Mary Callanan :: Boston musical theater's BFF

Saturday nights little Mary Callanan's parents sat her in front of the TV with a plate of beans and franks. The set was tuned into the easy listening Lawrence Welk Show, a variety hour hosted by the accordionist and bandleader.

Later that night, the little girl sat at the top of the stairs attentive to her parents and their friends they'd brought back to the house singing parlor songs. "Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde / And the band played on," they would sing; or the familiar refrain When Irish eyes are smiling..." -- favorites from the Irish American songbook with the lyrics that have never left her.

Cut to the present. Sitting with Mary Callanan in a coffee house near the Boston Center of the Arts. Her sky blue eyes, impish grin and reddish brown hair are a dead give-away to her heritage. She then underscores it by launching into a cheerful, spirited Irish tune ("That's Peggy O'Neal") with (in deference with her surroundings) unexpected quietude : "Peggy O'Neil was a girl who could steal... (beat)... any heart, any where, any time," But even singing sotto voice, Callanan still turns heads amongst the patrons.

A Broadway mama

Turning heads is something Callanan has been doing for years now in local cabarets and musical productions. What has endeared the actress to audiences is her crisp, clear belt - a voice that could easily fill a cavernous theater without a microphone. "Mary Callanan has a real Broadway mama voice..." wrote music critic Richard Dyer in The Boston Globe. "The reason she has been so busy is her phenomenal voice: one that can belt out show tunes with the best of them, and wring unexpected emotional power from any ballad," agreed Terry Byrne in The Boston Herald. Over the years she's appeared in summer stock, nightclubs, concerts and more than 25 musicals. This week she adds another when she opens at the BCA's Calderwood Pavilion in The Great American Trailer Park Musical this coming week.

Trailer Park, written by written by David Nehls and Betsy Kelso, was first performed at New York's New York Music Theater Festival in the summer of 2004. (The Festival also was the first home for such hits as title of show, Altar Boyz and the recent Pulitzer-winning Next to Normal.) From there it went off-Broadway the following year for a four-month run. A national tour came next, as did numerous regional theater productions, such as the one at the SpeakEasy Stage Company directed by artistic director Paul Daigneault and featuring a cast of Boston regulars including Leigh Barrett, Kerry A. Dowling and David Benoit.

"Everybody can sing their face off," she enthuses about the cast.

Ripped from the Enquirer headlines

One of the joys for Callanan is linking up with Barrett and Dowling who have two decades of shared on-stage history. Callanan's first professional job in Boston was in Front Row Center at North End's Theatre Lobby. Also in that cast was another new comer Lisa ("Leigh") Barrett. When Callanan wasn't on the road to places as far flung as Korea, she spent a good part of the 1990s at the same venue in Nunsense I and II. A fellow cast member for several years was Kerry Dowling.

"The Trailer Park rehearsals are hilarious," says Callanan who says she itches to get to work every day. "It's going to be a really good night out for the audience."

The storyline is ripped from the headlines of the National Enquirer.

Set in Armadillo Acres Trailer Park in scrub brush Florida where the residents may be poor and tired but are spunky even so: "Well, hello there! Ya'll must have taken a wrong turn off o' Highway 301 because you are in Starke, Florida... North Florida's most exclusive manufactured housing community," hawks Betty (Kerry A. Dowling), who runs the leasing office at the park.

One of Betty's bosom buddies, Callanan's character Lin, keeps busy making sure the nearby prison can't get up the voltage to fry her husband in the electric chair, "Because enforcing cruel and unusual punishment on a man for doin' wrong is not the job of the government... It's the job of the wife."

"We're what society let slip through the cracks but who cares? We don't, we live this side of the tracks," Lin sings with Betty. Their friend Jeannie (Leigh Barrett) would be sunning and singing with them but for her agoraphobia, which lets her go only so far as the doorway of the trailer she shares with husband Norbert (David Benoit).

"The characters are stereotypical but with heart," says Callanan. "You root for the people and that's what's good about the show."

