Music Rocks Her World: Quack Moore and Her Beloved Palace Theater

By Paula Thomas

The Palace Theater is a vintage and singular jewel on the Hilo landscape. Located on Haili Street just off the bayfront, the theater is undergoing steady restoration and refurbishment. Overseeing the transformation from “deteriorating” to “shabby chic” is one Quack Moore.

It seems fitting. Both are in the stage of reinvention. The Palace was built in 1925 to enrich an already vibrant Hilo town booming from the sugar industry, and lacking a stage and theater. The Palace thrived, more or less, for almost 60 years before age, and circumstance, and lack of funds began to take its toll. By the 1990s, it was boarded up.

That was around the time that Quack Moore, née Cheryl Hardwick, was shifting out of the artful, cultured, and zany life as a New York City musician and composer, and into a slower-paced, land-tied life on Hawai‘i Island.

She lives on a 30-acre macadamia nut farm with her second husband, Richard (Rick) Moore, and needed to reinvent herself.

As luck would have it, one of the first places she visited after moving lock, stock, and barrel in 2001 was the Palace Theater. Astute, then-president Stuart Hussey asked her to serve on the board, and she said yes. By 2002, she was the temporary second president of the newly founded Friends of the Palace Theater, the entity that provides the resources to operate and restore the theater.

“I was so naïve,” she admits. “I took the temp job, and it was not like there was a line behind me,” she notes dryly. “What did I know about non-profits? I was just flying by the seat of my pants. I had to learn everything from scratch: compliance, building codes, how to write “grantspeak”(gag), how to raise money … I had zero experience in non-profit management or operating a theater.”

The thing about Moore is that she is f-u-n-n-y and self-effacing. Be charmed; yet don’t be fooled by Moore’s easy humor. She has guts, grit, and enough energy to light up most of Hilo. Anything she sets her mind to, well, just help her or get out of the way. She’s a special cocktail of New York edge, an artistic genius with a fierce passion for music, and incredibly skilled at directing talent to make something BIG work.

This year, the 11th annual musical, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” graced the Palace stage. The whole idea of doing musicals was Moore’s. “It would bring in money and it would be FUN,” she thought back in 2001. The Palace had no repertory company and Hilo has a vibrant, fantastic arts community: actors, directors, dancers, choreographers with prime-time, big-time experience. That made it possible. The key was not to interfere with signature events already on the local arts calendar, so October was chosen as the month of the musical.

Hawai‘iana Live! was another brainstorm. Now in its sixth year, this signature Hawaiian cultural event, held every Wednesday from 11 am to noon, is funded and supported by the CPEP (County Product Enrichment Program). and managed through the Research & Development Department of Hawai‘i County. Funding comes from HTA (Hawai‘i Tourism Authority). The weekly event brings visitors in during the day and through a mixed-media production, artfully showcases the cultural heritage of the Islands, a heritage that captivated Moore at her first Merrie Monarch Festival.

Bringing in revenue is an ongoing struggle, as is continuing the building renovations.

Revenue is generated from rentals for community performances and events, and about 30 percent comes from art house films (down from 70 percent ten years ago).

Quack’s focus is on getting the building in shape. “The Palace has great bones, yet there was not much in it when we started,” she laments. Logic and money dictate what gets done when, and how. Safety and structural issues always take priority and range from a simple doorknob change to complex roof replacement. Hawai‘i foundations and local organizations and donors are among the Palace Theater’s regular supporters, as is a New York foundation. Much of the café, lobby, and office renovations are reflections of her husband Rick’s handiwork, thanks to local donations of supplies. All kinds of specialized equipment for projection, lighting, and sound have come from grants and industry partners. 2012 is the “year of the roof.” The $100,000 project is only about $20,000 short as of the start of fall. “I’ll do anything to get more money for the roof,” she says. “I’m like the Palace ‘ho’,”she quips.

The Real “Quack”

Some people are born to be doctors, or teachers. Cheryl Hardwick was born to play the piano.

It is a profound and passionate love affair that began when she was just five: A piano arrived at her family’s house in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, about an hour’s drive southwest of Pittsburgh. The piano was a new one, purchased by her grandmother and meant for the elder’s house that was under construction. Cheryl’s mother had agreed to store it until the new house was ready.

The piano never left the Hardwick house.

