By Myra Chanin . . .
Marcie Gorman, the philanthropic co-founder, Executive Producer and Artistic Director of the MNM Theatre Company, formerly toiled in the corporate sector as the longtime CEO of 300 Weight Watchers centers in Florida and Alabama. When they moved on, so did she. When she asked herself the burning question, what would she do with the rest of her life, the answer came easy. She’d return to the arts, specifically work her way up to musical theater, the same arena that had attracted her to vocal arts studies at New York City’s LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts, the venue celebrated in the Fame movie.
Marcie focused her energies on Palm Beach’s Dreyfoos School of the Arts where she served on the foundation’s Board of Directors, initiated the Theatre for Young Audiences program, and worked with the school’s theater department on all their mainstage productions. She related well to the students, who called her “Mama Marcie,” because when they shared their problems with her she did her best to help solve them.
In 2014 she co-founded the MNM Theatre Company which, since its start, has presented 17 high-quality, professional, musical shows that have received a plethora of Carbonell Award nominations. Marcie remains faithful to her intention of hiring Florida-born or -based talent as cast and crew for her productions. In her most recent presentation at the Kravis Center Rinker Playhouse, a revival of Five Guys Named Moe with book by Clarke Peters and music by the late and great Louis Jordan, the entire cast and almost the entire crew were either local, African American or both. Several performers attended the Dreyfoos School and attended or graduated from FAU.
I saw Five Guys Named Moe at a special performance for students and staff of the Dreyfoos School who packed the auditorium. As always, Marcie welcomed the audience in her informative, unpretentious, and down-to-earth way. She introduced the band by letting each musician play a few bars on his instrument and lauded Bobby Peaco, her Musical Director, who’d been called “the best rehearsal pianist in the world” by composer Jerry Herman (Hello, Dolly, La Cage aux Folles, Mame). Bobby also lives in Florida now.
Five Guys Named Moe is packed with songs composed by Louis Jordan, who pioneered a wildly popular, very danceable blend of jazz and blues called Jump Blues or Jumpin’ Jive—the forerunner of Rhythm and Blues and even Rock and Roll. Jordan, the bandleader of the Tympany Five, regularly topped the R&B “race” charts, achieving the Number 1 slot eighteen times, with 113 weeks in that spot over the years. He was also one of the first black recording artists to achieve crossover popularity with the predominantly white mainstream American audience, with Top Ten songs on the pop charts on several occasions. I’m old enough to have lindy-hopped to some of his biggest hits—“Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” was my favorite—when Jordan and his band performed live at Lincoln Center Plaza a few years before his death.
Five Guys Named Moe is described as a musical fantasy about NoMax (James White III – FAU, Actors Equity, opera singer), a penniless, lonely guy who finds solace in the songs of an imaginary singing quintet of well-intentioned friends trying to convince him to become a better person. He opened the show with a Johnny Mercer/Hoagy Carmichael-ish lazy ballad “Early in the Morning,” leaving the remainder of the first act in the equally capable hands of the Five Moes:
- Big Moe: Leo Jasper Davis—former Young Singer of the Palm Beaches, Dreyfoos Student, BFA from New World School of the Arts;
- Little Moe: T.J. Pursley—Orlando native, BFA from FAU;
- Eat Moe: Doriyan De’Angelo Caty—FAU BMA in Musical theater, President and Artistic Director of Black Undergraduate Theater Collective;
- No Moe: Don Seward—keystone player returning to Florida; and,
- Four-Eyed Moe: Michael L. Wallace—Palm Beach native, third show with MNM Theater Company.
I loved them all.
Big Moe was so bright-eyed and mischievous, cavorting in drag, that I could forgive him for the misogyny he warbled in “Brother, Beware” about the mendacity of females.
Little Moe singing “I Like Them Fat Like That” made him the dream man of every female in the audience who ever considered herself overweight!
Eat Moe made me wait until the second act to come into his own, tenderly warbling “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.”
Four-Eyed Moe—whatta dancer! A cross between Mikhail Baryshnikov leaping into midair and touching the tip of the toes of his spread-apart feet with his fingertips like a Moiseyev Cossack and then descending to the floor with a split worthy of Harold or Fayard Nicholas.
But perhaps Mama Marcie’s greatest gratification was her reunion with Jacquez-Linder-Long, the Director/Choreographer of the Five Moes, who’d so impressed her during the times they’d both known each other at Dreyfoos.
Five Guys Named Moe played September 8-24, 2023, at the Rinker Playhouse of the Kravis Center. Future information about MNM Theater’s plans and shows can be found at www.mnmtheatre.org
Photos: Amy Pasquantonio
Cover photo caption: Doriyan Caty, TJ Pursley, Don Seward, Michael Wallace, Leo Jasper Davis
