Theater Geek

by Mickey Rapkin

  “I want it to sound ugly,” he says, seated at the piano.

  “Why?” Rachael asks.

  Mrs. Lovett is preparing pie crust in a flea-ridden bakery in the wrong part of London Town. That’s why. Justin strains to come up with a vocal direction that will help Rachael understand what he’s hinting at.

  “You know how Kristin Chenoweth sings?” Justin asks. “You know how she talks? Like a bratty school girl, Nah nah nah nah nah nah.” Rachael imitates him, imitating Chenoweth. “Use that voice,” Justin says. He sings Mrs. Lovett’s lyric pinched through his nose: “These are probably the worst pies in London.”

  It’s not just the specific tone quality that’s a challenge for Rachael. “The Worst Pies in London” is set in Lovett’s bakery and Sondheim has written specific beats into the song where this woman is supposed to slap down some dough, pound the table with her rolling pin, or shoo away an errant cockroach. For example, Lovett notices Sweeney Todd entering her shop, and, holding her knife in the air, she screeches: “A customer! Wait! What’s yer rush? What’s yer hurry? (She sticks the knife into the counter) You gave me such a—(She wipes her hands on her apron) fright. I thought you was a ghost. Have a minute can’tcher? Sit!” And so on.

  Rachael doesn’t have props at this rehearsal, so the music director asks her to shout “Uh!” on the action beats.

  “Wait! What’s yer rush? What’s yer hurry? Uh! You gave me such a—Uh! fright. I thought you was a ghost. Half a minute, can’tcher? Sit! [bang the rolling pin] Sit ye down! Uh! Sit!”

  When Rachael makes a mistake, which she does often today, she lets out an awkward giggle. Or throws her hands up in the air, comically shaking her fists at the sky. If she strains to get the words out, she should take comfort in the fact that Patti LuPone, famous for blurry diction, worked through similar troubles when she played the role on Broadway for John Doyle. (At least Rachael didn’t have to accompany herself on the tuba.)

  Still, she was making progress. In front of the piano, anyway, with no one watching. But at rehearsal, later that first week, standing in front of the twenty-three-member cast in Studio D—a mirrored room with fluorescent lighting—it’s as if that afternoon session never happened. Rachael runs “Worst Pies,” holding her script in her hand, yet she appears hopelessly adrift. The director, Jeff Murphy—a Stagedoor veteran some kids call Jeffles—asks to move on to her next song, “Poor Thing.” At this point in act one, Sweeney Todd has returned from Australia, and he wants to know why the barbershop above Lovett’s bakery has remained dark all these years. Mrs. Lovett, not yet recognizing Sweeney (much changed after fifteen years in prison), explains that the townspeople believe the place is haunted. “There was a barber and his wife,” she sings, “and he was beautiful. A proper artist with a knife, but they transported him for life.” She then delves into the story of how an allegedly respectable Judge and his cohort took advantage of Sweeney Todd’s young wife many years ago. The song is told in flashback, and Mrs. Lovett narrates while the ensemble reenacts the horrors perpetrated against Sweeney’s bride.

  Here, the director instructs the seventy-five-pound girl playing Sweeney’s wife to lie down on the floor of the studio. He’s moving through the scene at a brisk pace. Until, that is, a young cast member interrupts the proceedings with a question about Jeff’s blocking. He wants to know why the character of Judge Turpin is suddenly lying on top of this innocent girl.

  Jeff Murphy: “Get on top of her. But don’t put any pressure.”

  Boy: [innocently] “Why is he getting on top of her?”

  Jeff: “He’s just getting on top of her.”

  Boy: “But why?”

  Jeff: “He just is.”

  Boy: “But …”

  Jeff: “He’s raping her, Okay?”

  Boy: [silence]

  Rachael lets out a laugh. It’s a rare moment of levity for the girl who was suddenly saddled with the near-impossible task of creating the role of Mrs. Lovett from scratch in two and a half weeks. Had she even seen the show before? Rachael shrugs. “I saw the movie with Johnny Depp.”

