Post by the Scribe on Jan 30, 2022 7:14:24 GMT
Karla met her husband Robby Benson (himself an actor) while working on Pirates of Penzance. They have been married since 1982 and have two kids. She was Linda Ronstadt's understudy. Karla is also famous for her professional relationship with Meatloaf who recently passed away.
SOARING FROM HARD ROCK TO 'PENZANCE' STARDOM
www.nytimes.com/1981/08/21/theater/soaring-from-hard-rock-to-penzance-stardom.html
By Leslie Bennetts
Aug. 21, 1981
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
August 21, 1981, Section C, Page 10
AT night she is Mabel, the demure Victorian maiden who gives her heart to a young pirate attempting a career change. During the day she is a rock-and-roller recording songs with titles like ''Dance in My Pants'' and ''Bloody Bess.'' ''It's a little schizoid,'' says Karla DeVito cheerfully. ''Sometimes I get kind of confused.''
At the moment, however, confusion seems a small price to pay for the success that has come Miss DeVito's way. Her life lately reads like the classic plot of the unknown singer who lands the part of understudy to the star in a hit show and ends up filling that star's shoes to critical huzzas.
In June, Miss DeVito replaced Linda Ronstadt as Mabel in ''Pirates of Penzance,'' after working as her understudy since January. She got the role despite her unlikely background, the highlight of which was a year on tour as the raucous and raunchy female vocalist with the hard-rock singer Meatloaf and his band. Although Miss DeVito's performance in ''Pirates'' has been favorably received, she will be leaving the show for a tour to promote her first record album, ''Is this a Cool World or What?'' It will be released next month. Maureen McGovern will succeed her as Mabel. Sense of Humor the Main Thing
Miss DeVito's unusual resume begins in Mokena, the small town in Illinois where she was born. Her father died when she was 3 years old, and her mother, with four children to raise, went to work selling at a clothing store. ''In our house, a sense of humor was the main thing,'' says Miss DeVito. ''That was how you survived all the blows life gave you, and that's what I've carried with me. Sometimes it's macabre, but I always maintain a sense of humor about everything.''
The ebullient Miss DeVito, who is now 28, says she knew at an early age that she wanted to perform. After graduating from high school, she went on to Loyola University as a theater major. While there, she also studied at Chicago's Second City. ''That was probably the best and most simple training I've ever had,'' she observes. ''It loosens you up and makes you open to anything.'' After a year, however, she dropped out of school to take a part with the national company of ''Godspell.''
Her next role, in ''El Grande de Coca Cola,'' took her from Chicago to Boston to New York, where she arrived in 1974 and decided to give up theater for a while. ''I wanted to get involved in rockand-roll and be part of the creative process from the ground level, where you really have control,'' she explains. ''I want to be the inventor.'' 'If She Can Do It, I Can Do It'
Following the Meatloaf period, Miss DeVito was working on her album in Los Angeles last fall when she got a call asking whether she would like to try out to be Miss Ronstadt's understudy in ''Pirates.'' Miss Ronstadt herself came out of a rock background. Although Miss DeVito had never even sung soprano, let alone done an operetta, she says, ''I thought, well, why not - if she can do it, I can do it!'' Miss DeVito joined the show as understudy when it opened on Broadway on Jan. 8. Four days later she went on in the starring role for the first time when Miss Ronstadt became ill.
The vocally demanding role of Mabel has prompted some changes in Miss DeVito's way of life. ''Mabel has to be in the stratosphere, and if you don't get the right amount of sleep and stay quiet a certain amount of the time each day, you lose those top notes,'' she says. ''I pretty much stopped talking to my friends; I wouldn't talk on the phone, and I went through periods when I wouldn't talk all day.''
Although she had never sung in Mabel's range, Miss DeVito has a powerful voice that packs a wallop even in the upper register. ''Mezzo was the highest I ever sang before this,'' she reports. ''The soprano roles were always boring; the alto part was always the most interesting.'' Created Her Own Vamp Role
The role of the simpering Mabel represents a departure in other ways as well. ''I've never played an ingenue before,'' says Miss DeVito, who is small and dark and striking, although her features are too sharp and too strong to be conventionally pretty. ''Even in high school melodramas I was always the evil woman. I created my own character with Meatloaf, too, sort of a vamp - playing against what I really am, I guess.''
