August 21, 2004 marked the opening of the Richmond Triangle Players' revival of their acclaimed production of Fred Barton's Miss Gulch Returns!, earning raves (below) surpassing even those garnered by their original production of 2002 (read original raves).  The Richmond revival incorporates the revisions Fred made for his own 20th Anniversary revival earlier this year, including the new song, "I Can Be An Icon Too."

The Richmond revival was selected for presentation at the National Gay & Lesbian Theatre Festival in Columbus, Ohio, September 2004.

On with the latest raves!

"Miss Gulch" Offers Great Fun

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Susan Haubenstock, Special Correspondent, August 21, 2004
Hilarious solo revue shines with clever impersonation of 'Wizard of Oz' character

Richmond is more fun than you think. You just need to know where to look.

The place to look at the moment is Fieldens Cabaret Theatre, where Richmond Triangle Players have brought us a return engagement of Miss Gulch Returns!

This is Fred Barton's hilarious solo revue focusing on Almira Gulch, that annoying maiden lady from The Wizard Of Oz who turned into the Wicked Witch of the West.  An unlikely subject for a comic cabaret, you say?  Well, enter Barton's world.

A self-confessed groupie of Margaret Hamilton (who played the role in the film) since the age of 10, Barton wrote "Miss Gulch Returns" 20 years ago and performed it in New York at Palsson's Supper Club, the venue for years of successful Forbidden Broadway shows.  Barton was one of the Forbidden Broadway co-conspirators -- a piano whiz/arranger/performer...

He has at least three goals here, and he nails them all:  clever, intricate rhymes; snickeringly good double-entendres; and the creation of an irresistible character.

But there's even more than that on display at Fieldens, because the chanteuse taking on the challenge of impersonating Miss Gulch is Robert Throckmorton.

Throckmorton first gave us Miss Gulch in 2002, and he's brought her back as a tuneup, because the production has been selected to be performed at the National Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival in Columbus, Ohio, next month.

Throckmorton is tall and lean, with long, expressive fingers that are equally adept at gripping a martini glass and whipping a bicycle seat out of Miss Gulch's wicker basket.

He's a great physical comedian -- probably the best pretend cyclist ever -- and not a bad dancer.  His singing is perfection, his timing terrific, his gestures hysterical.  The raising of an eyebrow or a finger leaves the audience breathless with laughter.  He even hands out snacks.

The premise is that a young man looking for love meets Almira in a bar and tries to woo her with the song "You're The Woman I'd Want To Be," but through some stage magic (and Thomas W. Hammond's intricate and brilliant costume design) Almira sings her reply, "I'm A Bitch."

There are Judy Garland references galore -- some sour grapes there as Almira reflects on why Judy got more attention than she -- and Almira sings "Born On A Bike," the answer to Garland's "Born In A Trunk."  There's a lot about Almira's rotten luck with men.

"There are a million love songs, a million unrequited love songs," Barton said in a 2002 interview. "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."

To that end, Barton includes a couple of ballads, which give Throckmorton the chance to show more emotional colors and change the pace of the show.

Randy Strawderman has given Throckmorton great support with the staging, which is minimalist but always sharp and effective, and Timothy Brewster does a great job as the onstage accompanist and general factotum.

The Deconstruction of Almira Gulch

GayRichmond.com review by Carter S Grove

Fred Barton, perhaps one of those "flamboyant men impersonating Judy Garland to this day," met Margaret Hamilton (aka Almira Gulch) quite by accident.... Barton's star-struck obsession with Hamilton led to his creation of Miss Gulch Returns!, a play that deconstructs this unforgettable yet often overlooked icon in a way that perhaps only a queer sensitivity can manage.

The show is firmly postmodern -- an ironic, psychological, and self-referential examination of this Oz anti-hero -- and is therefore wholly suited to today's queer sensibility. Throckmorton opens with a bit of stand-up (playing himself) which gracefully elides into an imagined pick-up attempt of Miss Gulch at a cabaret bar.  But Miss Gulch is not to be wooed, for she has her own floorshow to do.  Throckmorton makes the transformation from male to female, suitor to spurner, tall and handsome to tall and ugly right before the audience's eyes in "You're the Woman I'd Wanna Be."

