“Sleep is a precious commodity in this house!” declares Tina Jo Wallace with a laugh. Tina and her husband Matt are raising two young daughters while juggling full-time show business careers working at Clarksville’s Derby Dinner Playhouse, Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, and the Shakespeare Behind Bars program.
But it wasn’t always this way.
The initial meeting of Matt and Tina, their courtship, and his marriage proposal read like something from a romance novel.
The two actors met in May 2001 during the first day of rehearsals for Kentucky Shakespeare Festival’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“I was cast as Lysander, and she was Helena,” recalls Matt, who is originally from St. Louis, but grew up in Bowling Green, Ky. “By the time the show opened that summer we were dating. By the end of the play’s run we’d decided I’d move with Tina to Charlotte, N.C., where she had a job for the next few months. A few months after that, the two of us got jobs touring with Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, and in 2003 we got our first jobs performing at Derby Dinner Playhouse. Tina was Piglet in Derby Dinner Playhouse’s Children’s Musical Theater production of Winnie the Pooh, and I was cast in the Derby’s production of the musical 1776. I actually proposed to Tina on the Central Park stage here in Louisville and we married in 2004. Right after we got engaged we did Kentucky Shakespeare Festival’s Much Ado About Nothing, where we played Beatrice and Benedict. The timing of doing that production was kind of funny because it chronicles Benedict vowing to remain a bachelor until the day he dies!”
As to what it’s like when both the husband and wife have careers in the performing arts, Matt, who before moving to Louisville full-time in 2003 performed and directed theater in Chicago and throughout the Midwest, declares, “It’s crazy! All of my friends, who I graduated from theater school with, are living in big cities like Chicago or New York and trying to have a life. I’m always telling them to move to Louisville, which is so conducive to being a working artist. Between working with Stage One, Music Theatre of Louisville and my bread-and-butter jobs at Derby Dinner Playhouse and Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, not to mention voice-over commercial and film work, Tina and I are able to piece together a good life. We never get stagnant or bored,” he adds, “because we’re always working on something different. We always said we’d stay in Louisville until we stopped getting work, and the next thing you know — two kids later — this is our home now.”
A typical day for the Wallace family involves having morning time together until 9 or 10 a.m., followed by one or both of them running out the door to rehearsals. “Two or three days a week I’ll drive up to LaGrange to the men’s prison where I am head of the Shakespeare Behind Bars program, which at the moment has 20 participants,” says Matt. “Tina and I also share the Audience Development position at Derby Dinner Playhouse, in addition to the acting roles that we do there on a regular basis. If one or both or us are in a Derby Dinner Playhouse production, we don’t catch up at home with one another until 10 p.m., going to bed by 1 a.m.” At her husband’s last remark Tina interjects with a groan: “For some unknown reason, our girls have decided that 6 a.m. is when they’ll wake up each morning.”
Speaking of children, when asked what it was like to perform in not one, but two Derby Dinner Playhouse productions while well-advanced into her pregnancy, Tina deadpans: “I probably shouldn’t have been playing the title role of Sleeping Beauty at Derby Dinner Playhouse’s Children’s Musical Theater when I was six months pregnant, but I did.” The Dillsburg, Pa., native and Syracuse University graduate adds, “Matt — who was Prince Charming — and I covered up my belly with pillows. I then went straight into another Derby Dinner Playhouse production (the musical Smoke on the Mountain) while eight months pregnant, playing the role of an 18-year-old Christian girl. We hid my belly behind the standing bass fiddle that my character played.”
Tina is also one of the Derby Dinner Playhouse Footnotes — the waiters and waitresses who also perform before the show. She says, “Over the years Matt and I have gotten to know a lot of long-time season subscribers. So we have this kind of extended ‘family,’ who we’ll run into at the mall or the grocery stores all the time. They’ll bring us Christmas and birthday gifts for the girls and ask to see pictures every time I wait on them,” she adds.
Tina’s “extended family” remark evokes a laugh from Matt, who interjects: “When Tina was in the delivery room giving birth to Elizabeth, one of the nurses, who happened to be a long-time Derby Dinner Playhouse season subscriber, leaned over to us and said excitedly from behind her mask, ‘You know, I’m coming to the show this Saturday!’ I remember saying, ‘I hope you enjoy the show!’ before adding, ‘but let’s get this baby out.’”
“I’ve always had a sort of holistic feeling about working in show business,” says Matt. “I enjoy all elements of it, which included the two of us starting and running DDP’s first summer camp last summer.”
The camp was a huge success: 72 students ranging in age from 5-17 participated. The program will be extended to two weeks this summer.
“Tina and I are able to make a living in this business between the teaching of acting and commercial/stage and film acting,” he explains. “And we wouldn’t be here without Derby Dinner Playhouse Producing Artistic Director Bekki Jo Schneider giving us this life, as well as former Kentucky Shakespeare Festival Producing Artistic Director Curt Tofteland, who originally employed us at Kentucky Shakespeare Festival,” he stresses. “Tina and I have had a lot of angels along the way, who have made this happen for us.”
The couple then say, one after the other, “We have just been so blessed,” and Matt concludes: “And to be able to put out in the universe what we want and set our goals on it – it’s been a wonderful life.”
