When Cinderella opened at Diamond Head Theatre last January, it marked a new era for Hawaii's longest-running community theater. Two months earlier Fort Ruger Theatre, DHT's home since 1952, had been mostly demolished in favor of a brand-new, seventeen-thousand-square-foot space just next door. Other changes were also in the wings: Deena Dray, the company's executive director for more than a quarter-century, was preparing to exit stage left-her long-planned retirement timed to the culmination of the $23 million, decade-plus plan to raise the roof on the new, purpose-built theater.
It was not exactly a given that the show would go on when DHT broke ground for the new building in October 2020. Hawaii was then six months into a COVID lockdown, and the first vaccines had not yet made their debut. Stage seasons had been canceled statewide, behind-the-scenes staff were on indefinite furlough and theatrical troupes throughout the Islands were doing what they could to stay afloat. Some went on hiatus. Others, like the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival and Kumu Kahua Theatre, turned to online productions. DHT took it to the streets, staging drive-in musical revues from the Ruger's rear balcony, with audience members tuning in on their car radios in the theater parking lot.
"We tried out anything that we could do to entertain the community and keep people working," says John Rampage, who has been involved with DHT in one capacity or another for nearly fifty years, twenty-eight of them in his current capacity as artistic director. "The parking lot concerts were so enormously successful-there were originally four scheduled, but they ended up going weekly from July until November."
If any company were equipped to survive a pandemic, it's DHT, which traces its roots back to the Footlights, a members-only theater/salon that was founded three years prior to the onset of that other global health calamity, the great influenza pandemic of 1918. "Footlights was a group of society ladies, mostly descendants of missionary families, who got together to write and read each other's plays, which then evolved into presenting their first production in 1915," recounts Rampage.
The troupe prided itself in staging current material, mixing plays that had recently debuted on the continent with those written by Footlights members. The shows sold out and the critics mostly raved, though they were also at times a bit ... pearl-clutchy? "Three Playlets in Which Sex Discussion Plays Large Part Are Given With Commendable Success," reads the subheading for a 1917 Honolulu Star-Bulletin review, which goes on to note that one of the playlets, Eugenically Speaking, "is a burlesque bit hitting off the extremists on the ultra-modern subject, eugenics. In this a young girl brimming with half-baked eugenics ideas chooses a herculean street-car conductor as her mate, calmly takes him from his peaceful post to her home and introduces him to her indulgent but non-eugenically-inclined father. Here was an instance where the humor saves the undoubtedly delicate subject from downright indelicacy."
With a new executive director and a recently completed state-of-the-art facility—seen above during construction in 2022—the stage is set for Diamond Head Theatre’s post-COVID future. “The pandemic forced us to think outside the box,” says artistic director John Rampage. “That was a tremendous help when we moved into this new theater and had to look at everything in a totally different way.” On the opening page, Bailey Barnes rehearses for The Bodyguard at the new DHT in May 2023.
(BELOW) What a difference $23 million makes: Diamond Head Theatre has employed union musicians since the 1950s, but until the renovation the orchestra did not have a functional pit to call home.
Initially limited to seventy-five paying members-a mix of twenty-five "active members" who paid $2 per year and took part in productions and fifty "associates" who paid $3-Footlights eventually saw the benefit in expanding and becoming more egalitarian. In 1934 the club voted unanimously to form the Honolulu Community Theatre. In a letter written that year to the editor of the Star-Bulletin, the new group's executive secretary, Marjorie Wood, put it this way: "It seemed to the members that a new group representative in every possible way of the community, would produce more and better plays with every citizen of Honolulu a possible actor or actress or worker back- or front-stage-the director would have a free hand and excellent support."
It was the Honolulu Community Theatre that took possession of the Fort Ruger Theatre in 1952. In 1990, HCT was renamed Diamond Head Theatre-a lineage that makes DHT the third-oldest community theater in the United States.
"Some of the Footlights' plays were scandalous for their era, so they always had a reputation of being ahead of it," says Rampage. "Kita Wilder was the grande dame of Honolulu Community Theatre. We had an event shortly before she passed away, and we were talking about pushing the boundaries and she said, 'Oh, well, I did a show in 1951, and all I wore was a piece of chiffon and I was naked underneath.' So yeah, I'm proud of that. I'm very, very proud that they took tremendous chances."
Rampage made his own acting debut with Honolulu Community Theatre in 1975. He was already working as a professional performer overseas but was staying with his mother on O'ahu between gigs. "She was a volunteer in the costume shop, back when it was across the street at Kapiolani Community College-everything [but the theater] was over on that side in old military buildings," he recalls. "There was one building for sets, one for costumes. There was a rehearsal hall on the second floor, with an old wooden floor that you had to be careful not to put your foot through. And then they had a Matson container pulled up to the side entrance of the theater, with Christmas lights hung in it: That was the women's dressing room. But even back when it was bare bones, this theater organization did incredible productions.
"I had been in a show in Omaha; it closed, and I didn't have another gig for two and a half months, so I decided to come over here and live for free off my mother. One day she said, 'Why don't you go up to the theater and find something to do?' So I auditioned for Music Man, which was their big, bicentenary musical. That production had a live horse that came on stage and lived at the side of the theater. ... They were always pushing the envelope." During one performance the horse missed its cue after wandering off to graze in Kapiolani Park ... turns out Music Man was the last time a horse was given a cameo.
