Teen Club/Whole Backstage History

09/29/2025

Photos of the melodrama 'Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie (He can't corner you There).' Directed by Jaton Meyer in the spring of 1982, the show featured Tony Williams, Dorothy Coy, Phyllis Mendenhall, Rex Kissort and Cynthia Meyer. The show was presented at the World's Fair in Knoxville, TN, the top of the Harbor House in Guntersville and on the front steps of the Courthouse. From the estate of Bill Meyer.

10/24/2024

Spooky photos from the WBS after Spooktacular rehearsal

08/18/2024

I won't be able to attend the celebration of Cheryl's life today, unfortunately. However, are some more photos of Cheryl at a movement class at the Whole Backstage in Guntersville sometime in the 1990's, I think.

08/11/2024

Memories of Cheryl Part III

In the summer of 1977, we did the show ‘Oklahoma’ at the Guntersville high school auditorium and at the von Braun Civic Center concert hall. It was around this time that I really started getting involved in actually designing the lights. And Cheryl, as well as my mother, assisted me with that.

Since this was the first major musical for me to help with the lights, I was a bit intimidated. Candy Rhea of Albertville directed ‘Oklahoma.’ I believe Dot and Cheryl jointly did the set design and the lighting design. At Guntersville High School, the only way to get to the lights was from the rear of the auditorium, so we had to crawl over the iron ceiling beams to get to the lights. It was also intolerably hot in the ceiling. So, we chose to focus the lights after midnight, when it was a little bit cooler. But focusing the lights was extremely difficult because of the configuration. It was almost impossible to see the stage while you were focusing the lights, so you had to rely on someone below to tell you where to point the lights on the stage, and Preston and Cheryl helped me with that minor problem.

Doing the lights for ‘Oklahoma’ at the von Braun Center was much more intimidating, because I had probably five times the number of lighting instruments that we had at the high school. So, I basically said, ‘I can't do this,’ and Cheryl designed them for me. Honestly, however, I believe she was also a bit intimidated. Since the concert hall had union workers, we couldn't do anything except direct the technicians what to do. As a result, the lights for this show were not particularly good at the concert hall.

There are many stories that I could relate about touring ‘The Fantasticks.’ I believe we performed the show at the Lake Guntersville State Park pavilion on Independence Day 1977, for free. We performed ‘The Fantasticks’ in four separate locations, I believe, and each one of them had its own set of challenges and was very memorable. This was the first show we had ever done at the pavilion. The next summer, we became much, much more acquainted with that performance space. We did the show on a slightly elevated stage. There were a series of large wooden beams circling the periphery of the pavilion. We were able to hang the lights off a pipe which hung under the beams. Which was quite easy to work with. However, the pavilion, of course, was open air. And it was a bad weekend for insects. As a result, the insects were swarming the lighting instruments as well as the people on the stage. So, there were times when they swallowed insects as they were performing! It was quite a mess. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to be a performer for that performance. Additionally, the lights were hanging so low that every time a performer gesticulated near his face, he would cast a shadow right across his face. Believe me, we never made that mistake again.
We also did the show at the von Braun center Playhouse. We had done ‘Arsenic’ there the summer previous, so I was a little bit familiar with the performance space. It was the most amazing setup I had ever seen up to that point. It is a theater-in-the-round, which means the audience could circle the entire stage. The stage could also be re-arranged as a standard proscenium or a thrust stage. Since Cheryl and my mom had just completed a lighting course, they were very anxious to see what they could accomplish with lighting effects. By the time everything was said and done, they had used more than one hundred lighting instruments, and they had to find lights from all over the playhouse and probably all over the von Braun center to have enough Instruments to satisfy them. Needless to say, it was quite a challenge for me and Steve Smith to run the lights, thanks to Cheryl and my mom designing the lights for this complex show.

08/09/2024

In the fall of 1976, Dot directed the classic comedy ‘Arsenic and old Lace.’ Cheryl played the female lead, Elaine, and Dave Lauryn was the male lead, Mortimer. Cheryl was remarkably good in that role, in spite of the fact that it was a somewhat submissive female. We performed the show at the Lake Guntersville State Park lodge and at the von Braun Civic Center that fall. It was a two-story set, because the aunts had their bedrooms upstairs and Teddy Roosevelt had to come running down the steps shouting ‘Charge, charge the blockhouse!’

I would be very remiss if I did not mention where we rehearsed that show, as well as ‘Alice through the Looking Glass.’ Owen Couch, Cheryl's father, had a building right next to his motel and grocery, which was an abandoned restaurant, the Cactus Inn. The building is still here, just north of the river bridge in Guntersville, and today it is a company that completes headstones. At the time, the Whole Backstage did not have a place of its own, so we rented the abandoned Cactus Inn for a rehearsal space for about $100 a month. So, we rehearsed two shows in an abandoned restaurant if you can imagine.
It was about this time that I started becoming interested in stage lighting. Cheryl and my mom had taken a class at Montevallo in stage lighting, and I attended a few of the classes. It seemed interesting to me, remarkably interesting, so I proceeded to learn more about it. Cheryl taught me some of the fundamentals and I took it from there. Cheryl taught me the creative side, Steve Smith taught me the technical side, and Preston Beck was pretty much a blend of the two and taught me everything else. These were my three mentors. Not bad. A truly diverse, smart, and creative group of people to learn from.

