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Jacqui Hubbard: Staging It

Jacqui Hubbard, executive/artistic director of the Ivoryton Playhouse, has a message: It’s b…a…c…k! After more than a year of COVID shutdown, the playhouse will open for the season on Thursday, July 8 with a musical whodunit: Murder for Two.

A year ago at this time, Jacqui was at her lowest point.

“Last May and June I was depressed,” she says. “It was hard, especially for someone who draws identity from work.”

And, of course, there was no work, and an empty house.

“Norm was busy,” she says of her longtime partner, Essex First Selectman Norm Needleman, “my kids are grown; I was in the house alone.”

What made it worse was the constant uncertainty of the future and how to plan for it.

“We had COVID Plan A, then COVID Plan B, trying to react to things until that became impossible,” she says.

Still, by the end of June, Jacqui says things had begun to get better.

“Once over the hump in May and June, I felt a little lift. It felt like we were going to come back,” she recalls.

Instead of being so busy she had no down time, she had nothing but down time. So she put it to use.

She spent a lot of time calling the playhouse’s subscribers to let them know that, though she was not sure quite when, she was sure the playhouse would once again be open for business.

She also become an author, the result of a whimsical elephant the playhouse commissioned for its fundraising appeal. Ivoryton Playhouse set designer Cully Long told her he was sure there was a story behind the elephant, so Jacqui wrote the story and Cully illustrated it. Their collaboration produced a children’s book called Ella Capella and the Pink Umbrella, now going into its second printing. It is available at Toys Ahoy! in Essex and R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison.

The long gap in productions also gave Jacqui a chance to think about how the playhouse will operate going forward. There will be six yearly productions, not seven as had been the case previously. That decision will help the playhouse reduce production costs.

“What we had been doing was unmanageable,” she says.

Once the playhouse returns to regular scheduling, Jacqui plans on two musicals, running five weeks each, over the summer.

“Not experimental; that’s what people want in the summer,” she says.

The playhouse will produce at least one classic drama every year and the spring production will be a more experimental one.

Putting together a season, finding the right mix of plays is always a challenge.

“A season is a living breathing thing; you know when it feels right,” she says.

This summer, following Murder for Two, in which one actor plays 13 characters, the playhouse will present Having Our Say: the Delaney Sisters First 100 years, based on the book about the lives of two pioneering black sisters in Harlem.

“It’s about diversity,” she says of the African-American protagonists, “but it’s also about surviving; I think it is going to resonate with people.”

In all, the playhouse plans five productions this shortened season. In September, the theater will premiere a new show by David and Sherry Lutken featuring bluegrass and folk music with what Jacqui describes as a “new and timely story.”

October will bring back a tried and true playhouse favorite, Say Goodnight, Gracie! The George Burns and Gracie Allen Story. Jacqui says the they are still working on the holiday production and will announce it in a few weeks.

There will be major differences in how the playhouse operates this summer. For one, all tickets will be sold individually for each production. Subscriptions will return next season.

Though Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont has relaxed COVID regulations, the playhouse must operate under the far stricter regulations of Actor’s Equity, the association to which some of the performers belong. The audience downstairs will be seated in pods of two, with six feet separating every pod. Single spectators, also separated, will sit in the balcony. Everyone will be required to wear masks except, of course the actors. There will be no intermission nor any candy or food sales.

One of Jacqui’s challenges this summer has been finding a sufficient staff for productions. She had to let many people go when the theater closed and now cannot find all the people she would like for jobs like the stage crew.

“We’ll get through it,” she says.

Jacqui was born in the north of England, in a town called Billingham that is the location fictionalized in the movie and play Billy Elliot. She remembers the town having an unemployment rate when she was growing up of more than 30 percent because the mines, once the main source of jobs, had closed.

She was the oldest of five children and recalls putting on plays with her siblings as members of the cast. At Leeds University, she studied English and drama, and afterwards worked briefly with a children’s theater company that was part of the school system.

Jacqui came to this country with her then-husband, Ian Hubbard, a civil engineer with expertise in bridge building. He was working with the State of Connecticut on the construction of the new Baldwin Bridge in the early 1990s. Jacqui became involved in the storytelling project led by a former Old Lyme resident, Ro Hinman.

She approached the Ivoryton Playhouse, which then put on only a three-month summer season, about starting a children’s theater. The operators gave her both an approval and a warning.

“They said to be careful. The theater was a wreck,” she says. “The basement flooded; there were electric wires all over the place.”

Nonetheless Jacqui started the children’s theater and Needleman got a Department of Agriculture grant designed to foster culture in rural communities, which led to extensive renovation on the playhouse. The children’s theater was successful enough that Jacqui was asked about doing adult productions.

In 1999, the playhouse board of trustees asked her to take over as executive director.

She sees the role of a small regional theater as a very different experience than an extravagant night on Broadway.

“Small theaters offer a unique experience; it’s intimate, shared, different from a one-time tourist moment,” she says. “It is a feeling of connecting with the audience, like breathing together in harmony, every heart beating to the same rhythm, moments of real magic.”

For more information on the Ivoryton Playhouse, visit www.ivorytonplayhouse.org.