Ronnie Marmo is back in town with Lenny Bruce and ‘Dr. Bob,’ opening this week
Ronnie Marmo is back in town, bringing with him a new bride, an old friend named Lenny Bruce and a play about a couple of men who stopped drinking and changed the world.
Marmo is an actor, director and producer. Brooklyn-born and raised in New Jersey, he has long been a resident of Los Angeles, where he founded a theater company and has acted in dozens of films and TV shows, directed many more.
Before we get to his wife and Lenny, know that he brings to town this week a play titled “Bill W. and Dr. Bob.” Covering 20 years, it is a theatrical tale that begins with the 1935 meeting in Akron, Ohio, between a man named Bill Wilson and a doctor named Bob Smith, the two men who created Alcoholics Anonymous.
Sounds exciting, does it?
“It really is,” says Marmo. “Exciting and humorous. I first directed this play some 25 years ago. It really hit me because I have been in AA since I was 17 years old. Believe me, I had had a pretty reckless life until then and the organization saved my life. But there is nothing preachy about this play. It’s funny, it’s dramatic.”
Marmo directed this show more than two decades ago at his L.A. theater and, he says, “Every four years or so we’d bring it back and it was always a hit, playing for months. But this is the first time I’ve made the leap to be in it.”
He plays Bill W. in a cast of six. “It was a joy to cast the show here. What an amazing group of talent,” he says. “I’ve hired six understudies too, with the promise that each of them would get some stage time. I really decided to put my money where my mouth was.”
He is also adding a spark to our theater scene. As my colleague Chris Jones put it, “After years of darkness induced by both a pandemic and an internal crisis at the Victory Gardens Theater Company, the Richard Christiansen Theatre inside Chicago’s historic Biograph Theatre is finally coming back to life. The Los Angeles-based actor and director Ronnie Marmo said he plans to produce two shows inside the black box theater named after the late, venerable Tribune critic this spring.”
Marmo has long had faith in this town, since the fall of 2019 when he came here with “I Am Not a Comedian … I’m Lenny Bruce,” which had previously played for more than 200 performances in Los Angeles and New York.
It moved into the Royal George and spent six sold-out months at the now shuttered theater. He gathered all sorts of praise, such as this from Jones: “Even the most devoted Bruce fan will leave impressed with Marmo … Marmo’s great achievement … is his ability to replicate not just Bruce’s essential vulnerability, a sweet neediness that made him seek constant relief, but his furious mind, forever fated to rail about the lack of intellectual honesty in America.”
I suppose it’s possible you have never heard of Lenny Bruce, though he remains a presence on the entertainment scene (see “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”), and frequent presence in conversations about political correctness and cancel culture.
I have often written about him, highlighting his strong connection to Chicago. Playboy’s Hugh Hefner who, having seen Bruce’s act in San Francisco, arranged for the comic to perform at our Cloister Inn in 1958. From here, Bruce soared to stardom: big-time club engagements; comedy albums and movie roles; the first in a series of drug busts (in Los Angeles in 1959); a handful of national television appearances; the first in a series of arrests for obscenity that same year (the most notorious one took place in Chicago the following year); a six-month trial in New York City in 1964 that resulted in his being found guilty of obscenity; a virtual blacklist that kept him off U.S. stages; an autobiography, “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People”; increasing drug use and unstable behavior; and, finally, a deadly overdose in his California home.
It’s a tough life, tragic end, but one that makes for compelling drama.
The play from the outset has been directed by Joe Mantegna, that prince of the formative years of the Chicago theater scene who went on to become a major star in movies and TV. He is the one that convinced Marmo to come to Chicago.
The show came back here after COVID-19 eased for a long run at the Venus Cabaret in the fall of 2021 and for a couple of September 2023 sell-outs at the 900-seat North Shore Center for the Performing Arts. “We always wanted to get this show to Chicago, back home for me,” says Mantegna, who was born and raised on the city’s West Side and Cicero. “I’m delighted with the success of the show, but not overly surprised. I’ve always felt Chicago is a great theater town.”
Marmo is similarly effusive, saying, “I had never been here before we brought the show here in 2019.”
One other reason may be that he met his wife here. Janelle Gaeta was in town on business and, having a dinner date canceled, wound up getting the last seat available for Marmo’s show at the Royal-George and, he says, “I saw her and thought, there goes the rest of my life.” They were married in Los Angeles in July 2022.
Over the last few weeks, they have been renting an apartment not far from Biograph Theater and taking walks. “We only have been here in the past when the weather’s been nasty,” he says. “It’s been winter and so it’s been just great to get out and discover the city. A lake? Who knew you had this amazing lake?
He laughed and said, “So many reasons, I am, we are so happy to be here. I feel the energy, such a strong connection to this place.”
“Bill W. and Dr. Bob” previews March 7, opens March 8 at the Biograph Theatre, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.; tickets $49-$79 at billwanddrbobonstage.com
