This reporting was supported by the ARLnow Press Club. Join to support in-depth local journalism — and get an exclusive early morning email with a preview of that day’s planned news coverage.
Sixty summers ago, “A Pocketful of Preposterous Poems” debuted at Lubber Run Park with performances running July 29-31, 1966.
Presented by The Children’s Theatre of Arlington — overseen at the time by the county government’s then-Department of Recreation — “Preposterous” is cited by present-day Encore Stage & Studio as its founding production.
For years, though, no one at Encore, or in the local media, had much information about the show. But with a little sleuthing, many of the mysteries have now been uncovered.
Some questions remain unanswered, including exactly when The Children’s Theatre of Arlington transitioned from a government program to a standalone nonprofit arts organization. However, much of the history of that summer-of-1966 production is now available thanks to the recollections of Phillip Graneto, who developed and directed “A Pocketful of Preposterous Poems” for The Children’s Theatre.
The show borrowed from poems of Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll and others, and the performances were split into two acts divided by an intermission — the first featuring nine vignettes, the second with an adaptation of Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark.”
ARLnow interviewed Graneto, who has now retired from an extensive career in higher education, by phone from his home in New Jersey. He provided copies of playbills and photographs that help flesh out details of the 1966 production.
A stage director is born
Phillip Graneto was a teenager when his family arrived in Northern Virginia from Ohio in the late 1950s. After a year in Arlington, the family moved out to the Bailey’s Crossroads area of Fairfax County.
High-school graduation came in 1959, followed by undergraduate studies at the Catholic University of America and a master’s degree in set design from Carnegie-Mellon University.
Along the way, Graneto began working on a contract basis with the county’s recreation department.
“I started out doing scenery,” he said. “Ultimately, I ended up directing three shows.”
“A Pocketful of Preposterous Poems” was “like a revue for children,” Graneto said. “I was always pleased with the idea of it, and I think the kids had fun.”
The cast consisted of preteens up to age 12. Graneto said he had the most fun with the 10-and-11-years-olds, who were old enough to memorize and deliver their lines, but retained their childhood imagination and enthusiasm.
In the 1960s, the drama supervisor for the Arlington Recreation Department was Dorrit Carroll. She also was a frequent director of local plays into the 1970s.
Carroll’s daughter, Mary, was among the youth participating in the show.
Curtain time!
“A Pocketful of Preposterous Poems” was described in the playbill as “stupendous stultiloquence, balderdash and nonsense, with all reason, purpose and verisimilitude carefully removed.”
Among the works used as inspiration for individual vignettes:
- “Celery” and “The Germ” by Ogden Nash
- “The Jumblies” and “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” by Edward Lear
- “Streets of Glue” by Gelett Burgess
- “Jabberwocky,” “The Hunting of the Snark” and “The Old Man on the Gate” by Lewis Carroll
Cast members — most performing in multiple vignettes as different characters — included Janet Brown, Julie Robinson, Mary Carroll, Keith Bolton, Paul Taylor, George Taylor, Robin Grier, Lee Gormley, Christine Marfut, Robert Dodd, Gig Harrison, Page Ogletree, Mary Janoschka, Joani Dickson and Janet McDonald.
Production staff for the show included Graneto (director, set design), Ann Marimow (costume design), John Carroll (lighting design), Patricio Saavedra (stage manager), Judy Hall (sound), James Graves (lights) and John Halstead (technical director).
Joy Tauber, Holly Cole and Patti Parks handled makeup, and Dan Adams, Pete Bradley and James Dalton served as roustabout crew. Music was by Eric Bauman, Bob Hornstein and John Carroll.
What came next?
Encore’s website has an extensive list of production credits since “Preposterous Poems.” Here are the shows performed in the decade that followed:
- 1966-67: “A Pocketful of Preposterous Poems”; “The Great Cross Country Race”; “The Shoemaker and the Elves”; “Alphabet Ark”
- 1967-68: “Sleeping Beauty”; “Bobino”; “The Master Cat”
- 1968-69: “Beauty and the Beast”; “The Unwicked Witch”; “The Great Cross-Country Race”
- 1970: “The Merry Pranks of Tyll”; “Niccolo and Nicolette”
- 1970-71: “The Plain Princess”; “Rumpelstiltskin”; “The Prince and the Pauper”
- 1971-72: “The Snow Queen and the Goblin”; “The Wizard of Oz”; “Sing Ho for a Prince (Sleeping Beauty)”
- 1972-73: “Little Snow Girl”; “Alice in Wonderland”; “Trudy and the Minstrel”
- 1973-74: “Hansel and Gretel”; “Cinderella”; “Aesop’s Fables”
- 1974-75: “King Patch and Mr. Simkins”; “Peter Pan”; “The Owl and the Pussycat Went to Sea”
While admission to “Preposterous Poems” had been free, admission was charged for many future productions. Fifty cents seemed to be the going rate for shows in the first decade.
Archives of the Northern Virginia Sun include news items from those first 10 years. Among them, the theater troupe sponsored a playwriting competition in 1968, designed to commission a new show for children.
Judges for the competition included Zelda Fichandler of Arena Stage, Washington Post theater critic William Rico and other professionals.
Press releases about upcoming shows noted that mothers would be responsible for sewing their children’s costumes.
Quest for a permanent home
In 1971, the Arlington Players, Arlington Symphony and Children’s Theatre teamed up on a proposal to use space on the Cherrydale Baptist Church campus for a performing-arts center and administrative offices.
According to Northern Virginia Sun coverage, the proposal was opposed by the Cherrydale Civic Association. The group had no problems with the arts organizations, but objected to some of the space being leased to commercial businesses to offset costs.
As a result, the proposal died. So did another later that year, seeking to turn the former Stuart Elementary School into a performing-arts center.
