Pine Box Office

John Kenley, who said there are no small towns, only actors with small talent, has died at the age of 103. Deciding that hicks and rubes were every bit as deserving of an overpriced, overrated cultural experience starring washed up actors as big-city folk, he set himself up as the George M. Cohan of the Ohio Valley, bringing large-scale productions headlined by Mae West, Gloria Swanson, Burt Reynolds, Florence Henderson, Ethel Merman, Pam Dawber and William Shatner to places unaccustomed to professional theater, like eastern Pennsylvania’s coal country and Cleveland. He also virtually invented stunt casting of unlikely stars for their box office potential, like Hugh Downs in Under the Yum Yum Tree, Merv Griffin in Come Blow Your Horn, Jayne Mansfield in Bus Stop, filling the role Marilyn Monroe played on screen, and Joe Namath in Picnic. Kenley was the ultimate enabler, rewriting scripts on the fly, adding or subtracting musical numbers – whatever it took to keep the talent happy. That is, until the cast party on opening night, when he would put on a dress and take the first dance with the show’s leading man, a quirk that surprised first-timers who didn’t know that Kenley spent his theatrical off-seasons in Florida as “Joan.”