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!

For the next two decades, he stayed in the Twin Cities (“I’m not really a gypsy,” he says. “I’m more of a homebody”) and added many professional credits to his resumé. He joined the now-disbanded Edgewater Eight cabaret group and worked with Gary Gisselman, who brought him to Chanhassen for the inaugural production of How to Succeed in 1968. Following his debut at Chanhassen, he performed in forty-five other productions there, as well as a dozen shows at the now-defunct Chimera Theatre and numerous industrial shows and commercials. In 1984, he staged the dances for Prince’s film Purple Rain, and in 1988, he cochoreographed the half-time show for Super Bowl XXIII, a salute to Bob Hope with 2,700 dancers.

“By that point,” Command says, “I was tired of Minneapolis. So when Lorna and Loni told me to come out to Hollywood, I did.” He worked at a lot of little theaters and choreographed cruise ship shows, but soon made a name for himself choreographing for television, staging all the dances for The Golden Girls, Evening Shade, Perfect Strangers, Step by Step, and other sitcoms.

Work was often spotty, so to make ends meet, Command also taught high school courses to what he describes as “behaviorally disordered” teens in a juvenile detention center. But even when he did have a gig with a sitcom, the work itself ultimately proved unsatisfying. “It was like bad community theater,” he says. “Golden Girls had a great cast and it was brilliantly written, but with the frantic pace, everyone was always kind of winging it.”

While in Hollywood, Command maintained his connections with Minnesota by coming back each summer to direct the Riverside Theatre in Anoka. “Then they got all smarty-pants and dropped me in favor of Michael Brindisi,” he says. “[After that] the theater closed down within two years.”

By 1994, Command had tired of the disingenuousness that seemed to pervade LA. But it was the Northridge earthquake that led him to return home. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “It was a nightmare, a feeling of imminent death.”

Back in Minnesota, Command assumed full-time care of his ailing mother during the last six months of her life. After she died, he started graduate school at the University of Minnesota, intent on getting a Master of Fine Arts in directing. But he abandoned the program shortly after enrolling when he realized he was learning from “people who didn’t know as much as I do. How stupid they are at the U? It became meaningless, all the Mickey Mouse crap you have to put up with.” He returned to making his living as a professional director and choreographer, working at the Mounds View Community Theatre for six years before being hired away by BCT in 1997.

It might seem incongruous to find this cosmopolitan choreographer, who has worked with stars from Barbra Streisand to Prince, comfortably ensconced in a St. Louis Park split level and working for Bloomington Civic Theatre. But at sixty-two, Command is content to let others struggle for stardom. On the same recent trip to New York, he ran into an old friend, actor Joseph Joyce, whom he’d worked with at Chanhassen. Joyce was rushing off to a meeting with his agent. “How awful to still be fighting for auditions,” Command says. Still, he accepts the limits of his own career, but lays the blame squarely on ageism. “When they find you’re sixty-two, they don’t hire you.”

Despite his age, Command exhibits youthful passion and exuberance. While his gray hair bespeaks his age, his lithe, trim body still bears the hallmarks of his career as a professional dancer. His movements are elegant and extravagant, even flamboyant.

“It’s funny how you change, how different things become important [as you age],” says Command. “There’s health. Once that’s gone, nothing matters. Then friendship. That’s about it. I don’t have much family. My family is the people I’ve met in the theater.” That includes his partner, Jon Evans, a former Guthrie actor–turned–businessman. They met in 1982, playing Barnaby and Cornelius in Hello, Dolly! at Chanhassen, but then lost track of each other. They didn’t start dating until 1999.

“At my stage of life, people get forgotten about,” he says, which makes him almost compulsive about nurturing and expanding his vast web of intimate friendships. “I spent this past weekend with Lucie and her husband, Larry Luckinbill, up at their house in Katonah, New York,” he says. “She lives within ten minutes of Linda Eder. I want to introduce the two of them, but I haven’t made that happen yet. I want everyone to know everyone!”

In addition to working at BCT, Command has a part-time day job as a reservation agent for Northwest Airlines. But he insists he doesn’t need the money. “I’m good with money. The job is primarily to get health insurance for me. All my life, I have bought and sold real estate, leveraging it into our current home,” he says, pointing out that he also owns a house near Lake Calhoun and a condo in Hollywood overlooking Universal Studios.

He works at BCT because he wants to and is adamant it’s not a step down for him. “People ask if I don’t wish I was working at Chanhassen, and I say no. I don’t want to work that much,” he says. “Besides, I love the kids. They make me feel young, like thirty-four or thirty-five. And working with Anita Ruth is a treasure.”

“BCT is the greatest thing that has happened to both of us,” says Ruth, who frequently collaborates on the musical elements of the theater’s shows. “We first met in 1964, when we were both part of the club act, The First Nighters. Even then, he was already ‘John Command’. Since coming here, John has single-handedly resurrected the theater. He took hold of it and said we’re going to make it better. And he has made it better and better out of sheer enthusiasm.”

Though BCT had been moribund for a few years in the 1990s, Command didn’t join the staff with plans to overhaul the theater. “The first year, we just did small shows,” he says. “The next year, we did bigger ones. It just started to roll downhill. That first season, we did two shows and made around $3,000 in total ticket sales. This season, we’re doing five shows and have 3,700 season-ticket subscribers.” When asked about the future, Command remains equivocal. “We talk about expanding, maybe starting to do some small Equity contracts, but I don’t know. Right now, there is no answer.”

Command recently accepted his first two-year contract with BCT, “but, there’s always talk of hiring someone new,” he says, sanguine about the possibility. “When that happens, I’ll just be here,” he says, gesturing to his home. 

For information on BCT’s December 29–January 6 production of Love Letters, call 952-563-8575.

William Randall Beard is opera columnist for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.