In many ways Dara Cameron and Michael Mahler are a typical Oak Park couple. They have a nice, old house (a bungalow) near a nice park (Taylor Park), and a nice school (Hatch) that they will send their little boy to when he is old enough for kindergarten.
That may be why these two have played so many couples in their acting career: in Little Shop of Horrors. In They’re Playing our Song. In Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. In It’s a Wonderful Life.
Now, they are appearing in the Chicago premiere of a new two-person musical (as a couple) titled “The Last Wide Open” and playing at the American Blues Theatre in Chicago. There is just something very couple-ish about Cameron and Mahler. And they know how to transfer that to their work on stage.
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The two met in college 20 years ago, when they both were students at Northwestern University.
“I was a freshman,” Cameron recalled, “and Mike was a junior.” They were both singers in a campus acapella group, Purple Haze.
“I literally met him at the callback,” Cameron said. Mahler was already a member of the singing group. At callbacks, he and other members of Purple Haze sang a song to show the auditioners their singing style.
“He sang the solo in Elevation by U2, an all-acapella version. And I remember thinking, oh my god, he’s so talented and cute. And I think I had a crush on him my whole freshman year.”
At first, they were just friends, but that started to change when Purple Haze went to Rome, Italy, during Cameron’s Freshman year.
“We performed at the American ambassador’s home,” Cameron said. “The ambassador was a Northwestern graduate.”
They also sang for students at several schools in Rome.
“Nothing romantic happened between us in Rome,” Cameron said, adding, “by the end of the trip I think he finally realized that I was, maybe a …” Cameron paused. “A catch?”
“No,” Mahler interrupted. “Just, like, an option.” He flashed a Cheshire grin.
Cameron continued. “I think we really, like, knew we were going to spend the rest of our lives together before I graduated from college. I mean, I think it was very obvious that we were…”
“In it to win it,” Mahler interrupted again, grinning. Again.
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Both Cameron and Mahler are active members of Chicago’s theater scene. They have performed, together and apart, at most of the bigger theaters in town: Marriott, Chicago Shakespeare Company, Drury Lane Theatre, Paramount Theatre. In addition to acting, Mahler is a music director for musicals, and has co-written a number of well-regarded original musicals, including a musical adaptation of the 1987 movie The Secret of My Success and 1999 movie October Sky, and written some songs for Hollywood, including for the animated feature My Little Pony 2.
Mahler said he came from “a family of theater folks.”
“Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in on rehearsals for my mom and dad in community theater productions of Man of La Mancha and Music Man,” he said. “We had a very musical household. My parents are both singers and my dad plays guitar, my mom plays guitar and piano. We used to do a lot of singing as a family in our church growing up. We were kind of the Von Mahler singers.”
By contrast, Cameron did not grow up in a theatrical family.
“My parents were both public school teachers,” she said. “I fell into theatre. I feel like I wasn’t very deliberate about choosing to be a theater major, but at Northwestern, you kind of have to decide before you even go into what you’re going to do … and then, you know, I decided, I always said to myself that I wanted to try theater as a profession because if I didn’t, I would always look back and say, ‘what if,’ you know … could I have made it?”
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Life is a whirlwind for these two, performing in shows, and sharing the responsibility for raising their son. The two moved to Oak Park in 2011 after looking for a home near to both Chicago, where most of their acting jobs were, and Naperville, where Cameron’s mom lived.
“When we first moved here, most of our friends were still living in the city, you know, like in Lincoln Square,” Mahler said.
“We wanted a house with a yard,” Cameron added, “so we bought a bungalow by Taylor Park.”
The two had trouble getting a mortgage at first, because they were both working actors, and the realities of the acting life made banks nervous.
Mahler said he tried to prove they had a steady source of income by showing the bank all of the 1099s from the various shows they had been in over the past year.
“We were like, this means we get hired to so many acting jobs,” Mahler said, “and they’re like, ‘why do you keep getting fired from these jobs?’”
Ultimately, Cameron’s mother co-signed the mortgage. Thirteen years later, Cameron and Mahler are quite settled in.
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Cameron calls it a gift when they are cast in the same show.
“We get to spend more time together,” Cameron said.
In the new show, “it’s a two-hander,” Cameron explained. Set in a restaurant, the play features only two characters on stage: a waitress and a dishwasher.
“It’s a heavy lift.” Cameron said, “so we’re taking every minute we can, including our commute to and from the theater, to run lines and make sure we know what we’re doing.”
The Last Wide Open premiered at the Cincinnati Playhouse in 2019. In bringing the show to Chicago, the American Blues Theater asked the artists responsible for the show, playwright Audry Cefaly (play and lyrics) and composer Matthew Nielson (music) to make a few changes. In the original, the dishwasher is an Italian immigrant. They wanted to make him Polish.
“Chicago has this very vibrant Polish community,” Mahler said, adding that they were hoping to create a show that would capture the challenges of Polish immigrants while appealing to the Polish community.
“I mean, it’s still the same story, but infusing it with this Polish language and the rest, it all takes place in a restaurant,” Cameron adds, “and the restaurant is this really warm, beautiful Polish restaurant.”
They play with time in a kind of Groundhog Day like way. They play the same characters in three phases of time.
“There’s one version where my character has just been in America for two days,” Mahler said. “There’s one version where I’ve been here for two years. And then there’s one version where I’ve been here for 25 years.”
The theater space. With 35 seats, has been reconfigured to make the audience feel like they are in an authentic restaurant.
“So, the action is very immersive,” Cameron said. “The patrons are going to be a part of the show.”
