Dick Welsbacher, retired WSU director of theater, dies at 89

Dick Welsbacher spent a lifetime shaping the careers of actors and the enjoyment of theater lovers in Wichita. He gave shape and texture to theater in Wichita for 30 years as director of theater at Wichita State University. And he did all of this, as his son Rick said Tuesday, “by just being really nice.”

Dr. Welsbacher died Tuesday in Wichita. He was 89, his playwright daughter, Anne Welsbacher, said. He built up the theater program and created generations of admirers, including a fellow student from acting classes at Denison University in Ohio, movie star Hal Holbrook.

“I just got the news; it’s a big blow,” said Holbrook, now 90.

Dr. Welsbacher, who joined WSU in 1958, was director of theater and later chair of the School of Performing Arts until he retired in 1991. He made theater a powerful force for good in this community, actors and theater lovers say. Longtime actors say his son Rick was right: Dr. Welsbacher led by being nice, talking only about the positives of every person and every acting moment he directed.

Dr. Welsbacher could have been a star, Holbrook said, but instead came to Wichita in 1958 and stayed there. The motive for staying, his daughter Anne said: Rick had a learning disability, and Wichita had good teachers and therapy for him at the Institute of Logopedics. “After a few years here, he considered Wichita home,” she said.

His friend Holbrook starred in scores of Hollywood films, including “All the President’s Men,” “Julia,” “The Firm” and “Men of Honor.” At Denison University decades ago, Holbrook said, he and Dr. Welsbacher were friends and fellow actors in a group of students that included future star playwrights, directors and creators of musicals that hit big.

“Dick was the better actor – the most talented and convincing actor in our whole group. He was the opposite of me; I was always sort of making a noise or doing something to stand out, and Dick, who was so quiet and subdued, would then come in behind the rest of us and wipe us all out, he was so real.”

“I envied him and admired him so much that after college, I refused to let our friendship die,” Holbrook said. “I came to Wichita to see him more than once because I admired him so much – a talent that was so intimate and so simple that he never had to push it.”

Holbrook was only one of hundreds of devoted admirers of Dr. Welsbacher, said Joyce Cavarozzi, a WSU theater department professor and friend. In the past week and a half, at least 20 former students came to visit. Karla Burns, a Tony Award nominee, sang to him at his home on Monday.

Burns took his History of Theater class in the early 1970s. Students were at first startled by what they saw. “A short little man wearing moccasins, tossing his long hair about,” Burns said. “His voice – oh, my God, his voice … so mesmerizing that we all forgot to take notes. Every one of us failed the first test because none of us had taken a single note. He gave us another chance, though. Dick always gave us another chance.”

Had it not been for him, Burns said, she’d never have been nominated for a Tony Award, never would have acted or sung a note on Broadway.

Audiences loved him. In the early 1980s, Geri Jabara, a theater lover who with her husband, Fran, contributed to WSU and Wichita charities for decades, heard that WSU’s summer theater was having trouble raising money. Jabara called 10 friends, who gave $1,000 apiece and saved summer theater, not only that year but for years after.

“We’d do anything for Dick Welsbacher,” Jabara said.

Theater is important to human culture because it more than any other medium confronts us with our mutual humanity, said Kathryn Page-Hauptman, a former student of Dr. Welsbacher. No matter what our racial or cultural or political differences, theater transcends all, by showing that “as human beings we all share the same emotions, feelings, desires. Theater makes us more thoughtful, kinder, makes us understand each other better.”

“No one understood theater better than he did,” said Page-Hauptman, the artistic director at the Forum Theatre in Wichita. “Many people don’t realize this, but our town has more live theater than many other metropolitan areas.”

Most of what we have, she said, was inspired, influenced or shaped somehow by Dr. Welsbacher or his students.

He did it mostly by projecting goodness, on and off stage, she said. “We all loved him so much that we just wanted to do everything we could to please him.”

In Wichita in the late 1960s Hal Davis was a dyslexic kid, a WSU business major until Dr. Welsbacher took him under his wing. Davis became a commanding presence on stage, including on Broadway in a career that lasted more than 30 years. “I wouldn’t be an actor, I wouldn’t be doing all the things I’m doing if it weren’t for Dick Welsbacher,” he said.

One day, in his junior year in 1971 at WSU, Dr. Welsbacher cast Davis in the role of Hamlet, one of the more complex and demanding roles in all of theater.

“Soon after he cast me, he started taking me outside,” Davis said.

“He was always giving me gifts, and this was a big one. He told me to sit down with him under a little shade tree. He’d have me read lines from ‘Hamlet,’ and then he’d respond. Then he’d have me read more lines. And he’d say, ‘yes, do it that way with maybe a little more of this, or a little more of that.’”

Day after day they quoted “Hamlet” to each other under that shade tree, with Davis reading and Dr. Welsbacher answering, shaping, coaxing. “He taught me how to understand Shakespeare, and he gave me confidence in myself,” Davis said.

“After that, did I ever do a dramatic role of Hamlet in my career?” Davis said. “I did not. But did I know how to step up on a stage, in New York or anywhere else, and have myself a career?

“I knew how to do that. Because of him.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2015 at 5:57 PM with the headline "Dick Welsbacher, retired WSU director of theater, dies at 89."