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Community theater icon dies at 85
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
YOUNGSTOWN
Bentley Lenhoff, a towering figure in the region’s theater community who steered the Youngstown Playhouse in its glory years, died Wednesday at age 85 after a brief battle with cancer.
Lenhoff was closely associated with the Youngstown Playhouse in its glory years for decades and guided it through good times and bad.
He was at the helm of the Playhouse from 1965 to 1985, when the theater was thriving.
When hard financial times hit in 2004, Lenhoff returned at the request of a group trying to save the theater on the city’s South Side. Through his efforts as volunteer director, he was able to restore the Playhouse to firm footing.
Bernie Appugliese, the Playhouse’s operations director, was a protege, colleague and friend of Lenhoff for much of his life.
“Bentley Lenhoff is the reason the Youngstown Playhouse still exists and thrives today,” Appugliese said. “He was the major force behind this organization for more years than I have been alive. He was never content to rest on his laurels, but rather took this theater to the next level with every new season. He constantly pushed the limits and tried new and exciting things.”
On a personal level, Appugliese said Lenhoff was one of the strongest forces in his life.
“He mentored and fostered me like no other,” Appugliese said. “He is one of the people responsible for making me the successful theater professional I am today, and he continued to help and guide me up until very recently.”
Jim Lybarger has been the set builder at the Playhouse since the mid-1970s and worked with Lenhoff on a daily basis.
“What I remember most was the tone of the organization when he was there,” Lybarger said. “People were friendly and professional, and that made it run better. He was just a good boss. It was a family-friendly atmosphere and a fun place to be. He was really fun to work with as the director on a show, but also as the guy who wrote the checks or hired the jobbers. He could direct, act, raise money and spend it wisely.”
Todd Hancock, co-founder and director of Easy Street Productions, also recalled Lenhoff’s role as a mentor who encouraged young actors and helped launch many careers.
“He was a great leader, mentor and probably the best show-business man I ever met,” Hancock wrote in an email. “He wrote me a letter of encouragement when he saw me in a show in high school, gave me my first paying acting job and was always there with advice when Easy Street needed it. I think the entire theater community owes him a debt of gratitude.”
Like many longtime Mahoning Valley theater veterans, Patricia Fagan was stunned to hear of Lenhoff’s death.
“He was such a presence, a larger-than-life man, the kind of person who comes into your life and makes such an impact,” she said. “He was a wonderful mentor, very encouraging to me.”
Fagan worked directly for Lenhoff in 2004 when he came back to the Playhouse to help save it.
“I learned so much from him,” she said. “He was the go-to guy, the boss, and he had the last word.”
In reading the many “rest-in-peace” messages left on Facebook for Lenhoff, Fagan said she couldn’t help but think that would be the last thing he would want.
“He would want the lights, the action, the curtain going up,” she said.
Lenhoff lived in Poland with his wife, Nancy. The couple celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary in June.
A native of Petoskey, Mich., the Lenhoffs owned and operated a summer-stock theater in that resort city.
Bentley Lenhoff also worked at several other theaters in his career, including the State in Sandusky, which he helped to revive, as well as venues in Augusta, Ga., New York, Florida and Minnesota.
In addition to his wife, he leaves his daughters, Lyndean Brick and Alyssa Briggs, two sons-in-law, and six grandchildren.
Burial for Lenhoff will be Friday in Petoskey, but Briggs said plans are under way to have a memorial service in Youngstown at a later date.
Briggs said her father loved to tell actors who were auditioning for his plays the story of how he could have hired a young Barbra Streisand for a bargain price but passed.
It was a way of making them not feel bad in case they didn’t get the part, she said.
Lenhoff was doing a mass audition at a hotel in New York when a young and then-unknown Streisand pushed her way to the front of the line and insisted on singing for him. Lenhoff admired her voice but turned her away because his company was not doing musicals.
Years later, an assistant was digging through audition photos and stumbled across one of Streisand from that day. Lenhoff had written on the back of the photo “talented, but ...”
Much later in Streisand’s career, her management team put out a call for stories from industry professionals for a retrospective on the star. Lenhoff sent them the story, and it was used in album notes, Briggs said.