Nathaniel Shaw as Curly and Stephanie Youell as Laurey in "Oklahoma!" at the Fulton Opera House.
Oklahoma! at the Fulton Opera House
Melinda Tanner knows how to churn butter, thank you very much.
The real way.
You'll get a brief chance to see when "Oklahoma!" opens at the Fulton tonight.
Tanner is playing the wise and wry Aunt Eller, who helps guide her niece Laurey and the cowboy Curly toward true love on the eve of Oklahoma becoming a state.
With the box social and all, there's too much going on in the show to see much of Aunt Eller working, but Tanner wants it to be authentic.
She learned to churn last year, when she played Aunt Eller in a production of the beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein show celebrating the statehood centennial of Oklahoma.
Oklahoma! at Fulton"The first day I was handed 25 pages on churning butter," Tanner says with a laugh. "The director (Nick Demos) insisted we know what we were doing, that we be accurate."
And so does the Fulton's director, Michael D. Mitchell, himself a native of the Sooner state. He's noticing things that just don't fit.
"Michael is insisting on reality. The best compliment he paid me was asking if I was from Oklahoma," says Tanner, a native of Los Angeles. "Dialects are important to me."
The centennial production, which starred Tony nominee Kelli O'Hara, was a full-scale production with a cast of 65, many of them from Oklahoma. And the audiences went crazy.
"When the overture started, 3,000 people started stomping their feet," Tanner remembers. "It was amazing."
Tanner loves reprising the role.
"It's so well-written," she says. "She reminds me of my mother, my aunt and my grandmother, who kept my family together."
Aunt Eller runs the farm where she and Laurey live.
"I've chosen to give her a great sense of humor," Tanner says. "And she loves to dance, but she never gets the chance."
Aunt Eller was a woman who headed westward, a real pioneer.
Tanner headed East.
The daughter of May Lou Cook, a member of the popular singing group, The Merry Macs, who appeared in a number of films, Tanner was always around theater and music and film.
"I ended up working in the store," she says with a laugh.
She was getting work here and there, but not as much as her friends, which included members of an improv group she belonged to, Penny Marshall, Barry Levinson and Craig T. Nelson.
After one audition, she was told that she was kind of like Barbara Stanwyck, but too young. She should go to New York.
Which she did.
It was 1969 and she had $1,000 to her name and only a few contacts.
"I had no place to live, I knew nobody," she recalls. "I'd never been in a taxi cab."
She went to the Barbizon Hotel for young ladies, but at $40 a week, with only one meal a day, it was too expensive and you had to dress for dinner.
So she headed over to another hotel for young ladies, the Rehearsal Club, which was the basis for the movie "Stage Door."
She got to stay because she told the rather scary, tough matron she was a good girl.
"It was like living with your 40 best friends," she says of the Rehearsal Club. "A lot of Rockettes lived there. Everyone shared everything."
But breaking into the New York acting world proved tough.
"I went to open calls, which was pretty much a waste of time," she says. "I couldn't get an agent, I didn't know what to do."
She lived in a five-flight walk-up and her bathtub was in the kitchen.
"That was great for parties, because you could put lots of ice in the bathtub," Tanner says laughing.
Her first break came when she got a summer stock job.
Eventually, she found jobs in industrial films and commercials and was a spokesperson for Mobil Oil for three years, along with plenty of theater work.
Her favorite role was as Maria Callas in "Master Class" with Florida Rep.
"That's the hardest role I ever did," she says. "It wasn't only memorizing 60 pages, but she was bigger than life and I didn't resemble her in the least. I thought, if I can do this and not die, I've proven something to myself."
THAT'S THE TICKET
"Oklahoma!''
Opens tonight at 8
Cont. through Sept. 28
Wed. 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Thurs. 7:30 p.m.; Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun. 8 p.m.
$20-$45
Fulton Opera House
12 N. Prince St.
397-7425
www.thefulton.org.
(446)
