From Hollywood big time to Quad Cities theater

Jake Ladd has worked with some of the biggest stars in the film and TV industry, but has found a new career high in Quad Cities theater.

The 64-year-old southern California native worked four decades in Hollywood and regional theater across the country. He nailed his QC theatrical debut as Victor Velasco in the recent Playcrafters production of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park.”

Among Ladd’s many directorial credits, he helmed a few versions of the 1963 romantic comedy, 40-some years ago, co-starring screen legend Dorothy Lamour (1914-1996) as the mother, here played by Alexa Florence.

Ladd is impressed with QC community theater and recently said Playcrafters’ truncated two-and-a-half-week rehearsal schedule rivaled professional theaters.

“The difference also is in the 10 days that you’re putting up a professional production, you’re working eight hours a day. And this is a few hours a night and no weekends, so this was unusual,” he said of Playcrafters, praising director Adam Lewis.

“Adam is a lot of fun to work with and he creates an environment that allowed me to work out basically and I appreciate it working with him,” Ladd said. “I hope we do that again. He’s fun to work with.”

Ladd has been surprised at the amount of theater (and its high quality) in the QC area.

“And the seriousness with which the local theater is approached both by the people producing it and the people attending,” he said. “It was a reminder that how much fantastic theater is going on in the Midwest. But by the way, there’s far more theater being produced right here in the Quad Cities than there is in the Los Angeles area.”

Of the local productions Ladd has seen, he cited the new Mockingbird on Main in downtown Davenport.

“I was rather impressed by the seriousness that they work in and the depth of the projects they do,” he said. “I find that to be an impressive shop.”

“People forget that a lot of the most glorious names of American theater began in community theater,” Ladd said, citing nearby Nebraska as the birthplace of Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando.

“Community theater is the underlying blood supply for the arts in terms of theater and it goes out into film and television,” he said.

“Community theater is the lifeblood of not just American theater, but it’s also the lifeblood of film and television,” Ladd said. “There’s just as much great and mediocre and bad theater in Los Angeles and New York, it’s just that we imagine it as being somehow elevated, but it really isn’t. There’s no lowering of expectations, the only thing that I have observed, but it’s not just here in the Midwest is that theaters — particularly community theaters — are hungry for what will bring an audience and they’re guessing at what will bring an audience post-pandemic.”

Why move to the QC? 

By 2019, after the passing of Ladd’s parents and three of his siblings, and “exhausted by the pace of a very congested and increasingly stressful home state of California,” he felt it was time to pursue some other passions in retirement, he said recently.

He had fallen in love with the Midwest in general and the QC specifically over the course of travels and had developed a number of friends here.

So Ladd decided to buy a house in Davenport and moved that year with Murphy, his Old English Sheepdog, where he’s enjoyed landscaping and gardening as well as local theater.

He’s seen several shows in the area, but “Barefoot in the Park” was the first he was in.

“I love the Quad Cities — it’s a great place to settle down, retire and I love it,” Ladd said. “You have to have lived in southern California to understand how wonderful the Midwest is. It’s not all about the weather, you know, southern California, there’s a lot of stress that comes with living in a place where no one makes eye contact and driving 10 miles takes an hour and a half.”

The spring in the QC “is not just green – it’s 500 shades of green,” he said. “And in southern California, spring is too, and then it’s back to brown and dusty and dry and windy. Summer is a long time. It is a long summer there and it’s 110 degrees.”

He also has pleasantly found a societal culture shock in the QC.

“Friends came to visit from New York, we were in the grocery store. and after a few moments they pulled me aside and they said, ‘Why are all these people talking to us? There’s all these strangers are talking to us — what is going on?’ I said, it’s just the Midwest, people are nice, they’re just passing the time of day.”

From backyard to big time

Ladd grew up in La Crescenta, a small suburb of Los Angeles at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains (coincidentally founded by Midwesterners, he pointed out).

He and his brother Charles produced and starred in neighborhood plays, musicals and dramas, all in their backyard. Charles Ladd went on to win an Emmy for costume design (for “St. Elsewhere”), and his credits include “Ordinary People,” “Private Benjamin,” “Dallas,” “Hill Street Blues” and “Newhart.”

Jake Ladd’s big break came when a neighbor who worked for the Hostess Baking Company, having seen one of their backyard productions, offered him a job portraying “Twinkie the Kid” in front of the company’s “day-old” bakery store.

“That foam rubber body suit led to more prominent and lucrative work as a tap-dancing Oreo Cookie for a grocery store promotion and a talking carpenter’s level for a national home improvement chain,” he recalled. “As unimpressive as these credits may seem, I learned something that has informed my philosophy about working in the arts ever since — namely do the work, take the job, but not yourself, seriously, keep putting one foot in front of the other, one job after another, keep moving forward despite stumbles, earn a living.

“I must admit that most of the steps forward on my career path were as much the result of happenstance and chance as anything calculated or planned,” Ladd said. He attended Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., majoring in Theatre Arts.

Pomona is where many of Hollywood’s industry folk send their kids to get an actual education, he said, noting some classmates were Neil Simon’s daughter and Tyrone Power, Jr., who was Ladd’s roommate.

In those days, a Theatre Arts major was expected to attain working knowledge of all aspects of the theater, including lighting and set design and construction, venue management, theatre history and acting.

Ladd was hired by a high school to take over a Stage Arts class when the teacher went out on medical leave for a year.

It happened that famed radio and television pioneer director Martin Magner was temporarily using the school’s Studio Theatre facility for his newly created New Theatre, Inc., he said. Magner’s storied career had been in association with the Berliner Ensemble and as director of the Prague Opera Company before fleeing Europe for the U.S. and becoming a legend in radio and early television, Ladd said.

He also introduced Anne Bancroft and Lee Remick to television audiences. Magner was preparing a season of theatre classics which included works by Strindberg, Moliere and Yeats and would include the American professional premiere of Bertold Brecht’s “Sweick” in the Second World War.

Ladd bumped into Magner on campus and struck up a friendship, leading to the student being hired as his associate producer.

Later, the theater company settled into a new home at the Falcon Studio in the heart of Hollywood. The facility was owned by Ralph Faulkner, known in the industry as the “Fencing Master to the Stars,” Ladd said.

He taught and/or doubled on screen for the likes of Errol Flynn, Ronald Coleman, Basil Rathbone (himself a champion fencer), Tony Curtis and Tyrone Power. The Falcon Studio was also a favorite workout center for leading professional dancers including Vera-Ellen and Ken Berry, whom Ladd would later direct in a production of “Bye Bye Birdie.”

Ladd opened his own theater, The Jester Playhouse. For the first three seasons of a nine-year affiliation with The Jester, he directed 12 plays per year.

“It was intense and hard work and an amazing experience,” he said. “However, happenstance and chance were waiting around the corner… One night, a cast member in the current play fell ill. I was forced to go on stage in his place. In the audience that night was an agent from one of the industry’s top commercial talent agencies.”

150 national commercials

“I was offered a contract and for the next 22 years my association with that agency racked up more than 150 national TV and radio commercials,” Ladd recalled. “Work in television commercials led to work on TV shows and voiceovers.”

One day, while working on “Murder She Wrote,” a chance meeting with Harry Tatelman, senior VP at Universal Pictures, led to another new door opening.

Tatelman was looking for voice talent to re-record the voices of name actors for the digital remastering of some classic films in the Universal vault. Soon Ladd was part of what was known at the studio as “The Tatelman Project.”

He re-created large portions of Gregory Peck’s voice tracks for the impending 50th anniversary re-release of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Then came “A Touch of Evil,” “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” and “Born on the Fourth of July,” in which Ladd did voice tracks for Orson Welles, Max von Sydow and Willem Dafoe.

His TV credits include “Frasier,” “Cheers,” “Perfect Strangers,” “Full House,” “Sisters,” “Married With Children,” and “Days of Our Lives.”

A chance meeting and conversation with a patron at Ladd’s theater led to more opportunities — Lehman Engel (1910-1982), the most famous conductor and musical director in Broadway history, a founder of the St Louis Municipal Opera and author of numerous books on the history and structure of American musical theater.

Engel also operated a musical theater workshop in New York where established and up and coming writers, composers and lyricists brought their work for critiques by their peers and by Engel. Engel had started a branch of the workshop in Los Angeles and invited Ladd to be a “singer.”

“This meant that I would sing the songs written by composers and lyricists in the workshop so that the members could hear and critique the work…Once again, chance and happenstance,” he said.

“As a director, this opened up a world of professional creators to me,” which led to directing “A Candle In The Dark,” the musical stage adaption of the film “A Patch of Blue,” and the West Coast professional premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Marry Me A Little.”

Ladd directed “Bell, Book & Candle” with Cyd Charisse, “Gypsy” with Yvonne De Carlo, Simon’s “The Odd Couple” with Marvin Kaplan, and “Charley’s Aunt” with Donald O’Connor.

Cyd Charisse (1922-2008) — known for classic films such as “Brigadoon,” Silk Stockings,” “Meet Me in Las Vegas” and “The Band Wagon” — had a rider in her contract that wherever she performed, no matter what play or project, she had to have at least a few moments of dance, Ladd said.

“So for the project that I was directing her, it was a play called ‘Bell, Book and Candle,’ and it’s a non-musical, of course.

“It’s just doesn’t lend itself to dance, but yet you have to find a way to work that in and we did, but I mean, it’s just a lot of those folks, they are at the tail end of their careers, and holding on to the images of what they felt their audiences remembered them for,” he said.

Ladd is looking forward to strutting his stuff on his next QC stage.