• • •
Volpe tells the kids one day about what he has in mind for the set—something very spare but with visual images projected on big screens at the rear of the stage. The pictures will change from scene to scene, or even during scenes. He has put Robby Edmondson in charge of gathering the images and mastering the projection system, which will be high-tech, high resolution, and expensive enough that the projectors and screens will come in late because they can afford to rent them for only a short time. It’s high-risk. Robby will have to quickly make it all work, and Volpe won’t get a real look at it until perhaps a week before the production.
The cast members, often more traditional in their thinking than their sixty-four-year-old teacher, do not much like this idea. They have in mind that a set must consist of big pieces, stuff that gets hammered together and painted and then is moved all around during the show.
I never saw Volpe reprimand a student or express irritation when questioned about his directing decisions. He welcomes it (why else would he teach all those theater classes?) and treats the kids as his artistic partners. Julia Steele, who is playing the very difficult role of Martha—her character is abused by her father—is probably a little more pointed in her questioning than most of the others and sometimes pushes the limits of Volpe’s equanimity. “Let’s make her assistant director in charge of God,” he jokes to Krause one day.
After he introduces the idea of the projections, she says to him, “I think that will be really distracting. Won’t people be looking at the pictures instead of the play?”
It’s a reasonable concern, Volpe says. He’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen. They’ll look at everything once the system arrives and the images are loaded and tweak it if they have to—even though there won’t be a lot of time.
Revisions in the script must be approved by the authors, but the staging is where Volpe, as the director, gets to express himself. The production doesn’t have to look like it did on Broadway and, in fact, shouldn’t. “I want to do something different,” he tells them that day. “When the New York people come to see our production, I don’t want them to think we just copied them. I’d rather try something and fail than not try at all, you know what I mean?”
They move on to the day’s rehearsal, starting with one of the more haunting scenes, in which Julia’s character reveals to the other girls the secret of her father’s abuse. “Think about where you want to go with these lines,” Volpe says. “I don’t want to say to you, ‘Move four feet and then turn to your right.’ Take a chance and go somewhere. It’s a big stage, and there’s just four of you on it. Let it just happen.”
What follows is the unsettling “The Dark I Know Well,” sung by Julia, with Carol Ann, playing her friend Ilse, coming in about halfway through. “You say all you want is just a kiss good night, and then you hold me and you whisper, ‘Child, the Lord won’t mind.’”
Ryan Fleming coaches the vocals, but Volpe is the one who helps them see what is beneath the lines.
“When I’m singing this, am I supposed to be angry, or am I sad?” Julia asks.
“It’s a myriad of things going through her mind,” Volpe responds. “She’s repulsed, because he abuses her. But she has love for her father, for her family. She doesn’t want to be turned out of the house, yet she’s got to get out of that house. It’s such a difficult song. As you go through it, it will open up more and more to you. You’ll find the right way, but it’s really not one emotion that you’re getting to. It’s all these different things coming together, and they’re in conflict with each other.”
He has another idea. What if the father, near the end of the song, approaches slowly and stops right behind her? Volpe walks up onstage and demonstrates the movements. As she sings, he runs his hands along her body—he doesn’t actually touch her, but just outlines the contours of her shape. It is creepy, and I recoil a bit the first time I see it. But Volpe is unafraid. It’s theater, a deeply disturbing scene. He figures, let’s make it even more so. The song is a meditation on family secrets and shame. It’s supposed to be unsettling.
“Do you like it?” Volpe asks. “Should we do it this way?”
Yes, everyone agrees. It’s effective. They go through it one more time, with Mike McGrogan stepping back in for Volpe.
They talk some more about the show’s content. It has a minimalist aspect that he likes, but he tells them that it places an extra burden on the actors to fill in the empty spaces by building full-blooded characters. “This is a really difficult play because it’s such a simple play,” he says. “There’s nowhere to hide. You can’t hide behind the scenery, or within your costumes. It’s just you and the material.”
