Shelly Garrett, at the time a moderately successful bit actor with a string of minor television credits, was sitting in a posh Beverly Hills beauty salon when a less-than-poshly attired woman sailed in and cried out:
”Which one of you sluts is fooling around with my husband?”
For a number of reasons, Garrett now says, it wasn`t immediately clear whether the woman was addressing the shop`s male or female inhabitants. But what was clear to Garrett was that he had just been handed an idea for a play, a comedy he went on to write, entitled ”Beauty Shop.” It has since become one of the most unusual and phenomenal vehicles in current commercial theater.
Like the above character-whose pronouncement is repeated intact in the comedy-Garrett, as writer, director and producer of the show, has proven to be fearlessly unorthodox.
He sells ”Beauty Shop” and its gallery of a dozen-plus black characters, hardly resorting to any of the conventional promotional routes.
He takes out few or no print media advertisements and provides no publicity kits, nor does he make solicitations for feature stories or reviews. It is safe to say that his production, now on a national tour, can slip into town-as it did for brief engagements here in September and again in late October at the Arie Crown Theatre-without a vast portion of the white theatrical audience even becoming aware of its existence.
Instead, Garrett unleashes a deluge of short radio advertisements on a prominent station popular in the black community (here, he selected WGCI-AM/
FM) and otherwise depends on word-of-mouth. By those means, he and ”Beauty Shop” have been immensely successful.
In its second Chicago engagement, this one for five days, the show did well early in the week and then virtually sold out its Friday and Saturday performances, all this in the face of Arie Crown`s ordinarily daunting 4,000- plus seat capacity.
When he first opened the show in May of 1987 at a small theater in San Bernardino, Calif., Garrett`s goal was ”to run for only a month.” Instead, he was able to relocate to the larger Wilshire Ebell Theatre in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles and has played to sellout crowds in intermittent engagements there in the 2 1/2 years since.
He also managed special engagements in Oakland, New Orleans and San Diego before officially launching the road tour in September and, between the Chicago stints, playing for nearly four sold-out weeks in an 1,800-seat theater in downtown Detroit.
Stops are now scheduled for Dallas, Atlanta, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., and Garrett plans to launch a second company of the show to play elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Garrett says ABC is interested in a television pilot version of the play made by Warner Bros., retitled ”New Attitudes” and starring Cheryl Lee Ralph from ”It`s a Living” and Morris Day of the group the Time and the Prince movie ”Purple Rain.”
”We get a wide audience,” says Garrett, 43. ”Teens, grandmothers, housewives, construction workers and garbage men.
”Sometimes we get people who have never come to a play. The theater audience in the black community may not be huge, but it`s there and it`s growing.”
As for his marketing strategy, Garrett says he avoids most of the media simply because he has been able to succeed without it.
”Right now, we`re reaching our audience. When they dwindle, we`ll have to reach out. But, remember, we don`t have the budget of a `Les Miserables`
either.”
Garrett`s production consists of 17 non-Equity actors and dancers and a traveling company that altogether includes 40 employes.
As for the show`s success, ”everyone likes to laugh,” is how Garrett explains it. But not everyone has been unabashedly impressed.
In some ways a black combination of ”Steel Magnolias” and ”Shear Madness,” ”Beauty Shop” centers on the denizens of a Los Angeles salon and a birthday party planned for one of the workers.
The roster includes a sexy manager/owner, a flamboyant gay stylist, a bitchy and man-hungry hairdresser/beauty and another woman hairdresser who`s fat and lonely. Customers and visitors include a snotty, well-to-do doyenne; a shrewish wife and her henpecked husband; a mailman hot for just about everybody but the gay stylist who wants him, and an armed robber, who shows up to raid the cash register at the end of the first act.
Critics have not been kind and point out that many of the jokes are insults, aimed at fat people, gay people and unattractive people.
”It`s stereotypical and offensive,” complains Larry DeVine, who reviewed the production as theater critic for the Detroit Free Press.
”The kick comes from hearing people make bigoted, stupid remarks, and, if the show had been written by a white author, I think the black community would have been all over his case.
”As it is, a black woman who is an executive with a radio station here told me she was appalled by the show and spent the trip home in the car explaining to her son why stereotypes of gossipy, backbiting, pugilistic black women are offensive and untrue.”
In one typical exchange in the play, the character who wanders in wanting to know who is philandering with her husband gets involved in a long harangue with the gay character, Chris. As played by Steven Gamage here, Chris is an embodiment of stereotypical mincing gay mannerisms, snapping his fingers and swishing with outlandish exaggeration throughout the entire show.
After he`s accused of being an insult to ”Cub Scouts, the YMCA and Old Spice,” he tells the visitor to ”go home and have a talk with your mother. I wasn`t always gay-I might be your daddy.”
Earlier, when Margaret, the stout hairdresser, tells Chris his lifestyle
”turns my stomach,” Chris responds, ”Well, lord knows, there`s enough of it to turn.”
Garrett defends the humor: ”Chris is sharp-tongued, but the portrait isn`t intended to be negative. Nothing in the show is negative. Even the armed robber returns in the second act and gives the stolen money back, acknowledging that theft is wrong. The henpecked husband is redeemed. We`re a family show and we`re not out to insult anybody.”
Even critics admit that ”Beauty Shop” audiences agree. They laugh uproariously throughout and frequently give the show a standing ovation.
”The show has its flaws,” Garrett says, ”including its length.”
(”Beauty Shop,” including a party scene complete with male and female exotic dancers, runs for three hours.) ”But the audiences get it, and they come back and bring others with them.”
Meanwhile, Garrett has another problem. Five limited partners in the production have filed a suit in Los Angeles Superior Court claiming breach of fiduciary duties and a failure to provide proper accounting. They charge that, despite wide success, they haven`t received any return on their investment.
Garrett says the five were friends of his who originally came to him wanting to invest and who don`t understand the nature of show business financing, which can take even hit shows a long time to recoup.
”The whole thing boils down to only a $20,000 dispute,” Garrett says.
But none of the complaints appear to threaten Garrett`s steamrolling success. He`s now preparing a new script, to be titled ”The Living Room,”
described as a comedy-drama about family life, and seems to be able to keep
”Beauty Shop” going in both new venues and in return trips alike.
No follow-up is yet scheduled for Chicago, but, as Robert Guttenburg, theater manager at Arie Crown, said, with a sweeping gesture at the large crowd gathered in his lobby at one Friday night intermission, ”Look at all these people. Wouldn`t you be back?”
