Ojai Valley News
Ojai is blessed with a talented acting community and among this group are talented couples that often grace our stages with intense and very personal performances. The two stars of “33 Variations,” currently playing weekends at the Ojai Art Center Theater (OACT), are such a husband and wife pairing that bring powerful and emotional portrayals to their characters.
Tracey Williams Sutton plays the singularly focused Dr. Katherine Brandt, a musicologist coming to terms with her own mortality and her lifelong obsession with Beethoven. Cecil Sutton plays Beethoven near the end of his career as he realizes he is going deaf. In a beautiful transference in time and space, these two stories cross over centuries to touch the lives of every character.
How did this dynamic couple meet?
“When Frank Malle was directing ‘Private Lives,’ he actually set us up,” said Cecil Sutton. “He called both of us to audition together, though we didn’t know it.”
“I had seen Cecil at various plays and audition and felt he didn’t like me,” said Tracey Williams Sutton. “But when I arrived at the ‘Private Lives’ audition, Cecil took my hand, brought me up onto the stage and said ‘How lovely you look.’
“We had a great chemistry onstage but I didn’t realize it would translate into our lives until later. One time he was sitting in the theater, alone as he often does, and I went over to him and asked if he wanted to join a group from the show and go for a drink. And he said “I’d love to.”
“Frank sent us together on our first real date,” adds Cecil, “to represent the play at the 4Star Awards.”
They have performed together in a number of productions both in Ojai and Ventura County, and Tracey has directed Cecil in a number of plays.
“I always felt ‘33 Variations’ was an interesting show,” said Tracey. “Richard Camp, the director, couldn’t find his perfect Beethoven and he kept asking me to talk to Cecil. I didn’t want to pester him.”
“But she did,” adds Cecil. “I knew nothing about Beethoven so my approach to the part was that he was just like everyone else. The play shows that even though he was brilliant with his finished pieces, he worked at it really hard, constantly all the time until it reached brilliance.”
Beethoven was obsessed with creating 33 variations of a waltz as he dealt with his own demise. Dr. Brandt is an ailing but driven scholar, passionate about Beethoven and why he worked for three years on this waltz. This story creates sparks between the characters with humor, warmth, and a gamut of emotions.