Fans of The Wizard of Oz delight in Fred Barton's satiric cabaret Miss Gulch Returns! But Barton prefers that audiences focus less on the bicycle-riding, dog-snatching spinster who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West and more on the theme behind the tell-all spoof.
Yes, Barton said, he imagines why she hates scarecrows and what her off-screen life entails. Sure, he serves Oz trivia and theater dish. But "the show is not about Miss Gulch at all," Barton explained by phone from his New York City home. "She's a metaphor for me in a bad mood, for being self-defeatingly single. There are a million love songs, a million unrequited love songs. But when I wrote this, I felt there were not enough songs about people unable to fall in love to begin with or about people who can't even attract the attention of the person they want to love."
Local actor Brent E. Marty reprises his February 2000 incarnation of Almira Gulch for Theatre on the Square, opening tonight and continuing through Nov. 16. Pianist Paul Galloway accompanies him again. TOTS Artistic Director Ron Spencer, who co-directed the first offering, helms the revival.
The 44-year-old Barton's thriving career spans musical directing, conducting and playing on Broadway and the road. A leading arranger/accompanist on the cabaret circuit, Barton is best known as co-creator, arranger, pianist and performer in the debut Forbidden Broadway revue of the early 1980s.
He developed Miss Gulch Returns! somewhat by accident, said this lifelong lover of Oz. At age 11, he saw a tour of Oklahoma! co-starring Margaret Hamilton, the Gulch in the 1939 movie. The enthralled boy wrote her a letter, and Hamilton responded. A few years later, she passed through Barton's hometown of Boston in A Little Night Music. The high-schooler rushed backstage after a matinee, waving her note. She invited him to her dressing room between performances and revealed how the Oz magic tricks were done.
Barton filled in at the last minute as Gulch in a summer-stock Oz in 1979. Doubling as musical director, he positioned his piano just offstage and played "Over the Rainbow" – immortalized by Judy Garland for the screen – in full Gulch garb, then pedaled onstage. The crew, he recalled, couldn't stop laughing at the irony. Barton went on to create a popular five-minute routine about Gulch that he included in a club act.
When he attended the last reunion of Oz survivors in 1983, Hamilton showed up. Despite a paralytic stroke, she was wise, philosophical and funny, Barton remembered. "I was amazed. I thought: isn't it odd that the Wicked Witch turned out to be a wise, wonderful woman?"
In 1983, Barton expanded Gulch into a full-length piece – initially a mixture of his songs with interpolated material – as a vehicle for himself. The final, all-original product congealed by 1985.
Barton likes that Gulch entertains in a glittery, escapist way. Yet "it became much more than the sum of the parts," he said. "It represents a complete photograph of my state of mind at the time." Like the fictionalized villainess, Barton grew up feeling unattractive. Gulch wound up at a piano bar, plinking Judy Garland tunes, because Barton did, too. The torch song "Everyone Worth Taking (Has Been Taken)" and the bawdy ditty "Pour Me a Man" expand beyond Gulch lore to strike emotional chords.
"It still bugs me when someone comes up to a single person like myself and says, 'My terrific relationship of three years has just ended.' I think: 'How perfectly dreadful for you.' The Miss Gulch side of me says: 'When I have had a relationship for three years, I'll cry with you."