In the comedic musical genre where timing is all, Throckmorton is an atomic clock.... Throckmorton's hands, particularly the fingers, resurrect the spine tingling shivers we all felt as children when Almira first threatened "your little dog too."  His energy, all balled up with frenetic bursts at the animate and inanimate -- bartenders, the audience, a stuffed dog -- is über-Gulch, and his well controlled voice, a tenor with flashes of falsetto, will make you think Almira has indeed returned to sing her sordid story.

Even more, Throckmorton plays Fieldens like it's home field, like he's queening it up at the club with friends, rather than performing in front of paying patrons.  Campy, witty, bitchy, it's a constant source of wonder how Throckmorton blurs the distinction between the memorized gag and the impromptu wag.

Of course, he's working with quality material.  When the show opens with Throckmorton's monologue, we're enticed by a discourse on "the subject of this psychological cabaret analysis."  Throckmorton declares, "she is imprinted on the subconscious of everyone of us."  With her "salient characteristics" -- unpleasant, single, frustrated, and past her prime -- Almira Gulch is, in fact, "what everyone of us is going to become."

By taking an imaginative tour of the Almira Gulch behind the bicycle and broom witch, the show offers both a pop cultural romp as well as the beginnings of a sophisticated critique.  Indeed, this analysis cannot be too far removed from the post-structural method of critic Roland Barthes.

Yet even Barthes could not have woven the sophisticated and hilarious verbal ironies in the song "Pour Me a Man."  In the show, two versions of this number bring down the house, while commenting on each other and ultimately on the most basic of human needs.  If the play misses its mark on any level it's that Barton's script takes us often to the edge of deep self-awareness without always arriving.

No matter.  The songs, the parody, the sheer joy of play, and especially Miss Gulch's penchant for double entendre engage and elevate.  Almira offers herself up to us -- "May my mortification be your edification," and we take her, warts and all. It's loads of fun.

Fred Barton attended Throckmorton's first run of the show two years ago.  That led to discussions about how to improve and update it.  The result is a tighter script and two new numbers, the contemporary commentary of "I Can Be an Icon Too" (including reference to Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction") and the upbeat encore "Party Girl" which is borrowed from Barton's The Two Svengalis.

As usual, Fieldens Playhouse provides a perfect venue for such an intimate show, and Throckmorton plays this small house perhaps better than any other performer to date.  He knows how to touch audience members as individuals with direct eye contact, and there's not even a hint of play-acting when his hand pats the knee of a front row viewer.

Randy Strawderman and T. Ross Aitken collaborated with Throckmorton to improve the staging of this show compared to its first run.  Musical director and piano accompanist Timothy Brewster shares a palpable, though nicely understated, chemistry with Throckmorton.  Special kudos to Thomas W. Hammond for his absolutely precise costuming.

Richmond clamored for more Miss Gulch two years ago.  Now's your chance to be both amused and abused by this "musical vivisection of a stereotype" on its way to almost certainly great acclaim at the theatre festival in Columbus.

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The Wizardry Of 'Gulch'

by Roy Proctor, Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 08, 2002

Subtitle it "The Wit and Wacky Wisdom of Almira Gulch."

And call it downright wonderful as Robert Throckmorton, in the Richmond Triangle Players' Miss Gulch Returns, adds another immense audience-pleaser to his growing list of portrayals of outrageous women.

For 75 mercifully uninterrupted minutes, Throckmorton commands the tiny Fielden's Cabaret Theatre stage in Richmond's first production of this one-man musical.

First, clad in a black suit as himself, Throckmorton addresses one Almira Gulch in the audience and explains that this show is about "the musical resurrection of a stereotype."

Then, through the alchemy of theater, he transforms himself into Almira.

In one sense, Throckmorton had little to work with because Almira appeared so briefly as the bike-riding, dog-snatching Kansas spinster in the 1939 film classic The Wizard of Oz.

As played by Margaret Hamilton, color her evil.

As played by Throckmorton in this cabaret-style tour de force created and first played by Fred Barton in the 1980s, color her complex, colorful, hilarious and, at times, even poignant.

Why did Almira snatch Dorothy's beloved Toto?

In Throckmorton's telling, it had something to do with Almira's love for a guy named Joe who threw her over for a blonde.

