One Reel Wizard -- Just Think Of Norm Langill As Seattle's P.T. Barnum

IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT in Seattle and Teatro ZinZanni is in full swing.

Elegantly dressed couples sit in wood-and-velvet booths in a fancy old European show tent on Mercer Street, sipping champagne. Seattle composer Norman Durkee leads the band through supper-club standards. Quirky waiters and waitresses with foreign accents work the room, poised to launch into a zany comedy routine, dangle sensuously from a trapeze, or snatch your purse at any moment.

Meanwhile, a stocky, owlish, silver-bearded man in a magenta-checked velvet sport coat lurks benignly around the edges of the hoopla, quietly "snapshotting."

The term has nothing to do with photography. It's just Norm Langill-lingo for the quick-click quality control he employs at all events produced by his bustling company, One Reel productions. It means observing the action from many angles and spotting any "frame" that needs adjustment, be it a missed lighting cue or a sluggishly paced comedy bit.

At One Reel's Fourth of July bash at Gas Works Park, Langill busily "snapshot" among 60,000 revelers, this time wearing his ritual American flag shirt and Elvis pin. And next weekend he'll probably be roving the Seattle Center grounds incognito, making like a human digital camera at the mother of all Northwest arts festivals, Bumbershoot.

So why is the busy top cheese of a major nonprofit corporation with more than 50 employees (swelling to 1,000-plus during Bumbershoot) tending to such details? And why isn't he the hard-driving, slick Mr. Big producer one expects from Central Casting?

Because that's Norman: a hands-on impresario whose right brain/left brain, mellow-hippie/smart-businessman, "think globally"/"act locally" style makes him the quintessential Seattle doer-visionary. He is a Host with the Most who nurtured a funky little theater troupe tooling around Washington in an antique truck into a $14.6-million entertainment empire that presents some mighty grand parties: Bumbershoot, the Gas Works Fourth of July bash, the Summer Nights at the Pier concert series, Colorado's Lodo Festival and the recently-hatched WOMAD (World of Music and Dance) USA in Redmond - the only American branch of a famous roving festival presented at different sites around the globe.

One Reel also produced Seattle's world-class Goodwill Arts Festival, an offshoot of the 1990 Goodwill Games, and a ground-breaking American tour by Japan's Grand Kabuki Theatre, arranged by Langill and his wife, Jane Corddry Langill, a scholar of Japanese theater.

Even closer to Langill's heart are the odd-bodkins projects only someone operating a few degrees off center might dream up. Like sending American pro-football players to Japan to train with top sumo wrestlers and learn their centuries-old injury-prevention techniques.

Compared with some of these extravaganzas, Teatro ZinZanni is modest, catering to only a few hundred people each night. Yet it also may be one of One Reel's riskiest ventures yet. In his own unflashy way, Langill is a gambler, and on this whimsical little dinner theater he staked a six-figure investment and maybe his organization's future.

Among those who have watched the rise of One Reel and its unorthodox CEO - he keeps such a low public profile, cracks one pal, "he looks like he was hired to sweep up after Bumbershoot, not produce it" - it's hard to find anyone with a bad word to say.

Seattle Children's Theatre artistic director Linda Hartzell, who goes back with the 49-year-old Langill to their days as struggling actors, calls him "the closest thing to P.T. Barnum we have in Seattle." Susan Silver, a longtime friend and manager of prominent rock bands, says he's "a shrewd businessman as opposed to a rude businessman."

Mayor Paul Schell, co-chair of the 1990 Goodwill Arts Festival, calls him "an intuitive arts genius."

People do remember a few foibles. Members of his dedicated, loyal staff recall the time the sometimes spacey Langill forgot his visa and warm coat on a trip to Russia. And the day he dressed casually for a formal meeting of suited-up Japanese officials, yet forged an immediate rapport with them anyway.

One Reel is growing and diversifying, but it still reflects the personality and instincts of an unlikely exec who landed where he is via an unlikely route: the neo-vaudeville circuit.

LANGILL'S NEW OFFICE on Westlake Avenue is already crammed to the max with computer and stereo equipment and event memorabilia - posters, videotapes, souvenir tchotchkes. But the object he's most eager to show a visitor is the black-and-white photo of a 1931 Model-A truck with the words "One Reel Vaudeville Show" painted with a flourish on the side.

Driving that vehicle into corners of rural Washington where theater tours rarely venture, especially not outrageously campy ones, was an outgrowth of Langill's cultural philosophy and brand of risk-taking.

"It's always organic to me to go into an area where no one else is doing anything," he explains in his uncommonly becalmed voice. "It's great to be a pioneer because you make up your own rules and set your own standards. If I'd been in the old Northwest, I would've been a mountain man rather than a rancher or homesteader. I just like going into unexplored places."

He also likes plowing right ahead with things.

"We've never wasted a lot of time talking things to death here, because we like to be in `do' mode," he says. "And in everything we do, the mission is more important than the bottom line."

Almost as an after-thought he adds, "We just also happen to be very good at the bottom line."

