Jessica Sherr prepares to channel Bette Davis at BB’s Stage Door Canteen
By ALAN SMASON, Exclusive to the CCJN
It’s taken two lifetimes for Jewish actress Jessica Sherr to approach her role as Hollywood screen icon Bette Davis. Sherr, a New York City method actor, arrives in the Crescent City this weekend for two performances in which she will play the two-time Academy Award winner at BB’s Stage Door Canteen in a show she researched and wrote titled “Bette Davis – Larger Than Life.”
Jessica Sherr portrays Bette Davis this weekend at BB’s Stage Door Canteen at the National World War II Museum. (Photo by Jessica Sherr)
Speaking with the CCJN in a phone interview, the forty-something actress recalled beginning her career as a youngster, promoted by her mother to attend a performing arts school and later to participate in a summer program put on by the famous Old Globe Theatre in her hometown of San Diego.
“My mom got me into something that was really cool called Camp Orbit,” she confided. “My family didn’t have a lot of money, but a business sponsored me to go to this camp and it was an incredible experience because for a few weeks every day we went to the theater. We got to work – not quite on stage– but real close.”
One of her early memories from the camp was watching New Orleanian TV and film actor John Goodman perform on stage as Falstaff and then seeing him speak to the campers the following day.
Like so many Jewish performers, she gained more stage experience as a youngster through Jewish religious school and the various Purim spiels and plays about Jewish life. Sherr recalled Cara Friedman, a playwright at her local synagogue Beth Israel, who would compose the songs and dances and teach them to students in a program called Show Biz. “We would perform at the very lovely theater called Spreckles Theatre that was a downtown theater in San Diego,” she added.
Jessica Sherr performs as Bette Davis. (Photo courtesy Jessica Sherr)
Already a very determined and talented dancer, Sherr caught Friedman’s attention during auditions. She rewarded her with six different parts for one original piece the group was working on. “It was kind of embarrassing, but also really cool because I really worked hard,” she shared. During that two-year period, Sherr also worked on several other plays and was selected to work with the Malashock Dance Company on rather advanced choreography for a sword dance.
While she kept busy with some theatre work in high school, Sherr set her sights on obtaining a master’s of fine arts degree from the nearby University of California at Santa Barbara. But despite her high hopes, when she auditioned, she did not get in and two years later was disappointed again with yet another rejection.
Undaunted, she left the security and certainty of the West Coast and ventured into the heart of American theatre, New York City. Unlike her earlier rebuke in college, she was accepted to the vaunted Lee Strasberg Institute. Later, she studied with Wynn Handman, the artistic director and co-founder of the American Place Theatre, where several well-known actors including Michael Douglas, Joel Grey and Dustin Hoffman received training and several emerging playwrights like Sam Shepard received initial plaudits.
“That was really where, I think, I honed my craft,” Sherr noted. “That was a Meisner technique. It just made more sense to me.”
Sanford Meisner’s technique differs from Lee Strasberg’s method acting, although both stem from the teachings and “system” of Russian and Soviet theatre luminary Konstantin Stanislaviski.
Jessica Sherr in “Bette Davis – Larger Than Life.” (Photo courtesy Jessica Sherr)
Sherr studied with Handman, the progeny of Russian Jewish emigres, for five years. It was during this period she first began to research and write her shows.
Initally, she was drawn to stand-up comedy and tried her hand at emulating her heroine, Lucille Ball, through her own original work. “I actually was not a Bette Davis fan,” Sherr confided. But throughout this period, people would stop her on the street and remark to her how much she resembled a young Bette Davis, an actor of whom she had only a passing familiarity.
With two of her Academy Award statuettes, Jessica Sherr channels Bette Davis. (Photo courtesy of Jessica Sherr)
“I didn’t know enough about Bette; I had to learn about her, enough to put a pause on it,” she explained. She began to read her autobiography (“This ‘n That”) and other reference material about Davis. “I knew about her, but not to the extent of what she had done in Hollywood,” Sherr continued. “I fell in love with how her book is written. Beyond her being a movie star, she was just a smart woman and really ahead of her time.”
What started out partly on a dare to produce a one-woman show in New York became an extension of her class work as an actor. Soon, she had more than 20 minutes of material based on her research including her imagined phone call between an outraged Davis and her mother over the 1939 Academy Awards winners being leaked in advance of the ceremony. She used the material in what she lovingly refers to as “off-off-off-off-off-off Broadway shows,” referring to the size of the house on Saturday nights for 13 weeks.
After rapidly expanding the show to 55 minutes in length, she entered what she now called “the Bette Davis” show in the New York Fringe Festival. Not only was the show accepted; every show sold out. “People just wanted to see Bette Davis,” she mused.
Because of the turnout and based on information she gleaned by working with the New York Fringe Festival, Sherr was aware of the home of the original Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Before taking the show out of the country, she contacted the Bette Davis estate and sent her script there to confirm she was able to utilize the star’s name.
Emulating the actress who sparred with studio heads, Jessica Sherr stars as Bette Davis. (Photo courtesy Sherr)
To her surprise, she received a call back from Kathryn Sermak, Davis’ assistant. Sherr flew out to Los Angeles and met with her. Sermak was so impressed with her research that she gifted Sherr with a pair of Davis’ own earrings along with a scarf and gloves that had also belonged to the Hollywood star. Sherr took the items with her and incorporated them into her act in advance of her 24 sold-out shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
“Not only did we sell out every single show, we had people sitting on the ground. We had people waiting outside down the lobby. It was just a crazy phenomenon,” she noted.
The show was so successful, Sherr took it to Scotland two more times and eventually booked the full hour and 10-minute show at several off-Broadway venues in New York.
All of this got her notice and she came down to New Orleans to film two TV shows as a featured performer on “Claws” and “Cloak and Dagger.” Sherr was originally scheduled to appear in New Orleans two years ago at BB’s Stage Door Canteen, but all the shows were cancelled due do the COVID pandemic.
While the pandemic continued and theaters and film and TV productions were locked down, Sherr began to perform her Bette Davis show over Facebook Live on alternate Thursday nights just to generate interest and keep audiences entertained. The show originally titled “Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies” led to her creating a website to promote it.
As the pandemic dragged on, she received interest from Broadway on Demand to stream a version of the show over its platform. Sherr founded Velvet Fox Productions and, working with Karen Carpenter, a Drama Desk Award-winning director, collaborated on a filmed version of the Bette Davis show, complete with a musical soundtrack and opening and closing titles.
Filmed in 2021 at the Mile Square Theater in Hoboken, New Jersey, the show was picked up and streamed on demand. Her show also continues to generate favorable reviews from local and national critics.
Recently, she and two other actresses filmed a web series titled “Scratch This” about clueless lottery winners. “We’ve done really well with it,” she boasted. “It’s a fun comedy. We just won Best Web Series at the Garden State Film Festival.”
Thanks to Sherr and Bette Davis, audiences at the National World War II Museum on both Friday night and Sunday afternoon will learn about the star’s battles with studio heads and her many ill-fated marriages. Guests are advised to fasten their figurative seat belts. As the Hollywood icon famously remarked in the film “All About Eve”: “It’s going to be a bumpy night!”
“Bette Davis – Larger Than Life” played on Friday, Oct. 21 at 7:00 p.m. and on Sunday, Oct. 23 at 2:00 p.m.
