By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, December 13, 2006; C05
Signature Theatre is saying goodbye to its home of nearly 13 years -- a former bumper-plating factory with dodgy sewer pipes, impractically low ceiling girders and the sounds of pneumatic drills from adjacent garages piercing quiet moments during matinees.
Six actor-singers -- Donna Migliaccio, Eleasha Gamble, Will Gartshore, Tracy Lynn Olivera, Stephen Gregory Smith and Harry A. Winter -- will bid farewell to "the garage" in a cabaret, "The Last Garage Hurrah," running tonight through Saturday.
Signature already has set up offices in its $16 million, three-story complex above the new Arlington County library branch in Shirlington Village and will open Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods" there Jan. 12-Feb. 25.
"The thing I feel most proud of is, I look back at all the things that we did in the garage and I go, we really were invested," Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer says. The company "did some amazing things with not a lot of resources and a lot of obstructions."
Co-founder Migliaccio muses, "So much of Signature's personality through the years is this little chicken-salad organization that can produce filet mignon . . . it's going to be interesting to see the direction that it goes."
Gamble recalls "stepping into that building for the first time and it just felt like home. But that won't end. It'll just continue at this new place."
In the cabaret, she and Migliaccio will sing "Children Will Listen" from the fairy-tale-inspired "Into the Woods" because Migliaccio played the Witch in Signature's 1994 production and Gamble will play her next month.
She talks about the chances Signature affords actors. "You can explore and stretch yourself . . . really expand beyond your boundaries and feel okay doing that," Gamble says.
Migliaccio, for example, was the Reciter in Sondheim's "Pacific Overtures" -- a role usually played by an Asian man. "Did it serve the piece? I don't know, but I had the time of my life," the big-voiced Migliaccio says. ". . . I can play harridans at the drop of a hat, but it's just so refreshing to do something different."
Gartshore, who recently played Freddie Eynsford-Hill in "My Fair Lady," first appeared at Signature in "Floyd Collins" in 2000. A creative peak for him was William Finn's "Elegies" in 2004, because the cast sang the song cycle on a bare stage. It was "the simplest kind of musical theater," Gartshore says, but the actors had to "be bold and not be afraid" and "rip away any kind of artifice."
Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Allegro" in 2004 was a highlight of Olivera's young career. The show was being rewritten by Joe DiPietro and re-orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick to fit the cast. "There was one scene that I had that ended up being really funny and it was sort of tailored to the way I deliver jokes," she says.
Like Olivera, Smith landed roles at Signature pretty much right out of college. He played Lee Harvey Oswald in the recent "Assassins," which he says "challenged me to do something I don't do a lot of, because I'm always a sidekick funny guy, song-and-dance kind of guy." His first exposure to Signature was in the audience for "Sweeney Todd" in 1999. "It was the first time I was ever scared by a piece of theater. It was so close and in your face that I decided I wanted to work there," Smith says.
Harry Winter -- a character man, a comic, a singer of patter songs, a shuffler of soft shoes, a utility infielder -- played Col. Pickering in "My Fair Lady" and was the kindly dad in "110 in the Shade" and in "Allegro." He credits Schaeffer with giving him parts some of which "are a stretch for me, and the audiences all of a sudden started figuring out who I was."
Winter notes that when "Into the Woods" opens he will have "the first words in the new space and they are, 'Once upon a time.' I thought that was pretty cool."
Rated PG (County)"If I have to do another play set in an apartment in New York, I think I'll kill myself," says Mary Resing. She's joshing, of course, but the artistic director of the new Active Cultures Theatre Company -- its mission is to create "smart and juicy theater for a diverse, multigenerational audience" -- did spend eight years reading scripts in the literary office at Woolly Mammoth, most recently as director of new play development.
Resing decided to set out on her own after returning from a Fulbright scholarship at a theater festival in Armenia. She feels the need to create a new kind of theater for northern Prince George's County, where she lives with her husband and three children. "It's about creating a connection between a theater organization and a community that it is based in."
Active Cultures ( http://www.activecultures.org) will present its first show, Resing's "Hansel and Gretel Eat Crabs," Jan. 25-Feb. 12 at the Raw Theatre in the New Joe's Movement Emporium in Mount Rainier. Loosely inspired by the Engelbert Humperdinck opera, the musical incorporates styles ranging from rock, hip-hop and blues to German clogging tunes. In Resing's version, which she says is for ages 10 and up, Hansel and Gretel have morphed into teenage girls who get lost after a county fair beauty contest. "We were looking at the idea of, in today's world, who's the witch and what will parents fear," Resing says.
She's not aiming to create deathless drama. "I wanted to create theater that was ephemeral, that was in the moment, that was a conversation between a theater company and its audience, and was not intended to go on to Broadway," she says. "If it was never done again, it would have done what it was supposed to do."
Follow Spots· Lee Mikeska Gardner is replacing Matty Griffiths as managing director of Actors' Theater of Washington. An actress and director, Gardner has been nominated for seven Helen Hayes Awards and won for lead actress in 2001. She also served as managing director of Washington Shakespeare Company. Actor Rick Hammerly, a Hayes winner for Signature's "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," will become ATW's associate artistic director.
· Week 5 of the "365 Days/365 Plays" project of short works by Suzan-Lori Parks will feature performances Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at Silver Spring Stage ( http://www.ssstage.org). All seven plays of Week 6 will be presented Dec. 18 at 8 p.m. by American Century Theater as a classic 30-minute radio play. Patrons can listen by calling, toll-free, 1-866-212-0875 and entering the code 4930306#. For more information call American Century at 703-553-8782 or visit http://www.americancentury.org.