BERNE — Voters are at the polls, and two directors huddle in the high school auditorium here, preparing for their upcoming shows. Both are racing against time. One is strapped for cash. The other is concerned about staging. Both have seen better days.
Dick Foster, a fictional director, once very successful and a prominent name in show business, is broke. He wanders around the stage aimlessly and helpless, wondering about his glory days. Where have they gone" Clueless about how to get $100,000 to finance his play and where he is going to find the star of his show, Foster tells his actors to keep the faith.

James Meyer, the real thing, is battling pain and discomfort from the surgery he underwent this week. He instructs his Hilltown actors — where they need to stand on the stage, how to enter and exit the stage, how they will conduct themselves following the performances. He rehearses the musical’s final number several times to get his actors ready for this weekend’s performances.

Meyer, the director of The Hilltowns Players’ fall musical-comedy, Give My Regards to Broadway, stands in front of center stage and calls for the practice to begin.
"Finale!" he yells.

The actors come to the stage quickly. Some players are upbeat and anxious, sharing quick, hushed remarks with one another. Others, focused and serious, hang on his every word. Some high-school girls giggle.

In front, the five male players stand ready to perform the musical’s closing number. Holding white canes, each of the actors listens to Meyer.

One is a high-school freshman with a crew cut, wearing glasses and a trench coat. To his left, a man of about thirty dons a debonair three-piece gray suit decorated with a blood red tie. At center stage, a middle-aged man, dressed simply in black pants and a white, button-down dress shirt. To his left, a middle-aged man with a mustache, wearing a bow tie. On the far end, a high-school senior, wearing a fedora, holsters his gun.

A chorus of nearly a dozen women — high schoolers and veteran Players — stands behind the men, peaking around and between them to get a better look at their director.

The number starts, and the actors kick up their heels and sing to the accompaniment of a snare and a piano.

Give my regards to Broadway,
remember me to Herald Square,

Tell all the gang at 42nd Street,
that I will soon be there;

Whisper of how I’m yearning to
mingle with the old time throng;

Give my regards to old Broadway
and say that I’ll be there ere long.

The number ends.
"OK, OK. Thunderous applause, lights will come up, we will bow, you will curtsy," Meyer says.

He instructs a young actress how to place her feet when performing a curtsy.
"Right behind left," he tells her.

Ready to begin from the top, Meyer tells the actors to head backstage.

The lights go down, and then they come back up.

The show begins.

Comedy of errors

Set in a ramshackle, broken-down off-Broadway theater, Give My Regards to Broadway, tells the tale of the once-famous, successful director, Dick Foster, played with poise by Frank Meredith.

As the date of his play draws closer, and his pocketbook grows lighter, Foster’s theater is visited by a host of outsiders — a gangster hit man seeking vengeance, a bookie whose limousine has been riddled with bullets, a Virginian niece of a chorus girl, an aspiring actress, a pretentious Broadway star, and a Harvard man who sets the stage for a surprise ending.

With little or no money to his name and no foreseeable overnight wealth and stardom, Foster has a play, but he doesn’t have a lead actress. Meredith, an accomplished musician and novelist, playing the distressed director, throws up his hands in defeat as ever-mounting chaos surrounds him. The audience can’t help but sympathize.

Though he lacks the star of his show, Foster has faith that Mona Monroe, played by Penny Shaw, a star he helped create, will be understanding and agree to play the part, thus returning the theater to respectability and financial stability once more.

His situation is dire.

The heat in his theater building has been turned off because of unpaid bills. The actors who remain with the company earn little money, and are literally freezing and starving.
"I can’t afford to eat out," a chorus girl says matter-of-factly.

The chorus girls wear gloves, stocking hats, ear muffs, and winter coats to combat the theater’s cold temperatures.
"When we’re rich and famous, you’ll laugh about this," an optimistic chorus girl says.

Even Foster’s long-time sidekick, pianist Eddie Cowles, played by John Drahzal, doesn’t think they’ll ever see their way out of their predicament. Cowles, also feeling the drop in temperature, has been reduced to wearing gloves as he plays.
Enter Mary Collins, an aspiring actress, played by Ann P. Henry. She comes to Broadway from New Rochelle, "only 45 minutes from Broadway." Henry, in her first production with the Hilltown troupe, plays her character with a sweet innocence, casting a disappointed gaze downward upon hearing things that don’t comply with all she’s dreamed of.

Mary tells Foster her theater accomplishments and credits.
"You’re not very impressed," a disappointed Mary says after observing the stoic Foster.

Foster tells her Broadway is nothing but a place for broken dreams.
"You’re destined to be disappointed," Foster says. "Don’t take it personally, but, if you’re going to make it, it’s gotta be on Broadway."

Mary, undeterred by Foster’s remarks and determined to make an impression, sings for him.
"Only 45 minutes from Broadway, think of the changes it brings; for the short time it takes, what a difference it makes in the ways of the people and things," she sings.
Foster, strapped for cash and unwilling to take a chance on a newcomer, tells her, "You’ve got a great voice, but I just finished casting."

Their meeting ends and, Legs Ruby, played by Chad Newell with a thick Long Island accent, enters and looks around the theater skeptically.

Legs, a befuddled bookie running from the mob, is accompanied by Trixie, played with toughness by Holly Wilkie, his outspoken friend who works as a chorus girl at the theater.

Legs’s limousine is riddled with bullet holes.
"They don’t make bullet-proof cars the way they used to," he says.
Legs, though caught up in the criminal underworld, considers himself an "honest" bookie. He believes whole-heartedly in the opportunities of the U.S.A.
"My parents were immigrants. They came here without a penny," he says. In his persuasive salute to his adherence to innocence and purity, Legs sings, "I’m a Yankee Doodle Boy."
Trixie suggests Legs hide out at her place. Legs thinks on it briefly, but, feeling at home at the theater, tells her, "I’ll hang out here a coupla days. Nobody’ll look for me here."

Shortly after Legs has made the theater his home, mob hit man, Mugsy, played by Drew Swint, shows up, looking for him. Mugsy, dressed in gangster clothing, is joined by his clingy moll, Babs, played by Natalie Drahzal.
Mugsy says he’s looking for Legs, and says, "If you see him, tell him I want to give him a new overcoat — a cement overcoat."

Foster’s theater is later visited by Mona Monroe, an extravagantly-dressed, vain Broadway star. Foster tells her that he needs $100,000 for his play and that he needs her talents on his stage.

Mona refuses. Shaw plays the Broadway star with an air of pomposity and pretentiousness — petting Foster’s lapels, and looking about the stage as though she finds all she sees much too simple and repugnant.
"I’ve been offered another part in another play"I have a responsibility to my adoring fans," Mona says.

Just when things can’t possibly get more chaotic, the overwhelmed Foster is thrown yet another surprise when the Harvard man, played by Scott Rue, toting a briefcase, shows up at the theater and delivers the last thing Foster had been expecting — a check written by an anonymous person for $100,000.

***

Give My Regards to Broadway is being performed this weekend at the Berne-Knox-Westerlo High School auditorium.
Show times are on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and on Sunday at 2 p.m.

Tickets are $10 for adults, $8 for senior citizens and students, and $5 for children 12 and under.