A family connection to White Christmas

The finale arrives with that memorable snowfall. The music rings out and you feel like you’ve come home, but to a home at an inn in Vermont. “White Christmas” is a show about standing together, honoring friendship and community, and the way this holiday should be celebrated.

As the current Las Cruces run of the production comes to its conclusion Sunday, Dec. 21, there will be celebration, but also a sense of longing for those who have worked so hard to create this classic. They are our friends and neighbors, working regular jobs during the day, and then heading to the theatre to do something they really love.

Among the cast and crew for “White Christmas” is the Robillard family. This is not Anna and Dan’s first experience with this show. The couple met in a theatre and spent considerable time on Broadway and on the road participating in national tours.

Dan brings his technical expertise to Las Cruces Community Theater, experience honed working as a production engineer on a number Broadway shows, including a number of seasons with “White Christmas,” which was the first show he mixed after marrying Anna 20 years ago.  

His other credits include work on the third national tour of “Les Miserables,” a tour of “Miss Saigon,” and Broadway productions of “Wonderful Town,” “Legally Blonde,” “High Fidelity,” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

Anna Robillard, who plays the role of Judy Haynes in this production, made her debut on the LCCT stage as Annie in 1988. She trained formally at Trinity University and spent nine years on Broadway and performing professionally.

“My dad was in the army, and he was stationed at Fort Bliss, and my mom fell in love with Las Cruces, so we would come up here to do things,” Anna said. “I was 9 years old and taking theater classes at NMSU. I was at the theater one day, and one of the directors said, ‘They're having auditions for Annie right now.’ We went, and I got the role of Annie, and my brother was in the chorus.”

Her family moved to Florida after that, and Anna thought she would live in Las Cruces again.

The Robillards met in El Paso while Dan was a sound engineer on the “Les Miserable” when Anna joined that tour.

“I was 23 when I met him and had graduated college a year before,” she said. “I had been pre-med and dropped that, but I couldn't really figure out what I wanted to do. I love acting and singing, so I decided to try this and I got really fortunate. I got to do a couple of national tours and then, on Broadway, sort of the typical actor where you're in a show and it closes and then you go back out for something else, and I did that for nine years.”

Dan started theater in high school and continued throughout college at Jacksonville University.

“He was kind of integral to their theater department,” Anna said. “They had lost a bunch of people, and they really sort of recruited him. We joked that he didn't really like high school. All he liked in high school was doing lights and sound.”

Dan decided to try to make a living doing lights and sound. He was working on “Phantom of the Opera” when a sound engineer took an interest in him. After he graduated, he was offered the gig with “Miss Saigon,” which closed six months later. He moved on to “Les Miserable,” during which time he met and then married Anna.

When they first worked on the Broadway production of “White Christmas,” Anna was a member of the ensemble cast. This time around, she gets to play Judy.

“I never thought that I would get cast as Judy now because I figured I was too old, but that's also part of the beauty and what I love about community theater,” Anna said.

The Robillards decided to start their family and felt they were done with the crazy Broadway industry. They moved to Las Cruces, where Dan earned a second degree at NMSU.

“They offered him kind of the best deal of life experience and he became a civil engineer,” Anna said.

Having left the Broadway part of things behind and settled in Las Cruces, Anna and Dan didn’t leave the stage. Now, their three children are part of the LCCT cast and crew as well. Their two youngest, Ruby and Oliver, are part of the cast for this production, while their oldest son Ethan is following in his father’s footsteps as a behind-the-scenes guy, handling lights and video.

“A couple of things about community theater that I love is that for Broadway, so much of it is the production and the money, and they have so much money that they can pour into these productions,” Anna said. “You have amazing sets and moving pieces and all these things that we don't have the budget for here. In community theater, the talent has to carry the show.

“You really do find some awesome talent, and it's just so much of it, The budget is lower, so we can't have scenes that fly in and fly out and for this production there isn't a lot of scenery because it would make it so long for us to move everything on and off. Our director just said we're going to have minimal scenery so that we can move the show along because we need to keep the pace going. People here are doing it because they love it.”

That love is especially tied to this production, with its link to the holiday season.

“I feel like it's been really special because it is a Christmas show and feeling that Christmas spirit and being able to give that to somebody else is really neat,” Anna said. “It's really fulfilling. I feel like the audiences that have been leaving, everybody's smiling and just to be able to do that for the community is a really neat thing to be able to do.”

As the show comes to an end, the feeling returns of a sense that something will be missing for the people who spend so much time on the production.

“It's almost sad. I told Dan I want this to keep running because that is one thing that's hard when you've done it for a profession,” Anna said. Your show keeps running and that's what you're doing. When it closes now it's too short and feels like we need more, but I’ve been really fortunate to get to do it.”

Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” concludes its run Sunday, Dec. 21. Performances begin at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. on Sundays. There is also a Saturday matinee at 2 p.m. on Dec. 20.