Trailer Park exemplifies how Callanan has at last truly come into her own, she feels. "I'm a character actor. It's been more than 39 years and now I'm getting opportunities to do my craft. Now I can work."

Not that she hasn't always been performing: In her teens, Callanan emerged from the aluminum-sided two family home typical of the neighborhood that was, she observes, "the cradle of Irish Catholicism in the 1960s in Brighton," to sing at the rec hall in Oak Square.

"It was all about making sure you're entertaining people," she said about these early lessons in what makes a performer click with an audience.

One of her favorites in the variety acts put on there was Bob Crane, whom Massachusetts at large got to know as the state treasurer. "He was a consummate performer," praises Callanan, who adds he also sang "Carolina in the Morning" at her wedding reception along with her dad. "We had a 17 piece band, and I sang too."

Hostess with the mostess

Callanan brings that Irish sense of fun to the cabaret act she and her partner Brian Patton put together. "We've known each other for 26 years" says Callanan who marvels at the chemistry they have. They have a CD of romantic songs, How I Spent My Summer Vacation, recorded in 2003. "It wasn't until we started working in Provincetown that we fully experienced the feel good phenomenon of summer vacation," she writes in the liner notes.

"When we sing in Provincetown, we'll go straight for three hours without a break." They've been regulars in the Cape resort town for seven summers, first at the Crown and Anchor piano bar and more recently at the Boatslip.

Her popularity with gay audiences arises she believes from her penchant to "say what I think. I'm your fun pal who can sing her face off. Turn light blue if I have to. Break your heart with a song. Sing a disco song. Make fun of your date for wearing glitter on his navel. I'm the hostess who makes sure everyone's having a good time. I work very hard too at making it happen. I appreciate my audience and everyone wants to be appreciated."

She was in Menopause The Musical at the Stuart Street Playhouse nearly as long as the Provincetown gigs have lasted, a girl's night out show that she enjoyed for its bridge and tunnel audiences coming in from Chelsea and Everett. She's played all the nuns in Nunsense I and Nunsense II. All of it has been grist for the mill of knowing "where to stand and when to stick your big fat face in the light." Learning how "to ride a wave of laughter from the audience.

"You get plasma from the audience. They keep you fresh and on your toes. I'm lucky to have done shows that had really long runs," she said. "You part with your 45 dollars, it's not fair if I'm half-stepping. I got that from the old timers who lit up when it's 'go' time."

Her lusty "Another Op'nin, Another Show" opened last fall's production of Kiss Me, Kate at the Lyric Stage in which she played Hattie. She got an IRNE nomination for playing another Hattie - the one who sings "Broadway Baby" -- in Overture Production's Follies starring Len Cariou. She was in Damn Yankees and Letter From Nam at North Shore Music Theater and played a snazzy dinosaur in The Dinosaur Musical and a swamp animal in A Year With Frog & Toad both at Stoneham.

This summer Callanan takes on the role of Sophie Tucker in a one-woman musical revue of rousing vaudeville tunes put together by Jack Fournier and Kathy Helenda. Sophie Tucker: The Last of the Red Hot Mamas to be directed by the New Rep's new artistic director Kate Warner opens June 26 for a three week run at New Rep's Charles Mosesian Theater in the Arsenal Center for the Arts.

For Callanan, playing the vaudeville star known for her sassy style and bold personality harks back to those days in the rec hall in Oak Square, although up to now she'd only been aware of Tucker from her appearances on TV's What's My Line.

With some research, Callanan has become enamored of Tucker in her witty, bawdy heyday. "She knew how to put it over the footlights," says Callanan. "And she was determined to make it. Her parents told her she was too ugly to be a success on the stage but she wanted to sing. She went to try her luck in New York. Destitute and singing for pennies, she kept on believing in herself. She made it but she did it the hard way and she never forgot how she got there and where she came from."

The Great American Trailer Park Musical runs from April 30 through May 30 in the Roberts Studio Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St. in Boston's South End. For tickets or more information, the public is invited to call 617-033-8600 or visit www.SpeakEasyStage.com.