• • •
Are you all from the knitting club? C’mon! Is that where Volpe recruited you from?”
Danielle Tucci-Juraga, the choreographer, has arrived. She is another former Volpe student, from the same 1993 graduating class as Krause (as well as Nicole Sabatini, the Bravo executive). Tucci teaches at the dance school she owns just north of Levittown, choreographs shows at local theaters and high schools, and still performs professionally—in shows, on cruise ships, wherever there’s work. She had a cameo in the recent film Silver Linings Playbook as a dancer in the background of a scene.
She is the classic dance dynamo. If she weighs a hundred pounds, I’d be surprised. She is never called Ms. Tucci, Ms. Tucci-Juraga, Danielle, or Dani. It’s just Tucci, her maiden name before she married her Serbian husband.
She had been at a rehearsal the previous week and installed the choreography in several of the numbers and is now expecting to see progress. Volpe has already warned everyone, “You better be on your game. You do not want the wrath of Tucci. She will be on your ass.”
The boys start by rehearsing “The Bitch of Living.” It follows a scene in which Moritz (Tyler) lets Melchior (Luke) in on a secret—that he’s been having horrific nighttime dreams, erotic thoughts that rob him of sleep. Female legs in stockings and so forth. “Have you ever suffered such . . . mortifying visions?” Tyler asks.
Moritz’s education is in shambles, his whole world a wreck, because he can’t concentrate on anything but these thoughts. Volpe keeps stressing that the musical heart of the show is hard-driving rock. It embodies all the anger, all the chaos of teenage minds. “I don’t want this to be choral,” he says about “The Bitch of Living.” “It’s got to rock out. This is where the play becomes very electric.”
One of the darkest aspects of the show is that so much of it really is funny. The scenes with the boys and their preoccupations with sex are played for laughs, and should be. But the adults respond so poorly and brutally that everything spirals into tragedy. To Tyler, Volpe says, “Don’t fear you’re going over the top with this character. Let’s face it: He kills himself later.”
The boys are to jump on top of their school chairs and belt this song into handheld microphones. This quirk, the mics pulled from the woolen jackets, was taken from the Broadway production; every time they come out, it’s like the dusty drama has been preempted by a Sex Pistols concert. But Tyler looks uncomfortable standing on his chair, like he might be afraid of heights.
“C’mon,” Tucci says. “You’re kidding me, right? You’re, like, a whole two feet off the ground. Get over it! Don’t complain about it. Just do it.”
At the end of the number, they jump back down, then turn and kick the chairs over. It’s the “last word” they give the audience on the song, Tucci says, so it has to pop. She wants the turn to be fast and emphatic, not slow and leisurely like some of them are doing. “You can’t do it like that,” she says, demonstrating the incorrect form. “It’s garbage.” She’s also irritated that they’re kicking the chairs too delicately. “This isn’t hopscotch, you know. There’s not any hopscotch in this whole show.”
The dancing in Spring is not about gracefulness. It’s “Fosse-like,” according t
o Tucci—modern, athletic, violent-looking at certain moments. (On Broadway, the musical was choreographed by Bill T. Jones.)
Tucci and Fleming have a push-pull between them. He needs them to sing, and they’re still getting the hang of that; she needs them to move while they sing. At an especially exertive juncture in the choreography, Fleming looks up from his keyboard at her with an expression of despair. Instead of responding to him, Tucci turns to the boys and says, “I’m sorry, but this is musical theater, guys. Okay? You’ve just got to do it all.”
They go through “The Bitch of Living” a last time. “Your whole body has to be in it, not just your arms and your legs. And your soul, too. It’s very hard to teach. Just watch me. Copy me. There’s nothing wrong with it. I learned from every teacher I ever had, except if the teacher sucked.”
