photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Terry Thoelke, playing one of the two dueling divas, rehearses a song for "Vintage Vaudeville Revived!" on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at Theatre Lawrence.

“Where’s my pencil?” says Deb Madden at Tuesday’s rehearsal for Vintage Players, Theatre Lawrence’s senior theater program. She’s just come into the auditorium, running late and a little frazzled. “Do you have a pencil?”

Director Bruce Douglas doesn’t have one. Nobody in the audience does. Oh, but wait – they’re in her hair! She pulls one out and offers it to him. “Would you like a pencil?”

She’s not having a senior moment – it’s just her character, a forgetful prop manager named Flossie Fumble, in the Vintage Players’ new show about a show, “Vintage Vaudeville Revived!”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

For her role as a scatterbrained props manager, Deb Madden came up with this hairstyle that holds her pencils.

The show, written specifically for the cast of senior performers, is about a dysfunctional vaudeville troupe full of zany, extreme characters, including two dueling divas who each want to hog the spotlight. With the help of a ventriloquist who’s performed around the nation, they’ll be performing it this Saturday – one night only – at Theatre Lawrence.

While the fictional characters may be jealous of each other’s roles, the idea is for the performers to each get their chance to shine. Vintage Players, which has been around for a couple of decades now, is open to all seniors regardless of experience or skill level. And Douglas said the play was written through a collaborative process, one where improvisation is welcome and encouraged.

As Madden puts it, “It’s more, really, about us revealing who we are. And Bruce takes that and works with it.”

“It’s so important for a director to let that happen and not to be so invested in what’s on the page,” Douglas said. “Because the important thing is for the actors to have fun doing this. They volunteered. So if they come here and it’s like work, they’re not going to do it.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

The Vintage Players are pictured at Theatre Lawrence on Tuesday, March 24, 2026. They’ll perform their new original show “Vintage Vaudeville Revived!” this weekend at Theatre Lawrence.

‘They want to have fun’

For Sherri Millsap, “play” is the most important part of Vintage Players.

Her character in this show is “a flirtatious lady – very unlike my personality,” she said. “It’s a chance to play, to be a different personality and go for it.”

“You know what?” she said. “Sometimes older people wind up having different personalities not by choice.”

Millsap has been involved in theater since childhood. “My mother was in the theater,” she said, “and so from the time I could talk, she had me learning poems, readings and things to perform for family and friends.”

That’s a common theme in the group – people who’ve been around theater much of their lives and are looking for a way to stay involved. But those opportunities aren’t always easy to come by for older actors, Douglas said. He said community theaters are more likely to have special programs aimed at youth actors.

“The seniors are usually relegated to the audience, watching their grandchildren, watching their kids perform,” he said. “So, now we flip it, and the seniors are now performing.”

He’s found that certain types of shows work better for seniors. Humorous shows, he said, are “the sweet spot.” They’re a chance for actors to escape from the other commitments and responsibilities they have.

“There’s so much drama in our everyday lives,” he said. “For us as seniors, I’m done with drama. They want to have fun.”

Terry Thoelke, who plays one of the two divas in the show, has been having fun with theater since high school. She’s done a mix of musicals and other plays in the past – her favorite part that she’s ever played is her “dream role” of Annie Oakley in the musical “Annie Get Your Gun.”

She’s wowed her fellow performers with her talent for improv, too.

“These two right here are great at improvising,” Madden says about Thoelke and the other diva. During one rehearsal, she recalls, “they bickered at each other in character for 20 minutes. I couldn’t believe that they could do that!”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Terry Thoelke, left, and Josephine, ventriloquist Diana Rockwell’s puppet, are the feuding divas at the heart of Theatre Lawrence’s “Vintage Vaudeville Revived!” On keyboard is director Bruce Douglas.

‘The baby’

That other diva, Josephine, has a special sing-off number with Thoelke where they each lay claim to the stage. Before they run through it on Tuesday, Thoelke looks over toward her rival: There’s “the baby of the group,” she says.

Josephine, as befitting a prima donna, is a little insulted. “Not Josephine!” Thoelke is quick to clarify. “I didn’t say her! I was looking at you!”

She meant Josephine’s silent manager and puppeteer, Diana Rockwell.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Diana Rockwell, a ventriloquist who’s performed around the country, and her puppet Josephine.

Known as the “Ventriloqueen,” Rockwell is a University of Kansas alumna who’s based out of the Kansas City area. She’s performed her ventriloquist act around the country and even on national TV on the show “America’s Funniest People,” according to her website.

