Saratoga News

A souvenir program advertises a 1951 play directed by Lilian Fontaine.

Lilian Fontaine was synonymous with Saratoga theater

BY WILLYS PECK

If there were any thwarted theatrical wannabes in Saratoga during the 1950s, they couldn't blame Lilian Fontaine for their frustration; she would have gotten them on stage in one capacity or another.

Mrs. Fontaine, whose daughters, Joane Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland, afforded Saratoga vicarious recognition in the firmament of Hollywood stardom, was the moving force behind the Los Gatos Theatre Workshop, operated under the adult education program of what is now known as Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union High School District.

Her production career more or less segued into that of Dorothea Johnston, described in last week's Stereopticon article, and the two were well-acquainted. In fact, they played Mistresses Ford and Page in Miss Johnston's 1940 production of Merry Wives of Windsor.

The initial Theatre Workshop production was I Remember Mama, in October 1949. With the exception of a couple of productions at Villa Montalvo, the Theatre Workshop's home playhouse was the Los Gatos High School auditorium, there being no high school in Saratoga at the time.

But Mrs. Fontaine, a longtime Saratogan, did a lot of her recruiting here, and the term is used advisedly. It was said of Mrs. Fontaine that you could tell where she had been during the day by who showed up at rehearsal that night. If she met or saw someone she thought fit a particular part, she'd ask that person if they'd be interested in an adult-education theater class.

This eclectic approach worked, and some of the larger casts that had experienced principals, such as in Elmer Rice's gritty Street Scene, produced in 1950, were rounded out with first-timers in roles of documentary authenticity.

Street Scene calls to mind a production of that play a decade earlier that was mounted by another local group, the Saratoga Players, headed by a talented couple, John and Kay Breeden. Starting in the late 1930s, they produced some Noel Coward drawing-room comedies, as well as other works, using principally the Saratoga Foothill Clubhouse.

Their Street Scene, however, was staged in the grammar school auditorium on Oak Street. That auditorium is now the Saratoga School media center, but before its transformation in the early 1970s, it and the Foothill clubhouse had the only proscenium stages in town.

Anyone familiar with Rice's 1927 tragedy knows that the action in Street Scene takes place in front of a New York tenement house, with a view into first- and second-floor rooms, where some of the action takes place. It was a daunting task for amateur scene-builders, but it was convincingly handled in a limited space.

Another Saratoga theatrical couple, Paul and Pat Beaudry (she was Juliet in Miss Johnston's 1938 Romeo and Juliet) launched the Summer Circle Theater, an arena-style playhouse in the old Hotel Lyndon in Los Gatos, also in the 1950s.

The Beaudrys, in cooperation with proprietor Mason Shaw, even experimented with one-act plays in the Saratoga Theater, at Third Street and Big Basin Way, using live productions as a species of short subject with the regular film fare.

When the City of Saratoga wisely built its City Hall in the form of a community theater, opening in 1965, it was an official acknowledgment that creative activity had a long history here. In a future Stereopticon article, some of the more recent theatrical endeavors will be described.