Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  Volpe has spoken periodically at the GLAAD meetings, but it’s not one of the groups he serves as faculty advisor. Whether he is “out” at Truman is a matter of interpretation. He has not “announced” it, he says, and does not talk about it any more than “straight teachers run around telling people they’re straight. It should be an even playing field. It’s not something I feel I have to do. But it’s well understood. My students would have to be blind to not know I’m gay.”

  He thinks coming to terms with his sexuality made him a better teacher and theater director, though exactly how is not easy to say. “I know it did, but I really have to think about how to describe it. I guess once I acknowledged who I was—not only recognized it, but felt good about it—it influenced how I saw theater and it opened my eyes more to how I direct plays.

  “If you are not hiding something about yourself and you have finally faced down a demon—not that being gay is a demon, but that is how it felt growing up and through much of my life—you are going to be a more open and more aware person. And those are very important things for a director to be. But you have to also understand that theater is removed—it is once removed from life. It can feel very real, but it’s not life itself. It’s not the same thing.”

  His students do, of course, understand that he is gay. “It’s pretty obvious, but it’s not up for discussion,” Courtney Meyer says. “He’s such a big figure in this school that if someone was ever hostile about that aspect of him, it wouldn’t go over well at all.

  “If you’re in the theater program, you’re changed,” she continues. “You accept. You are exposed to people and ideas that, if you were a close-minded or bigoted person, you can’t be anymore. You change without knowing it or even thinking about it necessarily.”

  It’s not something that can be quantified, but I have the feeling that students at Truman are sometimes just plain nicer than what I’m used to seeing. The school feels like an unusually accepting place, especially in light of Levittown’s aversion to difference of all kinds and its legacy of bigotry. In 2012, a special education student, a boy with disabilities from a stroke he suffered before birth, was voted prom king. It wasn’t a joke or some post-modern ironic comment on the concept of proms and prom kings and queens. It was from the heart. He was beloved by the senior class, and it was an emotional moment when the honor was announced at prom.

  Afterward, his mother wrote a letter of thanks that was published in the newspaper. Her son, she said, was not “the all-star jock, the class president, or the lead in the school play; he’s just a nice guy who enjoys talking to people about sports, food, and what their plans are.” She expressed her gratitude that he had been at Truman for the previous four years “with such wonderful, accepting, and thoughtful young men and women.”

  Zach Philippi believes the spirit of the theater program extends into the rest of the school. “I think it sets the tone. Maybe there’s some cases where people get bullied at Truman, but I honestly don’t see it. It’s not considered cool, and people don’t put up with it. To me, it starts with theater. It’s open to everybody. Gay, straight, out, not out. I’ve only gone to one high school, so maybe it’s that way everywhere, but that’s not what I hear.”

  • • •

  It’s not surprising that the revered Zach, high school alpha male, would have a sunny view of social relations at Truman and perhaps even an idealized notion of how easy it might be for an outsider to fit in. I wondered what L. J. Carulli would tell me. He is the student who played the role of the street drummer and drag queen Angel Dumott Schunard in Truman’s Rent, and was himself openly gay at Truman. “The most fearless boy I ever taught” is how Volpe describes him.

  Carulli has played Angel again in a couple of professional productions of Rent—high points, so far, of his post-Truman years. Much of the rest of his life has not been easy. He is taking classes at the local community college while helping to care for his disabled mother, whose oxygen tanks I pass by on the front porch when I visit him. He says he might like to become a teacher. His father had been in the sign business—big neon displays, some of them hung in Atlantic City’s gambling district—but with the decline in the economy, demand for those signs dwindled, and now he is working part-time at Walmart.

  Carulli’s education before Truman was chaotic because his family moved several times and he bounced between schools in Philadelphia and its suburbs. The prospect of going to Truman terrified him at first. He had friends who were familiar with it, and they warned him that it might be a dangerous place for a boy who was shy, slightly built, and gay. “But it wasn’t like that once I got there,” he says. “Of course I was picked on every once in a while or somebody said something in the hall, but it never went beyond that. Mr. Volpe was like the biggest figure in the school. I don’t know what it would be like without him.

