Friday, January 14, 2000

WALL TO WALLER: Vet retraces steps in Misbehavin'

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — Ray Hatch may not have been born to choreograph and act in Fats Waller's revue, "Ain't Misbehavin'." But it would be difficult to imagine anyone better suited.

Born and raised in northwest Washington, D.C., he was immersed in the fine arts singing, dancing, acting, drawing from his earliest days.

"I always sang and danced," said Hatch, who not only plays the part of Ray but also steps outside his acting role to oversee movement in the Seaside Music Theater production that opens tonight.

"It never occurred to me that it was something that could be a career, though," he said. "My mother was very well-versed in all kinds of music, and every sort of music was around at home, when we rode in the car and listened to the radio, at plays, in the school chorus and at church, where I sang in the choir and in folk masses.

"I was the kid that always had the 45s and battery- operated record player I was the first one to have a portable record player, and I still have all my records. But I didn't get interested in theater until I was in 11th grade," said Hatch, 42, who lives in Orlando.

Until that high-school year, he was planning a career in graphic arts. But then a friend introduced him to her drama teacher, and things began to fall into place.

"My family lived just up the street from a big auditorium, and we were always going to shows there I saw Ella Fitzgerald 13 times," he said. "I got very interested in acting; I loved the whole idea of learning lines, of drawing on new facets of my personality."

Hatch already was singing in his natural tenor/baritone, though his first roles tended toward the dramatic. He hadn't yet begun to tap into another innate talent, however.

"I was a senior in high school when a teacher at the Columbia School of the Arts in Maryland recommended me for a part in The Me Nobody Knows,' and I began to dance I didn't dance until I was 18 years old, and that's late for a dancer."

But once he learned his steps, everything clicked.

Hatch went directly from professional work while in high school to the stage, skipping college and launching a career that has taken him to Los Angeles, Chicago, China and, since 1990, to acting and directing stints from his Orlando base. One of his jobs was in Illinois, working with "Ain't Misbehavin'" director Chuck Hoenes, who has been a choreographer/director at Seaside for more than 20 years, in a different production of the musical.

That was his third "Ain't Misbehavin'" he had played his usual part, Ray, in the first two productions, said Hatch. And, after that third show in Hoenes' Illinois theater, in which Hatch had a triple role acting, directing and choreographing he went on to develop his various approaches to the revue of Fats Waller hits from the '20s, '30s and early '40s. The one he and Hoenes are staging at SMT Downtown will be fairly true to the original, he says, a show that swept the award categories after its 1978 Broadway opening.

"Our show will be pretty much exactly the same colorwise, and in the costumes and set," said Hatch. Unlike the recent Broadway tour of "Ain't Misbehavin'" that served more as a showcase for its stars, the Pointer Sisters, the Seaside "Ain't Misbehavin'" will go right to the main point, and will be a celebration of Fats Waller's music. There's no real story line but through the music, because of the way it's arranged, you come to understand the kind of person he was, the kind of people he hung around with, the kind of joy his artistry encompasses," he said.

"The show is also a celebration of that core earthiness that exemplifies African Americans just having fun," said Hatch.

There will be only six people on stage Illeana Kirven, Sapphira Schatara, Horace E. Smith III, Shontelle Thrash, pianist and SMT musical director Terry Tichenor and Hatch himself. They won't trace the life of Fats Waller, a man who hit his stride while in his early teens and who was already a legend in America and abroad when he died, in 1943 at age 39.

But as they rock past, from the opening "Ain't Misbehavin'" of 1929, to the final "It's a Sin To Tell a Lie," from 1933, those tunes many of them American classics but some nearly forgotten tell a tale, with "a beginning, middle and end," he said. Fats Waller was just huge a gigantic man, with enormous talent, who lived large in every way.

"Every time I do Ain't Misbehavin' it's a little bit different I've done it with people who were physically like the original cast, and I've done it with people who were different from them. It's always very smooth as far as the movement is concerned, though; its movements are like those in a well-oiled machine," said Hatch.

And its movements, not surprisingly, are like his own constant, jazzy, syncopated, pulsing with an inner vitality that echoes that of the 20th century, from ragtime to stride, and on through jazz, swing and the rhythms Fats Waller's work inspired. Long before those first dance lessons, when he was 18, Hatch was dancing, to all the music around him, always.

"My instruments are my voice and my feet," he said. "I play my voice, and I play my body."