The long-awaited production of Calendar Girls is finally making its way to the stage! Silhouette Stages production of the show, directed by Conni Ross, was originally slated for the Slayton House stage in March of 2020. The show was in its final phase of tech week when the pandemic shuttered the world, shutting down the state and all live-theatre with it. Two years later, with indefatigable hope and a feeling of triumph, director Conni Trump Ross has given us some time in a one-on-one, sit-down interview exclusive!
Thank you so much for giving us some time to talk about the project, Conni. This has clearly been a passion project of yours for quite some time, why is this show— Calendar Girls— so important to you?
Conni Trump Ross: I think the most rewarding thing about this show is— of all of the shows that are available to produce, they’re for younger actors. I wanted to do a show that allowed actors of— maturity, let us say— have a chance to be on stage again. So Calendar Girls allows both the male and female actors, mostly age-ranged 50 and above, to be on stage. These are meaty roles. We ran Act II last night and the actors are emotionally involved; they were crying on stage last night. I was crying as I watched last night. Last night was the first time we took masks off in rehearsal. They could actually see each other and each other’s emotions. There were a couple of times that they were actually crying. The tears were there.
The story is very emotional anyway. It focuses on the death of the husband of one of the characters. As I say, it’s about the loss and the friendships and how we go through the loss of love, and the friendships that hold us together through that. In this storyline, there’s a little bit of ego involved and what happens when the ego gets a little bit too big with one of the friends. There’s a little bit of a break with a couple of the friends, and they eventually come back together of course, but that loss of friendship for a moment, the love of friendship and how it pulls us together, it shows us how important that is. The need to hold onto each other is very real.
Going back to— “why this show?” I don’t think in my many years of life that I know of anyone who has not been impacted by cancer either directly or indirectly. As you watch this show, you’re reminded that we all lose someone or have come close to losing someone by that deadly disease. Growing up, you didn’t even say the word ‘cancer’; it was whispered. It wasn’t talked about. So we’re discussing cancer. We’re talking about it. We’re discussing how do you handle it— the loss of someone— and what do we do as just lay-people? How do we manage the emotion of it? These six women band together and they do it in a way that most of us would not have the courage to do. And that is simply— they decide to take their clothes off and make a calendar and raise money. They go against the norm of the WI, which is the organization in England that they belong to. They’re going to do it, with or without permission, which I personally applaud because so many of us don’t go against the norm. We stay within our little box. And they decide to go against it. With or without permission they are going to do this calendar.
And as it turns out, because this is a true story, in the end, they raised enough money with the first go-round of their calendar not only to buy the settee that they were going to put in the hospital— they raised enough money to build a wing in the hospital. And this was decades ago that this happened. This show has been done all over the world and it’s actually now a musical on the West End. Would love to do, but the rights are not here yet, that’s why we’re doing the play. It’s a wonderful, wonderful show, and I’m really hoping people will put on their masks, bring their vaccine cards, and come out to see us.
As you mentioned, ‘they do take their clothes off.’ What is it like challenging the stigma that comes along with ‘women of a mature age?’ Hollywood and mainstream media tend to bring this all-too-often negative stigma to women of a certain age who are trying to appear and feel sexy, particularly when it comes to taking of your clothes. How are you dealing with those challenges?
Conni: Great question! We’re actually doing a real calendar that we’re selling and will be sending a donation to a Leukemia Foundation. We have an outstanding photographer, Russell Wooldridge. When we did our first photo shoot, one of the first things we did was we had all the women come together to support each other. We bought doughnuts and pastries and mimosas. Everybody was there supporting each other. Russell is so professional and so caring; nobody actually cared what they looked like. They were more concerned with their makeup and their hair than they were with showing anything. What I would say is that the way that the photos are done in the calendar, and the way that I’ve staged these shots for the actual production, nobody really sees anything. The actors definitely are without clothing. But nothing is showing to the audience. Nothing is showing in the calendar. Everyone felt very secure. As I always tell my cast, “Just trust me!” They got to see their photos after Russell took several shots, they got to see all of them and say, “Oh I didn’t like that” or “I think you can see something here.” And we would redo the shoot. He deleted any photos that they didn’t like. Everybody was quite safe. As far as them being older and comparing themselves to Hollywood? I think that when you hit a certain age, we don’t care about Hollywood anymore. We really don’t. When you hit a certain age, if you’re comfortable with yourself and who you are, you don’t care. You’re happy with who you are, what you’ve accomplished, and that’s actually what this show is all about anyway— being comfortable with who you are and developing these friendships and knowing who you’ve become on the inside is more important than who you are on the outside.
