By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
Joe Giordano can remember long hours making a one-room schoolhouse on Amwell Road into a community theater.
Stripping the walls down to the studs. Installing electrical wiring and fire-resistant Sheetrock and ceiling panels. Painting and hammering.
“The kids started to call me the Playhouse widow because it took him five years,” said Mr. Giordano’s wife, Linda.
When the work was over, the Somerset Valley Players had their own permanent home.
The theater group will celebrate its 30th anniversary at the Somerset Valley Playhouse’s location in the village of Neshanic with a small reception on Saturday, Sept. 12, at 2 p.m.
The group will celebrate and honor all of its community theater Perry Award nominations received this year, as well as announce its 2016 season of plays and musicals.
The Somerset Valley Players organized more than 45 years ago and presented their first productions at Van Derveer Elementary School in Somerville. This group of volunteers put on one production a year in the beginning, increasing the bill to three shows, including their first musical, “Guys and Dolls,” performed in 1971.
The drudgery of productions at many temporary homes fostered “a distant, yet tantalizing, dream” of a theater of their own, the Players’ website says. After a long search, the troupe purchased the former one-room schoolhouse (which was then a printing company) on Amwell Road. In 1980, along with all of their props, scenery, furniture, and costumes, they moved into their new home.
Over the next five years, members spent countless hours renovating the building. In January 1985, the doors of the Somerset Valley Playhouse opened to a full house. The first show in their new theater, mirroring their beginnings, was “Guys and Dolls.”
In the first season (the Players’18th) in the playhouse, the group also produced “Deathtrap,” “Sunday in New York,” “Wait Until Dark,” “On Golden Pond” and “Gemini.”
Mr. Giordano says he was one of a handful of people who undertook the labor of love to remake the schoolhouse into a theater. He was a local insurance agent with an office on Route 206, and he gained the job of accepting deliveries and honing his own carpentry skills at the theater.
He puts his wife Linda, Lucille and Gary Garrison, and Ken and Harriett Orsinski in the core group of workers on the building. Mr. Giordano said Neil VanCleef, the site engineer they hired, remembered he went to fifth grade in the building in the 1950s.
Converting an 80-year-old building for public use required attention to building codes, but the troupe hired an architect whose resourcefulness helped make renovations possible and affordable for the volunteer group.
“When things needed to get bent, they got bent,” Mr. Giordano said.
Lacking public water to the site, a chemical system was installed for fire prevention in the basement, he said. Sometimes, practicality trumped architectural niceties, like the wainscoting and tin ceiling that had to be torn out, he said.
The area that was to become the stage and seating was created by ripping out sliding doors that had made the one large space into two rooms.
The Giordanos are life members of the Players, having paid their dues in all kinds of roles. Mr. Giordano built sets and ran the lighting and sounc boards. Mrs. Giordano directed and was on stage for years, he said.
“I’m retired now,” said Mr. Giordano. “I still like to go to the theater, sit on my butt, watch a play and be critical.”
The Somerset Valley Players will also use Saturday’s occasion to salute its nominees for Perry Awards, which are given by the N.J. Association of Community Theaters.
More than 200 shows produced by theater companies around the state are submitted for consideration each year. NJACT bestows awards in 33 performance and technical categories based on reviewer scores, which require more than 400 reviews by trained NJACT volunteers.
SVP garnered nine nominations for “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” It also had two nominations for youth actors in “Humbug,” as well as one for “I Hate Hamlet,” three for “The Addams Family” and one for “Moon Over Buffalo.”