Miss DeVito, a feminist, views Mabel as ''a woman ahead of her time.'' ''She's the only one,'' Miss DeVito notes approvingly, ''who's willing to say, 'Yes, I'll take that guy!' ''
She looks back on her career as ''a series of unplanned mishaps that always led me into positive experiences.'' ''I've never been ambitious, so much as I've always just been in the right place at the right time with the right goods,'' she says. '' 'The Great Mistake' is what they used to call me in college. I guess that's how I could never sing anything that remotely resembled coloratura and then could come in and sing Mabel.'' Writing a Rock Musical
Miss DeVito is also writing a rock musical ''about a female pirate in the 17th century,'' she says, adding that the inspiration came not from ''Pirates'' but from a play called ''Bloody Bess,'' which she saw in Chicago in 1975. She has written a number of songs for the show, in which she hopes to star, and wants to be in position to do an audition for backers by December.
''That's my baby; that's the real important thing,'' she says of the project, which is subtitled ''A Musical Tale of Piracy and Revenge.''
In the meantime, however, there is her new album, which contains four songs of which she is author or co-author, including ''Bloody Bess.'' Miss DeVito is also featured on Jim Steinman's album ''Bad for Good,'' in the duet ''Dance in My Pants.'' She says her music is ''power pop, a little bit weird,'' then throws up her hands in exasperation and says she can't really describe it.
''My album is one side of me,'' she says. ''Mabel shows another side of me. 'Bloody Bess' shows an entirely different side of me. But right now I just want to go out there and be 100 percent me.''
STAGE: NEW CAST AT HELM OF 'PIRATES OF PENZANCE'
www.nytimes.com/1981/09/30/theater/stage-new-cast-at-helm-of-pirates-of-penzance.html
A LOT has happened to Joseph Papp's production of ''The Pirates of Penzance'' since it first sailed triumphantly into Central Park two summers ago. In January, this musical moved to Broadway's most problematic theater, the Uris, and survived the difficult sea change in such fine style that it ultimately received the Tony Award as the season's best revival. Last summer, ''Pirates'' vacated the Uris to make room for ''My Fair Lady'' -only to land in Broadway's second most antiseptic house, the Minskoff. Just before and after the latest move, four new principal performers joined the cast.
This week, critics have been invited to see how the show has held up. While one would like to report that ''Pirates'' is one of those productions, like ''A Chorus Line,'' that seems impervious to cast changes, that is not the case here. Certainly the director, Wilford Leach; the ch oreographer, Graciela Daniele, and the musical adapter, William Ellio tt, are to be congratulated for keeping the broad design of the ir remarkably inventive revival in shiny-as-new shape. Their bright concept -to rethink but not rewrite a century-old operetta with modern Broadway razzle-dazzle - remains as solid as ever. It's wh en one looks to the small details - the ones that only performers ca n provide - that the slippage becomes apparent.
Three of the newcomers - Maureen McGovern, Robby Benson and Kaye Ballard - are in varying degrees passable, though none of them yet come up to the level of their predecessors. Actually, Miss McGovern, a Hollywood veteran, is a real find for the musical theater - though not necessarily for the role of an ingenue. She has a knockout voice and is already singing Mabel with greater authority than either Linda Ronstadt or Karla De Vito. After stopping the show with ''Poor Wandering One,'' she then goes on to reveal that she's a winning comedian, too. Yet there's no ignoring the fact that she is too mature for this character - especially as she must play opposite Mr. Benson's puppy-doggish Frederic. One greatly misses the innocent, horny sexual magnetism that Miss Ronstadt and her frisky slave of duty, Rex Smith, brought to the young lovers' duets.
If Mr. Benson lacks Mr. Smith's presence as an actor and a singer, he makes the most of his limited charms. As always, he's a convincing naif, and he intermittently taps into the joshing (but not campy) comic tone of Mr. Leach's staging. As Ruth, the piratical maid of all work, Miss Ballard is having a lot of fun - and success - with the music, but has yet to build a character. In the past, this performer has shown a tendency to broadness, but here she has swung too far in the other direction - she's bland. Surely, Miss Ballard, the cast's most recent arrival, can and will create a dizzy persona to match those of the previous Ruths, Patricia Routledge and Estelle Parsons.
Whether Treat Williams will take charge of his crucial role, the Pirate King, is another question. This young actor, a commanding center to the movie version of ''Hair'' (if not to ''Prince of the City''), makes almost no impression at all in ''Pirates.'' Brave as he is to follow the extraordinary Kevin Kline, he has fallen into the worst possible trap; instead of attempting to obliterate our memory of Mr. Kline by creating his own characterization, Mr. Williams slavishly imitates nearly all of the previous Pirate King's gestures.