She and Josephine have been working together since 2020, she said. But she’s been interested in ventriloquism much longer than that. Her fascination with it began when she was a kid, she said, after she read the “Goosebumps” horror novel “Night of the Living Dummy.”

“It was just so out there and so unique, even though it was so creepy at the same time,” she said.

Getting into this art takes a lot of practice, Rockwell said. There are certain sounds called “trouble consonants” – “B,” “P” and “M” – that you have to learn to pronounce in a completely different way, and she compared it to learning another language.

“There are lots of people out there that are a naturally good actor or a naturally good singer, but no one is a naturally good ventriloquist,” she said.

It was Rockwell’s idea to do a vaudeville-themed show, Douglas said. A show about a variety show featuring a puppet might make some people think of “The Muppet Show,” and Rockwell said the comparison makes sense. But “even the dialogue in this for the people who are not using puppets kind of comes off that way,” she said.

“It’s like we’re all Muppets,” she says. “Or, it’s like everyone is a Muppet and Josephine is the human.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Director Bruce Douglas, right, coaches Deb Madden of the Vintage Players on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at Theatre Lawrence.

Scratching the ‘theater itch’

Flossie Fumble the props manager certainly has some Muppet-like eccentricities to her. That hairstyle with the pencils? Madden said she created it because “there’s not much real estate behind my hearing aid here.”

“Between my glasses and my hearing aid, I have no place for the pencils!” she said. “So I developed this silly hairdo, which goes with Flossie quite well.”

All her life, Madden told the Journal-World, “I’ve had a theater itch.”

It’s been with her since childhood, even though she’s never been a professional actor. As a kid, she and her family moved around a lot, and everywhere they ended up, she would look for an audition. “You get a part, have instant friends and an instant, important project,” she said.

Among the people she met because of her love of theater was her husband, about whom Douglas says, “if he’s not a professional actor, he’s pretty close to it.” When the couple lived in California, Douglas says, they worked with the famed acting coach Lee Strasberg, known as the father of method acting.

“So, she comes with really good credentials,” Douglas says of Madden.

Throughout her career as an elementary teacher, Madden would incorporate theater and art into her lessons. But it wasn’t until she retired that she started performing in community theater productions. She’s done “a little sprinkling of everything” since then, she says – a few musicals, some more serious plays. She was the town gossip in “Our Town,” Lady Montague in “Romeo and Juliet,” Mrs. Bennett in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

She’s also done readers theater, where she “felt very much that you can just bring a character alive for the audience.”

“I could be playing four different characters and they would come back and tell me afterward, ‘We totally knew when you were doing the different characters,'” she says. “‘You completely changed yourself.'”

That experience comes in handy for Vintage Players, where things are quite flexible during rehearsals. “Sometimes we play different characters,” she said. “If someone’s not here, we just switcheroonie!”

Those who want to join Vintage Players shouldn’t be afraid to try, because it doesn’t involve the same time commitment as being in a big main-stage production would. The group meets twice a month, at 1:30 p.m. on the second and fourth Tuesdays, and participants have scripts during the performances so there’s no memorization required. Most of the time, the group isn’t just rehearsing, but is going out and performing at places like senior living communities and schools.

“I’m a grandma of twins,” Madden said. “There are times when I couldn’t possibly rehearse every night of the week.”

And Douglas is hoping to “cast a wider net,” he said, with new types of offerings – “have more musical comedies, possibly a cabaret, we’ll do a little gig out in the lobby or on the patio.” One of the upcoming projects will be a seniors-only version of the musical “Guys and Dolls,” which Madden said will use an adapted book from a company that caters to senior and youth performers.

But no matter what they’re doing, Douglas wants the focus to stay on having fun and scratching that theater itch, and his cast members agree.

“I always thought that if we had a camera in there just watching our rehearsals, it would be a show on television,” said Millsap. “It’s just ridiculous; we pop off and say things to each other and do stupid things and have fun. And that’s the main part of it.”

Vintage Players’ “Vintage Vaudeville Revived!” will be at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, March 28, at Theatre Lawrence, 4660 Bauer Farm Drive. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at theatrelawrence.com/vintage-vaudeville.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

The cast of “Vintage Vaudeville Revived!” rehearses on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at Theatre Lawrence.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Terry Thoelke, playing one of the two dueling divas, rehearses a song for “Vintage Vaudeville Revived!” on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at Theatre Lawrence.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

On stage, ventriloquist Diana Rockwell, left, director Bruce Douglas and Terry Thoelke rehearse a scene from “Vintage Vaudeville Revived!” on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at Theatre Lawrence.