  “Then once I got involved with drama, it was like I was protected. Every kind of kid was in drama—the popular kids, the kids who played sports. You were their friend, and it wasn’t like they even had to say anything to the rest of the school. People who were mean or bullies or whatever couldn’t pick on you. They knew they had to leave you alone.”

  CAST MEMBERS OF SPRING AWAKENING. FROM LEFT: COLIN LESTER, JUSTIN MCGROGAN, JONATHAN EARP-PITKINS, TYLER KELCH, AND ADELBERT LALO.

  SPRING AWAKENING

  Music Theatre International is one of those businesses that seems to traverse two distinct time periods: the modern era of robust websites and instant communication and an earlier epoch of musty mail rooms, bad coffee, hand-selling, and sentiment. The company was founded by Frank Loesser, who wrote the music and lyrics to Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It owns the theatrical rights to hundreds of shows—standards like Les Misérables, Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man, and Damn Yankees; just about the whole Sondheim canon; every Disney musical; and much of the newer work from London’s West End, Broadway, and Off Broadway.

  The current CEO and co-owner is Freddie Gershon, a classical musician in his younger days who studied for eight years at the Juilliard School. He became an entertainment lawyer with an all-star list of clients that included Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, and Bette Midler, and a producer of concert tours and Broadway shows. Along the way, he published a novel about the music business with the title Sweetie Baby Cookie Honey.

  His spacious office in Midtown Manhattan feels more like a drawing room than a work space. The floor is covered with a big Oriental carpet, the walls decorated with fine art. Gershon, in his early seventies, trim and natty-looking, shakes my hand, offers me a seat, and begins talking before I can ask a question. He had recently been awarded an honorary Tony Award for his long contributions to the world of theater and specifically for creating the Broadway Junior line of offerings—thirty- and sixty-minute versions of works that can be performed by elementary and middle school students. The program nurtures a love of musical theater in children and has the additional benefit of cultivating future Broadway ticket buyers.

  “What they appreciated is that I’m putting tushies in the seats,” Gershon says, giving a Yiddish twist to the old showbiz expression “asses in the seats.” “That’s why I was given the Tony. They don’t give a fuck about the art, some of them, but they love that I’m building audiences from the ground up.”

  Current Broadway is not entirely to Gershon’s taste. It’s too overloaded with circus acrobatics and special effects. Ticket prices are through the roof. And the craft? Don’t even ask. “People like David Merrick, Jerry Robbins, Hal Prince, if you showed them this stuff, they’d say, ‘I’m impressed. Now lose it.’ They understood that you need to strip it down. Trust the material. A good story, a great song, it’s enough.”

  The money constraints of high school theater enforce a certain discipline and purity. Gershon read a newspaper story about an unusually prosperous high school that spent upward of $200,000 on a show, and it infuriat
ed him. “To do what?” he says. “Impress people?”

  Drama is deeply embedded in the culture of American high schools, perhaps not quite like football, but close. At MTI, it represents a steady business—year after year, teachers make selections from the company’s catalog, send in their checks for the rights, and wait for the scripts and other materials to arrive in one giant box. For a show that runs over two weekends and five or six performances, a school like Truman pays as much as $5,000, mainly for the licensing fee. High schools with bigger auditoriums pay more.

  Rates are set by the size of the theater and the popularity of the show, so a production of, say, Beauty and the Beast, which tends to sell lots of tickets, is the most pricey, but also gives a school the best chance to make its money back, or even turn a profit. MTI also sells various extras: T-shirts themed to the shows; licensed artwork; items from the “prop shop”; sound effects CDs; an OrchEXTRA music system, with the show music loaded, for schools that do not use a pit orchestra.

