Interview: Director Lisa Glover of AIN'T MISBEHAVIN' at Short North Stage

Close your eyes and think about the Roaring Twenties. What’s the first image you see? Model T Fords? Mobsters with Tommy Guns? Speakeasys? Young people drinking hooch and dancing the Charleston?

Director Lisa Glover hopes AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ will challenge the way her audience looks at that reckless decade. The review of the life and music of jazz pianist Fats Waller runs Sept. 5 -Sept. 22, at the Garden Theater (1187 North High Street in downtown Columbus).

“When you think of the Roaring Twenties, you think of flapper girls and this inherent innocence,” said Glover, who is making her debut as a director with this show. “But there was a lot of grittiness to that time.

 “It’s so intriguing to me how Waller is the founder of this style of jazz music and at the same time, he struggled. He went from having rent parties, these illegal get togethers just so he and his band could pay the rent, to staying at the Waldorf (Hotel).”

Short North Stage hopes to capture the fun as well as an unflinching look of the era as singers Christian McQueen (Ken), Israeljah Reign (Nell), Catara Brae (Charlaine), Isaac Tobbler (Andre), and Sydney Arterbridge (Armelia) lead the audience through a 30-song journey from the dive bars of Lennox Avenue to the infamous Cotton Club.

Attendees are encouraged to arrive early to be a part of a “speakeasy experience.” Prior to the show, Guests enter through a secret door to attend a pre-show party. Before the show starts, the stage will resemble one of the underground clubs of the 1920s complete with a dance floor, a bar, and three lounge singers performing.

“Every night, the stage will be open for people to dance and get a drink from the bar (before the show),” Glover said.

But the musical review will also give the audience a chance to experience the low parts of the era as well.

AIN’T MISBEHAVIN,’ which won three Tony awards in 1978, tries to capture the jagged edge of the Roaring Twenties era. The show retraces the pianist’s steps from his run-ins with the police and the racism of the era.

“Black and Blue,” tells its audience of how difficult it was to be a black woman in the 1920s America:

Cause I can't hide what is on my face
I'm so forlorn. Life's just a thorn
My heart is torn. Why was I born?
What did I do to be so black and blue?
I'm hurt inside, but that don't help my case
'Cause I can't hide what is on my face

As difficult as the lyrics are to read, it is hard to believe “Black and Blue” was commissioned to be a comedic number as a part of the musical HOT CHOCOLATES.

According to biographer Barry Singer, lyricist Andy Razaf, claimed he was threatened by mobster Dutch Schultz at gun point to create a light-hearted song about the trials and tribulations of being a black female.

“(Schultz, the show’s financial backer) literally put a gun to Andy's head and told him that if he didn't write it, he would never write again, Singer wrote in Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf.

When the song was played in the show’s opening night, Razaf and Waller must have thought they signed their own death sentence. The audience fell into a stunned silence before exploding with applause. Seeing that the song, although it was not a comedic number, was hit, Schultz left the two men alone.

Glover first saw AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ several years ago when several of her friends were involved with a Columbus cast.

“(When I saw the Columbus show), I literally actually knew every single person in the cast and the director of the choreographer and I just loved it,” said Glover, who recently took in the show again during a birthday visit to Chicago. “I thought it was such a cool piece of art for black artists because it's an all black show.

“I thought that's so amazing and had no idea that I'd be directing it years later.”

After starring in shows as diverse as TOXIC AVENGER and DREAMGIRLS, Glover finds it much more difficult directing than performing.

“I'm inherently a performer, so creativity and art is what I'm best at,” Glover said. “Directing is a lot harder than it seems.”

Glover believes she was born to be in the theater. She can remember trying to get her mom Helga Glover to take her to auditions when she was nine.

After she landed the role of Raw Hide in TIED TO THE TRACKS, Glover has been convinced this is what she wanted to do with her life.

“Honestly I think I came out singing,” she said with a laugh. “I grew up in a sports family. No one sings, no one dances in my family except for me, so it was a bit odd (of a choice).

“I did that one show and I thought to myself, ‘This is what I was born for. There's nothing else that I want to do.’”

Glover’s tenacity was tested once she got into the real world of auditioning for parts. Many hope the world is much more color blind now than it was during Fats Waller’s era. Yet Glover said she has seen theater racism still exists.

“Things are really going in a much better direction now. However, I will say as someone who has half Puerto Rican and half black, there have been many times I've wanted to quit because So many times you're told to your face, blatantly, ‘this is not for you.’

“I was choreographing a show and the cast ready to go. The director took out a black person's headshot and put a white person’s in because ‘there was just too many black people in the cast.’

“After a while you just don't want to play anymore.  I don't want to play a game where the rules are set up not for people like me to win. You have to push through all that and show up every day because you love what you do.”

Photo credits: Fyrebird Media

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