Good, fellas: The guys have it this Riverside season

Riverside Theatre may want to add a cigar bar to its just-opened outdoor cocktail bar, with a testosterone-targeted season that spans rockabilly, strippers and football.
For the second year, Riverside Theatre is staging a play amid its usual lineup of musicals. And lineup is the operative word in “Lombardi,” a play about a week in the life of legendary football coach Vince Lombardi who in the mid-1960s led the Green Bay Packers to a championship. The play is based on the 1999 book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist David Maraniss, “When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.”

The story of great leadership has particular meaning today, says Riverside CEO Allen Cornell, who will be directing the play. “I think a lot of men would be interested in coming to the theater to see this,” he says. “Most importantly in this day and age, it’s about who are the winners and who are the losers and what does it take to be a winner.”
Cornell has cast Richie Zavaglia in the lead role. Along with bearing a physical resemblance to Lombardi, Zavaglia’s own Italian heritage led Cornell to select him. “He was in a play I directed several years ago, and I thought of him. He’s really a fine actor.” That play was “Breaking Legs” in 2009.
“Lombardi” opens Jan. 30, perfect timing for a ticket as a stocking stuffer.
Before that are two more main-stage shows likely to please the patrons with pickup trucks. “Hank Williams: Lost Highway” opens the season in late October, followed by “Million-Dollar Quartet,” the tale of the chance recording session of four massive country and rockabilly legends.
The two shows, while featuring similar music, “are very different stylistically,” says Cornell. “The Hank Williams piece has more of a narrative thread. You really follow Hank’s journey of how he became a legend along the lost highway. ‘Million Dollar Quartet’ is more of a spontaneous interaction of these guys when they came together this one time.”

That famous session took place in December 1956, at Sun Record Studio in Memphis. Owner Sam Phillips had called in his latest artist, the then-unknown Jerry Lee Lewis, to help out on piano on a track Carl Perkins was recording (Perkins’ most famous hit was “Blue Suede Shoes”). As the session got underway, Elvis Presley, then 21 and a former Sun artist, dropped by to say hi and decided to join in the jam. Meanwhile, Johnny Cash had come to listen to Perkins; he grabbed a guitar, too.
In the middle of the jam, Phillips called the local paper’s entertainment writer. He came out with a UPI photographer. The story and photo ran the next day under the headline “Million-Dollar Quartet.”
The stage musical written about that afternoon premiered at Daytona’s Seaside Music Theatre ten years ago, opening on Broadway in 2010.
Riverside’s production will be directed by Keith Andrews, who directed “The Full Monty” here in 2012.
There might have been a quintet had that serendipitous studio session taken place three years earlier, before the stunning early death of Hank Williams. His story is told in “Hank Williams: Lost Highway,” a tribute to the country-and-Western legend who died at 29 on a snowy New Year’s Eve in the back seat of a Cadillac. Williams, cited by Bob Dylan as a major influence, is known for hits including “Hey Good Lookin’” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
The Broadway show deeply impressed critics. Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone called the musical “exhilarating” and said he was “stunned at the forceful, clear-eyed and moving depiction of his life.”

Key in the Vero cast is David Lutken; he co-created and performed in “Woody Sez” at Riverside as well as in the original Broadway cast. “He’s an old friend and one of the most talented acting musicians I’ve ever known,” says Cornell. “If anyone can find the truth in Hank Williams’ music, he can.”
Both shows are in the same vein as one of Riverside’s best-sellers last year – “Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash,” another jukebox musical honoring a country legend. That play ended with a local tragedy: the show’s star and director, Jason Edwards, died of a heart attack here in Vero just two days after the show closed. He was 62.
Despite the popularity of “Ring of Fire,” Cornell says the two upcoming tributes are coincidence, that booking the shows was the result of rights becoming available.
Cornell says so far, it’s the stripper’s story that is reeling in the reserved seats. Never mind that the strip-teasing in “Gypsy” was a century ago; the musical, based loosely on the 1957 memoir of Gypsy Rose Lee, is regarded as one of the all-time greatest Broadway musicals.
“Gypsy” was first envisioned by producer David Merrick and Ethel Merman, who starred in the original version. With a book by Arthur Laurent and music by Jule Styne, the musical launched songwriter Stephen Sondheim’s career and has always been considered one of Broadway’s greatest. Riverside hasn’t staged it for “a million years,” says Cornell, but when he saw the movie version on TV last year with Rosalind Russell, his favorite Rose, it sparked his interest to stage it again.
The last Broadway revival in 2008 starred Patti LuPone, who included songs from the show when she and Mandy Patinkin performed at the Vero Beach Museum of Art in 2011. A West End production in 2015 was recorded and broadcast on PBS in the U.S. in 2016. The show was staged by the all-volunteer Vero Beach Theatre Guild in 2015.
“‘Gypsy’ has been revived so many times on Broadway, that’s one of the reasons we haven’t been able to do it,” says Cornell. So far, the lead roles, including Rose, who Cornell calls the “stage mom monster,” have yet to be cast. “We have a list of leads,” says Cornell. “For actors at that level, anything can happen in their lives this far out.”
“Gypsy” will be directed and choreographed by Riverside veteran Jimmy Brennan.
The other big seller so far is “Mama Mia!” And that is likely not because it appeals to men; its chick shtick has driven droves of women to see it in both stage and film versions.
The third jukebox musical in the Riverside lineup, this one threads together the songs of the Swedish pop group Abba. There is a plot as well, a paternity who-dunnit with the setting a destination wedding on a Greek island.
Don’t feel left out yet, dudes. There are a couple more options for the XYs in Riverside’s smaller Waxlax stage. For the subset who live and breathe Barbra Streisand, there is “Buyer and Cellar,” a 90-minute one-man comedy about Streisand’s real-life basement, which is apparently crammed to the gills with her myriad possessions, meticulously merchandized as if in a mall. That image, which appeared in a Streisand coffee table book, inspired the lone actor to fantasize minding that store.
And finally, for the classic man, a musical comedy mystery with multiple endings based on Charles Dickens’ unfinished last novel: “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” With book, music and lyrics written by Rupert Holmes, Broadway’s “Drood” has been trimmed to a cast of 12 to fit into the intimate Waxlax. For that, director and choreographer DJ Salisbury worked directly with Holmes. While the version the two collaborated on has been staged a couple of times, the Riverside production may be “the most serious regional theater stab at this point,” says Cornell.
“I’m hoping Rupert will make it down to see the production,” Cornell says of the British pop star and frequent Streisand collaborator, best known for his hit “Escape (the Pina Colada Song).”
“He contacted me when he knew I was interested, and said, ‘If I can be of any help, let me know.’”
Here, too, Cornell has an eye to the gentlemen. While the play should draw lovers of murder mysteries and Victorian England, in another concession to the large production, some of the audience seats will be incorporated into the set.
“It’s a pub,” says Cornell. “There’ll be drinks served.”