How many current Lambs have shared a house with Fred Astaire and John Houseman? Teacher, writer and producer Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder has. More accurately, Patricia shared her house with them.
The interior of her former gray stone and shingle Victorian home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., had a Tiffany glass and woodwork sitting room used as the setting for Fred Astaire’s home in the film, Ghost Story. Released by Universal in 1981, this horror film had two Lambs in the picture: Fred Astaire, who became a member in 1922, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Gunga Din), who joined the Club in 1939. Others in the film included Melvin Douglas (Ninotchka), and John Houseman, whose career ran from collaborating with Orson Welles to playing the curmudgeonly Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase in the 1970s.
Patricia said that Astaire was “so disciplined and committed” on the set during the production. Covered in an Afghan and drinking Russian tea that Patricia made, Astaire would sit in a rocking chair by the fireplace in her house during the shooting of the film. When called to perform, she said, “Astaire would slowly rise and magically turn himself into his role.” This film would be his last.
Patricia first met Houseman in the early 1970s, when he came to Saratoga Springs with his students from the Julliard School of Drama, who included Kevin Kline, Mary Lou Rosato, David Schramm, Patti LuPone and David Ogden Stiers (M*A*S*H). “At first I was very intimidated by Houseman with his bedroom eyes looking intensely at you,” she said. Houseman became her friend, whose culinary tastes she still remembers: “He loved lamb chops. My husband would grill them.”
Patricia summed up her experience with these legends: “Fred Astaire and John Houseman both loved the theater and lived it.”
Patricia has herself recently produced Kunstler at a theater called The Creative Place, located in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where she has lived for the past 45 years. The unconventional William Kunstler (1919-1995) was a crusading civil rights lawyer and activist who represented defendants such as the Chicago Seven, Black Panthers, Attica Prison rioters, the Berrigan Brothers, the Central Park Five, as well as Freedom Riders in Mississippi. Patricia said, “Everybody deserves representation. He was braver than brave.”
In February and March 2017, Kunstler at the 59E59 theater, the Off-Broadway Manhattan theater, to sold-out audiences. After its recent shows at the Barrington Stage Company in downtown Pittsfield, MA., the show will tour nationally in 2018-2019 by Columbia Theatricals.
This is but part of the multi-faceted career in theater of Patricia, whose experience in drama began early in life. As a child, her parents enrolled her in the theater program at Syracuse University in the 1950s. Around age 12, she was in a production of Alice in Wonderland with Peter Falk (best known as the rumpled detective in the television series Columbo). “I had a walk-on part. I was a playing card. I think that I was a spade and perhaps an Ace.” She recalls of Falk: “He would make us laugh. He was interested in other people and friendly, not self-involved.”
Sawyer Falk (no relation to Peter Falk) led the Syracuse University program in which Patricia participated as a youngster. Patricia said that in Jerry Stiller’s autobiography, he credits Sawyer Falk for inspiring his career. Patricia said, “Falk had great intuition about people and their talent. He encouraged students to work hard and keep going. He was a taskmaster with a lot of warmth.”
At Eastwood High School in Syracuse, N.Y., Patricia performed in a production of Junior Miss at the Playhouse in Fayetteville, N.C.
Patricia earned a Teachers Certificate in English and Theater at State Teachers College (now University at Albany). After she studied English and business administration with a minor in speech, Patricia went on to earn two master’s degrees. One at Syracuse University was in theater in which her focus was on George Bernard Shaw. Her second master’s degree at Syracuse was in science, whose topic was oral interpretation.
Patricia earned a PhD at New York University, where she wrote a dissertation on government and the arts.
She went on to found the New York State Theater Institute in Albany (which later moved to Troy, N.Y.) for over three decades. The first chair of her advisory board of the Institute was Richard Porter Leach, who had worked on a radio show for the NBC orchestra under conductor Arturo Toscanini. Leach later became the first executive director of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
She credits Governor Nelson Rockefeller for believing in the arts “even at a time when New York City and New York State was in a fiscal crisis.”
She has been a proponent of using theater to teach across disciplines. “You’ll be a better actor or director if you know history and literature.” She is opposed to those who have said that theater is not relevant to the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. “Yes, it is,” she has responded. She offers the example of how in The Miracle Worker, one learns history, geography, economics (what Annie Sullivan who taught Helen Keller was paid), and more.
In Moscow in 1976, Patricia co-produced Rag Dolly, based on the famous rag doll. It was brought to the Kennedy Center and Broadway under the name Raggedy Ann.
Patricia also produced Hizzoner!, a play about the much-beloved New York City Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia. Featuring the actor Tony Lo Bianco, the show was written by Paul Shyre. “La Guardia is one of my heroes. He stood up and fought for the people.”
Patricia has taken productions to Jordan, Russia, Sweden, England, France, Italy and London’s West End. She said, “I’m a great believer in cultural exchange.” Theater can create understanding among cultures, she said. “People around the world all have the same hopes and aspirations for themselves and their family. It doesn’t matter which race or culture, we’re all the same.”
Patricia has been invited to give lectures in the former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary. She is passionate about the importance of introducing young people to quality theater.
Patricia learned about The Lambs through a Broadway colleague, Pat Flicker Addiss, a Tony award-winning producer. She was seconded by Magda Katz, whose work has included editing and filming video trailers of celebrity interviews and live performances. Dining at the Club with Pat Addiss one evening, Patricia learned that Fred Astaire was a Lamb, after seeing the large photo on a wall at The Lambs of the Gambol (large touring show) in 1923. In the photo, a young Astaire stands alongside many other Lambs, including John Philip Sousa and W.C. Fields, who is sporting a distinctive white top hat.
Patricia met her husband William Fortune Snyder in theater in high school. Her husband worked as an anchorman for a CBS affiliate and also as director of communications for Governor Hugh Carey. They earlier decided that only one of the them could be in theater, so as to ensure enough finances for raising a family. They have three sons, two of whom are musicians and the other in public relations. She said, “In retirement, now my husband and I can afford to both be in the theatre.”
— by Gary Shapiro
