2008 Woodie Awards
Experience yields results on '42nd Street' set for June Richards
HEATHER RICHARDS
Issue date: 4/8/08 Section: Arts
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City Times
Two of the actors are stopped, yet again, by June Richards' sharp voice.
"No, no, no. I will scream from the audience. It's an ugly gesture - what I said nine thousand times."
Fifteen other students gathered on the edges of the stage ham it up to one another as Richards holds court from a metal folding chair upstage. This is a rehearsal for "42nd Street," and June Richards is the director.
"Good. Perfect," Richards says to the tortured-looking man whose gesture was so unattractive, but stops him again, "No, don't be cute."
A small woman with a warm, intense presence, Richards has been the artistic director at San Diego City College for, "10 exquisite, beautiful years."
"42nd Street" is the latest production, and with three weeks to go, the actors are still missing cues and bumping into one another. Richards remains calm and commanding. Rising to act out a bit of a song, castigating, threatening and encouraging the actors she admits are mostly green, Richards still appears confident that the show will succeed. She has been in her students' shoes many, many times.
"When there is a movement the people involved don't know that they are setting precedents… This is when no one had moved to New York yet," Richards recalls of her early days in the business right before New York's theater scene had a significant revival. Her memories are dotted with powerful names: Jose Ferrer, Amy Irving, Morton Subotnick.
She began acting as a teenager through her high school though her family had no involvement in theater. "Not at all, nothing." Richards says she fell "madly in love with performing," and so joined the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where she met the daughter of Uta Hagen; Hagen was already a significant name in theater. "Much of life is accidental," Richards says.
At that time, what is now the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre was the San Francisco Actors Workshop. Richards performed numerous plays with the workshop and eventually moved with the company to New York City. The Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre was intended to be the cornerstone of theater in the U.S., and Richards was involved in the beginning of that movement. She then joined the Herbert Bergdorf Studio in lower Manhattan under the tutelage of one of New York's prestigious and most respected acting teachers, Uta Hagen.
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