Fifty-one years ago, Louise Mills and her friend Corinne Berg founded the Bainbridge Light Opera Association bringing live community theater to the island.
All these years later, she’s still doing the same thing.
Both the venue and the name have changed — from the former big-top circus tent which the Bainbridge Light Opera used to host Broadway Musicals in a vacant lot near where High School Road meets Highway 305 to the comfortable digs that Bainbridge Performing Arts operates out of these days — and Mills has grown in age, but she’s still as emphatic as ever.
“I think this is going to be a great show,” she says for the fifth time in the interview, talking with What’s Up last week. “There are some very good performers here, we have professionals who now live here but were in Hollywood or on the stage in Chicago or New York. We’ve been very fortunate on Bainbridge.”
Likewise, Bainbridge has been very fortunate to have had Mills.
In appreciation, her show, “What’s This Thing Called Love? A Musical Revue,” takes the stage for one weekend only, with shows at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at BPA. Tickets are $15.
Showing her appreciation for BPA, a portion of the proceeds will be donated back to the theater.
The show is a massive production on the musical scale, directed by the team of director Michele McCrackin and music director Karen Rice, with close to 30 love songs spanning the near entirety of 20th century musical theater, and even into the 21st.
“There’s songs that I think are being done now, and there are the older songs that you’d know even if you’re not old enough to remember when the song was written,” Mills noted.
The play gets its name from the Cole Porter song “What is This Thing Called Love?” — which the island singing group Side by Side will open the show with. And the titles roll on — Sinatra’s “Call me Irresistible,” “Sooner or Later,” Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” and even “Grow Old With You” to name a few. It should be a glamorous affair.
Mills, who’s been an avid fashion collector since the age of 10, is costuming the show — guys in tuxedos, dolls in evening gowns.
And though there’s not a specific era which the show is aiming to cater to, it will be set in a dim-lit Parisian club-type atmosphere with a three-piece jazz band on stage amidst a party of young and old. Even the club honors Mills in its name — “Chez Louise.”
“(Mills) still gets some recognition from some of us old timers out here, but there’s a new crowd,” said producer Steve Stolee. “There’s a lot of people who maybe recognize this white-haired lady, but not really know who she is.”
Mills is a pivotal piece of the Bainbridge Island theater scene, even though she’s been on and off the island and in and out of the spotlight over the past few decades.
Though she’d studied drama and pursued a brief stint in professional theater training, Mills has never actually been too much of an actor or singer herself, she said. She’s always been the one with the ideas, and the gift of talking people into doing them.
“What my talent is is getting people to do things that they didn’t know that they wanted to do,” Mills said. “Whenever anybody asks me what I do, that’s what I say.”
“And now she’s done it again,” the BPA press release read. WU
Check out Louise Mills’ vision in “What Is This Thing Called Love?” a musical revue of almost 30 love songs from Broadway to jazz standards, directed by Michele McCrackin and musical director Karen Rice, on the boards at Bainbridge Performing Arts this weekend only.
Shows will be at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. on Sunday at BPA, 200 Madison Ave. N on Bainbridge. Tickets are $15. Info: www.bainbridgeperformingarts.org or call (206) 842-8569.