Clearly, the "mission" is what really turns Langill on: the ideal that whether he's entertaining hundreds of people or hundreds of thousands, collective, live public celebrations are antidotes to "the depression and loneliness" of the cyber-age, connecting people of varied ages, interests and backgrounds. It's a Woodstock Nation ethos - the original '60s version - but more inclusive and less naive.

"People have a passionate need to come together and share experiences en masse," Langill philosophizes. "The more we all work on computers, the more we need these live experiences. It becomes revolutionary just to reach over and touch someone who's listening to the same music and watching the same show in the same place.

"To have an audience of mixed ages, ethnicities, economic brackets is becoming a rarity in this world. With Bumbershoot, I've wanted everybody in Seattle to feel that this was their event, that they owned it."

Langill first discovered the power of communal festivities during his middle-class boyhood in Milwaukee, when he attended that city's famous Summerfest celebration with his family. Encouraged by his mother, a fine-arts appraiser, Langill was a creative child who loved theater and began acting in plays at age 10.

Later, as a University of Wisconsin student at the height of the Vietnam War protests, he watched the anti-war turmoil and saw theater: "There was all of this street demonstrating, and occupying buildings, and bursts of tear gas, and running around in the streets. It was a lot more exciting and dramatic than being in class."

Things were somewhat calmer when Langill entered the fledgling professional graduate acting program at the University of Washington, run by noted director-teachers Duncan Ross and Arne Zaslove. In student productions, Langill specialized in character roles and, Hartzell recalls, "was really good at comic things, like Moliere plays."

But fate and necessity led elsewhere. After linking up with other actors (including such future notables as Lori Larsen and John Aylward) to form a ragtag summer theater company in 1972, it was Langill who volunteered to manage the troupe - temporarily. Running the newly christened One Reel Vaudeville Show "made a producer of me," he says now.

"I found out I have a right and a left brain that are equally strong. A budget to me is like a script - it tells a story, but in numbers instead of words."

Initially an offshoot of Empty Space Theatre, One Reel first specialized in bizarre, spoofy musical melodramas - for example, the memorable "Nightmare Curse of the Virgin Mutant Slug of Horror From the Tomb of Blood," and the historical romp, "Trouble on Mount Baker," covering 200 years of Pacific Northwest history, from slugs to sasquatches.

The troupe (which included Langill's brother Scott and One Reel's current executive president, Louise DeLange) distinguished itself not just by its zany antics, but by its audience. True to his desire to bring disparate people together, Langill and co-founder Alan Brandon booked the shows into county fairs and rural festivals.

"Country-and-western music was the standard entertainment, but we were the alternative," Langill says. "We'd do our thing on the same stage where barbershop quartets and tap-dancing little girls performed. That's where I learned that in a large event setting, people are much more sophisticated and open-minded than you might think."

The late, great yellow Model-A helped the troupe bond with rural patrons. After pulling into a new town, Langill would open the hood and tinker with the engine "so people realized we weren't some elitist city arts types, but regular guys just like them."

The mellow pace accelerated as One Reel won government and private arts grants to keep on trucking. Then Langill had a brainstorm for the off-season: What about presenting a campy "Sci-Fi X-Po" at the Pacific Science Center? The first X-Po, in 1975, featured a madcap science-fiction drama and a surprise cameo by B-movie king Buster Crabbe. It was a success, so more X-Pos followed.

"We were really lucky," says Langill, "because we anticipated the whole `Star Wars' craze."

In 1980, the ambitious producer, now 30 years old, took on a far bigger challenge.

A free, government-supported Seattle arts festival was concocted in 1971. By 1973 it had been renamed Bumbershoot, and by 1980 was in need of an overhaul and a new producer. A municipal committee hired Langill and, after some political sturm und drang, he got his wish to charge admission for the first time - $2.50 a day. There was grumbling, but One Reel's first Bumbershoot was a hit, with Chuck Berry, Paul Horn, Emmylou Harris and avant-garde dance duo Eiko and Koma in the lineup.

The event now seems a bargain at $10 a day, drawing about 200,000 people for a long-weekend spree of top pop, folk and rock music acts, poetry, dance, theater, film and literary events.

Langill in recent years has handed the primary producing duties for Bumbershoot over to cohorts Sheila Hughes and Reenie Duff, but still oversees the event and cherishes its memories.

One of his favorites involved a Langill coup: the only live gig anywhere by the faux rock band Spinal Tap - actually, comic actors from the film "This Is Spinal Tap."

Another peak: an unparalleled rock powwow Langill calls "a total nightmare and an amazingly spiritual evening," the outdoor Jimi Hendrix 25th Anniversary Concert in 1995, featuring many musicians who'd played with Hendrix decades earlier.

"It rained during the show, so all the lights went off except for two spots," Langill recounts. "Many of the performers played way beyond their allotment of 10 minutes each. So I had to knock on six dressing rooms and tell six rock stars they couldn't go on. But it was such an amazing night, and I was really in a zone."

There have been a few bummers, too, in what Langill calls "the Bumbershoot Wars."

