After 35 years in Green Bay, baton twirler, dance instructor and 'Gong Show' spoons whiz Barb Alloy is heading west
GREEN BAY - When Barb Alloy says she’s had a “kajillion” students she loves, she’s only exaggerating slightly.
If she wasn’t stepping out onstage herself as a singer, dancer and actress in countless local productions or working her magic behind the scenes as a choreographer and director for Green Bay Community Theater, Evergreen Theater and others, she was teaching kids how to put their best performance foot forward.
She taught dance and baton twirling for the Green Bay and De Pere city park and recreation programs for years, and then Bellevue and Algoma recruited her, too. On her day off, she did tap and ballet lessons at the YMCA, including a Mommy & Me class for 2-year-olds.
She choreographed or directed such big musicals as “West Side Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Hello, Dolly!” at Green Bay East, Southwest, De Pere and West De Pere high schools, sometimes working once again with students she had taught as young children. As the owner of Alloy Photography for 25 years, she photographed kids for dance recital pictures and they often came back to her years later for their senior portraits.
After 35 years in Green Bay, Alloy is packing up her dancing shoes — and piano and musical spoons — and heading west to Portland, Oregon, to be closer to family. It’s a retirement of sorts, but she has already signed up for theater production announcements in Portland and is scoping out potential work in commercials.
As she was getting ready for her departure this week, she ran across hand-drawn cards from students from decades ago. Sweet little mementos with drawings of baton twirlers with notes like, “Miss Barbie, you were the best teacher.”
“I can’t throw them away,” Alloy said. “They’re so cute.”
Downsizing from a four-bedroom house to an apartment means a lot of possessions can't make the move with her, but her many fond memories of time in Green Bay, those are all going along.
“I had a really good run here in Green Bay. I just had such nice jobs and worked with so many nice people,” Alloy said.
She loved that she could pitch something that had not been done before and somebody was always game to give it a go. When she applied to to a dance instructor with the city of Green Bay in 2001, they were already doing ballet, tap and jazz programming, but she introduced a showstoppers class, where kids could sing while they danced. When she proposed baton lessons as a great way to teach hand-eye coordination for girls and boys alike, the turnout was huge.
That's her as Nurse Vicodin in 'Ed Gein, The Musical'
A native of Milwaukee, Alloy went to high school in Peshtigo and then moved to Los Angeles in 1977 for five years before returning to Wisconsin to raise her daughter in Green Bay. She enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to finish her theater degree and performed in campus productions of “Guys & Dolls,” “King Lear” and “Man of La Mancha.”
She was off and running in the decades that followed, but it wasn’t only theater and dance. As a co-owner of Heim Video Production, she worked behind the camera on “The Polka Variety Show” that aired on WLUK-TV in the ’90s. Her film credits on IMDb.com include her role as Nurse Vicodin in “Ed Gein: The Musical,” the 2010 cult classic about the Wisconsin murderer and suspected serial killer. She also choreographed the movie’s final number.
From 2001 to 2018, she teamed up with Zoomie Hardtke and Lana Kaku as the Glamarama Cabaret, performing the music of Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton and other glamour queens all over northeastern Wisconsin, including at paper mill banquets. Their rendition of The Chicks’ “Sin Wagon,” with Hardtke on washboard, Kaku on vocals and Alloy on spoons, garnered many standing ovations.
She played the spoons on 'The Gong Show,' with Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Alloy is a famous spoons player from way back. Growing up in Milwaukee, her mom played the polka cello, also sometimes called a Stumpf fiddle, a homemade instrument adorned with door springs, bells and pie pans that is played by bouncing it up and down on the floor.
“But I was too small to play that, so she gave me spoons and said here, ‘You clack, clack, clack these.’ Not quite as fun, Mom, but thanks,” Alloy said. “So I started getting creative with the spoons — back and forth and under the elbow and finger rolls. And people would go nuts over the spoons.”
While in Los Angeles from 1977 to 1981, she often broke them out to play with a bluegrass band that performed weekly where she bartended. Patrons kept hounding her to go on “The Gong Show,” the popular '70s TV amateur talent show hosted by Chuck Barris where acts that were bad got gonged off the stage.
Alloy taught her waitress friend who played banjo how to play spoons and the two of them went on the show together. They didn’t get gonged. They received a score of 8 from all three celebrity judges, Arte Johnson, Allen Ludden and Jaye P. Morgan.
“We didn’t win, but we had a lot of fun," Alloy said.
People still ask her to play the spoons at parties. When she and Hardtke went to see The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at Door Community Auditorium years ago, one of the men in the band was playing a cardboard box with paint stir sticks that had been taped together with spacers in between. Alloy went up to him during intermission to tell him how genius it was. Somebody else in the band hollered out it was because he had forgotten his spoons.
“So I reach in my purse and whip out mine and go, ‘You can use mine,’” Alloy said.
The guys in the band did one better. They invited her up onstage to play them with fiddling great Vassar Clements.
“Afterward the band goes to sign CDs and autographs and I had a line of people who wanted to talk to me — for silverware!” Alloy said. “‘You’ve got Nitty Gritty right here to my left, guys.’”
She already has her next student waiting for her in Portland
Alloy has been forced to slow down in recent years. She has scleroderma, an autoimmune disease that affects her lungs and breathing. The Glamarama Cabaret shows eventually got to be too taxing for her, but in March, she did a 5-minute, show-stealing turn in Abrams Spotlight Productions’ “Gypsy” as Electra, the stripper who sings “You Gotta Get a Gimmick.”
It was a reminder to her that she doesn’t always have to play the lead; smaller parts can be just as rewarding. She looks forward to being active in a Portland arts scene that is also robust with TV, movie and advertisement filming, which she hopes will afford her some well-paying opportunities for less strenuous work.
She’ll miss the Green Bay theater community and its many affordable options for seeing friends in a show, but she looks forward to spending time with her daughter and her next student, her 3-year-old granddaughter, whom she plans to teach piano and dance, of course.
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Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or kmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @KendraMeinert.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Barb Alloy leaves Green Bay after 35 years of dance, theater and baton
