Joan Shepard.
Joan Shepard, an acclaimed actress who was additionally a producer of summer time inventory and kids’s theatre productions, died on March 3 on the age of 91.
Joan Shepard started her life within the theatre as a toddler actor on Broadway in productions that starred Tallulah Bankhead, Shirley Booth, Ralph Bellamy, Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, Vivien Leigh, and Laurence Olivier. In a assorted profession that lasted 75 years, Shepard—whose pictures usually confirmed her hair trimmed in an impish pageboy fashion—retained a childlike enthusiasm for the stage. One of her best contributions, later in her profession, can be introducing hundreds of schoolchildren to the surprise of theatre.
Said Shepard’s daughter Jenn Thompson, “Mama fell in love with the theatre when she got her first job at 7. Laurence Olivier cast her in his production of Romeo and Juliet that he was also acting in. At one point early in the play he carried her out onstage and placed her on a wall, and she fell in love—with him, I suspect, and with everything else she experienced. ‘Stamped with love’ was how she described herself, and she never lost that wonder and delight. I think she always saw the theatre through the eyes of her 7-year-old self.”
“My mom’s greatest joy was, without a doubt, acting,” mentioned her son, Owen Thompson. “She wore an almost absurd amount of hats, but in her heart of hearts, she was an actor first, last, and always. In a song she once wrote, she referred to her discovery of acting, which happened as a young child, as ‘The way I was to live / The way I was to give.’ And the giving she mentions here became an enormous outflow.”
Performing on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in nationwide excursions and at regional theatres, co-founding two theatre firms, songwriting, and producing had been all a part of that outpouring, which, her son continued, gave “enormously to audiences and artists alike, not only in terms of the uncountable shows she produced and often acted in, but in the opportunities and employment she provided for actors of all levels of experience—particularly to young actors new to the business.” In different phrases: A whole lot of Equity playing cards had been earned in exhibits that Shepard co-produced.
Shepard died of pure causes in her East Village condominium, surrounded by books and memorabilia from a large life on the stage that included many collaborations together with her husband Evan Thompson and her two kids, New Yorkers who would go away their dad and mom’ theatrical nest to grow to be actors and administrators in their very own proper. Jenn Thompson is a former Broadway, movie, and TV actress who’s now a busy theatre director whose credit embody work at Goodspeed Musicals, Hartford Stage, Denver Center Theatre, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Off-Broadway’s TACT/The Actors Company Theatre, and the brand new nationwide tour of Annie. Owen Thompson is an actor, director, and instructor who serves the brand new inventive director of the Schoolhouse Theater in Westchester County, N.Y.
Joan’s husband, Evan Thompson, died on the age of 83 in 2015. The couple co-founded the touring kids’s theatre firm Fanfare Theatre Ensemble, a not-for-profit troupe for which they and others wrote diversifications of traditional tales that featured them, their kids, and lots of different actors in bookings throughout the Northeast, Midwest, and as far south as Florida, between the years 1972 and 2014. All 4 members of the family performed a slew of child and grownup roles with the Equity-affiliated Fanfare, bringing unique musicals “to thousands of children in underserved communities while employing hundreds of actors,” Jenn Thompson mentioned, citing such future stars John Goodman and Ken Page as having acted in a few of Fanfare’s early exhibits.
The Fanfare reserving venues had been as rangy as college auditoriums, Elks golf equipment, and legit theatres, together with Westbury Music Fair on Long Island and Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. Actors, units, and costumes had been loaded onto a passenger van in Manhattan, maps had been opened, and floor was lined. Many early-career actors received their first jobs working with Fanfare on such exhibits as Huckleberry Finn, Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Goldilocks, Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, Treasure Island, and lots of extra. Composer John Clifton was a frequent collaborator.
The tireless, pixie-like Shepard appeared in 99 % of the exhibits, son Owen Thompson mentioned. His mother gamely donned pants to play Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island and was a middle-aged Little Red for a time, earlier than her daughter took over the half and Joan graduated to the function of Grandmother. The excursions had been profitable, however the mission was bigger than feeding the Thompson-Shepard household: Fanfare was introducing reside theatre to generations of children who won’t bear in mind the artists’ names however would have the lasting reminiscence of the theatrical expertise.