  MTI licenses about fifteen thousand shows each year for professional, amateur, and school performances. Gershon says schools represent the core of the business, and the company could be successful if that was all it did. In bad economic times, the school trade drops off less than the rest. After the recession hit in 2007, the company heard from a handful of schools that could no longer mount productions. In most cases they were not killing their programs, but experiencing financial shortfalls peripheral to the drama program, which they hoped would be temporary—for example, no funds to pay janitors to stay after three P.M. or for buses to transport late-staying students.

  Occasionally, a show is canceled for more idiosyncratic reasons. Gershon tells me about some materials that were sent back to him from a high school in Texas that had paid to license Annie. The principal included a note with the boxed-up scripts explaining they could not do the show because they had discovered it was satanic. Gershon called him right up. “I’m the owner of the company,” he said. “How can I address your problem?” The principal said that he was disturbed that Daddy Warbucks came from Hell’s Kitchen.

  “It’s a neighborhood in New York,” Gershon explained.

  “See then, that’s right,” the principal said. “It is satanic.”

  The older Gershon gets, the more attached he is to the scholastic part of MTI. It is both a business for him and a kind of mission. “It means everything to me. Look at what’s happening in the other parts of their lives. These kids, they text each other. They don’t know how to read faces. They don’t have antennae. Theater gives them what a computer takes away, what no classroom teacher can teach. They learn to work with other people. They learn patience and tolerance and how to be deferential to each other. They learn to be good citizens. It’s unifying. It has an impact on kids that can’t be quantified. Educators don’t know how to measure it.”

  He notes the growing “pressure and resistance” to arts education during the school day (as opposed to after-school theater). “People say, What’s all this froufrou singing and dancing and acting got to do with anything? How’s it help them get better SAT scores? But in the arts, you learn a vast amount of information without even knowing you’re learning it. It’s the only way some people can learn.”

  I tell him about Mariela Castillo and how theater was the realm in which she finally realized she has the ability to process large amounts of information. “That’s wonderful,” he says. “But I’ll tell you something—those things happen more than you think.”

  Gershon and Stephen Sondheim are friends—in fact, Sondheim was one of the first to agree to have some of his plays condensed into the short Broadway Junior versions for younger children. (When other authors resist, fearing their creations will be “chopped up,” Gershon persuades them by “invoking the icon.”) He and Sondheim help financially support a drama program at a school in Lower Manhattan for special needs children, including some with autism.

  When Gershon learned that one of the students, in the midst of a rehearsal, spoke his first word ever, he said to Sondheim, “We have to see this.” They took a car together to the school. “I said to him that the one thing we can’t do is cry, because it could be disturbing to them if they see two old men cry.”

  • • •

  Gershon rode in the limousine from Manhattan that day in 2001 to see Truman’s version of Les Misérables along with Cameron Mackintosh, a co-owner at MTI. People at their level of theater can see straight into the soul of a production, beyond what can be dressed up with money, technology, lavish set design, or even beautiful voices. “Lou Volpe is as good as you get in high school,” Gershon says. “He’s better than some people in the professional business. There is a sense of collegiality and respect and awareness among everyone involved in his shows. You cannot fake that kind of thing. You feel that from them, and it comes from their teacher. It’s the only place it can come from.”

  John Prignano, MTI’s senior operations officer, also traveled to Levittown that evening. He had first seen a Truman show at a festival the previous year. “Every kid onstage had a character,” he tells me. “They were all one hundred percent committed. That doesn’t happen often. Acting is all about the choices that you make in the moment. I thought, Someone is really teaching them to trust their choices, and whoever that is, I want to work with him.”

  The popularity of Les Mis—the staggering ten thousand–plus performances in London’s West End since its 1985 opening, the long Broadway run—made it a natural for the school market. But its scale was an obstacle. Three and a half hours in its original form. Based on a complicated novel by Victor Hugo. Mackintosh’s personal attachment to Les Mis, one of his first great successes, was another complicating factor. “That show was his baby,” says Gershon. “He knew every nuance, every problem that needed to be solved.”

