Ex-Actor Gets Laughs--as Playwright : Shelly Garrett’s play has become a word-of-mouth smash; soon two companies will be taking it on the road

Resplendent and shirtless in a white silk suit, Shelly Garrett looked cool. But he wasn’t.

It was near midnight at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles. Moments earlier, a capacity audience had rewarded Garrett’s play, “Beauty Shop,” with a standing ovation. Some in the fashionably attired, mostly black crowd, congratulated Garrett while others leaped up to grab “Beauty Shop” balloons floating to the ceiling.

Although he appeared pleased, Garrett was visibly irritated as he plopped down later in a small office. He punched the air with an outstretched finger. “They’re not cutting in on the laughs soon enough,” Garrett said, criticizing his cast. “This show has too many laughs in it. It goes on long enough, and these performers have got to come in on their lines faster and cut the audience off. Otherwise, we’ll be here all night.”

When it comes to “Beauty Shop,” Garrett isn’t fooling around.

He wrote, produced, directed and promoted the play, and he wants it to be perfect each night. Garrett, 43, who struggled as a TV actor--with bit parts in everything from “Baretta” to “Police Woman”--and produced beauty pageants to pay his bills, feels “Beauty Shop” is pivotal to his goal of becoming one of the first successful black presenters of theatrical comedy productions.

Although “Beauty Shop” is only his second play, the all-black production, set in a middle-class salon, has consistently drawn sellout crowds in its scattered engagements at the 1,270-seat Wilshire Ebell during the past 1 1/2 years. It’s all the more remarkable because the play’s success is not due to hype. There are no major stars. Despite pleas to major newspapers, he could not get reviewers in to see his play until two weeks ago, and Garrett did only limited radio advertising.

What really distinguishes the play is the amount of humor specifically aimed at black audiences. Garrett acknowledged that some white audiences may not get the jokes. “I wrote this for black people because I don’t feel there is enough quality black theater in Los Angeles,” he says.

To get the word out, Garrett advertised exclusively on black music stations--KACE-FM, KJLH-FM and KGFJ-AM. Mike Mann, promotion director of KACE, said: “I’ve never seen this much attention over something with such little advertising. People go to this play expecting a good time, and that’s what they get. Then they go and tell someone else, and they come back because they want to see the expression on their friends’ faces.”

Garrett credits word of mouth and significant repeat business for the play’s success. “It really makes me feel good to see black audiences supporting black theater,” he says. In marketing the play, Garrett focused on attracting black women between the ages of 25 and 49. “Black men . . . go to sporting events, but black women go to plays,” he says. About 95% of the show’s audiences have been black, he says, and 75% of that audience have been female.

Garrett said he knew that blacks would relate to the humor in “Beauty Shop.” “White humor is more conservative, but black humor is more down to earth, to the point,” he says. “Blacks don’t want it conservative, they want it like it is. All the great ones--Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley--all did it like that.”

To get the play produced, Garrett put up his own money, including the $1,200 a night it took to rent out the theatre. Early on, the cast worked without pay. It was hand to mouth until word of mouth caught on and the play became a hit. The play now has a 16-member crew. The cast wears costumes provided by Garrett instead of their own clothes. Cast members are also paid between $300 and $400 a week. And the latest engagement at the Wilshire Ebell, running Thursdays through Sundays, is apparently the most profitable. Garrett said the budget for this month’s 20 shows totaled $50,000, which included rental of the theater. “We made that back the first week,” he says.

When “Beauty Shop” completes its current 20-performance run Aug. 27, Garrett has booked the show in San Diego, Chicago and New Orleans. In September the play begins what Garrett says will be a national 50-city tour, starting in Detroit. John Ray, a promoter who has put together concerts by singers Anita Baker and Lionel Richie, said he is spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to take “Beauty Shop” on the road. Two separate casts will perform the play in large and small cities simultaneously. “I believe in this play, and I’m ready to put my money where my mouth is,” Ray says.”

Garrett hopes that by building momentum on the road the play will end up on Broadway, though that is only in the idea stage. Ryan, for one, thinks the play, to be retitled “Shelly Garrett’s Beauty Shop,” might do better on Off Broadway.

ABC has shown interest in a TV series inspired by “Beauty Shop” that could be used as a mid-season replacement. A pilot has already been filmed and ABC has commissioned 12 more episodes. Garrett is serving as a script consultant on the series.

