The show goes on! Take a virtual tour of a celebrity museum

Sal St. George may not have been born in a trunk, as the show-biz saying goes, but the stage has certainly been his world for more than 40 years. 

Having worked as an actor, director and playwright, calling St. George, 70, a triple threat is no understatement. The Medford resident had been responsible for crafting dozens of shows across Long Island, from musical showcases like “The Lucille Ball Story” to the slavery drama “Running Scared, Running Free” with his company St. George Living History Productions. But since the coronavirus pandemic brought an abrupt end to live theater in March, he's taken on a new role as a virtual tour guide.

One Monday each month, St. George and his son, Darren, 33, take visitors via Zoom to museums devoted to show business legends. On Sept. 21, a digital trip to the Bridgeport, Connecticut-based Barnum Museum dedicated to master showman P.T. Barnum is planned followed by a tour of The Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, North Carolina, on Oct. 26.

“We usually get about 100 people,” Sal St. George said. “Our audience is primarily 45 and older and very dedicated to being there. A lot of people have nothing to do on Monday, and this is our way of giving back to the them.”

For St. George, going from theater to tours hasn’t been that great a leap. In addition to presenting live stage productions, St. George has had another career lecturing two to three times a week on entertainers of the past at libraries, universities and colleges. “When the pandemic hit, everything stopped,” he said. “Suddenly people were calling me up with this thing called Zoom. Darren said to me, 'We have a mailing list of about 3,000 people. You can’t just keep them hanging there. Why don’t we do something where you can talk to everyone on a regular basis and see what happens.' That was the genesis of the idea.”

St. George started doing lectures every Monday through his website salstgeorge.com, attracting visitors outside of the Long Island area. After one of his lectures, he received a complimentary email from an attendee in New Jersey who turned out to be George Burns’ niece, Wendy Ballin. St. George got Ballin and her family as guests for one of his lectures, where they regaled the audience with stories about Burns. After that, St. George was keen to explore other outlets for his online programs.

“I said to Darren, I knew of a couple of celebrity museums. Why don’t we try tapping into them and see what happens?” he said.

In 2014, while doing research for a show he created on Red Skelton, St. George contacted the curator of the Vincennes, Indiana, museum devoted to the carrot-topped comedian. He decided to reach out to them again. “They hadn’t heard from me in years, but they remembered me," he said. "I asked if they’d be interested in having a virtual road trip.”

Anne Pratt, director of the museum and president of the Red Skelton Museum Foundation, didn't have to think twice. “It felt like a win-win for us,” she said. “At the time we still had not reopened to the public, so being able to reach an audience that may not have an opportunity to come to the museum was great. Normally we have 50 to 60 bus tours a year. This year we’ve had one.”

ZOOM, ZOOM, ZOOM

While St. George relished taking people to these new places, Zoom was strange territory he wasn’t initially anxious to navigate.

“The hard part was teaching an old dog new tricks,” he said. “Learning Zoom was a slow process. I just had a difficult time with it,” he said. “I was resistant to learning all of the intricacies. My whole life I’ve been in front of a live audience. This is so foreign to me.”

Darren, who serves as his dad's technical as well as creative advisor, proved to be a patient and adept tour guide himself as he helped his father become acquainted with Zoom.

“It was a very fair learning experience because I had to learn it myself,” said Darren, of Sound Beach, adding that his wife, Cassandra, who has a film background, helped him understand lighting and camera angles using Zoom. “The challenge became how to present it to Dad. How do I create a new work environment that makes him feel comfortable and able to interact with the audience?”

That meant creating the ability to include tour patrons' questions and input. “Coming from the stage you want to feedback,” said Darren, who also works as education and public program director of the nonprofit organization Preservation Long Island. “You want to see the people, you want to read their comments and their questions, and respond to them in real time. We want to have that immediacy with our guests.”

The tours, which run about an hour, open with father and son doing an introduction. From there, an official from the museum being shot via cellphone takes viewers through each room. Pratt was also accompanied by someone carrying a selfie stick. Though she admits there were some technical glitches, viewers got to see the museum’s many offerings, including costumes, personal artifacts and interactive exhibits including one in which guests can be transformed into a clown. The last stop, not surprisingly, was the gift shop.

“I didn‘t realize the Red Skelton Museum was as large as it was,” Sal St. George said. “They also got an actor to do a few of Red's routines as one of his characters. The people were thrilled, and then we said what’s next?”

NEXT STOP

After the Skelton tour in June, St. George discovered there were about 35 celebrity museums throughout the country, including the John Wayne Birthplace Museum in Winterset, Iowa, which was presented via Zoom in July. The museum's executive director, Brian Downes, was excited about the chance to introduce the venue to a broader audience, but it was St. George’s enthusiasm that was the selling point.

“He came across on the telephone as very genuine and sincere,” Downes said. “He was passionate and that’s key to everything.”

Now St. George has a wish list of museums, including ones devoted to Katharine Hepburn, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra, that he wants to present. A few museums on the list, most notably “It’s a Wonderful Life” Museum in upstate Seneca Falls, are good to go.

If a pandemic and learning a new technology weren’t challenging enough, St. George also has had to deal with losing his Medford home to a fire in October 2018. He and Darren have been working out of an apartment in Bellport that the insurance company arranged for Sal and Mary, his wife of 39 years, to stay in.

St. George is hoping that his house will be rebuilt by Christmas. He then wants to create a small studio in which he and Darren can have new equipment to create more advanced tours and lectures.

“We want to make better quality programs for everybody and expand our knowledge and open up more diverse ways of learning,” said Sal St. George. “We want people who come to our programs to leave saying 'I didn’t know that?' Then we know we’ve hit the mark.”