  Further complicating matters for Rachael, the camper playing Johanna, Sweeney’s daughter, inhabits her character from the get-go. Johanna has been locked away by Judge Turpin. And the young actress playing the role, a girl named Dani Apple, was perfectly cast. Like Johanna, Dani has an ethereal look to her eyes that lends itself perfectly to the task. The campers take notice of her talent immediately. “She’s a star,” says Jordan Firstman (Sweeney Todd). And when Dani sings through “Green Finch and Linnet Bird,” Jordan insists that the entire room quiet down, shouting: “Everyone listen! Dani Apple is singing!”

  Rachael, looking on, is awed by the angelic sound of this girl’s voice but forgets for a second that Johanna is supposed to sound gorgeous. Or that no one ever leaves a good production of Sweeney Todd talking about Johanna. Mrs. Lovett is the role. Still, exiting the rehearsal, Rachael grabs on to the music director’s arm for support, pleading: “Will you work with me every day?”

  Like any exclusive establishment, Stagedoor Manor has a clearly defined social hierarchy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the dining room. (Sebastian Stan, a Stagedoor alumnus who made his Broadway debut in a 2007 production of Talk Radio, likens the cafeteria here to a minefield, referring to the ever-changing seating chart as “high-powered drama.”) The cool place to sit this session is the Garden Room—a small, private dining space off the main cafeteria, hidden from the watchful eye of the camp administration. And the room is cozy, with barely enough floor space to accommodate two long tables and an upright piano. Naturally, this is where Rachael Singer, Brian Muller, Harry Katzman, and much of the talented, older campers eat lunch.

  It is a raucous place. And though Rachael is largely silent today—preferring to wallow in her grilled cheese—the conversation otherwise ricochets back and forth. Topic one: Aaron Albert, a seventeen-year-old camper, who will be leaving Stagedoor in two weeks to film a new Disney XD series about a once-famous ’80s rock band reinventing itself with a high-school-age lead guitarist. Aaron, who is working steadily, recently did a guest spot on Nickelodeon’s wildly popular series iCarly, and there’s now a rumor going around camp that he hooked up with that show’s star, Miranda Cosgrove. Aaron, here eating a sandwich, sharply denies this suggestion, shouting: “She came over my house for a party. But that’s it!” Other lunchtime topics include: the surprising popularity of jean shorts for men (“jorts”), the lack of attractive male campers this summer, and the women of Bravo’s Real Housewives of New Jersey. After a while, one might think the only thing these kids talk about is The Real Housewives of New Jersey, but one would be mistaken. They also talk about The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

  But the conversation, as always, returns to the shows and the progress of rehearsals. Someone asks Rachael about Sweeney Todd, about the Cockney accent she’ll need to play Mrs. Lovett. Rachael brushes the question aside. She’d done a Cockney accent three years ago in a Stagedoor production of Me and My Girl. She wasn’t concerned with her vowels. In just fifteen days she’ll be onstage for Sweeney Todd’s dress rehearsal. Who is going to notice her Cockney accent if she can’t even spit the lyrics out?

  That Harry Katzman would play Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum this summer had to be the worst-kept secret at Stagedoor Manor. He first caught wind of the casting two months ago, back home in South Carolina. Apparently one member of the camp’s artistic staff let it slip in conversation with another camper, who let it slip to Harry a mere moment after promising not to.

  “I’ve begged to play Pseudolus every year,” Harry says. “It’s been a running joke. But be careful what you wish for.”

  In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pseudolus is a self-important slave in ancient Rome, hoping to secure his freedom by helping his master’s son find true love (even if it’s with a courtesan from the house of Marcus Lycus). And it’s been Harry’s dream role ever since he saw the sho
w at London’s National Theatre in 2004. Forum is chock full of sexual innuendo, mistaken identities, and overheard (and often misinterpreted) dialogue; it’s basically the Three’s Company of musical theater. Sondheim based the show on the work of the Roman playwright Plautus. Where Aristophanes waxed on about the Gods, Plautus—so hot in 180 B.C.E.—was the original sitcom writer, the first to exploit the silly situations in which we mere mortals often find ourselves.