Tucci tells them she will stop prompting them from the side. They’re supposed to know the dance by now. But she can’t stop—in the moment before they make each move, she demonstrates it. “I’m sorry, I know I said I wouldn’t cue you, but I have issues with control.”
She talks with Volpe as she packs her bags and hurries out. They agree this is a particularly fast-learning group. She says they’re picking it up as quickly as she can teach it. Volpe says, “It’s all there, but the attitude is too soft.”
She explains later that her mission at Truman is to run “a really fast boot camp.” At other places she teaches, kids’ minds sometimes drift. Not in Volpe’s rehearsals. And since she’s from Levittown, she knows the terrain—knows, for example, that there are never any parents poking their noses into the auditorium, looking at their little ones rehearsing before buckling them up in the family sedan and driving them home. I never see kids get picked up; they walk, get a ride from a castmate, or take the late buses for those involved in after-school activities.
The Truman Drama kids have not been raised as delicate flowers. The community has deficits, but also strengths. “It might seem like I’m pushing them really hard,” Tucci says, “but it’s what they want. I could do it a different way, but the show would be crap, and nobody would be happy about it.”
• • •
The three people most intimately involved in assisting Volpe all have their different styles. Krause, the one most constantly by his side, is the profane den mother. Tucci is the drill sergeant. And Ryan Fleming, the vocal director, is the gentle soul. It’s not that he has a soft touch with the kids. He is as demanding, but in a different way. The kids want to reach the level he is driving them to, and if he just says “C’mon, guys,” it has the same effect as Tucci calling them to attention in her way.
He tells me about his career one day over burgers and a couple of beers at a bar and grill up the road from Truman. He does a little bit of everything—directs the music program at Emilie United Methodist Church in Levittown, where he’s due in a couple of hours to lead choir practice; gives his private lessons; and sings professionally with the Crossing and the Opera Company.
He is not a former Volpe student and not originally from Levittown, or really anywhere in particular. His father was a pastor in the Church of the Brethren, one of the “peace churches” along with the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). His family moved frequently, whenever his father was assigned to a new church. Fleming’s peripatetic career has been by choice. He attended Westminster Choir College in Princeton and has a degree in secondary education, but has passed up offers to teach full-time.
Like everyone I have ever known who has made a life in music, Fleming believes deeply in its powers. The evening news is playing on the TV in the bar. We ignore it mostly, but one story catches his attention: a hopeful piece on Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who was shot in the head and suffered devastating injuries. It says that she is relearning how to speak by singing songs she had learned as a child, a common therapeutic method for traumatic brain injuries. “What would happen if she didn’t know any songs?” Fleming says. “Does anybody ever think about that stuff?”
A student who lands a role in a Truman musical can get up to four years of Fleming. In that time, Fleming can pass on only a fraction of his huge storehouse of musical literacy, but he runs his own fast boot camp. Combined with four years of Volpe, it is potent.
When the cast was chosen, Fleming knew that it had strong voices, even beyond Carol Ann. There is Brittany Linebaugh—“That girl’s got some power!” Fleming says—who in addition to strong pipes has a magnetic stage presence. People tend to remember her after a show, even when she doesn’t have the most prominent part. Julia Steele and Shannon Harron are innately musical, if not trained, and Fleming can easily work with them.
The girls are deep enough in vocal talent that Volpe gave Marilyn Hall the nonsinging adult role, even though Fleming considered her his best voice. “Wait a second, you’re going to take my best singer and not have her sing?” he said at the casting meeting. Volpe said he had no choice; Marilyn was the only one who could play the part convincingly.
Tyler Kelch, Colin Lester, and Luke Robinson, by high school standards, are pros. The two new boys (besides Mike McGrogan), whom Fleming had been skittish about, are making steady progress with lots of one-on-one tutoring. He just wants them to be listenable, that’s all. There are others to uplift the production.
