photo by David N. Seelig

the very
musical world of
R.L. Rowsey

by Pat Murphy

The last time R.L. Rowsey looked at his wristwatch was September 2000, on a Tennessee road east of the Mississippi River while headed west toward Hailey, Idaho, in his burgundy-colored Honda Civic.

Rowsey unclasped his inexpensive Swatch and hurled it out the window, an abrupt gesture that made a literal as well as figurative statement about his past and future.

Little wonder Rowsey felt the urge to dispatch his watch to an inglorious fate. Since teaching piano at 14 years old for $5 per lesson and later at 17 voice-coaching for a musical dinner theater in the Richmond, Va., area, Rowsey, now 43, had been held captive by calendars, clocks and telephones in a business celebrated for romance and glamour, that but for habitués could be unendingly stressful.

If not on the road with theatrical companies, Rowsey was in a New York City or Virginia or Maryland office fretting over business details and human failings.

“I don’t sit at big desks well,” he says with a trace of contempt for confining office routines.

So, arriving in Hailey, he became managing director of the Company of Fools, the energetic, flowering live theater group with Virginia roots that actor-Hailey resident Bruce Willis lured to Hailey in the mid-1990s to stage productions at the Willis-owned-and-lavishly renovated Liberty movie house on Main Street.

The contrast between Rowsey’s tranquil new Hailey setting with one of his former frenzied workplaces, New York City, immediately confirmed the wisdom of abandoning big city theater for rural America.

“I need to live here!” he remembers saying during his first taste of Hailey, with the exuberance of a man who’d escaped an occupational gulag.

If Rowsey needs to live here, then Hailey and the rest of the Wood River Valley also need him.

In three years since arriving, Rowsey has helped create and enlarge musical appreciation up and down the spine of the Wood River Valley, not only through his music in live performances at Company of Fools, but as an engaging Pied Piper leading young and older to awaken their dormant amateur talents for a new love of music.

Restless and ubiquitous and always in need of a new outlet for his artistic passions, Rowsey seems to be everywhere at once, as if he were two or three men.

He teaches students at Sun Valley’s Community School. He presides over musical theater classes in the Company of Fools’ warmly colored and casual walkup offices and studio over the Roark Law Firm on Hailey’s Main Street. He’s assistant to the conductor as well as a singer-pianist member of the popular Caritas Chorale. He’s on the voice faculty of the Sun Valley Summer Symphony Conservatory and arts director at Light on the Mountain Spiritual Center. He’s the driving spirit in the Blaine County Academy of Acting.

R.L. Rowsey takes a break backstage during his pre-Hailey years. photo courtesy R.L. Rowsey

All that on top of providing music for stage productions and doubling as managing director of Company of Fools, jobs he vividly describe as “connecting my passion—arts—with my work—arts administration.” Put in a more practical perspective, artist-administrator Rowsey says that even when playing the piano for a Fools production, “I have my eye on ticket sales.”

The practical side of Company of Fools is no small matter. The group has a $500,000 annual budget. It seeks and needs grants. It pays actors and musicians union scale wages (even Willis receives no more, no less when performing). And the company’s ambitions for more productions require Rowsey to keep the income larger than expenses.

Is this simply more of the frantic pace of the East Coast lifestyle he vowed to flee? Not to Rowsey. The Wood River Valley’s scenic grandeur, friendly folks, easy-going lifestyle, smaller setting and vast growth potential for arts and culture are more recreation than stress. Rowsey candidly views his peripatetic pre-Hailey years as “thoroughly rewarding (but) not fueling me in a lasting way.”

Then came Hailey:

“There were people on the streets. As I had my first meal at Shorty’s, people stopped and chatted. I was calmed by the mountains. The air smelled better here. It was the people who captured my heart.”

He’s also been tantalized by the gifted artistic skills of people he’s met here—“people with massive talents, brilliant, but who chose other careers.” Several valley pianists, he says, could’ve been concert performers.

To friends in New York who still wonder why he’s smitten by small-town Idaho, Rowsey sends this message:

“It’s nice to know the person that sells you the nails for the (stage) set, the friend who runs the box office, the lady who writes the articles about your work in the newspaper, the donor who increases contributions so you can do the work you want to do, the child in your elementary program, the patron who saw the show four times, and artists who share their sandbox with you. There’s real potential here.”

Rowsey’s introduction to Company of Fools goes back to 1996. He was providing music with a nine-piece orchestra for the road company of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” when it appeared in Boise. He rented a car, drove to Hailey and saw the Fools staging of “Fool for Love,” with Bruce Willis.
In just four hours, Rowsey’s mantra—“I need to live here!”—took shape. Touring America at the time “was great, but I was exhausted,” he recalls with a sigh. Never a morning person, Rowsey suddenly found himself eager to awaken with the dawn to see the Idaho sunrise.

To understand why Rowsey ignites devotion of admirers, one need only meet R.L. (Roy Leslie is his full name, but he’s just “R.L.” to everyone). He’s a bear of a man over 6 feet tall, with a melodic surround-sound voice, an easy-going manner that some might describe as cuddly and that promptly turns casual acquaintances into friends, eye-catching close-clipped salt-and-pepper hair and beard, an inextinguishable smile. In conversation, he’s apt to curl one leg under the other and spread out in absolute relaxation at a coffee house or in the Fools’ comfy offices.

What comes through as strong Rowsey characteristics are a selflessness and missionary zeal.

“What excites me,” he explains, “is laying the groundwork for other artists to perform—to be bold in vision.”

He remembers, with understandable pride, producing “West Side Story” at two Maryland high schools where student casts were so fired up they pasted a sign of their determination in the rehearsal hall: “Up For The Challenge!”

Here’s a take on Rowsey from Denise Simone, co-founder of Company of Fools as well its associate artistic director and frequent star of Fools productions:

“There’s an energy,” she says of R.L. “I’m not talking about ‘trip over yourself effusiveness’ or energy that burns a hole through others. I’m talking about a very open, very giving energy that just exudes, without effort, an energy that inspires.”

And this from Rae DeVito, a fellow singer in Caritas Chorale: “R.L. Rowsey has the perfect name. He can ‘rowse’ us to sing and maybe even sing better, to laugh, to party and is quite a talented accompanist.”

Rowsey dismisses lavish praise for his impressive reputation and popularity, quickly diverting tribute to others: to Simone, to Fools artistic director Rusty Wilson, Fools production manager John Glenn, resident designer Dennis Rexroad, plus faithful supporters of his educational projects.

But in time Rowsey may want to call on the community esteem he’s accumulated to help fulfill his ultimate dream for Hailey and beyond. For 10 years, he’s mentally sketched a “Center for Creative Expression” with a national reach—an arts and cultural complex with residences to attract artists, musicians and performers for study and development of ideas.

If Rowsey’s dream becomes reality, then throwing away that watch three years ago and moving to a small town in Idaho will have been more than worthwhile after all.