  In Forum’s opening number, Pseudolus refers to himself in the third person. “Pseudolus is probably my favorite character in the piece,” he says. “A role of enormous variety and nuance, and played by an actor of such, well, let me put it this way. [beat] I play the part.” A smug, comedic role for a baritone? No wonder people have been telling Harry he was born to play Pseudolus since the first day he washed up at Stagedoor Manor, pompously handing out his artistic advice to directors twice his age.

  Harry Katzman and a fellow camper, Matthew Meigs—co-stars in 2008’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood—eat lunch with their cast. The display of lunchtime camaraderie, though heartfelt, was also a ploy to win the camp’s Best Ensemble prize. Photo courtesy of Harry Katzman.

  Ask Harry about his conduct as a first-year camper and he will now admit: “I tried to show off my knowledge too much. I was constantly trying to impress people. I was among my people for the first time!”

  It has been quite a journey.

  Harry is from South Carolina, by way of London, England. Listen closely to his speech—to words like talk and hat—and you’ll hear a trace of the Blighty. Harry’s parents, both Americans, met there in the late ’70s and never left. At the time, his father was a psychoanalyst working overseas; his mother was traveling abroad, her life abruptly rewritten when she met this man. They married soon thereafter, and children—two girls and a Harry—followed like nesting dolls.

  The Katzmans set up residence in Muswell Hill, and then Camden Town, a pocket in northwest London within minutes of the West End theater district. At the tender age of five, Harry saw his first show, a 1995 production of A Little Night Music starring Dame Judi Dench. This Sondheim musical—a soap operetta, really—is the story of an aging actress in pursuit of a now-married man she’d loved years earlier. Whether young Harry understood the machinations of these adulterous couplings or not is immaterial; at five years old, he fell in love with the theater. Two years later, the feeling was cemented at a West End production of Guys & Dolls. “I just remember the lights,” Harry says. “It all made sense to me.”

  From then on, Harry practically lived at the National. “The theater was the one thing that calmed Harry,” says his mother, Debbie Katzman. “He was catatonic.”

  At thirteen, Harry—a tad overweight, very expressive—sang with the well-regarded Finchley Children’s Music Group, an audition-only choir launched in the 1950s by the well-known British composer Benjamin Britten. The choir performed all over Europe. They sang Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion” at London’s Royal Festival Hall. “A lot of my friends had been in West End shows,” Harry says. “Shows like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. A bunch of my friends were up for Gavroche in Les Mis, but I was too tall to audition.” He did, however, go out for The Little Prince, an operatic adaptation of the classic story that was being filmed for the BBC. While Harry didn’t get that job, he made it past several rounds, and has since kept the letter inviting him to the callback. Ask Harry about his childhood in London and he’ll tell you, with some hesitation: “I didn’t think I was what people were looking for.” For a kid who sometimes doubted himself, this letter from the casting committee of A Little Prince was concrete proof of self-worth. “Congratulations,” it read at the top.

  “Harry was very professional about rejection,” his mother says. “He’d say, ‘That was a good experience.’ Or ‘Maybe next time.’” Of her child’s sometimes shaky self-esteem, she says, “Harry’s father was proud of him. But he never said it was good enough.”

  No matter what, Harry always had the theater. At age twelve, he saw Jerry Springer: The Opera at the National. He was a frequent visitor to the well-regarded Donmar Warehouse, where he caught a 2000 production of Merrily We Roll Along, a lesser-known Sondheim work that had closed on Broadway in 1981 after just sixteen performances. On weekends, Harry would often make his way to a music store called Dress Circle on Monmouth Street in Covent Garden. “In London,” Harry says, “you’re independent from a young age.” The clerk behind the counter knew Harry not just by name but by taste, and he’d suggest cast albums new and old for the upstart maestro. “I’d use my pocket money for CDs,” Harry says, and he accumulated more than three hundred cast albums in those years. Home at night, Harry would spend hours lost online, scrolling through the Sondheim forum Finishing the Chat (a clever nod to the song “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park with George). Needless to say, when it came time to prepare for his bar mitzvah, Harry was a conscientious student. “My rabbi used to be an opera singer,” Harry says. “He was so excited to work with me. We had many more classes than we should have.” At the party to celebrate his thirteenth year, