It would seem a very long bridge – one almost impossible to cross — from the repertory theaters of Communist Prague in the late 1960s, when the censors had the final word, to the sounds of songs like Hound Dog, and the musical theater of the 1990s in America.
For Nicholas Howey, executive producer of the company that brings Smokey Joe’s Café to the Providence Performing Arts Center this week, it was a journey helped along by Vaclav Havel, a playwright who serves today as president of the Czech Republic, and with whom he had become familiar while studying repertory theater in Czechoslovakia in 1968-69.
The Russians had invaded, Howey said, in response to a growing, active anti-communist movement for independence about two months before he was scheduled to arrive in then Czechoslovakia, but a few months later he was able to make the trip, during the Russian occupation.
He experienced wonders in the theater – “miracles” he calls them – that he wouldn’t experience again, and spent time with people he now refers to as “heroes.”
”There were two issues,” Howey said. “One is the theater and how they did it and that was a miracle. It absolutely has influenced how we (his company) do it. The other thing is the incredible political situation. There were good guys and bad guys. In 1968-69 in Prague you were on one side or the other. I was hanging around with all the heroes. It was an exercise in courage.”
Among the heroes was Havel, who began working as a stagehand in Prague’s theaters and eventually became assistant director and dramaturge (assigned playwright) of Prague’s Theater on the Balustrade, where his first plays were produced.
Havel was active in the democratization movement in Prague, and after the Russian invasion in 1968 his work was banned in Czechoslovakia. In the years that followed, he was imprisoned several times for his anti-Communist beliefs and activities.
It was a conversation with Havel, the end of an interview that Howey remembers as prominent in his realization that musical theater had substance.
”It was Havel who said to me at the end of the interview – I ask if there is anything I should have asked.” To which Havel responded: ‘I think you Americans don’t know what you have with the musical. You’re ashamed of it. You should be proud of it. It’s real theater.’ As a result of that comment I went into musical theater.”
Somehow this comment has helped Howey bridge that long gap between those days in Prague, when he had to smuggle out tapes of conversations, fearing for his own safety, to Hound Dog of Smokey Joe’s Café, a musical that Howey suggests touches many generations with a wide range of music and emotions.
Since his days in Prague Howey has shaped a successful career that has spanned more than 20 years, most recently as executive producer and co-founder of Troika Entertainment, a company that has produced numerous touring productions, including Smokey Joe’s.
And in that business, he has employed many of the techniques he learned during his days in Prague.
As a result, his company also keeps many of its functions in-house, able to better control costs. We have our own music people in-house, design people in-house, our own marketing,” Howey said. “We build our own scenery. The kind of repertory theater I was looking at, they had a different show every evening with a huge set. We’re similar in that we have an awful lot of internal resources and wear a lot of different hats.
”It helps the bottom line immensely,” he said.
Meanwhile, Howey never loses touch with Prague, returning every couple of years. And while he considered, and was even encouraged by Havel, to write a book about his experiences, he chose not to, for fear that some of those with whom he had become close could face imprisonment as a result.
But his experiences and those gained in 1974 when he returned to Prague with the late actor/playwright Larry Shue, were the subject of Shue’s last play, Wenceslas Square.
