Stephanie Bates leans into the dressing-room mirror and delicately re- adjusts a false eyelash that perspiration has set askew. The women behind her scramble for their costumes, throwing off tap shoes, pulling on tights. The mood is frantic, but full dress rehearsals are like that. No one is quite comfortable with the routine yet.
The finale is next. Bates, calmer than most, slips into her show-girl outfit, a jeweled network of baubles and beads cascading down her lithe body. A feather from her sequined cape floats past her painted red lips, and she blows it away matter-of-factly. Ten pounds of rhinestones, wires and multicolored feathers ascend 3 ft. over her head. The headdress hurts. Bates must crouch down and walk ducklike to clear the door to the stage.
She takes a moment to steady herself, and the music comes up. She and the others glide gracefully into the spotlight, arms extended, costumes dazzling. Step, kick; step, kick. It’s the glitzy routine you would expect from any professional nightclub act. But this show is something special: its cast is made up entirely of military personnel and their spouses.
Although she handles herself well, Bates, 39, is not a show girl. She is a Marine wife and mother, whose husband, Marine Corps Major John Bates, is one of many soldiers from the Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Station who are serving in the front lines in Saudi Arabia. It’s not that she and the other wives are not worried about their husbands’ safety. Instead of agonizing nonstop in front of the television, however, they are occupying their time in an unusual way: dancing.
“I know it sounds frivolous compared to what’s going on,” says Bates, “but it’s a needed diversion. Otherwise, I’d just sit here with the news on, thinking about him every minute of every day.” Her diversion takes the form of the Mardi Gras Follies ’91. It is a charity fund raiser, staged annually by the Awa Lau Wahine, a Hawaiian term meaning Ladies of the Harbor. The group is an officers’ wives club composed of Navy, Coast Guard and Marine women on the island of Oahu.
A somber mood prevailed over the usually high-spirited cast and crew as practice began on the night of Jan. 16, the day war broke out in the Persian Gulf. Bates anguished over whether or not to attend rehearsal that evening. She finally decided to go, but admitted that there wouldn’t be any “sparkle” in her performance that night. Her son Josh, 12, accompanied her. They needed to be together while Josh’s dad was in harm’s way.
As opening night approached, practices became more intense. There were routines to be remembered, costumes to be fitted and lyrics to be learned, and there was timing to be perfected. The gnawing fears of what was happening to their husbands in the Saudi desert slipped, temporarily, to the back of their consciousness, as director Jack Cione put his 55 charges through exhausting rehearsal routines.
Anyone familiar with these productions — and most Oahu residents are — knows they are not your typical “Hey, let’s put on a show” charity fund raisers. Having professionally directed and choreographed all his life, director Cione will accept nothing less than polished and professional – performances, even from an all-volunteer cast. Says he: “I abhor any attempt, big budget or small, that comes off looking like a PTA production.”
The gala dates back to 1955, when the women staged a Mardi Gras costume ball, presided over by a king and queen. By the mid-’60s, it had evolved into an annual one-night minstrel show. Each successive year has brought more talent and bigger audiences. But it wasn’t until Cione took over as director in 1988 that the event was catapulted from an in-house variety show to a professional-quality production.
The culmination of his efforts is a power-packed 90-minute musical revue that will run for five weeks starting Feb. 7. It boasts snappy show tunes, precision tap lines, and leggy ladies in dazzling costumes dripping with sequins and feathers. All this is sandwiched between an opening carnival act that nightly crowns the king and queen of Mardi Gras, and a red, white and blue finale guaranteed to strain the tear ducts of even the most hard-nosed patriots. Though the cast consists entirely of active-duty and retired military personnel and dependents, it turns in a performance that rivals anything you’ll see on the stages of Las Vegas or Atlantic City.
Cione, 64, is certain he has another smash hit in the offing: “At my age, I’m too old to turn out a flop.” His confidence is justifiable. A lifelong dancer, choreographer and director, he retired to Hawaii in the ’50s after making a million with a chain of successful dance studios on the mainland. But the show-biz bug was still with him. When he viewed a lackluster show at a Honolulu nightclub in 1958, he got the owner’s consent to work his magic and turned it into a winning act. To give it that extra bounce, Cione had his dancers go topless. It shocked the island like nothing else since the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Audiences swarmed into the club, and Cione was given half the operation as a reward. He ultimately parlayed his success into a string of nine clubs.
Today Cione is using old costumes from his nightclub days — with some essential parts added — to grace the bodies of the officers’ wives and other Mardi Gras cast members. The women, however, have no qualms about Cione’s lurid past. Producer Jeanne Dorsey, wife of the commander of the Third Fleet, Admiral James F. Dorsey, calls Cione a miracle man for volunteering so much of his time, effort and talent to mold a military community into a theatrical troupe. For his part, Cione enjoys the chance to work with these gung-ho amateurs. “It’s their positive attitude,” he says. “They’re living out the fantasy of what it’s like to be a show girl. I love to see them blossom.”
Although this is Bates’ first year of doing the show, she is well ahead of the rest of the group. The petite, youthful-looking blond studied tap and ballet all through her school years. She choreographed her college drill team in Arkansas and moved on to a brief stint in modeling while studying for her master’s degree in early-childhood education at the University of Central Arkansas. Her stage work stopped when she began teaching kindergarten. But her dance training and modeling experience make her the exception rather than the rule in this production; most of the other cast members have had neither.
“I start at ground zero with these women,” says Cione. For five months, they are drilled in tap, jazz, how to walk as a show girl, theatrical makeup and stage presence. When Cione’s done with them, women who have never had Lesson 1 in tap will hoof their way through a 10-minute routine without a glitch. They may not know a single other step, but they’ll nail their numbers every performance. The director has a penchant for squeezing the last drop of showmanship from what he has to work with. He pushes each performer to her limit.
Bates is at ease with that degree of commitment — both onstage and at home. Her husband John, who won three Purple Hearts and lost most of his right lung in Vietnam, has made a career of pushing himself to the limit. The last time she spoke to him, just a few days before the fighting began, he assured her that the situation “isn’t as bad as it sounds.” Stephanie and her son cling to those words now. “We have our highs and lows,” she confides. “There are times when I’m at rehearsal and think, ‘My God, what am I doing here? There’s a war going on, and here we are, dancing, as if nothing has happened.’ “
It was back in September that John left for Desert Shield. “At that point, we figured I’d be practicing while he was away, and he’d be home in time to see the show,” says Stephanie. “I like to think there’s still a chance he’ll be home in time to see a performance.”
Whether or not that wish comes true, Bates and her fellow performers take pride in the fact that their show is expected to net more than $25,000 for both local and military charities, including the Red Cross and Navy Relief Society. Thus the cast and crew of Mardi Gras Follies ’91 seem to be tapping ! out a new twist on an old adage: “They also serve who only sing and dance.”