A Marriage of True Minds

Husband-and-Wife team Andrew Rohn and Catherine Capellaro collaborate on the anti-capitalist musical Walmartopia

Workers of the world, are you desperate for relief from raging Wal-Martization? Then run, don’t walk, to the Bartell Theatre and get your tickets for Walmartopia, the rollicking song-and-dance show by local husband-and-wife duo Catherine Capellaro and Andrew Rohn. The musical that premiered to raves at Overture’s opening last year is back, revised and lengthened. If the early rehearsal I saw is any clue, you’ll come out laughing like a loon, and the show’s sneaky tunes’ll play in your head for weeks to come. Walmartopia, produced by Mercury Players Theatre, runs Dec. 9-Jan. 14.

Run, don't walk to get your tickets for the rollicking song-and-dance show....You'll come out laughing like a loon, and the show's sneaky tunes'll play in your head for weeks to come." -Isthmus Weekly

Rohn (co-author, composer and co-director) and Capellaro (co-author and co-director with Casey Grimm), both 39, are making a national name for themselves, whomping up politically progressive Broadway-esque farces about the running dogs of über-capitalism. Their zany, lefty, activist art is a very appealing form of resistance. Who are these clever thespians, and how do they get away with it?

They live in a ramshackle blue house on the east side with their 6-year-old twins Leo and Julian, two dogs, two cats and one piano. Their furnishings are comfortably Spartan; in their mag rack I spy Harpers, The New Yorker, The Progressive.They support their art on ticket sales, occasional grants and one anonymous Mercury Players patron. Rohn does massage therapy to pay the bills. Capellaro is managing editor of Rethinking Schools magazine. For fun she tarts it up with Cherry Pop Burlesque. The couple’s in a disco band on hiatus called VO5, and the Madgadders—music for kids.

Capellaro and Rohn, in fact, were performing-arts kids, growing up on similar tracks in different parts of the country. Their paths crossed at the late, great irascible, iconoclastic Joel Gersmann’s Broom Street Theater. The rest was destiny.

Rohn played Oliver when he was 9 and living in Montana. He spent his performing-arts high school days in Portland, Ore., creating new works with an acting ensemble, dancing and playing music. For college he chose Oberlin, where he played a lot of music, got a B.A. in religion, then moved to Oakland with a band. Oakland was a scary place in ’89, he says. He lived in a slum down the block from where Black Panther Huey Newton was shot to death in a bad drug deal.

When a friend recommended Madison, Rohn decided to try out the town. “I took right to it. What hooked me first was Broom Street Theater. I auditioned right away, for Nashinull Inquirer Returns [a 1991 Gersmann original]. I was really excited. It was like my high school days, only Joel was crazier and more absurd.”

Capellaro grew up in New Glarus, where her parents ran the regional weeklies. “I was kind of a wallflower kid. I came alive in music and drama, and we had an amazing director in high school, Larry Daehn, who comes to our shows now. He was a loving hard-ass at a rural school. He held us to high standards.”

Her sophomore class did Music Man. “I’d never seen a musical before. I was hooked.”

Capellaro ran an underground paper, went to Israel as an exchange student and tried out for the lead in Hello Dolly on the verge of her senior year. “My mom likes to say she didn’t know I could sing, but I knew I could.” She belted along with Carol Channing on the record, learned the songs and got the part. It was a personal victory.

“I was in love with musicals, but I graduated and forgot all about it.”

Her undergrad life at UW-Madison was a blur, Capellaro says. She spent a lot of time canvassing for the Wisconsin Action Coalition and drinking beer, but school was useful. She strung together a package of relevant courses aimed at political advocacy and journalism. “I took histories of marginalized people and anything political I could find. The UW is great for offering lots of choice.”

Capellar wasn’t thinking about the arts. She got her B.A. and moved to San Francisco to intern at Mother Jones. “I was there a couple of years, between the earthquake and Gulf War I. Andrew was in Oakland at the same time, like a parallel universe.”

She loved the Bay Area, but it didn’t feel like home. “I was depressed and adrift, as people in their 20s can be. Then I fell madly in love with Bruce the Botanist and followed him to Guyana. It was great, but Bruce and I weren’t meant to be. I came back to home base and got a job editing Willy Street Co-op’s marketing newsletter.”

One day her sister decided they should go try out for a Broom Street play.

It was Gersmann’s My Fair Arab, 1992. “I hadn’t done theater since high school. I was nervous and fumbling in my bag for a cigarette and this very handsome fellow approaches and reassures me that the very quirky guy inside wasn’t so bad and we should just come in and audition.”

She got cast. “Ever since, I’ve been involved in theater. And I have to say, Madison’s had an abundance.