Showtime
for
Shoedog

Act I, Scene 5. Open with Murray standing on a pair of stools, wearing top hat and jacket. He addresses the audience.

“Tip-Top is now open for your business – and for your pleasure ... Send me your sexy co-eds, your lonely divorcees, your loaded widows. Send ‘em to Murray, shoedog supreme. Lord of the loafer, wizard of the wingtip, sultan of thestiletto ... It’s time once again for Murray the Master to work his dazzling foot magic on one and all.

“It’s Showtime in Shoeland!” he shouts, announcing that Tip-Top Shoes is open for business.

It was showtime for Shoedog, as UI professor Stephen Bloom’s play was performed before near-capacity crowds at the Five Flags Civic Theater in Dubuque on Nov. 6 and at the McCreary Community Building Theater in Perry on Nov. 20.

The two performances were funded through three grants. A University of Iowa Year of the Arts and Humanities grant gave Bloom $5,000 for his project Shoedog Travels to the Iowa Heartland. A grant from the Arts Council of Iowa added $1,500 and the Perry Rotary Club gave $1,000. Both theaters donated space for the performances. The grants paid for the actors, programs, posters and incidentals. Admission was free to the public.

Bloom chose to perform Shoedog in Dubuque and Perry because his book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America did well in those communities and he spoke about the book in both cities. Soon after the book was published in 2000, Bloom spoke about Postville to a standing-room-only crowd at the Carnegie-Stout Public Library in Dubuque. Bloom got the same reaction when he spoke about the book in Perry.

Shoedog is the story of 16-year-old Elliot, who is working in his father’s Paterson, N.J., shoe store in the summer of 1962. Master shoedog (a slang term for shoe salesman) Murray is attempting to teach Elliot the tricks of the trade, hoping that Elliot will take over the failing business despite his father’s wishes.

Shoedog is both a drama and a comedy. Bloom said the play often touches a few audience members because they know what it’s like to be pushed by their father into a profession.

“It’s more than very moving to see grown men cry because they are so moved by your words,” Bloom said.

UI professor Basil Talbott, who has seen the play several times, found Shoedog very funny. He said the scene where Murray teaches Elliot the “secret art of the holy foot massage” stuck out in his mind.

“I liked the one scene where the wily old-fashioned shoe salesman is showing how he seduces women into buying shoes with everything from salesmanship to foot massage,” Talbott said. “The actors brought that scene to life in a very amusing fashion.”

Bloom said the play is “a 98 percent true story.” All of the characters existed in real life, just most of the names have changed. The character Elliot is actually Bloom.

“There really was a Mrs. Steiner,” Bloom said. “There really was a Marian. There really was a younger me. It’s as nonfiction as nonfiction gets.”

The play is based on real events in a two-day span of Bloom’s teenage life.

“I remember every line from those two days,” Bloom said. “I could describe Murray down to his cufflinks. The lines ring true because they are true.”

While researching his role, Jerry Wolking, who played Murray, talked to a saleswoman in a shoe store. Her dialogue and the writing in the play were a perfect match.

“I told her ‘I have everything you just said written in a script lying in my car,’” Wolking said. “And she looked at me like I was some kind of nut or something.”

Bloom didn’t want to pick a favorite line from the play.

“That would be like asking who’s your favorite child,” he said. “I don’t have an answer for that. They’re all my creations.”

Melissa McBain, who directed and acted in Shoedog, loved being able to interact with the playwright. Ordinarily, the direc-tor doesn’t converse with the writer on a day-to-day basis as McBain and Bloom did.

“There’s a thrill involved in developing new work, nuancing characters and questioning development,” McBain said. “And working with a writer of Mr. Bloom’s caliber is very exciting.”

Shoedog is based on a short story Bloom wrote in 1991 titled “The Little Man.”

At the time, Bloom was a reporter in the San Francisco bureau of The Sacramento Bee. Bloom gave the story to colleague Brian Cronk to read. Cronk told him the dialogue was good, and the story would be better suited as a play. The two men made a handshake pact to transform the “The Little Man” into a play.

“The setting and colorful characters were ideal for the theater,” said Cronk, now news editor of The Wall Street Journal Sunday. “After all, people enter and leave shoe stores just the way actors enter and leave the stage.”

Cronk brought an editor’s touch to the play, and helped cut a play that was originally eight hours long down to a 90-minute performance.

“Some of what I provided is what you don’t see,” Cronk said. “That is, the play was much, much longer to begin with and I edited and rearranged scenes, as well as cut and tightened dialogue, in an effort to make it fit the time frame of the theater.”

After work, Bloom and Cronk would develop the script on a first-generation computer in a closet in Cronk’s San Francisco apartment. In 1993 a staged reading of Shoedog was held at Perform Theater. At a staged reading, the lines aren’t committed to memory and there are no costumes, but it gives producers a chance to come scout a play to see if it could be produced. It also gives the writers a sense of what needs to be changed.

“We were lucky to have a theater group do a staged reading,” Bloom said. “It’s very different to have actors speak the words you’ve written and act out the scenes.”

After another reading, this time in Des Moines, the debut performance was on Nov. 14, 2003, at the Quad City ArtsCenter in Rock Island, Ill.

Before the play was performed in 2003, the script changed many times.

“Especially last year, every time we came in to rehearsal, it was a different script,” said Howard Johnson, who plays Elliot’s father, Harold.

The future looks bright for Shoedog. Bloom said 10 theaters in Chicago know about the play, and are debating about whether to bring it to the Windy City.

Beth Davis, who has been a board member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago for more than 15 years, said Shoedog has enormous potential.

“Audiences will find easy access to several sophisticated levels of meaning in the play: the moving story of a son’s free spirited coming of age butting against his father’s own failed dreams, the universal issues of the pull of obligation versus free will, the romantic lure of escaping the mundane realities of life,” Davis said. “Bloom’s ear for fresh dialogue, cracking with realism, is apparent in Shoedog.”

Bloom and Cronk have even higher aspirations for the play.

“Where’s it gonna end up?” Bloom asked. “We hope it ends up on Broadway.”

— Travis Brown