premiere of the musical version of John Waters’ “Cry-Baby” last season.
This time, the show is a Florida premiere. Rights for “Nice Work” were only released last season.
Packed with playful, pun-filled tunes, the musical’s book is written by Joe DiPietro, who won a Tony Award for “Memphis.”
After fits and starts dating back to 2001, the show opened on Broadway in spring of 2012 with Matthew Broderick as Jimmy.
Like its smaller neighbor to the south, Vero’s Theatre Guild, Henegar’s success relies in part on the charm of community theater, where humbler surroundings, familiar faces and earnest volunteers create the theater equivalent of comfort food.
Of late, though, the Henegar has become a hybrid of community and professional theater. Not only does it from draw from Melbourne’s much larger talent pool, Rion has started paying those actors with a theater degree or professional experience.
Earman too is being paid, his first income from directing since leaving his teaching job at a Port St. Lucie high school drama department. He works full-time helping to manage the box office of Sunrise Theatre in Fort Pierce.
Paid or unpaid, Rion’s recruits are strikingly talented, and even those without “triple threat” stature shine when their strong suit takes center stage. The show has considerable skillful dancing, some gorgeous singing, and enough physical comedy to plant smiles on faces.
This time, though, Earman gets some credit; he auditioned the cast.
Rion’s role, of course, was already set. A St. Augustine native who moved to New York to act, he won roles in several national tours before going into teaching and earning a graduate degree.
At Riverside Children’s Theatre, he cast Ben, then in middle school, in “The Beloved Dearly,” a comedy about kids building a pet burial business, for which Ken Clifton, Riverside’s now full-time music director, wrote the music. “We were the first ones to do it with actual kids playing the roles,” says Rion.
By then, Earman was a fixture at RCT, having taken classes since the age of seven. A graduate of Indian River Charter, he worked at Busch Gardens during and after college. At 22, he was teaching drama at Treasure Coast High School when members of the Theatre Guild saw one of his student plays. They invited him to direct a two-act play at the Guild in the summer of 2010.
Rion went on to become fine arts department chair at a college in North Carolina, and helped found the fine arts academy of Brevard’s Satellite High.
The two ran into each other at a Florida teachers conference, and stayed in touch on Facebook. In November 2014, Earman directed his first big musical at the Theatre Guild, “Sweet Charity.”
“That got a lot of attention,” says Rion. “We used one or two of the people in ‘Cry-baby.’”
Earman directed the Guild’s “Hairspray” last fall, another musical version of a John Waters film.
When Rion realized he wanted to take a break from directing for one show this season, Earman came to mind.
“After a while your eyes blur,” he recalled last week, as the two sat in the men’s dressing room at Henegar, an hour before the final dress rehearsal. “I just called Ben and said do you want to do this?”
The two shared a knowing look. “No pressure,” said Rion with irony. “It’s the most coveted slot of the season, then I decide to audition, so he’s directing me. No pressure there.”
“If I’d slept on it one more night, I might have said no,” said Earman.
“It’s a natural fit,” Rion went on. “I’m glad I had somebody like Ben, who knows me. If I was going to audition, it would have to be for somebody who knew about how insecure I feel on stage again, and knows how neurotic I am.”
Earman nodded. “You’ve chilled a little bit.”
Maybe. But even Rion admits to cutting up more than most. Worse, he has held on to his own instincts as director, and has to stop himself from making corrections.
“It’s so hard to change your brain and not be in charge and to let somebody else be,” says Rion.
“And the daunting task is when you’re an artistic director and you decided to (be in) a show, there’s a thing where people are, ‘Well, can you do it?’ Like, ‘those who can’t, teach.’ ”
Acting takes an entirely different skill set, he says. “It’s a completely different side of the brain when you’re looking at the big picture,” he says. “When you’re acting, you’re looking at what’s in front of you. You have to not be worried about the minutia all around you and just be very focused. It was hard for me in the beginning to find my field of vision.”
Then there’s filling the nimble role of the do-nothing playboy Jimmy, which along with delivering a daffy sex appeal, requires Rion to sing, dance and giggle while climbing over couches, racing up the stairs, jumping into bed, and being carried out horizontally by the tap-dancing chorus line.
“You realize your knees don’t act like they’re 20,” he says. “And at 45, your memory isn’t like it used to be. Jimmy’s in every page of the script.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
For Earman, the challenge has been taking charge of a production in totally unfamiliar territory.
“I had to adjust to a different venue and different people,” says Earman. “I was born and raised in Vero. Most of the people at the Guild I’ve known for years. I know how to handle them. It’s hard for me to know how to handle people here. And it’s a shorter process; it’s only six weeks of rehearsal. For ‘Hairspray,’ we had two-and-a-half months. And I’m such a perfectionist.”
Earman, who describes his directing style as “very stern,” may be doing his cast a favor by softening up Rion for his next directing role.
“I’m seeing how hard it is for the actors,” Rion says. “I found myself as a director starting to take the process for granted. To go from bark and yell and get your lines quicker, to this – boy, it opened my eyes.”