It's not a successful impersonation, either in terms of skill, energy or concentration. Mr. Williams can't do the acrobatics - he fudges the deadpan backward pratfall at the end of his first number, for instance - and he is reduced to talking the tongue-twisting ditty (''My Eyes Are Fully Open'') that's been interpolated from ''Ruddigore.'' Yet even if Mr. Williams could execute his intentions, his work would still seem stale - mimicry, however well done, can never be as exciting as a freshly minted performance. And when the Pirate King seems lackluster, so do many of the high points of the show's first act.
Luckily, there are compensations throughout, especially for those who have not previously encountered this ''Pirates'' - or, for that matter, any other version of Gilbert and Sullivan's glorious confection. The ensemble and band conquer the Minskoff as they did the Uris, and so do the original cast's holdovers. Act I picks up decisively with the arrival of George Rose's batty, parasol-twirling Major General. Act II receives a manic boost from Tony Azito's rag doll of a Keystone Kop and from the cyclonic, slapstick dance routines that send him and his fellow constables flying. From there, it's on to the pirates' thrilling kickline (''With Cat-Like Tread'') and the celebratory fireworks of the finale. While the overall voyage is calmer now, you can be sure that ''Pirates'' still sends the audience home on a very high wa ve. On a High Wave THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE, by Gilbert and Sullivan; directed by Wilford Leach; music adapted by William Elliott; choreography by Graciela Daniele; scenery by Bob Shaw and Mr. Leach; lighting by Jennifer Tipton; cotumes by Patricia McGourty; sound by Don Ketteler; conducted by Dan Berlinghoff. Presented by Joseph Papp. At the Minskoff Theater, West 45th Street and Broadway. Pirate King ............................Treat Williams Samuel ..................................Stephen Hanan Frederic .................................Robby Benson Ruth ......................................Kay Ballard Major-General Stanley's Daughters Robin Boudreau, Maria Guida, Nancy Heikin and Bonnie Simmons Edith .....................................Marcie Shaw Kate ..................................Laurie Beechman Isabel ....................................Wendy Wolfe Mabel .................. ..............Maureen McGovern Major-General Stanley .....................George Rose Sergeant .... ...............................Tony Azito Pirates and P olice Dean Badolat o, Mark Beudert, Scott Burkhold- er, Walter C aldwell, Tim Flavin, George Kmeck, Phil LaDuca, Daniel Marcus, G. Eu- gene Moose, Jeff McCarthy, Joseph Neal, Wal- ter Niehenke , Joe Pichette, Ellis Skeeter Williams and Michael Wilson.
SOARING FROM HARD ROCK TO 'PENZANCE' STARDOM
www.nytimes.com/1981/08/21/theater/soaring-from-hard-rock-to-penzance-stardom.html
By Leslie Bennetts
Aug. 21, 1981
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
August 21, 1981, Section C, Page 10
New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to Times Machine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared.
www.nytimes.com/subscription/multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=4KKHF
www.nytimes.com/subscription/multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=4KKHF
AT night she is Mabel, the demure Victorian maiden who gives her heart to a young pirate attempting a career change. During the day she is a rock-and-roller recording songs with titles like ''Dance in My Pants'' and ''Bloody Bess.'' ''It's a little schizoid,'' says Karla DeVito cheerfully. ''Sometimes I get kind of confused.''
At the moment, however, confusion seems a small price to pay for the success that has come Miss DeVito's way. Her life lately reads like the classic plot of the unknown singer who lands the part of understudy to the star in a hit show and ends up filling that star's shoes to critical huzzas.
In June, Miss DeVito replaced Linda Ronstadt as Mabel in ''Pirates of Penzance,'' after working as her understudy since January. She got the role despite her unlikely background, the highlight of which was a year on tour as the raucous and raunchy female vocalist with the hard-rock singer Meatloaf and his band. Although Miss DeVito's performance in ''Pirates'' has been favorably received, she will be leaving the show for a tour to promote her first record album, ''Is this a Cool World or What?'' It will be released next month. Maureen McGovern will succeed her as Mabel. Sense of Humor the Main Thing
Miss DeVito's unusual resume begins in Mokena, the small town in Illinois where she was born. Her father died when she was 3 years old, and her mother, with four children to raise, went to work selling at a clothing store. ''In our house, a sense of humor was the main thing,'' says Miss DeVito. ''That was how you survived all the blows life gave you, and that's what I've carried with me. Sometimes it's macabre, but I always maintain a sense of humor about everything.''
The ebullient Miss DeVito, who is now 28, says she knew at an early age that she wanted to perform. After graduating from high school, she went on to Loyola University as a theater major. While there, she also studied at Chicago's Second City. ''That was probably the best and most simple training I've ever had,'' she observes. ''It loosens you up and makes you open to anything.'' After a year, however, she dropped out of school to take a part with the national company of ''Godspell.''
