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The South Haven Theatre Series stages the final performance of its 2021 season with “An Evening with Teddy Roosevelt” at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 20 in the Listiak Auditorium of South Haven High School, 600 Elkenburg Street.
“An Evening with Teddy Roosevelt” features historian/impersonator Joe Wiegand as the 26th president of the United States. Wiegand has portrayed Roosevelt in all fifty states. He even performed at the White House to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Roosevelt’s birth.
Theodore Roosevelt was a soldier and statesman, explorer and scientist, historian and author. As our youngest president, he personified a vigorous nation on the cusp of the American Century.
TR’s stories entertain and inspire today.
Wiegand, who grew up in Elmhurst, Illinois, is “a man of considerable mass—not flabby but stout, like Roosevelt,” wrote Jordan Fisher Smith in The New Yorker.
Wiegand was a college runner, who grew into his present role, according to his wife Jennie, who accompanies him on tour. Wiegand displays all the skill and presence of a professional actor, which he is not. His earliest inclination was to be a politician. After high school where he served as student council president. He completed an undergraduate degree in political science at the University of the South and studied international politics in Costa Rica, South Africa, Italy, and the Philippines.” He had earlier been elected Governor of the American Legion Illinois Boys State and President of the American Legion Boys Nation programs. He twice ran for a seat in the Illinois legislature but lost. He ran other people’s campaigns while a county commissioner.
On Christmas of 2001, his sister-in-law gifted him a copy of Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Wiegand discovered a brilliant dead President who wasn’t using his lines anymore, and became him.
Called “the conservation president,” Roosevelt doubled the number of sites within the National Park system and signed legislation establishing five new national parks: Crater Lake, Oregon; Wind Cave, South Dakota; Sullys Hill, North Dakota; Mesa Verde, Colorado; and Platt, Oklahoma.
Speaker of the House Joe Cannon showed his opposition: ‘Not one red cent for scenery!’ he declared. Responding from behind his bushy mustache and wire rim spectacles, Roosevelt-Wiegand said: “But the American people called for national parks, and I was able to deliver five more. We passed the Monuments and Antiquities Act, too, during my Presidency. When Congress wouldn’t declare the Grand Canyon a national park, I used the Act’s power to declare it a national monument!”
Wiegand spends an hour a day in vigorous outdoor activity and sunlight to maintain a semblance of Roosevelt’s wind-burned complexion and acquired his Roosevelt voice, a particular rapid-fire cadence, from listening to on-line versions of Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder recordings of the President.
Admission is $15 for adults and students are free of charge. Tickets can be purchased at the door before the performance or on-line at www.southhaventheatreseries.org.
Current COVID protocols, which at this time require the wearing of a mask, will be followed.
For persons who are uncomfortable at a live performance, “An Evening with Teddy Roosevelt” will also be live-streamed and tickets for that can also be purchased at www.southhaventheatreseries.org.
This performance is sponsored by South Haven Community Foundation and 5/3rd Bank
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