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“Oklahoma,” staged in 1978, was among the musicals produced at the Haymarket Theatre. (Photo courtesy Eric Dobbs and Bev Appleton)
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Diane P. in "Starting Here, Starting Now" (Photo courtesy Eric Dobbs and Bev Appleton)
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"How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" (Photo courtesy Eric Dobbs and Bev Appleton)
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"Cats" (Photo courtesy Eric Dobbs and Bev Appleton)
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Rehearsal for "Hello Dolly" with Dawn Westbook, Bobby Smith, Delores King, and Regi Clemon (Photo courtesy Eric Dobbs and Bev Appleton)
The Haymarket Theatre, true to drama, began from an ending.
Actor, producer and director Bev Appleton starred in the comedy “6 Rms Riv Vu,” the last full-length play staged at Westhaven Lodge Dinner Theatre. It was March 1974, and the theater, located off U.S. 360 east of Mechanicsville and next to a man-made lake, had operated for about two years in a former restaurant of the same name. When its next production, “The Girl in the Freudian Slip,” was set to open, the show wasn’t ready. With no entertainment for a benefit performance, Appleton and his accompanist came to the rescue.
“I sang every song I knew until I was hoarse,” Appleton recalls. Later that year, he produced Elaine May’s 1969 one-act play “Adaptation” and “The Diary of Adam and Eve,” a segment of the Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick musical “The Apple Tree.”
Then the stage went dark. Appleton, who had majored in finance at the University of Richmond, saw an opportunity. He figured, “I have just enough business acumen to do myself a lot of damage. Didn’t have a dime to my name in 1975. It was kind of crazy to open another theater — and in the middle of the gas crisis.”
The Richmond region already had three dinner theaters: Hanover County’s Barksdale, Swift Creek Mill in Colonial Heights and The Barn at 15000 Patterson Ave. Part of a chain of North Carolina-based theaters, the Barn struggled, even with its “magic” stage that descended from above.
An uncle of Appleton’s signed the mortgage note. His business partner was Richmond Symphony trombonist Robert Formaini. Set designer Fred Brumbach transformed the facade of the building to hearken back to the Tudor period of London’s Haymarket Theatre.
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Bev Appleton appeared opposite Katherine Tracy in the Haymarket Theatre’s first show, “6 Rms Riv Vu.” (Photo courtesy Eric Dobbs and Bev Appleton)
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Bev Appleton and Katherine Tracy in a promo picture for the Haymarket's opening, in 1975 (Photo courtesy Eric Dobbs and Bev Appleton)
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Rehearsal for "Salute to Broadway" with Tom Width, Katherine Tracy, Jan Guarino, Bev Appleton and Gingy Higgins (Photo courtesy Eric Dobbs and Bev Appleton)
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(From left) Larry Bland, Sheila Spurlock and Kim Strong in "Purlie" (Photo courtesy Eric Dobbs and Bev Appleton)
The first show, opening July 11, 1975, on Appleton’s 28th birthday, was a revival of the Westhaven’s “Six Rms Riv Vu.” Most of the actors were available, and they knew their parts.
The Haymarket’s dinner fare came from the kitchen expertise of Julian Moroni, founder of Julian’s Restaurant, then at West Broad and Robinson streets. He’d officially retired, but couldn’t stand not being in a kitchen. “We always had one special Italian dish because Julian cooked for us,” Appleton says.
During its 1975-84 run, the Haymarket put on 47 shows helmed by 20 directors. The productions included Richmond theater professionals such as Gordon Bass, Terry Burgler, Nancy Cates, Jan Guarino, Joe Inscoe, Eloise Libron, Liz Marks, Richard Newdick, Diane Pennington, Emily Skinner, Jack Welsh and Tom Width, now the artistic director at Swift Creek Mill Theatre. A first-season audience questionnaire led to the Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals “South Pacific” and “The Sound of Music,” mixed in with Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” and Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
During a New York theater visit, Appleton saw the musical “Purlie” based on the play “Purlie Victorious” by actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis, about a “fast-talking black minister who outwits a white plantation owner who is close kin to Simon Legree,” as a New York Times reviewer described a 2005 production. Searching for someone to play Purlie, Appleton found Second Baptist Church’s choir director, Larry Bland. “I talked him into it, and he brought along maybe six choir members.”
A critical and financial success, “Purlie” opened the door for more African-American themed shows. These included Micki Grant’s “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” directed by Patch Clark, and, in 1981, “The Wiz.”
While playing tennis with musician James Roots, Appleton asked for suggestions on casting the role of Dorothy. Roots told him about his daughter Desirée, then 12 years old. Appleton balked at first. The character is onstage 90 percent of the show and has an enormous amount of lines, besides singing big tunes.
Desirée auditioned, got the part, and on opening night, she turned 13.
“How do you put a tornado onstage?” asked Richmond Times-Dispatch critic Jon Longaker. “One way is to get yourself a cast such as Bev Appleton has assembled. … Then you just sit back, watch a whirlwind of music and comedy onstage and hear gales of applause and laughter sweep over a delighted audience.”
Then came a hugely successful 1982 run of the Fats Waller revue “Ain’t Misbehavin’, ” directed by Appleton and produced by Jackie Nichols from New York. The cast featured Peter Wherry, the Tin Man in “The Wiz,” and at the end of the run, a Las Vegas-based producer scooped up most of the cast to take the show on tour in the U.S. and Europe. Wherry also directed the Haymarket’s all-black “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”
By the mid-1980s, Appleton began branching out to advance his career. He studied with Niko Psacharopoulos of the Williamstown Theater Festival while also putting his creative energies into the Actor’s Rep, a company that produced classical, contemporary and musical theater from 1982 to 1990, mostly in the basement of Matt’s British Pub in Shockoe Slip.
The Haymarket was left in the hands of actor/director Nancy Cates. In February 1982, while she was substituting as stage manager for “I Love My Wife,” a caster jammed and toppled a piano on her, breaking a femur. Cates held auditions for “No Sex Please, We’re British,” by her hospital bed while in traction at Stuart Circle Hospital. The shows went on.
Then came third-act complications. Starting in 1983, the Virginia Center for the Performing Arts (today’s Dominion Energy Center) offered a Broadway subscription series. The Haymarket’s lease approached expiration in a building requiring extensive repairs. Debt accumulated and ticket sales didn't meet projections.
“We couldn’t survive,” Appleton says.
The theater closed July 22, 1984. The last show, the Terry Burgler-directed “Hair,” ran for nine under-attended performances. Among the cast members was the late entertainer Steven Moore, who, in a later standup routine, described performing “Hair” in the nude while the audience ate manicotti, though Appleton clarifies that all the manicotti had been consumed or cleared away before the nudity commenced.
