Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Show

Twenty or so years ago, Michael Baldwin produced many shows with singing, dancing and dialog he wrote himself to entertain his parents, their friends and anyone else in the Salisbury neighborhood who liked to see kids practicing stardom. He played any stage he could get. “I used to stand on a piano bench in my parents’ living room, holding a mock microphone,” he told me. And he recalls every word of the donkey’s song from the Christmas pageant at St. Mary’s Church when he was 5. Now, Baldwin, 30, lives in New York, still acting. Professionally now. But he is back home, briefly, to produce another show here, “Zombie Town,” as a benefit for TriArts where he and a lot of his pals got their start on a stage. “Growing up, I can’t remember thinking of any other option than a life in theater, a life in the arts. My thirst was never ending.” Baldwin started life on stage as a little guy, skinny, with a bright face, auditioning at TriArts, wearing baggy shorts and a confident air. He would try anything on a stage. He just looked joyful up there, I remember. He studied voice in those days with Michael Berkeley and Joanna Seaton, and tap at Impact with Mel Shulman and he got roles in everything from TriArts’ “Barnum” in a tent in Pine Plains (directed by Berkeley and Ray Roderick) to his first pro job in Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Woman Who Laughed” at Sharon Stage. That last was an eye-opener. “I was really taken by the drama. It pushed boundaries. It made people think. They left the theater with new ideas.” After college, where he studied theater and sociology, and with $1,500 in savings, Baldwin went to New York City along with a bunch of other Skidmore grads to get a job in theater. “I wanted to do everything,” Baldwin remembers. Sleeping on friends’ couches until he got work, he auditioned for musicals, dramas, Shakespeare, comedies, chorus lines, commercials, voiceovers. Anything. Everything. And of course he took acting and dancing and singing classes until he realized there was not time or money enough to pursue everything at once. So he tries to “funnel it all down,” these days. As best he can. He is just back from a role in “Shear Madness” in Seattle, and he is readying for its national tour: Eight shows a week for six months beginning in August. But in between, he figured it would be fun to go home and see his father — retired bank president Gerry Baldwin, now co-owner of the Caddie Shack in Canaan; and his mother, Mary Ellen Baldwin, a retired nurse — and his sisters and his friends and, well, since he’s here, why not put on a show?