  When first offered the chance to do the pilot, Volpe declined. He didn’t understand why he was chosen, and the challenge of it left him petrified. Why don’t you ask some other high school that has better facilities? he said to Steve Spiegel, MTI’s president at the time. He protested that his stage was just thirty-five feet across. Some high school stages were about twice that wide. His sound systems and acoustics were substandard; the seats were those awful wooden planks. Spiegel said that he didn’t care about any of that and neither did anyone else at MTI. If they wanted a rich school with all the best facilities, they could easily have found one. “We think you can do this for us,” Spiegel said.

  That terrified Volpe even more. He felt like he had been tapped on the shoulder for a mission beyond his reach. He feared that if the show did not succeed, it would never be licensed for other high schools and he would be blamed. When he told his friends about the offer and his decision to decline it, he imagined they would understand his reasoning. They didn’t. They all had pretty much the same reaction: Have you lost your mind?

  Volpe thought of his late mother and what she so often said to him: “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” When he had revealed to her that he was gay and asked if she was surprised, she said to him, “Louis, I watch Oprah, you know.” She was unafraid, unflappable, fully modern. He liked to think he lived by her creed, but he could not honestly say he did in this case.

  He called Spiegel back two days later to make sure the offer was still good. Told that it was, he agreed to take on Les Mis. “I still sometimes wonder why I backed off that,” he says now. “There was no excuse. My mom was probably up there having a fit.”

  Another high school, Holy Trinity in Hicksville, Long Island, had staged a previous MTI-sanctioned pilot of Les Mis. Mackintosh was impressed, but not ready to give his approval afterward for a wider licensing. “Cameron wanted it redone,” Gershon says. He gave notes on the performance, which were passed on to Volpe.

  When the curtain closed on Truman’s production, Mackintosh turned to Gershon and said, “Let’s lock this,” signaling that he had blessed Tr
uman’s version of his show. Volpe’s choices—his rewrites and cuts, made in consultation with MTI—would be enshrined in Les Misérables School Edition. “Cameron will not ever lower his standards,” Steve Spiegel says. “If they had not performed at this level, he would not have allowed it to be released. It was very much in the balance, and they pleased him.”

  • • •

  Volpe usually produced Truman’s musicals in the spring in order to build in more rehearsal time. But MTI liked the pilots to be produced in November so they could be marketed for the next school year, which meant Volpe and his students had to get started in the summer. Rehearsals for Le Mis and Rent began when students would normally be enjoying their time off, or working—to say nothing of Volpe’s time off—as would rehearsals for the third pilot he took on for MTI.

  On June 29, 2011, less than forty-eight hours after he returned from the triumph of Good Boys and True in Nebraska and two weeks after the previous school year ended, Volpe climbs into his Mercedes coupe and sets out on the twenty-minute drive to Truman. The car is an indulgence that he has made into self-parody. (Its color is slate, not gray, he likes to point out.) He parks in Truman’s empty lot, walks through the school’s quiet corridors, and slides his key into the lock of Room B8. He makes his clockwise circle of the room and fluffs the couches, then turns the air-conditioning up, takes a seat behind his desk, and waits for everyone to arrive.

  Marcy had once said to him, “I know you love me. I know you love Tommy. But that school is where your pulse is. It’s where your heart beats.” She wasn’t wrong.

  The fatigue left over from the difficult trip back from Nebraska—multiple flight delays, another night in a hotel after they couldn’t get all the way home—is magically gone. What he feels instead is the anticipation and excitement of another production lifting off. Auditions are soon to begin for the rock musical Spring Awakening. The collaborations with MTI came to him at different junctures of his career. After the success of Le Mis, he embraced the opportunity to do Rent as soon as he was asked. “It was totally different,” he says. “Les Mis gave me a lot of confidence. I was a different director after that. It was beyond what I could have ever dreamed of. With Rent, they were not burning up the fax line as much, and they didn’t come down to look in on rehearsals. I felt like they trusted me more. It may have also made a difference that it wasn’t a Cameron Mackintosh show.”