Fleming doesn’t figure anyone in this cast is going to sing on Broadway. “Not this year,” he says. Antonio Addeo, the 2007 Truman graduate, is knocking on the door of that level of success in New York. But it’s becoming tougher for Truman kids with the music program being decimated in Bristol Township. Vocal performance is like violin or basketball; you just don’t take it up as a hobby at sixteen years old and reach the heights. Fleming thinks Tyler Kelch could be great fronting a rock band. Carol Ann, too. But her voice, for all its power and layers of meaning, probably went untrained for too long to compete for vocally demanding professional stage roles.
Before he has to go off to rehearse the church choir, Fleming tells me about another local high school, one with a killer music department. “It’s fifteen minutes away and it’s like night and day. Another world,” he says. The school has a couple of vocal teachers, a music theory teacher, and instruction across the whole range of orchestral instruments, including strings. Their musicals are “technically perfect, or as close to that as a high school can be,” he says. But they do not rise to Truman’s level.
“I’m sorry, but they just don’t,” he continues. “Someone could say, ‘Oh, he is part of Truman Drama, so of course he is going to say that.’ But look at the acclaim Truman Drama gets, all the honors. MTI is not going to these other schools and asking them to do these pilots. The ambition at Truman is higher. The intensity is higher. Our kids feel these shows so deeply. That’s Lou, forty years of Lou.”
MEMBERS OF THE 2013 CAST OF GODSPELL, IN T-SHIRTS COMMEMORATING FOUR DECADES OF VOLPE’S PRODUCTIONS AT TRUMAN.
IF YOU HAVEN’T DONE IT, IMAGINE IT
A few weeks into the school year, the cast hits a plateau. It happens part of the way through every production. They know their lines (mostly) and the choreography (mostly), but opening night is still off in the distance and they’ve already been at it for a while.
The excitement of being chosen for the pilot, the newness of first coming together, has dissipated. Little things begin to bother them. One day the auditorium is not available and they have to move to the cafeteria, where the football team has gathered to consume a spread that’s been set out for them—sandwiches, chips, soft drinks, cookies. “We’re the ones who are the best in the country, and they’re the ones feeding their faces,” Lindsay Edmondson, Robby’s sister, says.
Even Volpe shows flashes of grumpiness. He sits in the auditorium and observes as a scene is rehearsed, one he’s had to tone down. “Sometimes I wish I could do this the real way,” he says. “It would be so much funnier.” It’s the only time I ever
hear him complain about the limits of being a high school director or express a wish that he could work at a higher level of theater.
He tells the cast that the following week, two days of rehearsals will be lost because he and Krause are attending a conference of high school theater teachers in Chicago. The kids don’t like it. They may be getting a little weary, but they’d still rather rehearse than not. “Is this something you have to do, or you go because it’s fun?” Colin Lester asks.
He is launching into one of his bits, as Volpe knows. Colin is one of the school’s top students as well as a serious actor planning to pursue theater in college. He is distinctly a character actor type, a little guy with a tuft of blond hair and a face that reads irony and attitude.
“Oh, it’s fun,” Volpe says of the upcoming conference. “We know lots of the other teachers there.”
“So it’s like an ego thing, too? You like it when people say, ‘Oh my God, there’s the great Lou Volpe’?”
“Yes, that’s exactly how it is. We eat fancy hors d’oeuvres, and they buy me expensive champagne and praise me in elaborate toasts.”
The production itself could use some of the snap of this repartee. Part of the problem is that not everyone is fully off book—they have not yet memorized the whole of their parts.
“You will never have a character when you’re reading from a script,” Volpe has to tell them. “The play will never work.”
He segues into the rhetorical tic I’ve heard before, his own call and response. “Am I mad? No. Is the show awful? No. Is it good? No. Right now, we’re stuck in neutral. If you’re satisfied with that, fine. We can do a very neutral show and the audience will applaud politely and forget the whole thing one minute after they leave the theater. But if you want to do better than that, you’ve got to get rid of the damn books. Do you hear me?”
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