The news on Monday of the passing of beloved actress Georgia Engel strikes close to home for the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s theatre program and Kennedy Theatre. In the years shortly following the opening of Kennedy Theatre, Georgia Engel matriculated though the theatre program and shared the stage with many of Hawai‘i’s legacy performers, faculty and stage technicians. In addition to Engel, during Kennedy Theatre’s first decade Bette Midler appeared in several plays, Timothy Dalton (of “007” fame) appeared as a guest artist in Macbeth and Paul Winfield and Cyril Cusak appeared in Coriolanus. Local personalities, Dave Donnelly, Dick Fair, Wallace Chappel (later the director of the Honolulu Theatre for Youth), Edna Lee Leib, Edward Sakamoto, Joyce Maltby, Edward Langhans, Loyal Garner, Peter Lawrence, and Patricia Herman also shared the Kennedy stage in those early years.
Engel, later to gain national prominence as Georgette in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” appeared on stage in the University of Hawaii Theatre program’s Kennedy Theatre productions from 1966 through 1969 in such classics as Camelot, Romeo and Juliet, Tartuffe, and Mary Stuart.