In 1975, arts groups backed a $1.3 million county bond referendum that would have modernized and expanded auditorium facilities at Washington-Lee (now Washington-Liberty) High School to serve both the school and performing-arts community.
But 1975 proved a bad year for bond referendums in Arlington. Seven of the eight local referendums on the Nov. 3 ballot went down to defeat, most by lopsided margins.
The W-L auditorium bond was the most unpopular, crushed by a vote of 23,612 against to just 5,169 in favor.
In its reporting on what it called a “walloping defeat” of the bond package, the Northern Virginia Sun suggested that a combination of economic recession, inflation and county tax rates had soured voters.
In the same 1975 election, Republicans Walter Frankland and Dorothy Grotos won the two County Board seats on the ballot, a stinging rebuke of the Democratic/ABC (Arlingtonians for a Better County) coalition that had held all five seats for the preceding five years.
Subsequent efforts to create a community arts center have faced similar challenges. A nonprofit advocacy group in 2022 proposed creating a facility featuring a 150-seat black-box theater and related ancillary spaces, but it never gained sufficient momentum to move beyond a planning effort.
The lack of success in those efforts did not mean The Children’s Theatre, or other arts groups, faced homelessness. Many productions were held in the community theater that opened in conjunction with the new Thomas Jefferson Junior High School (now Thomas Jefferson Middle).
The school opened in the fall of 1972, and its theater remains a favored venue for many troupes, including Encore.
Transition to professional management
By the late 1990s, The Children’s Theatre began to augment its volunteers with a professional staff. Hired as artistic director was Susan Keady, a Montgomery College adjunct professor and host of children’s radio programming.
“It’s great to be an artistic success,” Keady told The Washington Post in 1997 coverage, “but you’ve got to pay the bills, and you’ve got to teach the kids that it’s a business and you have to be responsible.”
That year, the organization began an “aggressive fundraising campaign” to supplement its annual budget.
Things moved along smoothly, but local arts groups faced an unexpected challenge: an earthquake. The 5.8 magnitude temblor was centered downstate in Mineral, Va., but rattled Northern Virginia and caused structural damage to Thomas Jefferson Community Theatre.
The Children’s Theatre — by then renamed Encore Stage & Studio — and other groups using the Thomas Jefferson facility, like the Arlington Players, spent more than a year at other venues before reconstruction work was complete.
For the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons, Encore again was on the move. This time it was owing to construction of Alice West Fleet Elementary School on what had been the Thomas Jefferson Middle School surface parking lot.
The Thomas Jefferson theater stayed open during construction, but with parking essentially nonexistent, Encore and a number of other theater troupes opted to find other venues, such as the theaters at Gunston and Kenmore middle schools.
The pandemic requires new approaches
By March 2020, Encore had staged three of its five shows for the 2019-20 season, with “The Frog Prince of Spamalot” and “West Side Story” on the horizon.
The arrival of Covid changed those plans. In-person events like theater productions were canceled and performing-arts organizations had to figure out a Plan B.
For Encore, that included shifting some programming to an online platform. In addition, the troupe held a number of drive-through events, including “Winter Star” in December 2020.
During those events, families stayed in their vehicles and drove to various stops, where performers presented scenes in chronological order.
Indoor performances resumed in September 2021 with a production of “The Hobbit” at Thomas Jefferson. Initially, audience members needed to remain masked up and show proof of Covid vaccination to attend.
Crowds returned over time, with a January 2023 production of “Disney’s Beauty & the Beast Jr.” drawing about 2,600 attendees over two weekends.
Disney shows always draw in crowds. The all-time attendance record for Encore productions was set at 4,400 for “Little Mermaid Jr.” in 2014. One of the last shows before the pandemic — “Frozen Jr.” — drew 2,900 over several weekends.
What does the future hold?
Encore closes out its 2025-26 season with “The Addams Family,” to be presented at Thomas Jefferson July 17-26. The 2026-27 season opens with “Hansel and Gretel,” running in September and October at Thomas Jefferson.
Additional shows include “Madeleine’s Christmas” (November-December) at Gunston Arts Center; “The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical” (January) at Thomas Jefferson; student-directed one-act plays (February) at Theater on the Run; Twisted Trails & Tall Tales: An American Folktale Adventure” (February-March) at Thomas Jefferson; “The Enchanted Bookshop” (May-June) at Thomas Jefferson; and “Bye Bye Birdie” (July) at Thomas Jefferson.
Graneto’s post-‘Pocketful’ career
“A Pocketful of Preposterous Poems” was the last show Graneto worked on for the county’s recreation department. In the fall of 1966, he departed the local area after taking a position as an assistant designer in the theater department of Brandeis University.
Later stints would include faculty and staff positions at College of the Holy Cross and Glassboro State College, which in 1992 took its current name of Rowan University.
At Rowan, Graneto was involved in about 80 stage productions during a 40-year faculty career from 1970-2010. He directed his last production at the college — Moliere’s comedy “The Misanthrope” — shortly before his 2010 retirement.
Among his students at the New Jersey college was Robert Hegyes, who in the mid-1970s would become known to TV audiences as Juan Epstein, one of the Sweathogs on ABC’s wildly popular sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.”
Graneto said he isn’t entirely sure why Encore considers “Pocketful of Preposterous Poems” as its starting point. There were, he notes, similar youth productions presented by the recreation department earlier in the 1960s.
Regardless of the reasons, he expressed happiness that Encore is going strong, six decades after his show hit the summertime stage.
“I’m pleased to be part of its roots,” he said.
Thanks to Encore Stage and Studio, Phillip Graneto, Christian Oberly of Rowan University, the Charlie Clark Center for Local History, Virginia Chronicle/Library of Virginia and The Washington Post for support with research.
