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Making Maui Shine

For the past few weeks, I’ve shared ongoing conversations with artistic creators on their craft and contribution to Maui’s burgeoning performing arts scene. Long revered institutions are essential in making live entertainment significant on Maui, but it is the constant influx of talent that makes it thrive.

“It’s the classic comic and the showgirl story,” said John Padon, co-producer of the all-new King Kamehameha Komedy Klub in Waikapu and former owner of the four-time Best of Las Vegas Award-winning Sin City Comedy at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino.

Padon’s wife, Dejah, a Maui native, began her dance training with the Maui Academy of Performing Arts as a child, but the two met while performing together in the revue “Skin Tight” at Harrah’s Reno Hotel and Casino. After selling Sin City Comedy last year, Padon asked Dejah if she wanted to come home, and it wasn’t long before they were both active in live entertainment on Maui.

In addition to her featured dancer role in Maui OnStage’s recent production of “Guys and Dolls,” Dejah served as choreographer on the King Kekaulike High School production of “The Music Man” last month.

Hungry to produce comedy on Maui, Padon shared why he chose King Kamehameha Golf Club.

“It’s not a very interesting story,” he said. “I was playing golf with my uncle one day and went upstairs and stumbled upon the Waikapu Ballroom. I just said, ‘Wow, what a beautiful room.’ So I asked the bartender about renting it and then met with Anela (Gutierrez) and Pete (Sebastian), the event directors. They’ve been awesome. The aloha spirit is incredible.”

I inquired how that compared to opening a comedy club in Las Vegas.

“No one in Las Vegas is going to help you,” he said. “Opening here has been a breeze, a true breath of fresh air. Everyone on Maui is so helpful.”

Padon calls producing “a hobby at this point,” but he’s excited to bring high-caliber headlining comedy veterans to Maui. He described Friday’s show as “blue collar comedy-like,” with three-time Country Music Association award-winner Steve McGrew and Country Music Television regular Bobby Wayne Stauts. Future performers will include Carl Labove, and Padon also hopes to bring music-based Las Vegas productions to Maui.

Beginning at open mic nights in the 1980s in his home town of Albuquerque, N.M., he was eventually mentored by “The Improv” founder Budd Friedman.

“I was booked on ‘The Improv’ circuit as an opener. The second comics were guys like Adam Sandler, David Spade and Rob Schneider, and the headliners were Jerry Seinfeld, Tim Allen and Jeff Foxworthy. It was a comedy college – my own personal Ivy League education,” he said.

In time, The Comedy Store in San Diego became his home club where he met Labove and Sam Kinison.

“Sam died in Carl’s arms,” Padon shared. “They were best friends and roommates. The joke was, Sam’s room was the front seat and Carl’s was the back.”

McGrew and Padon first met on the Honolulu Comedy Club tour in the mid-1990s, where he performed at the former Sports Page in Kihei.

“Comics killed for that gig,” he said. “We’d spend more money than we made, but who doesn’t want to come to Hawaii? Twenty years later, the best comics in Vegas are begging me for a King Kamehameha gig.”

Another contributor to the island’s performing arts scene, Kathryn Holtkamp is a Los Alamos, N.M., native and Maui newcomer who first came to Hawaii on a national tour of “Cats” in 2011.

“I was one of those kids that always did theater as an extracurricular in school,” she shared. “Toward the end of high school, I decided I wanted to pursue theater professionally.”

That choice eventually brought her to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City where she had the opportunity to perform for Stephen Sondheim and met fellow students Ricky Jones and Hoku Pavao Jones.

“We visited Hoku and Ricky (with husband Michael Vincent) and just fell in love with Maui,” she said. “The grind of the New York theater scene wasn’t what I fell in love with when I got started. In New York, everybody says ‘No.’ Here, everybody says ‘Yes.'”

While visiting, she attended the Maui OnStage production of “Rent.”

“I couldn’t believe the caliber of theater happening here. I wanted a change and decided to make theater more of a hobby.”

Since the fall, Holtkamp has performed at the Frank Sinatra 100th Birthday concert, the King Kamehameha Waikapu Ballroom on New Year’s Eve and most recently in “The Broads of Broadway.” This summer, she’ll make her large-scale production Maui debut as Lucy, the female lead, in MAPA Live’s “Jekyll & Hyde” in Castle Theater at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center.

“Lucy is one of my dream roles. All actors have their bucket list and she’s on there. The problem was, so was the Lady of the Lake (from “Spamalot”), but I love the MACC, it’s such a beautiful space, and after seeing ‘Evita’ last year, again, I’m so impressed by the caliber of Maui productions.”

I asked if Holtkamp had any future dreams on her bucket list.

“I’d love to get involved with teaching,” she said, “I’d like to specialize in acting courses and audition techniques for professionals.”

She doesn’t rule out moving home someday, though.

“There’s not a professional theater company in New Mexico, except for the national tours,” she said. “It’s a life dream to start my own theater company in Santa Fe, but utilizing uncommon spaces as theater spaces.”

Like Dejah and Holtkamp, Jerry Eiting caught the acting bug in his youth, beginning with the Baldwin Theatre Guild. In 1986, he headed to San Diego to pursue theater professionally and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in musical theater. Eventually, he performed for two seasons at San Diego’s open-air Starlight Musical Theatre and later with the Civic Light Opera circuit performing in musicals like “42nd Street,” “Kiss Me Kate,” “Follies” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” all over Southern California.

“Four months into a six-month contract, I began to question my happiness, and then I lost my voice,” he shared. “It happened that my brother called to tell me he was opening a poolside bar at the Maui Coast Hotel and asked me to come back to work with him. So I quit the show and came home in 1993.”

Six months later, the MACC opened and Eiting was cast as the lead in the first musical ever produced in Castle Theater, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“My perspective had changed,” he said. “It’s more of a hobby now versus the fantasy of making money in theater.”

Eiting also worked alongside his father writing copy and producing radio ads at KPOA.

“The experience at KPOA gave me the opportunity to bond with Hawaiians and have a deeper understanding of Hawaiian culture,” he said.

Since returning to Maui, Eiting has performed in more than 20 musicals.

“I consider myself a singer who acts,” says Eiting.

I asked what he looks for in roles. “Kick-ass songs,” he joked. “I like dramatic and intense music with the good ‘money notes.’ Gomez (“The Addams Family”) was one of my favorite roles, and Javert (“Les Miserables”). Gomez was everything I wish I could be. Embracing the darkness of life but with a heart filled with light.”

I described his choices as flawed leading men. “I like that,” he replied.

His latest role is a bit of a departure as he takes on King Arthur in “Spamalot,” the musical version of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a film which he says he’s “been quoting for over 30 years. I’m playing the straight man this time,” he added. “He’s an educated, temperamental aristocrat dealing with the uneducated masses that surround him.”

I asked about his process in transforming to a new character. “I have a natural sense of the character right away and I think I am a good cold reader. Ninety-percent of what I want to do is there right away, but I have faith that it’s the director’s show, not mine, and I’m there to co-create their vision.”

Eiting says that his hobby is a blessing. “It’s a gift in my life – to escape into a role and be someone else is therapeutic and it has improved my life.”

ALSO THIS WEEK

Rick Scheideman concludes his one-man-show performances with “An Evening with Albert Einstein” on Friday.

* The performance will be at 6:30 p.m. at the Pioneer Inn courtyard in Lahaina. Courtyard dining is available prior to the show. Tickets are $20 and may be reserved by calling 276-4201 or purchased at the door.

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