Her next role, in ''El Grande de Coca Cola,'' took her from Chicago to Boston to New York, where she arrived in 1974 and decided to give up theater for a while. ''I wanted to get involved in rockand-roll and be part of the creative process from the ground level, where you really have control,'' she explains. ''I want to be the inventor.'' 'If She Can Do It, I Can Do It'
Following the Meatloaf period, Miss DeVito was working on her album in Los Angeles last fall when she got a call asking whether she would like to try out to be Miss Ronstadt's understudy in ''Pirates.'' Miss Ronstadt herself came out of a rock background. Although Miss DeVito had never even sung soprano, let alone done an operetta, she says, ''I thought, well, why not - if she can do it, I can do it!'' Miss DeVito joined the show as understudy when it opened on Broadway on Jan. 8. Four days later she went on in the starring role for the first time when Miss Ronstadt became ill.
The vocally demanding role of Mabel has prompted some changes in Miss DeVito's way of life. ''Mabel has to be in the stratosphere, and if you don't get the right amount of sleep and stay quiet a certain amount of the time each day, you lose those top notes,'' she says. ''I pretty much stopped talking to my friends; I wouldn't talk on the phone, and I went through periods when I wouldn't talk all day.''
Although she had never sung in Mabel's range, Miss DeVito has a powerful voice that packs a wallop even in the upper register. ''Mezzo was the highest I ever sang before this,'' she reports. ''The soprano roles were always boring; the alto part was always the most interesting.'' Created Her Own Vamp Role
The role of the simpering Mabel represents a departure in other ways as well. ''I've never played an ingenue before,'' says Miss DeVito, who is small and dark and striking, although her features are too sharp and too strong to be conventionally pretty. ''Even in high school melodramas I was always the evil woman. I created my own character with Meatloaf, too, sort of a vamp - playing against what I really am, I guess.''
Miss DeVito, a feminist, views Mabel as ''a woman ahead of her time.'' ''She's the only one,'' Miss DeVito notes approvingly, ''who's willing to say, 'Yes, I'll take that guy!' ''
She looks back on her career as ''a series of unplanned mishaps that always led me into positive experiences.'' ''I've never been ambitious, so much as I've always just been in the right place at the right time with the right goods,'' she says. '' 'The Great Mistake' is what they used to call me in college. I guess that's how I could never sing anything that remotely resembled coloratura and then could come in and sing Mabel.'' Writing a Rock Musical
Miss DeVito is also writing a rock musical ''about a female pirate in the 17th century,'' she says, adding that the inspiration came not from ''Pirates'' but from a play called ''Bloody Bess,'' which she saw in Chicago in 1975. She has written a number of songs for the show, in which she hopes to star, and wants to be in position to do an audition for backers by December.
''That's my baby; that's the real important thing,'' she says of the project, which is subtitled ''A Musical Tale of Piracy and Revenge.''
In the meantime, however, there is her new album, which contains four songs of which she is author or co-author, including ''Bloody Bess.'' Miss DeVito is also featured on Jim Steinman's album ''Bad for Good,'' in the duet ''Dance in My Pants.'' She says her music is ''power pop, a little bit weird,'' then throws up her hands in exasperation and says she can't really describe it.
''My album is one side of me,'' she says. ''Mabel shows another side of me. 'Bloody Bess' shows an entirely different side of me. But right now I just want to go out there and be 100 percent me.''
STAGE: NEW CAST AT HELM OF 'PIRATES OF PENZANCE'
www.nytimes.com/1981/09/30/theater/stage-new-cast-at-helm-of-pirates-of-penzance.html
A LOT has happened to Joseph Papp's production of ''The Pirates of Penzance'' since it first sailed triumphantly into Central Park two summers ago. In January, this musical moved to Broadway's most problematic theater, the Uris, and survived the difficult sea change in such fine style that it ultimately received the Tony Award as the season's best revival. Last summer, ''Pirates'' vacated the Uris to make room for ''My Fair Lady'' -only to land in Broadway's second most antiseptic house, the Minskoff. Just before and after the latest move, four new principal performers joined the cast.
This week, critics have been invited to see how the show has held up. While one would like to report that ''Pirates'' is one of those productions, like ''A Chorus Line,'' that seems impervious to cast changes, that is not the case here. Certainly the director, Wilford Leach; the ch oreographer, Graciela Daniele, and the musical adapter, William Ellio tt, are to be congratulated for keeping the broad design of the ir remarkably inventive revival in shiny-as-new shape. Their bright concept -to rethink but not rewrite a century-old operetta with modern Broadway razzle-dazzle - remains as solid as ever. It's wh en one looks to the small details - the ones that only performers ca n provide - that the slippage becomes apparent.
