Beilue: Teamwork and Determination

‘Texas’ roles impacted those in the entertainment industry

Photo: West Texas A&M University alumna Jenny Nolan Bailey poses with "2 Broke Girls" star Garrett Morris on the set of the CBS sitcom where Bailey worked as second second assistant director. Morris was an original star of "Saturday Night Live." 

So it may not have been Hamlet’s Soliloquy, but no matter. Jenny Nolan Bailey can remember her line from “Texas” even though it was nearly 30 years ago: “Come on, girls, the boys are waitin’!”

“I said that a million times that summer,” Bailey said.

In case Reilly Downes ever forgets her six years with “Texas’’—and she won’t – she could always look on her right arm and there’s a reminder. It’s a tattoo of a tomboyish pinup-style cowgirl with ornate boots and flowing hair.

“Sometimes I name my tattoos,” Downes said. “This is one is Parmalee.”

Stands to reason. For five of her six years with the summer outdoor musical drama, Downes played outgoing Parmalee Flynn, a cowgirl with some rough edges who falls for Colonel Henry’s young ranch foreman Dave Newberry.

“It was probably the most fun I’ve had in my whole life,” Downes said.

The summers in “Texas” do not wash away easily, if at all. For the large cast and crew, the work is just that – work. The demands of six nights a week from late May to mid-August are a great teacher that few in their late teens and early 20s can experience. For many, nightly performances in Pioneer Amphitheatre in Palo Duro Canyon State Park became part of a springboard to later success in the entertainment industry.

“I learned working as a team,” Bailey said. “I’d done theater before where you rehearse a month or so and do several shows. But doing a show six nights a week for a summer was hard. At that point, I realized this is hard, but I love it. Working with the same people and personalities all summer, there’s a lot of drama besides being in a drama.

“Just getting up, going to class, going to dance class, carpooling to the canyon, finishing the show and going to someone’s house until 2 a.m., and then doing it all over again, I couldn’t do that now, but it was one of the best summers of my life. It was making my art my business and thinking, ‘Yes, this is what I want to do.’”

Bailey, a 2017 inductee into the West Texas A&M Theater Hall of Fame, has been a director in Los Angeles in television and film for nearly 20 years. The best-known “Texas” alumnus in front of the camera is Sherry Stringfield, who played Kate Lucas in 1987. Stringfield was nominated for three Emmys in the role of Dr. Susan Lewis in “ER.”

Going back to the early 1970s, when “Texas” began to gain a footing, Brad Maule was “Dude,” one of the comic relief cowboys. He was not comic relief as Dr. Tony Jones in the daytime drama, “General Hospital,” from 1984 to 2006. Current “Texas” box office manager Mark Sellars was in the show in 1989 and 1990. He worked for 20 years in Los Angeles at Disneyland and Universal Studios and later on cruise ships before he was a choreographer and associate producer on game shows. Countless others have gone on to careers on and off stage, in classrooms, on cruise ships and elsewhere.

Then there is Downes, who at 31 is just creating her niche in the industry. After her final year as Flynn in 2017, she and husband Dakota Brown left to find stage work in Chicago. She acted in a Shakespeare Theater company, and in July, will be in Nashville to record an EP, a medium-length album of five songs of what she calls “sad cowgirl music.”

“It really helped me make myself a determined person,” Downes said of her six years in “Texas.” “The years were ever changing. It was something new. There’s two weeks of rehearsals that build into a three-hour musical with ornate dancing, and vocals and scenic changes.

“In most college productions, you have months of rehearsals and are able to slowly build into your character, but with ‘Texas,’ it’s about being very focused and getting stuff done. Especially if I’m down, that’s helped me a lot in my career to be able to draw on ‘you used to do this in ‘Texas,’ you can do anything.’”

‘Texas’ grind is a taste of the business

Photo: Jenny Nolan Bailey poses with director James Burrows on the set of "Will and Grace." The prolific Burrows co-created "Cheers."

Bailey grew up in Gilmer, an East Texas town of 5,000 that’s 20 miles northwest of Longview. She saw the show in high school with a church group. Bailey already loved the theater, and thought “Texas” would be something to perhaps pursue one day.

A high school counselor recommended Bailey look at her alma mater, WT. When Bailey and her mother visited, they were taken by the campus theatre, by Royal Brantley, professor of theatre, and the entire campus. In the summer of 1992, her last summer in Canyon, she was a singer and dancer in “Texas.”

Ten years later, she was in Los Angeles. She had a bit of an epiphany when working in Dallas on “Walker, Texas Ranger” and realized the entire crew was from southern California. She soon moved there, applied to the Directors Guild of America trainee program, and made the cut, one of just 17 out of 2,500 applicants.

That led to some initial work on “War of the Worlds” and “The Office,” which led to assistant directing in such films as “Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift,” “Lions for Lambs,” and the 2008 movie, “There Will Be Blood,” nominated for eight Academy Awards.

With husband Kevin, a golf pro at Lakeside Golf Club in Burbank, and son, Landon, 9, Bailey saw that television was more conducive to some type of family life. That has led to 12 years of work primarily as a director in television, most notably as a second second assistant for “Will and Grace” and “2 Broke Girls.”

During the pandemic, Baily was able to work as second assistant director for Netflix’s “Dad, Stop Embarrassing Me,” a comedy series starring Jamie Foxx.

It was at WT, with Brantley and Lila Vars, and later at the University of North Texas, that provided an early foundation for Bailey’s career. “Texas” was a cram course in that.

“WT gave me the confidence and willpower to move forward,” Bailey said. “Everyone there built me up and I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I put my heart and soul into everything I did, and it was a learning process for me.

“I work in the film industry now. Our hours are terrible. We work 16 hours a day and that’s normal. That’s when I realized if you’re going to make art your life, it almost becomes your life. You have to eat, drink and sleep it 24-7. If you don’t love it like that, it’s probably not for you. You learn quickly it’s going to encompass your life, and if that’s not OK, it’s not for you.”

Photo: Reilly Downes played comedic cowgirl Parmalee Flynn for five seasons in "Texas." She is now recording her debut EP in Nashville.

For Downes, she played dancer/singer Sadie Cline in her first season, and then got and kept the role of the comedic Flynn for five seasons. What audiences saw was an extension of who Downes was. She is from Bandera, a town of less than 1,000 located 50 miles northwest of San Antonio. It’s the self-described “Cowboy Capital of the World.”

“I felt like I embodied her,” said Downes, who graduated from WT in 2013 with degree in Musical Theatre. “In Bandera, the joke is there aren’t parking spots – just hitching posts to tie up your horse. I grew up a tomboy riding horses. So I felt like I can do this because I am her.”

Leaving for Chicago and new opportunities after the 2017 season was the right thing to do, but didn’t make it any easier.

“Honestly, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “It was like a breakup, it really was. Anyone in the cast who saw me that night knew how hard it was for me to let go of Parmalee. She was a part of me.”

Do you know of a student, faculty member, project, an alumnus or any other story idea for “WT: The Heart and Soul of the Texas Panhandle?” If so, email Jon Mark Beilue at jbeilue@wtamu.edu.