It’s Good to Be John

When Bloomington Civic Theatre artistic director John Command sat down for his first interview for this story, he had just returned from a three-day trip to New York City to attend singer Lucie Arnaz’s fifty-fifth birthday party at the legendary jazz club Birdland. “It was great,” he says. “Lucie sang, along with Phoebe Snow. And when a TV reporter asked Lucie [on camera] who was the funniest person she knew, she said, ‘John Command. And you’ll have to go to Minneapolis to find out why.’ Then she looked over at me and mouthed, ‘And I believe it too.’”

Command then launched into the story of how he met singer Lorna Luft in 1987 at Burt Reynolds’s dinner theater in Florida, where he was choreographing a production of Mame in which she was playing Agnes Gooch. “[Her half-sister] Liza Minnelli came to a performance, as did Ann Margret,” he says. “And Loni Anderson was there. Loni was only going with Burt then. They hadn’t married yet.” Following the interview, Command was running to the airport to pick up Anderson—a friend of his since the 1960s when the two attended college together—who was coming to town for a cousin’s funeral.

Another of his close friends, actress Sally Struthers, visits Minnesota this month to share the stage with Command, who makes a rare return to performing. The two star in BCT’s production of Love Letters, a story of a forty-plus-year relationship told entirely through the letters exchanged. It was Struthers’s idea to mount Love Letters and to make it a benefit for the theater. “It’s a chance to see John do a serious dramatic role,” says Struthers, who was reached by phone at the studio where she’s filming the TV series Gilmore Girls. Both she and Command will forego a salary in favor of establishing a fund to provide the company’s volunteer actors with a stipend.

Struthers’s and Command’s friendship dates back more than fifteen years to when the two met at comedian Fred Travelena’s house. “We met and that was it,” says Struthers. “You couldn’t tear us apart. He is such an intelligent, creative, high-energy person that I was drawn to him. I couldn’t get enough of him. With fast-thinking, fast-talking people like him, I am in awe.”

“Inside that gorgeous body is a kind, thoughtful heart. He knows how to cultivate friendships. He opens the door for you, holds your chair, makes sure people pay you enough.”

Struthers has performed twice before with BCT, first as the smart, cunning title character in Hello, Dolly! in 2003 and then as the spicy lead in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 2005, both under Command’s direction. “Not many people would see me that way and let me try those roles,” she says of her work as a musical comedy star. “John does.”

Struthers’s deep friendship with Command has led her to call Minnesota her second home. “John has shared friends with me, and they have become my friends,” she says. “I even know the folks at the grocery story by name. He’s carved out a life for me there. I could walk into that life and not look back.”

Command began his career as a dancer in the early 1960s. While still in junior high school, he performed with the professional St. Paul Civic Opera. “They would bring in a star and a choreographer from New York for each show,” he says. After more than fifteen shows with the opera, he performed in the national touring companies of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Funny Girl and also danced in the 1969 film version of Hello, Dolly!