Set during two days at the “Pamper Me” salon, “Beauty Shop,” the play, revolves around the beauticians and the people who come into the shop: a bossy wife who berates her meek, ex-Marine husband, Herman; a married mailman who wants to date any of the beauticians; a huffy resident of a nearby housing project who wants to know who in the shop has been fooling around with her husband. The story also concerns preparations for a birthday party for Margaret (Adrian Y. Black), a lonely, overweight beautician who is continually ridiculed, often cruelly, about her weight. The show’s other main character, Chris (Theo “T” Fitzgerald), is a sassy gay beautician who is not shy about insulting customers or his colleagues, especially when his life style is criticized.

Spiced with melodrama and pathos, the main ingredient in Garrett’s “soul food comedy” is insults--fat jokes, ugly jokes, gay jokes, “ ‘yo’ mama” jokes. The Times’ Sylvie Drake, in her review, wrote that “Beauty Shop” had its “share of flaws” and that the play was an amalgam of “comedy, melodrama, Chippendale’s, Las Vegas and a Cinderella story.” She said, “By the usual American (meaning Anglo-European) standards ‘Beauty Shop’ is a sentimental, poorly structured, badly directed, self-congratulating show. But where is it written that those standards fit?” She added, “the laughter never stopped.”

During one scene, Naomi (Kimberly Brooks), who suspects someone of sleeping with her husband, confronts everyone in the shop, including one enraged customer, Rachel (Henrietta M. Hartshorn). The two face off, with Rachel ready to fight. Rachel says, “So get on in my chest.” Naomi bends down and squints at Rachel’s chest and says, “Chest? You ain’t got no chest. Looks more like two eggs to me--fried!” The onlookers, impressed with the comeback, whip their arms in the air, snap their fingers and say in unison, “Hello!”

In several recent performances the audiences laughed and screamed as the scenes unfolded, sometimes so loudly that the ongoing dialogue could not be heard. Women and men raised their arms in the air and waved their hands. They talked back to the characters.

“It’s like when everyone says ‘Hello’ in that one scene. That’s a black thing. . . . ‘Hello!’ replaces ‘I heard that,’ ” Garrett says.

When Garrett wrote the play, he was concentrating on pleasing a black audience, he says, which is a somewhat different approach than he sees on Arsenio Hall’s talk show. “He’ll say something really funny, and I know that’s his black person joke,” Garrett says. “Then he will say something I don’t understand, and that will be his white person joke. Arsenio has to make sure he crosses over.”

Even though the play is aimed at black people, “White people can enjoy it. But they have to come with an open mind. They can’t sit there with their arms crossed saying ‘entertain me,’ ” Garrett says. “We had a full house the other night, and about 20% of the audience was white,” he says. “They were screaming with laughter.”

One of the biggest laughs in the show occurs when one customer enters the salon with a poster of a beautiful woman to show how she wants her hair styled. Chris, the gay beautician, says: “Here’s what you do--go out the door, drive three blocks, make a right turn at the signal and it’s across the street from Taco Bell.”

“What is?” asks the customer.

“The Magic Shop!” snaps Chris. “ ‘Cause ain’t nothin’ we can do for you in the beauty shop!”

Garrett said he wanted to make sure that despite its length, “Beauty Shop” kept the audience laughing--even if it did not make perfect dramatic sense. He mentioned a moment that seems for most audiences to be the highlight of the play. It comes near the end at Margaret’s birthday party. Tom the mailman (Lawrence McNeal III) offers to dance for Margaret to make up for the practical joke. Suddenly the lights turn red, Michael Jackson’s “Bad” thumps through loudspeakers, and the muscular postman performs a pulsating strip tease.

Women in the audience scream as they encourage Tom to take off more clothes. At the same time, female dancers in gold top hats and sequined outfits move up and down the aisles, waving wads of money at Tom. When the postman whips off his shorts to reveal red briefs, the screams from the audience reach a crescendo and continue when the entire cast breaks into a choreographed routine moments later. The gold-clad women come up on stage, and the cast steps back while they dance. The number continues for 11 minutes.

“Does a play have to make sense all the way through as long as people are entertained?” Garrett smiled.

