After headlining more than a dozen national tours and traveling by truck with the Big Apple Circus, the past year has been slow for Halenda, who booked a few cabaret shows in nursing homes and online.
“Mostly, I’ve been at home and being safe in Virginia,” she said in a Zoom interview. “This is the first thing I’m doing out of town.”
Halenda’s looking forward to hearing a live audience respond to her performance, something that has been a challenge online.
While performing online for a nursing home in Richmond, “I pretended the camera was a room full of old people,” she said. “It was odd. I never heard them laugh. You don’t hear any kind of response, so I’ll really be happy to be doing this in front of some people in Sarasota.”
“It’s a medium-sized show, but it increases the danger for the performers and the cost,” he said. Equity is requiring performers to be vaccinated before contracts will be approved. “Because of the time we go into rehearsal, we can’t be sure everyone in the cast will be fully vaccinated,” he said.
In its place, Hopkins will bring back the one-woman show “Sophie Tucker: The Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” originally developed by FST in 2001 with the late playwright Jack Fournier and its star, Kathy Halenda. It opens June 7.
It has been presented several times at FST and in more than two dozen other productions across the country. In the show, Halenda recounts the life and career of the legendary actress, singer and vaudeville star, known for such songs as “Dark Town Strutters Ball,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “There’ll Be Some Changes Made” “My Yiddishe Mama” and “Some of these Days.”