November 14, 2003 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 11

eveningsout

Thrown out of drama school for being too femme

by Kaizaad Kotwal

The story of Dick Scanlan is worthy of a play, movie or musical. Scanlan, the cocreator of Broadway's spectacular 2002 hit Thoroughly Modern Millie, has lived a life with terrible lows and dizzying highs.

Millie, which won the 2002 Tony for

Dick Scanlan

Best Musical, in addition to awards for choreography, orchestrations, and costume design, is now touring. After its current Cleveland stayover, it will move to Cincinnati for a two week run.

Scanlan co-wrote the show, based on the 1967 movie musical, in addition to the lyrics for ten new songs. He said that when he went to work on Millie he "had never written a play let alone a lyric."

Scanlan, who is living with AIDS, lost a partner to the disease and just after they had finished working on the show, his co-creator Dick Morris passed away too.

When asked about how being gay has influenced his work on Millie, he said, “In a way it affects everything. When you're raised as an outsider, your ways of watching the world is automatically different and you bring those perspectives to your work."

Scanlan and the show's title character both wanted to flee their unhappy, provincial lives in small American towns in order to find themselves in New York City. Scanlan left Bethesda, Maryland, and Millie leaves Salina, Kansas.

"I left for New York," he said, "first and foremost to learn how to be gay. Once I had learned how to do that very well I began to focus on my art.”

Scanlan attended Carnegie Mellon's prestigious drama program, but had a very bad experience there. He was essentially kicked out of school "for being too effeminate.'

""

"I think their way of putting it," he said, "was to say that my personal mannerisms and pronounced lisp would severely limit me in the roles that I would find in the professional theatre."

He was not alone. In addition to several other effeminate men, overweight women were also kicked out of the Pittsburgh university's acting program in the late 1970s and early '80s, he said.

Scanlan is a persistent dreamer and it is this gift that brought him to collaborate with Dick Morris. Scanlan had watched the film version of Millie with Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Channing, and in his mid-thirties decided that he'd like to do a stage musical version of the movie.

When he contacted Morris, who owned the rights to the script, the curmudgeonly writer simply hung up on him. Not to be deterred, he kept calling and writing Morris and his agents, anyone who was willing to listen. Morris, it seemed, wanted to do the stage version alone.

"Finally, I just lied to Dick," Scanlan said, "when I told him I was coming to Los Angeles on business and that I wanted to meet him and see how he was doing with his stage adaptation of Millie."

Morris "cautiously agreed" and invited Scanlan, who had to scurry to get a ticket to Los Angeles, to his home. Once the two met, Morris took to Scanlan in an amazing way and the two became close friends.

Scanlan believes that part of what may have compelled Morris to meet with him is the fact that Morris had been diagnosed with bladder cancer, and knowing his imminent mortality, probably wanted to check Scanlan out to see if there was a chance of making a stage Millie a possibility.

Morris died in 1996, a month shy of his 72nd birthday and shortly after completing the collaboration with Scanlan. So strong was the bond between the two that Scanlan recounts a touching anecdote about Morris's love for him.

"We were talking one day about the onagain, off-again love affair that Dick had had with Rock Hudson when both of them were contracted with Universal Studios in the 1950s," Scanlan said. "I asked Dick whether Rock had been the love of his life to which he laughed and said, 'Oh God, no!""""

Morris told Scanlan that Hudson was "unbelievably funny, sweet, silly," but "never the love of my life." Scanlan then asked Morris as to who had been the love of his life. "At first he said he had never had one," Scanlan recounted, "and then after a moment he pointed to me."

Like Hudson, Scanlan too has known the ravages of HIV and AIDS. Scanlan met Kees Chapman in early 1983 in a bar in Manhattan. This being the time before much awareness of safe sex, Scanlan admits that the two "had a lot of unsafe sex together." Chapman got sick in 1987, and almost a year to the date of his AIDS diagnosis, he died. Scanlan was certain he was positive too but didn't get tested till 1992 when his T-cell count got low enough to warrant medication.

Scanlan remembers vividly the day his doctor called to tell him the news of his test results.

"I was in a show called Pageant at the time and that day I had just had a new kitchen floor put in and was removing the excess grout before having to go to the theatre at six in the evening. My doctor called and asked whether this was a good

Burning bright

time and I told him that I knew the result was positive."

Scanlan also recalls the level of his performance that evening as Miss Great Plains, a role he developed for the comedy about a drag queen beauty contest.

"I, for some reason, felt very elated that I had been so blessed to have been performing in this great play, in such a fantastic role and I thought that if I had to go out right now it wouldn't be all that bad," Scanlan said. "I thought to myself then that it had been a great 32 years and I was consumed with gratitude."

Scanlan has been with the epidemic right from the onset and he is one of the luckier ones from that early period to still be around. He marvels at "the enormous amount of adrenaline that was pumping in the early days of the disease when there was so much mobilization and unleashing of power," to fight the scourge.

"In those days the community came together and we took care of our own," he continued, "and we didn't let difference and cliquishness and our elitism interfere."

For Scanlan, that has "unfortunately changed today, where there is more of an apartheid for people living with HIV and AIDS. Because it is now perceived as a manageable as opposed to terminal affliction, there is so much less energy around it and our values seem to have become more shallow and superficial.

Ember Swift, right, and Lyndell Montgomery will be swinging through Ohio for three shows in November Canadian chanteuse Swift has a style that flits throu many genres that describing it would require an illegal number of hyphens. They have been through Ohio before, playing shows in all parts of the state She wane of the acts at the National Women's Music Festival held this past June in Kent.

She and her eponymous band, which includes Montgomery, are touring in support of their latest album Stiltwalking, which hit number one on the www.outvoice.com last month. She was also nominated for Outstanding Songwriter at the Out Music Awards for her politically-charged tunes, which are complemented perfectly by Montgomery's musical mastery

The hand will be at the Ba

19th St. in Cincinnati on November 20. The show starts at 9 merver is S and it's 21 and over. For more information, call 513-421-2337.

The following night, Ember Swift will be in Dayton at the Canal Street Tavern, 308 East First St, 937-461-9343. Admission to the show, which starts at 9:30 pm, is $10.

Finally, on November 22 the two will be be in Cleveland at the Winchester, 12112 Madison Ave, for a free 10 pm show. For more information, call the bar at 216-226-5681.

Free MP3s, band bios and more information are available at www.emberswift.com.

-Anthony Glassman

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He says that some of the abatement in energies surrounding the epidemic is understandable because "it's hard to sustain that kind of passion and outrage without needing a break."

Scanlan's musical has been widely acclaimed for the sheer fun and enjoyment that it offers its viewers. This may have been a sublime serendipity coming from two men who have been to the depths of pain and darkness with illness and lost loves in an era bookmarked by the onset of AIDS at one end and September 11 at the other.

Thoroughly Modern Millie opened on Broadway about seven months after the terrorist attacks, and it may very well have been one of the tonics that New York desperately needed. In an age of art that seems so cynical and message oriented, the idea that one can have a show that is pure, unadulterated fun is a thoroughly modern notion in itself.

Scanlan himself has proved that dreams. impossible as they may seem, are worth holding on to, are worth nurturing, are worth life itself.

Audiences will get to partake in the magic that is Thoroughly Modern Millie in Cincinnati from November 18 through the 30th at the Aronoff Center. Call 513-369-4363 for tickets and more information.

Millie is currently completing its run at the Palace Theater in Cleveland, where it ends on Sunday, November 16. For tickets and information, call 216-241-6000.

Michael A. Thomas

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