As Quack tells it, she just felt drawn to that piano and started to play it. “Sitting down at the piano and playing just felt right,” she said simply. An only child, she started with lessons, performed in recitals, and got better and better teachers as her skills improved. Long before she reached high school, she set her sights on leaving Brownsville—“I was dying to get out”—and becoming a concert pianist. Her goal: college and a master’s in music from The Juilliard School in New York City.

During high school, her grandmother upgraded the piano to a grand. At Chatham College, as a music major, she got to play with musicians from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and continued to perform in competitions. She connected with famed pianist Eunice Norton, who lived in Pittsburgh at the time and had trained under Artur Schnabel. When she applied to Juilliard, she got in on a scholarship.

Like many people who are very hard-working, Quack’s youth included farm life. The family farm in Washington, Pennsylvania was a gathering place for aunts, uncles, cousins, and “had the typical array of animals—cows, ducks, sheep, goats, cats, and dogs,” she recalls. The animals amused her, especially the ducks and their quacking. Because she imitated their sounds so readily, and apparently very well, her cousins nicknamed her “Quack.”

33 Years in New York City

Although she dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, Cheryl Hardwick found work playing for ballet and dance classes and rehearsals for performing groups. Then came a few Off-Broadway plays, some Broadway plays, and big and little gigs all over the city. It was not a concert pianist’s dream, and yet it was a life. One of her most bizarre jobs was playing piano for the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse on the Lower East Side. She followed in after Barry Manilow and a young singer named Bette Midler had decided to move on. In the circles she ran in—writers, musicians, performers—she met people like writer Susanna Moore (her husband’s sister), comedian and producer Lorne Michaels, and musician Paul Schaeffer.

In 1975, the latter invited her to join their foray into late night television on NBC. Cheryl Hardwick was hired to help drive the band’s rhythm section on the very first NBC Saturday Night broadcast on October 11, 1975, on keyboards along with Paul Shaeffer. Michael O’Donoghue, a founder of National Lampoon, and later to become her first husband (he died in 1994), was among the first writers. She stayed with the Saturday Night Live show for 25 years. “You know,” she said wryly, “sometimes you bumble into things … the gig that turned into a career.”

At a party she hosted early in her New York career, her Pennsylvania past caught up with her. She had invited her close cousin from Pittsburgh, and as everyone was mingling, drinking, and talking, he asked someone where “Quack” was. The response: “Who?” Then, “What did you call her?” Once he explained, the old nickname stuck.

Quack’s talent seems boundless. In 1989, she joined the Sesame Street composing team, and they won a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Music Direction and Composition in 1990 for their work with Sesame Street. She created over 30 songs for the show, e.g. “14 Carrot Love,” “DiscoToothbrush,” “Grouch Girls Don’t Wanna Have Fun”, and she voiced one of the Oinker sisters.

Today, when her fingers fly over keys and she’s in front of a band, she is home. Music is her Muse; the keyboard, her avenue to the divine. More often than not these days though, musicals aside, Quack Moore plays classical concerts, a return in her “retirement” to earlier dreams.

It is worth noting her prowess as a musical director. She edits the score, sometimes shortening or lengthening sections, improvising transitions, always working the music to accommodate scenery changes, timing needs. As she rehearses all the singers and directs choruses, Quack can pick out the nuances of tone, the balance of voices or lack thereof, within a matter of bars. She understands how to draw people out, quiet them down, shut them out, coach them in dynamics, tone. She can write all the orchestral music and conducts the band and singers.

This is what jazzes her, what makes her rock, what makes her tick, what brings her great joy. She knew it could, and that’s why Quack and Rick Moore settled in East Hawai‘i when they visited the islands in the late 1990s looking for a place to live. One of the reasons for choosing Hilo was the presence of the Palace Theater. “I won’t live in a town that doesn’t have an old theater,” she said. “It tells a lot about a community when there is an old theater in town. It means that the arts are valued and that there is a history of performing arts there.”

Quack worries that a whole generation—people now in their 30s and 40s—have no memories of the Palace because it was boarded up during their childhood. Working to restore it, and provide entertainment gives her something to do, and it raises money and builds awareness of the theater for the future.

What fascinates one about Quack Moore is her inimitable strength of spirit and passion, and the arc of her life that one can see coming full circle. From Brownsville, Pennsylvania to Hilo, Hawai‘i: an aspiring concert pianist rises to new and unanticipated challenges, then resettles back to her roots: a farm, a small town, and a theater, with a grand piano on the stage.

Let the music continue! ❖

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For information about the theater: HiloPalace.com
Contact writer Paula Thomas: Paula@DelphiPacific.com