Langill has fielded public and media gripes about the festival's programming (too much pop culture, not enough "high culture"); the size of its crowds (too big, too small), rising ticket costs, multiplying corporate sponsorships. ("We were doing corporate sponsorship long before it got trendy," points out one colleague.)

By most accounts, Langill is a guy able to hear criticism and he took some complaints to heart, such as the early-'90s charge that Bumbershoot catered too much to baby-boomer musical tastes and ignored the edgy new sounds of rap and grunge rock.

"That was from my own lack of understanding," he says now. "I thought my own baby-boom peers would be culturally dominant forever. But I started meeting teenagers who didn't even know who the Beatles were. I realized our children weren't having the same experiences we had, and we had to shift gears in our programming to make sure the next generation would be coming to Bumbershoot."

Then there was the serious challenge to Langill's leadership of Bumbershoot in 1985, when Seattle Center honchos thought new producers might control crowds more efficiently, generate more revenue and draw more stars. Their controversial choice for the job was Media One, a promoter of for-profit rock and pop concerts.

Langill, recalls historian Paul Dorpat, who served on Bumbershoot's civic advisory committee at the time, "got right in and fought that," urging his loyal supporters to protest the change. The powers-that-be were barraged with phone calls, and Langill and One Reel stayed put.

"Norm is a soft-spoken guy who comes across as very low-key," says Corporate Council for the Arts director Peter Donnelly. "But when he needs to really be tough, he can be."

Another trial was the rainy Labor Day weekend of 1994, when Bumbershoot attendance plummeted. With accumulated losses of more than $300,000 over several years, Langill asked the city to let his organization take total fiscal and administrative control of the festival and streamline it. Eventually the City Council agreed to hand over Bumbershoot entirely to One Reel and reduce its role to landlord. Since then, the festival has stabilized financially, though it's still a year-by-year crapshoot.

Meanwhile, One Reel keeps adding demanding new projects, often at Langill's instigation.

"He's the creative genius here and the one who steers the course," says Jane Zalutsky, One Reel's respected second-in-command. "I'm more the one who figures out how to make it happen and get it all done."

Even though he's the dreamer, Langill's work life is crammed with meetings, event blast-offs and scouting trips to festivals in Asia and Europe. Off-duty, though, he's not much of a hob-nobber.

Married since 1987 to Jane, a gracious, fair-featured woman who runs some of One Reel's international projects, Langill resides in a cozy, light-filled 1907 Craftsman bungalow on a sylvan street in Queen Anne. They have one child, 11-year-old Alexandra, and fit in periodic skiing and beach vacations. ("Norm's idea of a great getaway," Jane laughs, "is to fall asleep on the beach, with his laptop open to a budget.")

Budget was much on everyone's mind at One Reel after Langill decided to risk nearly all of the company's cash reserves on launching Teatro ZinZanni.

Zalutsky traces Langill's obsession with the project back to 1992 and the Barcelona Olympic Arts Festival. "We took a show there, a Japanese-American theater piece we produced called `Labor of Love.' And when Norm came home from Spain I asked him how it went. But all he could talk about was this amazing European show tent he saw, with these cabaret performers, and how totally great it was."

Many wondered how One Reel could manage to rent and ship over such a tent from its owners in Belgium, find a place in Seattle to park it for several months (an early plan to use the Bathhouse Theatre was foiled by Green Lake park activists and a lengthy permit process), and risk so much on a four-course dinner-theater show loaded with imported French-Canadian and European talent.

But Langill is as passionate about ZinZanni (it's a made-up name that just sounded right) as he was about persuading Russia's famous Bolshoi Ballet, against great odds, to perform in Seattle's 1990 Goodwill Arts Festival.

ZinZanni, in fact, represented a return to Langill's own vaudeville roots, and an outlet for his neglected talents as an actor, director, writer and closet clown.

"Pop and rock music are the money drivers here, but not the main thing One Reel does," he says. "As I was planning ZinZanni there was this profound sense that I'd done a basement clean-up of my mind. There were just a whole lot of ideas that had been in there waiting for me to use someday, and this was the place for them."

That's why Langill has shown up to "snapshot" nearly every performance since the show opened last October. And why he takes special pride in the production's achievements: a run extended many times, glowing reviews, in-the-black finances. And why he'll wager another sizable chunk of change taking ZinZanni - lock, stock and cabaret tent - to San Francisco, uncharted topography for One Reel, after it closes in Seattle at the end of the year.

Can Langill keep concocting new ways for people to boogie en masse? And can One Reel expand to realize his brainstorms, without busting the bank or losing its celebrated mix of playfulness, savvy and soul?

Odds are they will, but time will tell. On a Saturday night under the ZinZanni tent, Langill is very much in the present. He's hanging out, encouraging a nervous new cast member, guffawing at a comic juggling routine he's seen 30 times, making sure the audience exits to exactly the right jaunty music.

He's here because of something he learned long ago, one of those things that distinguishes the great party-givers from the merely competent: It's the small pleasures that will add up to the big bangs. And the host should be having at least as much fun as his guests.

Misha Berson is The Seattle Times theater critic. Benjamin Benschneider is staff photographer for Pacific Northwest magazine.