Three of the newcomers - Maureen McGovern, Robby Benson and Kaye Ballard - are in varying degrees passable, though none of them yet come up to the level of their predecessors. Actually, Miss McGovern, a Hollywood veteran, is a real find for the musical theater - though not necessarily for the role of an ingenue. She has a knockout voice and is already singing Mabel with greater authority than either Linda Ronstadt or Karla De Vito. After stopping the show with ''Poor Wandering One,'' she then goes on to reveal that she's a winning comedian, too. Yet there's no ignoring the fact that she is too mature for this character - especially as she must play opposite Mr. Benson's puppy-doggish Frederic. One greatly misses the innocent, horny sexual magnetism that Miss Ronstadt and her frisky slave of duty, Rex Smith, brought to the young lovers' duets.
If Mr. Benson lacks Mr. Smith's presence as an actor and a singer, he makes the most of his limited charms. As always, he's a convincing naif, and he intermittently taps into the joshing (but not campy) comic tone of Mr. Leach's staging. As Ruth, the piratical maid of all work, Miss Ballard is having a lot of fun - and success - with the music, but has yet to build a character. In the past, this performer has shown a tendency to broadness, but here she has swung too far in the other direction - she's bland. Surely, Miss Ballard, the cast's most recent arrival, can and will create a dizzy persona to match those of the previous Ruths, Patricia Routledge and Estelle Parsons.
Whether Treat Williams will take charge of his crucial role, the Pirate King, is another question. This young actor, a commanding center to the movie version of ''Hair'' (if not to ''Prince of the City''), makes almost no impression at all in ''Pirates.'' Brave as he is to follow the extraordinary Kevin Kline, he has fallen into the worst possible trap; instead of attempting to obliterate our memory of Mr. Kline by creating his own characterization, Mr. Williams slavishly imitates nearly all of the previous Pirate King's gestures.
It's not a successful impersonation, either in terms of skill, energy or concentration. Mr. Williams can't do the acrobatics - he fudges the deadpan backward pratfall at the end of his first number, for instance - and he is reduced to talking the tongue-twisting ditty (''My Eyes Are Fully Open'') that's been interpolated from ''Ruddigore.'' Yet even if Mr. Williams could execute his intentions, his work would still seem stale - mimicry, however well done, can never be as exciting as a freshly minted performance. And when the Pirate King seems lackluster, so do many of the high points of the show's first act.
Luckily, there are compensations throughout, especially for those who have not previously encountered this ''Pirates'' - or, for that matter, any other version of Gilbert and Sullivan's glorious confection. The ensemble and band conquer the Minskoff as they did the Uris, and so do the original cast's holdovers. Act I picks up decisively with the arrival of George Rose's batty, parasol-twirling Major General. Act II receives a manic boost from Tony Azito's rag doll of a Keystone Kop and from the cyclonic, slapstick dance routines that send him and his fellow constables flying. From there, it's on to the pirates' thrilling kickline (''With Cat-Like Tread'') and the celebratory fireworks of the finale. While the overall voyage is calmer now, you can be sure that ''Pirates'' still sends the audience home on a very high wa ve. On a High Wave THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE, by Gilbert and Sullivan; directed by Wilford Leach; music adapted by William Elliott; choreography by Graciela Daniele; scenery by Bob Shaw and Mr. Leach; lighting by Jennifer Tipton; cotumes by Patricia McGourty; sound by Don Ketteler; conducted by Dan Berlinghoff. Presented by Joseph Papp. At the Minskoff Theater, West 45th Street and Broadway. Pirate King ............................Treat Williams Samuel ..................................Stephen Hanan Frederic .................................Robby Benson Ruth ......................................Kay Ballard Major-General Stanley's Daughters Robin Boudreau, Maria Guida, Nancy Heikin and Bonnie Simmons Edith .....................................Marcie Shaw Kate ..................................Laurie Beechman Isabel ....................................Wendy Wolfe Mabel .................. ..............Maureen McGovern Major-General Stanley .....................George Rose Sergeant .... ...............................Tony Azito Pirates and P olice Dean Badolat o, Mark Beudert, Scott Burkhold- er, Walter C aldwell, Tim Flavin, George Kmeck, Phil LaDuca, Daniel Marcus, G. Eu- gene Moose, Jeff McCarthy, Joseph Neal, Wal- ter Niehenke , Joe Pichette, Ellis Skeeter Williams and Michael Wilson.