“We went to some very out-of-the-way places, and the impact was real,” Jenn Thompson mentioned.
Siblings Jenn and Owen additionally labored with their dad and mom (as actors and later administrators) when Shepard, husband Evan, and actor Warren Kelley had been requested by director Jane Stanton to assist launch a summer time inventory season on the Connecticut’s historic Ivoryton Playhouse, which was debt-ridden, dormant, and going through closure in 1987. Their summer time inventory nonprofit Equity firm, River Rep Theatre Company, for which Shepard carried out and served as managing director, offered 97 productions for 19 seasons, up via 2005, revitalizing the venue, which nonetheless operates at this time below an unrelated producing mannequin.
Joan Shepard was born in 1932 in New York City to Sylvia Wasson Shepard and Hayden Shepard, a trumpet participant within the orchestras of Harry Archer and Paul Whiteman. When Whiteman’s band toured to Europe for a stint within the Thirties, Joan’s dad and mom positioned her in London together with her paternal grandmother. When World War II broke out, the Shepards couldn’t get to London, so Joan was evacuated to New York City, crusing the Atlantic on her personal to be reunited together with her dad and mom in New York. In Manhattan, Shepard attended the Professional Children’s School. After highschool, she attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.
Her Broadway credit as a younger actress embody Philip Barry’s Foolish Notion (with Tallulah Bankhead and Mildred Dunnock) for The Theatre Guild in 1945; Tomorrow the World (with Ralph Bellamy and Shirley Booth) in 1943 and afterward tour; This Rock by Walter Livingston Faust, that includes Billie Burke in 1943; the short-lived, Elia Kazan-directed The Strings, My Lord, Are False in 1942; A Young Man’s Fancy, a three-act play set at a boys’ camp by Harry Thurschell and Alfred Golden, in 1947 (and later a Kraft Theatre TV model); the Sigmund Romberg musical My Romance in 1948; and Sunny River, an operetta by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II, directed by Hammerstein, in 1941.
Shepard hit a profession excessive when she performed Doris within the unique Broadway run of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding starring Julie Harris and Ethel Waters in 1950-51. A decade later, Shepard graduated to Harris’s lead function of tomboy Frankie reverse Waters at Pasadena Playhouse; Waters and Shepard had saved in contact, and the star requested Shepard for the function. The cowl of the Pasadena Playhouse playbill exhibits Shepard on Waters’s lap as they sing a hymn; the souvenir program was treasured by Shepard, her daughter mentioned.
Although she made TV and movie appearances (HBO’s Girls, ABC’s What Would You Do?, Disney’s College Road Trip), the stage was her major world. She appeared in a lot of nationwide excursions, together with the Broadway nationwide tour of Oliver! in 1965 and a tour of Marat/Sade. She labored at nonprofit regional theaters together with Two River Theater, Goodspeed Opera House, Human Race Theatre, New Harmony Theatre, Berkshire Theatre Festival, the Cape Playhouse, and elsewhere, and performed roles in Off-Off- and Off-Broadway productions, together with a 72-performance run of Othello starring Earle Hyman in 1953-54.
In 2012-13, Shepard’s one-woman present Confessions of Old Lady #2, a gathering of songs and tales from her profession, was carried out within the New York Fringe Festival, on the Manhattan cabaret Don’t Tell Mama, and on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland, the place critics and audiences had been charmed by her peripatetic historical past. The cabaret present’s title referred to a job she performed in a Disney TV film (she realized her character’s generic identify when she noticed it posted on her trailer on set), nevertheless it was additionally a sly nod to the no-part-too-small ethos that she embraced in her profession. She ultimately took the present to Ivoryton Playhouse a decade after River Rep had left the venue.
“She kept a tally of how many performances she had given onstage over her lifetime,” son Owen Thompson mentioned. “The last time I caught a glimpse of it, the number was north of 9,000.”
In addition to her kids, Joan Shepard is survived by daughter-in-law Leda Zukowski, son-in-law Stephen Kunken, and granddaughter Naomi Kunken.
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