Judy Gans and Julie Lennick, cousins with a shared show-biz legacy, have roles in a new production of Richard Rodgers’ Two by Two, based on the biblical story of Noah’s Ark.
Both women have deep roots in the Canadian entertainment industry, with family members who performed on and wrote for radio, television and the stage, beginning in the 1930s.
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Lennick’s mother, Sylvia, made her most famous appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in May 1958, as a member of Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster’s troupe. In a skit called Rinse the Blood Off My Toga, Wayne, as a private eye, tries to finger Marcus Brutus, played by Shuster, for the murder of Julius Caesar. Playing the widow, Sylvia cries out, in a Bronx accent, “I told him, Julie don’t go.” Sylvia’s line got a lot of laughs, but she rarely appeared with Wayne and Shuster after that. “She was getting all the laughs, and Wayne and Shuster didn’t use her so much,” her daughter said.
Lennick was born after her mother rushed to the hospital from a live broadcast of the CBC radio show At Home with the Lennicks. Sylvia’s husband, Ben, wrote the scripts for the mid-1950s comedy show.
Julie Lennick’s parents founded a theatre company in 1930s, which they resurrected in the 1960s, to give themselves and other actors work. Sylvia, who died in 2012, worked for more than a half century. “Everybody else had parents – the mother stayed home and the father went to work. And I thought, Why can’t we be that? Why doesn’t my father put on a suit and go to work, get a job?” Lennick said wryly.
She and her cousin grew close as children while they were taking acting classes from Judy’s mother (and Sylvia’s sister), Geri, in the basement of Judy’s house. Lennick decided she wanted to sing after she heard Judy perform in a show, so her parents sent her for lessons with Charles Jordan, singer-songwriter Marc Jordan’s father.
Despite their youth, Geri, who had been a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York in the 1940s when it was run by legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner, taught her students method acting, improv and the basics of mime. Now 89, Geri is still active in local theatre. Two of her musicals, based on the stories of Rapunzel and Cinderella, were presented at recent Toronto Fringe Festivals.
Lennick, a community theatre veteran, introduced her cousin to community theatre in the early 1980s. “Once I got into it, it was an amazing journey,” Judy Gans said.
The cousins interacted on stage together for the first time as adults in a production of Grease in 1990. Since then, Gans and Lennick have appeared on stage together in productions of Oliver, Damn Yankees, The Music Man and Gypsy.
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In Two by Two, presented by the Civic Light-Opera Company, Lennick, who has the role of Noah’s wife, comedically spars with her malcontented daughter-in-law, Leah, played by her cousin, Gans.
Two by Two, with music by Rodgers and lyrics by Martin Charnin, was first presented on Broadway in 1970. It’s a modern retelling of Noah’s preparation for the Great Flood and its aftermath and includes contemporary themes, among them the devastation of the environment. The musical’s story was based on Clifford Odets’ final play, The Flowering Peach, which depicted Noah’s family as a lower-middle-class Jewish family from the Bronx.
The Civic Light-Opera Company’s production of Two by Two features director Joe Cascone as Noah. Along with Gans and Lennick, the cast includes Andrew Long, David Haines, Eric Botosan, Lindsay Burrows and Katie Richardson. For tickets to Two by Two at the Zion Cultural Centre from April 6 to 17, click here or call the box office at 416-755-1717.