You were originally directing this back in 2020, attempting to open in March of 2020, but the Pandemic shuttered the world, and now we’re finally here in what feels like an eternity later, and you’re getting up on the boards in 2022, what would you say has been your biggest challenge— other than waiting out the two-plus years of this pandemic— getting this show up on stage?
Conni: Well, I will say this has been the longest labor of my life and I’m just ready to birth this baby. I think the hardest thing for me, quite honestly, was getting my energy back up. Because we actually were in tech week and got shut down in final tech. We had literally six hours to come back into our venue and clean it out. It happened very quickly. We put everything away. Silhouette’s board said, we’ll do it next year in 2021. So I thought we’d do it in 2021. So for a year I was rearing to go, my energy was up and up and up and we were ready. But then it didn’t happen. And then for another year, I started to feel like “oh, this will never happen.” My energy took a dive. And then 2022 came. And it was like “is it really going to happen?” So I’ve been excited, but I’ve been holding my breath, cautiously. Even though we’re 18 days away— I’m still excited but I’m holding my breath!
What would you say is the moment in the show that really defines what the show means for you?
Conni: The moment in the show is when they decide they are going to do the calendar. And when they come out in the scene with their robes on, and they decide they are going to make that calendar, and the first person, which happens to be Ande (in the role of Celia, Ande Kolp), when she steps up there and the lights start flashing, the camera starts going— and for me, that’s the moment. Because they have finally said, “Yep. Calendar Girls. It’s gonna happen.”
What would you say being a part of this never-ending project has taught you about yourself? What is your big, personal takeaway from laboring on a project out of sheer love for over two years now?
Conni: Oh this is so easy. I am former military. And I am, as my husband says, ‘such a control freak.’ Part of that is military. I’ve worked very hard over the years not to have to be in control. Because you can’t be in control all the time. In the military, you have to have a certain amount of things that you are in control of all the time, but what I have learned over the past two-plus years, there are some things you just don’t have control over. I’ve learned I just have to let it happen. If it happens it happens and if it doesn’t, there’s a reason. Just step back, take a breath. I have a tattoo— the semicolon. And what that means is, “Breathe. Take a breath. If it doesn’t happen now, it’ll happen another time. And if it didn’t happen, then there’s a reason.” So Calendar Girls has been the perfect example. It didn’t happen in 2020, I took a two-year breath, it was a deep breath! And it’s happening now. There was a reason it didn’t happen. I don’t know what the reason was, but there was a reason. I will say— and I’m going to put a shout-out to the guys who are building the set— Bill Pond, who is building my Sunflower Field…maybe in 2020 my Sunflower Field wouldn’t have been as incredible as it’s going to be. Maybe there’s the reason.
I know you’re directing it, but if you could be in Calendar Girls, who would you be?
Conni: I’d probably be Cecelia. I’m a little feisty. Okay. I’m feisty.
Why do you want people to come and see Calendar Girls, other than— ‘please come to live theatre because we’ve all been sitting at home on our butts for two years?’
Conni: Well that’s a great reason right there! This show has so many lessons about life. Number one is that cancer strikes equally, every day. You don’t know who, when, or where. And you need to, as they say, smell the roses— but in this case, smell the sunflowers. That’s number one. Number two, you need to realize that friendships are so powerful and they’re fragile. And you need to cherish them and that even when friendships crack a little bit, they can be repaired. Most importantly, actors of all ages deserve to be on stage. And playwrights need to be writing for ages from the teens all the way up to the 80’s. Musicals are great and I direct lots of musicals, but we need to be doing plays too, and we need to incorporate lots of older actors— not older— experienced, seasoned, actors. We need to get them back on stage too.
If you could sum up the Calendar Girls experience in just one word, what would it be?
Conni: It’s hard to do. Needed.
Calendar Girls plays March 18th through April 3rd, 2022 with Silhouette Stages performing at Slayton House Theatre in Wilde Lake Village Center— 10400 Cross Fox Lane, in Columbia, MD. For tickets, call the box office at (410) 637-5289, or purchase them online.
The official Calendar Girls calendar will be available for purchase beginning opening night. Be sure to check back here for a ticketing link and more details!