Over the years DHT has been a showcase for big-name guest artists and a launching pad to future stars. In 1964, University of Hawaii student Bette Midler (seen above back left) appeared in her second DHT production, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Over the years, the back portion of the Ruger Theatre was expanded, allowing for everything-costume shop, set shop, rehearsal hall-to be under one roof, which at the time was another first for local theater. The Ruger was also a true community magnet: Rampage recounts how in the 1950s and '60s, actors like Emma Veary and Ed Kenney would do a 5:30 show at the theater before heading off to Waikiki to play music in the evenings. In 1958, Kenney would gain national fame for playing Wang Ta in the original Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song. A few years later a young Bette Midler was famously fired from a bit part in the chorus of HCT's Show Boat after she upstaged Veary in the starring role. (She was rehired the next day.)
Through the years, the theater also acquired a bit of a reputation for being haunted. "Almost every theater has a ghost, at least one. And we have several, had several. In Hawaii that's not laughed at; it's taken very, very seriously," says Rampage, noting that all were supportive spirits (among them his own mother, whom others swore they had seen over the years, happily seated in the balcony). "After our final rehearsal of Cinderella in the old building-it was coming down the next day-we invited the spirits to come next door, so that they wouldn't be surprised. We just didn't want any of those poor souls wondering what happened to their entertainment center. So we invited them over, but I don't know yet if they made the trip."
Though it was much beloved, the Ruger was never up to the needs of modern stagecraft: It was built in 1933 as a movie house for soldiers garrisoned just down the way at Fort Ruger. Honolulu Community Theatre made modifications after taking it over, but there were some things that just could not be fixed. "The primary change is that we now have a fly loft," says Rampage. "Honestly, that is the reason the new theater was built, because that is the one thing we couldn't do in a renovation, which we seriously considered because a lot of people were very, very attached to the old theater."
The permitting on the old theater would not allow for the fifty-odd feet of new roof height that the loft required. And the loft was essential in bringing DHT into the twenty-first century: It allows multiple set pieces to be quickly raised and lowered from above. In the Ruger Theatre, set pieces all had to be hidden in the wings, from where they were moved horizontally on and off stage.
"It was like a jigsaw puzzle, and a real challenge for the set designer: A piece would start in one place offstage, and during another scene it would be moved to another place, and then in another scene it would have to be moved again until it could finally be moved on stage," says Rampage. "In the 1950s-Broadway's golden era, as they call it-a show was always three hours long. They would have a scene and a lavish set, and then the lights would go out and you would sit in the dark while the orchestra played a repeat of the music and the set was changed behind the curtain. But shows aren't written that way anymore-the audience expects them to move quick. With the fly loft we're now able to do that. It's not a new concept; it goes back to the very origins of theater in ancient Greece. They would have a sunset or a sunrise, or the heavens, and through a pulley system it would go up and be hidden by trees. So it's not that this was some kind of vanity project-like, 'Oh, we have to have the newest and the finest'-it was the one thing that was always holding us back, the thing that we always said we really needed and didn't have."
Like all DHT productions, The Bodyguard—seen above during dress rehearsal in 2023—is true community theater. “The performers are volunteers who are given a small honorarium,” says Rampage. “It doesn’t even cover their gas to get here, but really is a sign of respect for what they’re giving.” Among the actors pictured above is Barnes (center foreground), who like all the actors has a day job—in her case, a flight attendant for Hawaiian Airlines.
Another major change is the addition of an orchestra pit. DHT is the only community theater in Honolulu to use a union orchestra and has been doing so since the 1950s. For years the orchestra was more or less seated in the audience, in a section off to the right of the stage (or, in a few cases, on the stage itself). This could be charming for theatergoers in that it highlighted the live aspect of the music, but it also made things a bit more challenging for actors, who rely on visual cues from the conductor. "There was originally an orchestra pit in the old theater," says Rampage, "but at some point in the 1950s, they built the stage apron forward. This brought the show closer to the audience, but then the orchestra pit was way, way, way too far back in the stage and couldn't be used anymore. Now we have it down in front again, which is wonderful, except we have to keep reminding the old-timers that they can't walk to the edge of the stage anymore or they're going to fall into the pit."
After seventy years in the Ruger Theatre and only two shows in the new space-at the time of this writing, The Bodyguard is midway through a sold-out run-Rampage says the company is still finding its footing in other ways. "Coming into this theater was like learning the alphabet all over again. It's wonderful, but it's a whole new way of working, especially sets and costumes and things like that. The old theater, everybody knew what our limits were and what we could push. We're still learning how far we can push it now, which is exciting."
The old Ruger Theatre wasn't completely demolished last October. The back portion, which housed the costume shop, set shop and rehearsal hall, is still there, and plans are ongoing to renovate those areas into a new Theatrical Arts Building, to further expand already successful programs like Shooting Stars, DHT's by-audition program for young actors ages 8 through 16. There are also summer camps for budding thespians and year-round classes for all ages.
Trevor Tamashiro took over from Deena Dray as executive director in April. After twenty-plus years on the continent, it was a homecoming for him, both to the Islands and to Diamond Head Theatre. He's a Punahou School graduate, with an acting resume that includes Damn Yankees and The King and I, both DHT productions. (DHT recently found a costume with Tamashiro's name tag in it. "I think that was 1997. ... Isn't that crazy?" he laughs.)
Where Dray's crowning achievement was the construction of the new theater, it's now up to Tamashiro to take the next step. "My big thing is to really build on the legacy that has been established here," he says. "I was performing here when John and Deena were in charge, and so I owe so much to them-for me it's really just building on that foundation and then finding ways to move forward as we look to the next one hundred years."
