LIFESTYLE & ARTS | 15 SUNDAY BREAKFAST Kenilworth’s Barbara Rinella still a showstopper with her first-person renditions
“I’m having so much fun with people’s reactions (to the costume),” says Barbara Rinella of her one-woman show as Catherine the Great.
photography by j. geil
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david sweet
Back in the 1970s, Barbara Rinella was asked to speak at a book club about John Cheever’s “Falconer.” Standing at a podium with notes, she offered her thoughts about the novel, which features a university professor who is imprisoned for murdering his brother. After she finished, her mother-in-law approached her. “She said, ‘Now, my dear, you’re assuming everyone will rush out to buy the book. They won’t,” recalls Rinella, sitting in the living room of her Kenilworth home near her miniature black poodle, Winston Spencer Churchill. “She said, ‘Why don’t you just tell the story?’ “A light goes off. Tell the story. Do it in first person. In costumes.” Since then, famous women such as Cleopatra and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — and even men of history such as Andrew Jackson (along with the namesake of her dog) — have been brought to life by Rinella, who performs one-hour shows which dramatize current fiction and non-fiction books. During one week this month, she performed four different programs a total of 10 times. She’ll go to community centers, country clubs, schools, homes — and even to sea aboard
Crystal Cruise Ships, where she’s been invited back for 17 years to entertain passengers with her one-woman shows. “I was Einstein the other day. I try to put my voice lower,” Rinella says when asked about how she can assume the role of a man. “But halfway through, with Einstein, I turn into his mother. ‘Albert, put some mousse in your hair!’” Though the Einstein costume was relatively simple (despite having to remove the moustache when she played the mother) she said it was perhaps her most challenging role “because I had to grasp his theory of relativity and be able to explain it.” In the same program, she also dressed as Steve Jobs, who was born the year Einstein died. That program was based on biographies of the men by Walter Isaacson that Rinella had read. But don’t think she merely recites any book by memory. “I take the good lines from the book verbatim, but my creative strength is taking the work of literature and figuring out how to persuade people to be interested,” she said. “At the start of Catherine the Great, I ask the audience, ‘How many people in the world have been surnamed the Great? It’s 104. And how many women? One!’ ” Recently, Rinella has enjoyed playing the role of the Russian empress. “A big part is the fancy costume,” said Rinella, who created
it herself. “I’m having so much fun with people’s reactions. And her last years, what was her joy? Her grandchildren,” adds Rinella, whose house is adorned with many happy pictures of hers — Annabelle, 5, and Brady, 2. Happy is the way Rinella describes her childhood in East Grand Rapids, Mich. The youngest of two girls, she was encouraged by her father, who told her, “You can do anything.” She and her sister, Dorothy, put on the Argentina Summertime Review in their neighborhood. After school, Rinella would line up her dolls and teach them everything she had learned that day (no surprise that she ended up teaching English at New Trier). For college she followed her sister to Duke University, where she was a cheerleader. Rinella said that experience buoys her to this day. “Cheerleaders are involved in crowd control. I can tell when people are or aren’t having a good time,” she said. Rinella enjoys a Sunday breakfast at Ridgeview Restaurant in Wilmette — that is, when she’s not playing tennis or paddle tennis, her favorite sports. Speaking of favorites, does she have one among the 100 programs she’s performed? “When I’m asked my favorite,” she says, “I say ‘The next one.’ ” ■