She loved, she lost, she suffered, and she became a sadder but wiser – and embittered – woman in the process.

Miss Gulch Returns! has nothing to do with Hamilton's playing the role on film.

It's predicated on the unlikely possibility that, after being reduced to a bit part in The Wizard of Oz after her big number, "I'm a Bitch," was cut, she ended up as an entertainer in an establishment called Dorothy's Bar and Lounge.

Funny thing is, Throckmorton makes all that seem likely from that early moment he sings the hilarious "I'm a Bitch," then cuts into a biographical number in which Almira explains that she was "born on a bike in West Topeka on an afternoon in 1902."

Throckmorton's unerring knack for comic timing based in female psychology and his ability to continually spring surprises based in character soon has the audience eating out of his long, tapered hands.

Barton's script is devilishly clever – so clever, in fact, that Almira seems to the Oscar Wilde epigrammatic manner born – and Throckmorton knows just how to lob each zinger into the house.

Sample:  "As my mother always said, 'It's impolite not to keep the conversation going when the other person's mouth is full.'"

Or simply:  "Frustration is the mother of appreciation."

Throckmorton, who staged the show with Randy Strawderman, gives each line its explosive due, sings as expressively as he speaks and gets fine support from musical director Timothy Brewster, who doubles as the onstage pianist.

Thomas W. Hammond's schoolmarmish costume for Almira springs a lot of surprises of its own. Timothy McMath's bar setting, which features a large rainbow and a ruby slipper as big as a canoe, is A-OK. McMath devised the fine lighting as well.

She'll Get You, My Pretty: Miss Gulch Returns

GAY RICHMOND, February 8, 2002, Reviewed by Carter Grove

She's Back!

You may not be able to recall who Miss Gulch was or name the actress who played her.  After all, she had no musical numbers and was cast as the bicycling witch who puts Toto in a basket.  She wasn't exactly one of the more endearing characters in The Wizard of Oz. But like one of your childhood nightmares, Almira Gulch is back in the Richmond Triangle Players production of Miss Gulch Returns!.

You might expect Miss Gulch to be a bitter, shrewish, aggressive, angry sort.  She is.  And yet, you can't help feeling for her all the same.  Maybe it's all of her double and triple entendres, all the puns, and all the gender bending and gay-friendly humor ("As my mother used to say, show me a man with a sense of humor, and I'll show you his lover").  Perhaps it's because you sympathize with her unhappy childhood in West Topeka and the raw deal she's received since the film that ensured Judy Garland's fame.  Or maybe it's because "In short, she's what each one of us will become."

Miss Gulch says she could have been like Judy Garland, with the "flamboyant men impersonating her to this day" if her musical number, "I'm a Bitch," hadn't been cut from the film.  Ever since, she's been a lonely woman, frequenting cabarets, where she eventually became a performer.  She drinks to excess, only because she can't find a man, as she tells us in the memorable tune "Pour Me a Man". The show appeals so well because it's part cabaret, part standup comedy, part drag show.  What could be more fun?

When playwright/lyricist Fred Barton accidentally met Margaret Hamilton, he began a star-struck obsession that led to the development of Miss Gulch Returns.  But where Fred Barton, who played the role in the original production, has Gulch sing in a clearly masculine New York cabaret style, Robert Throckmorton's renditions in this production sound like the way Miss Gulch would sing these songs.  It's not just her voice that resonates, it's her style.

Throckmorton masters the stage, as well as his voice, body, facial expressions and timing.  Even when the pianist misses a beat or hits the wrong key, Throckmorton never does.  His ad-libs flow so easily that the untrained ear might think they are part of the original script.  He first appears on stage as a man of low self-esteem who introduces and attempts to seduce Miss Gulch.  By the time he changes into drag, Almira Gulch's tight-fisted body and repulsive big mouth stun the memory and mesmerize the attention.  In Fieldens' very intimate venue it can be difficult even for the best actors to find the right chord to connect with the audience.  The experienced Throckmorton plays this stage like it's his home field.

The costume design is right on target, down to the campy nose and fishnet stockings.  Throckmorton's complete control of the house ensures that Miss Gulch Returns wickedly entertains.