Mountain Play Visionary Smith Dies

Marilyn Smith, who served as executive director of the Mountain Play for more than two decades and is widely credited with resuscitating it, died early Sunday after a lengthy bout with cancer. She was 78.

Smith, who helmed the renowned 97-year-old theatrical event on Mount Tamalpais from 1977 to 1999, died at 5:30am at her home in Glen Ellen, Calif., accompanied by her husband of 58 years, Robert Smith, and their five children. Smith had been "bright-eyed and cheery and playing Bridge until just a few days before she went," according to her son Mike.

Marilyn Smith arrived in the Bay Area in 1957 from Kansas with a degree in music education. Marilyn and Bob lived on Cascade Drive and sent their five children to Mill Valley public schools, and she got involved with the music program at Old Mill School. She later began producing outdoor concerts at Marin Center in San Rafael.

In 1976, Smith produced Steve Riffkin's original Bicentennial Suite and presented it in the Headlands. For that production, Smith set up a shuttle bus system, a move that drew interest from the Mountain Play, which needed a system to get crowds to and from the Sidney B. Cushing Amphitheatre located a top Mount Tamalpais without creating a traffic and parking mess.

At the time, Mountain Play was in a state of disrepair financially and in need of some leadership, according to Sara Pearson, the Mountain Play's current executive director.

"It was really hardly living anymore," she said.

The Mountain Play asked Smith to come on board, and she did so on one condition: that they turn to Broadway musicals for its performances for the first time.

"She basically breathed life into a dying organization and reinvented it," Pearson said. "She just had the vision and spunk and an unbelievable ability to keep going.

The period that followed was filled with successful theatrical runs , with Smith using a wide array of antics to spread the word about the Mountain Play.

 "The whole organization was revitalized," Pearson said. "People began coming again and the tradition was revived, and generations of people brought their children and grandchildren to Mountain Play."

One such marketing campaign was for "Fiddler on the Roof," in which Smith commission an artist to arrange 10,000 eggs into a fiddler onto a hillside above Larkspur Landing.

"She hadn't quite thought about what would happen to those eggs over time," Pearson joked.

In 1999, her final year as executive director, Smith arranged to travel to Cuba to recruit some Cuban dancers to participate in a showing of "West Side Story." The move sparked a media firestorm.

"She was the mom of the Mountan Play – she was the center of it," Pearson said.

Marilyn Smith is survived by her husband Bob, their five children, their respective spouses and 10 grandchildren. Mike Smith said specific memorial arrangements were still being made, but that the family will ask that donations be made to Mountain Play in Marilyn Smith's honor.

"She was a force to be reckoned with for a long time in Mill Valley," said Kim Taylor, the former publicist for Mountain Play.