The success marks a big change for Garrett, who played modest parts in cop shows and sitcoms. “I would be a gangster or a detective on the cop shows. On ‘227,’ I was Jackee’s boyfriend. On ‘Gimme a Break,’ I was Nell Carter’s boyfriend. I would have three or four lines, then was quiet after that.”

His real desire was to be behind the lights, in control. “I wanted to shape projects.” Before he could try that, Garrett formed an Inglewood-based production company that specialized in staging small, local black beauty pageants in hotel ballrooms and concert halls: The one for Father’s Day was called “Color Him Father.” But he still wanted to create.

He approached “Beauty Shop” not only as a playwright, he said, but as a businessman. Garrett thought the beauty shop setting would be a perfect vehicle for a comedy. The title came to him before he thought of the plot. “I wanted to go after something that everyone could identify with,” he says. “All women have been in a beauty shop, and some men have too. Women know what goes on in there--the gossip about men, jealousy, loneliness. Men want to know what the women talk about.”

The creative spark for “Beauty Shop” came several years ago when Garrett was getting a manicure in a Los Angeles beauty shop. A woman in a housecoat and wearing curlers walked in. “She was kind of nervous as she looked around, and she stared at everyone,” Garrett recalls. “Finally she said, ‘Which one of you sluts has been fooling around with my husband?’ It got real quiet, and everyone looked at each other.”

But “Beauty Shop” bombed when it first premiered at the Wilshire Ebell in 1987. Michael Kirkwood, the executive manager of the Wilshire Ebell, was working backstage when Garrett first rented the theater. “The show wasn’t much of anything then, and it didn’t do much for the audience,” he said. “Then he went away and came back in February of 1988, saying he wanted to try again.”

Garrett reworked the play’s dialogue and beefed up the jokes to make it “more ethnic.” He put in the female dancers in the male strip scene “because too many men were getting really upset at the way their women reacted. So I gave them something tn look at too.”

Garrett booked 10 shows two weekends in a row. “There still weren’t a lot of people, but the following week, the phones were ringing off the hook. The next weekend was sold out,” Kirkwood says.

Kirkwood said Garrett continued to book the theater whenever there were available dates. “It just kept on going,” he says.

One viewer, Clarissa White, 27, of Los Angeles, a hotel front-desk manager who has seen the play twice, compared it to a bachelorette party with male dancers. “It’s what happens when a bunch of women get into a room,” White said. Pam Tucker, 27, of Long Beach, saw “Beauty Shop” for the first time a week ago. “If you’ve ever been in a beauty shop, that’s exactly what happens,” Tucker said. “The insults are a bit much. But the play is really creative.”

The acceptance for “Beauty Shop,” Garrett says, makes up for the commercial failure of his first play, “Snuff and Miniskirts,” a comedy that played in Los Angeles for six weeks in 1985. The play was about an elderly female disc jockey who “tried to be hip and always had snuff in her mouth and wore miniskirts.”

Now that the money is starting to build up from “Beauty Shop” Garrett wears clothes that would rival any outfit in Gentleman’s Quarterly. A black Lincoln Continental limousine takes him to and from the theater, and he is continually flanked by one and often two security guards. “It’s important to look successful,” he says. “People want to be around very successful people. But if I were truly successful, I wouldn’t be sitting behind this desk, paying these bills. Someone else would be handling it.”

Some who work with Garrett don’t think he’ll be sitting behind the desk much longer.

“Shelly has a very deep perception of black drama and black comedy,” said Bernadette Stanis, an actor who was in the TV series “Good Times” and is starring in “The Living Room,” another all-black comedy-drama Garrett is producing at the Coronet Theatre in Beverly Hills, about a married black couple who flirt with infidelity. Besides the “Beauty Shop” national tour, Garrett is finishing “Beauty Shop 2,” which he hopes to premiere in February.

In addition, Garrett plans to write another female-oriented comedy called “The Ladies Room.” “I’m trying to figure out where the ladies room will be,” he said, laughing. “I don’t know whether it will be a nightclub or a restaurant. But it will be about what women talk about.”

What black women talk about?

Garrett says: “There will be black women. But there will probably be a Mexican woman and an Oriental woman. I can get a lot of comedy out of that. There will probably even be a white lady. There will be one of each. Like they do us. They will be tokens.”