In the fall, I assume my mom and Cheryl went back to school. My mom got her degree in early spring of 1977, I think. My parents were divorced at about the same time. That summer, or earlier, my mother hit upon the idea of paying some of the performers to act in the show ‘The Fantasticks.’ So, in the summer and the fall of 1977 we performed the show in at least four diverse, very different performance spaces. Cheryl was the mime in ‘The Fantasticks,’ and again, she did an exceptional job. My memories of that show are very strong, for several reasons. But back to that later.

Cheryl and Dot worked on the lights for at least two shows that Montevallo that I can recall. They did ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ at the Palmer theater. They did the ‘Lion in Winter,’ I believe, in the Reynolds theater. So, they were getting a little bit proficient at lighting. In the Palmer theater, the lights were run from a small space called the cage off stage right. It was an old-style autotransformer board, so Dot and Cheryl had to work closely together. In the Reynolds theater, the lighting booth was in the rear and was only accessible from a rope ladder. The lighting system there was a little bit more advanced, but Dot and Cheryl still had to sit right next to one another.

08/08/2024

My memories of Cheryl, Part I
I first became acquainted with Cheryl in the spring of 1976. At the time, my mother Dot Moore (founder of the Whole Backstage theatre in Guntersville, Alabama) was studying at the University of Montevallo to get her degree in speech and drama. Cheryl was also studying at Montevallo and got a degree in drama. They took several of the same classes together. I was still in school at the time, so I did not pay a whole lot of attention to the classes that my mother was taking. However, if I am not mistaken, they at least took one class in set design and one class in stage lighting together. I did not know at the time that Cheryl was originally from Guntersville.
Dot and Cheryl received their degrees at roughly the same time. I recall seeing Cheryl in a to play at Montevallo, ‘Ah, Wilderness,’ one of Eugene O'Neill's few ‘normal’ plays, at Montevallo. I believe Cheryl came to Guntersville for the summer, and probably worked at her dad Owen Couch’s store and motel, the Lakewood. People stayed in the motel by the week, I believe. When some of them moved out, Cheryl got the unenviable task of cleaning out the refrigerators. I worked in the store for a few Saturdays, I suppose when nobody else wanted to work there on Saturday evenings.
Around this time, Cheryl got pretty involved in the Whole Backstage. She helped my mom with the musical ‘1776.’ I was one of the representatives and Cheryl coached me on my part at her dad's home, which was attached to the store. Johnny Brewer and Bob Crook were also in ‘1776.’ It was their first play with us. I believe Cheryl may have coached them as well. Cheryl also did the choreography for the play, I think. And finally, she also had the cameo role in ‘1776’ as a painter of Benjamin Franklin, I believe. ‘1776’ was my mother's master’s thesis project, and she performed the show for her advisors at the Guntersville High School auditorium.
Cheryl was one of my earliest crushes. But as usual, I did not follow up because I was too shy. She was several years older than I was. Cheryl was outspoken even then, and quite attractive. I am sure that many other guys had a crush on her at the time.
Cheryl and my mom had bonded closely by this point, so it was pretty much a given that they would be working together on Whole Backstage plays. After we completed ‘1776,’ we repeated and revised our adaptation of ‘Alice through the looking Glass.’ Several Marshall County children in my mom’s acting classes had adapted the Lewis Carroll classic the prior spring and we had performed it all over Marshall County. We were invited to perform the show for Alabama Public Television, with color cameras. APT at that point had only black and white broadcasts, so this was pretty special. They had a series of color cameras that were transported all over the state for special recordings. Since it was about four to five months after we had done it in the spring, many of the parts had to be recast. Additionally, several songs were added or revised. My mom, Cheryl, Kim Morin and, and Edwin Weaver rewrote or added some of the songs. Kim Morin was Alice. And Cheryl was her mirror image, and a mime. We filmed ‘Alice’ late in the summer of 1976 over a period of a few days at the APT studio in Huntsville. Cheryl may have played other parts in the rewrite as well, but I honestly cannot remember. I am sure she also helped with the choreography.

08/08/2024

Photos of Cheryl Couch as Elaine in 'Arsenic and Old Lace' at the Whole Backstage in 1976.

08/04/2024

I was profoundly saddened to learn of the death of Cheryl Couch, Whole Backstage alumna, who died in her sleep last night. Cheryl was one of my mom’s (Dot Moore) best friends. They graduated from Montevallo together. Cheryl starred in several Whole Backstage plays as well as starting a mime troupe in Guntersville, Alabama. She had most recently served as a teacher at the Cincinnati Actors’ Studio.

There is no way I can put across what she meant to me in a single post. It will probably take several postings over a few days to convey a small part of her life, and her importance to the Whole Backstage. Right now, I am simply trying to comprehend her passage. I also have many photos of her in WBS shows, which I will be posting, as well.

She was, to me, a mentor in stage lighting techniques. Cheryl was an amazingly creative, strong, and strong-willed woman. She was, truly, a force of nature, whose life touched many others. Goodbye Cheryl.

May flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest.

07/15/2023

On a May 1969 episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Fred Rogers soaked his feet in a kiddie pool with his frequent guest star, “Officer” François Clemmons. The moment may seem unremarkable today, but it came across as a brave and firm stance during the American Civil Rights Movement when integrated public swimming pools were seen as controversial.

02/07/2022