Actors must learn more than lines, songs for Gaslight’s Smoke on the Mountain

Release Date: 9/26/2006. Expired: 10/21/2006

As if learning dialogue and songs during six weeks of rehearsal wasn’t enough, the cast of the Gaslight Dinner Theatre’s current production of Smoke on the Mountain also had to learn to play their own instruments, some of them for the first time ever.

Smoke on the Mountain, a hilarious comedy packed with vintage gospel music, continues in the Gaslight through Oct. 21. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays beginning with a 6:30 p.m. buffet dinner. Tickets are $27 per person and include dinner, drink, dessert and the performance. Smoke on the Mountain is sponsored by Tennsco.

“Smoke on the Mountain is unique in that the cast accompanies itself and each member plays a variety of instruments,” said director Hal Partlow. “It added another element to the casting process in which we not only searched for the right actors and singers, but they also needed to be able to play multiple instruments.”

Set in 1938 in a small Baptist church in Mount Pleasant, N.C., Smoke on the Mountain is the return to the revival circuit of the wacky Sanders Family Singers. Burl and Vera Sanders take their family back on the road after a five-year layoff with knee-slapping stories and harmony-blending songs.

Paul Kerr, who portrays family patriarch Burl, plays guitar, mandolin, banjo and harmonica in the Gaslight production. Kerr has appeared in or directed Smoke on the Mountain five previous times.

Without ever having any formal music training, Kerr taught himself to play piano as a teenager and “started playing guitar to impress girls.” He’s been playing the harmonica for about 10 years now but says in this production he is playing more mandolin than before.

“Every show is amazingly different,” Kerr says of his current role.

He says learning to play new instruments also means more doors are open in his theatre career. “The more you can do, the more you work.”

As for his multiple stringed instruments, Kerr says his guitar background helps in learning the mandolin and banjo.

“The fingering is all different, but the chord progressions are the same.”

The Gaslight production also marks Kerr’s first opportunity to perform in Smoke on the Mountain with his girlfriend, Kiersten Vorheis, who plays his wife, Vera Sanders.

Vorheis plays piano, upright bass, spoons, washboard and autoharp in the production.

She has played bass and piano “since I was a kid,” but had to learn the autoharp for this production. She says her background made it easy because it’s “just like playing piano.”

“It was a lot to learn at once,” Vorheis says of the show. “But I think it’s more fun because you get to set your own tempos (when providing your own accompaniment).”

While this is her first appearance in Smoke on the Mountain, Vorheis says she’s always enjoyed musicals, including a role two years ago in He Keeps Me Singing, which exposed her to gospel music.

“Musicals are more prolific, so more people enjoy them,” she says.

Alex Dittmer plays guitar, banjo and bass in his role as Stanley Sanders, Burl’s brother who has been “away” for some time and recently returned to join the Sanders Family Singers.

Dittmer says he’s been playing guitar for about 20 years and is “strictly self-taught.” He was “vaguely familiar with the bass and admired the banjo.”

To prepare for the role, he downloaded chord progressions from the Internet to teach himself the banjo.

“The hardest part is making it look like I’m as comfortable with the banjo as with the guitar,” Dittmer says. “I’ve always liked bluegrass music and the banjo is such an indigenous instrument to this part of the country.”

One other complication that Dittmer says he has noticed is that the time he’s spent playing banjo and bass is “adding these weird calluses in new places on my fingers.”

As daughter Denise, one of the twins, Sara Schoch plays bass, piano, washboard, tambourine, basket, wood blocks and shaker.

The Ohio native has studied piano since the age of nine and got some tips on the upright bass from the stepfather of her fiancé, Ryan Hunt, who she met while appearing in 2004’s Gaslight Dinner Theatre production of My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra.

The hardest part about playing the bass, Schoch laughs, is the size of it. “It’s about twice as big as I am.”

She says the key to being a good washboard player is to “play with enthusiasm” and to be careful to avoid getting too close to her microphone and making it too loud.

Despite her years of experience on the piano, Schoch says Smoke on the Mountain has been “pretty much like re-learning” because she learned to play classical music and “had never accompanied anybody before.”

Bryan J. Wlas is Dennis Sanders, the other twin, and plays piano, bass and tambourine in the show.

He took piano lessons for about nine years through his freshman year in college and “played a lot of classical and music theatre, which helped me learn to sight-read real well.”

Being in a show like Smoke on the Mountain “takes more rehearsal because it adds another layer to what you have to do,” Wlas says of learning dialogue, songs, blocking and playing instruments.

Wlas, who is the resident choreographer for productions at The Renaissance Center, says that performing with Kerr and Dittmer has inspired him to learn to play guitar.

As June Sanders, the only Sanders family member who doesn’t sing, Katherine Jett provides a variety of accompaniment on the fiddle, leather belt, cymbal, tambourine, triangle, train whistle and tom tom, in addition to sign language interpretation. “I don’t sing, I sign,” her character says.

Jett has studied violin and played in a children’s orchestra, but says the fiddle is something different.

“A violin sings; a fiddle dances,” Jett says.

She trained on classical and orchestral music and has never played violin as a soloist, so picking up the fiddle to play vintage gospel tunes was a bit of a challenge. She played a little fiddle in the Young Actors Studio production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and some violin in a production of Romeo and Juliet.

Timing is the key to her brief performances on cymbal, triangle and train whistle and Jett says snapping the leather belt to simulate a whip crack in the song Christian Cowboy is a “challenge” as well.

While some productions of Smoke on the Mountain turn June’s sign interpretation into slapstick, Jett took up the role seriously to provide true American Sign Language interpretation. She had taken a sign language class when she was 12 and to prepare for the role she studied with a friend who is proficient in sign language.

“We sat down with the script and went over exactly what I had to sign,” Jett says. “It kind of lit a fire under me to learn more.”

Helping Partlow pull the whole production together is musical director Nathan W. Brown, who is part of the production as Brother William, the piano player at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church.

Brown says Smoke on the Mountain presented a new challenge for him because the Depression-era gospel music style is “definitely different from anything I’ve done.”

To prepare, Brown researched the music and listened to recordings from the period.

He said the hardest part of bringing the show together actually came when Partlow had to cast the show looking for good actors and singers who also could play. And because those actors chosen brought a variety of skills and abilities to the performance, some changes had to be made.

“We had people with strengths in different areas, so we had to practically re-arrange the entire show to utilizes those abilities,” Brown said. “It turned out better than we expected because we have so many musically talented people who are all willing to shuffle responsibilities like that and take on new challenges.”

Brown said the first week or so of rehearsal was devoted entirely to the vocals so the cast could become comfortable with their songs before the next layer of playing instruments was added to the process.

The exciting part of having the cast playing its own instruments is that it makes the show dynamic each performance, Brown says. “Tempos are not always constant when you perform as many shows as we are and this group is so good about listening to each other and adapting.”

Brown says he was added as a piano player “originally as a safety net for the cast. It’s nice to have an extra set of hands on the piano.” But, he says, the cast is so musically gifted and picked up so quickly on the instruments that he has become more of just a filler to allow the cast to do more things.

“It’s been a lot of fun,” Brown says just halfway through the show’s run.

Smoke on the Mountain continues in the Gaslight Dinner Theatre through Oct. 21. All lunch matinees for the show have been sold out for weeks and a few tickets are left for the remaining evening performances. For tickets and reservations, call (615)740-5570. To learn more about the show, call (615)740-5600.

The Renaissance Center is a fine arts education and performing arts center at 855 Highway 46 South in Dickson, just 35 miles west of Nashville on Interstate 40 at exit 172.

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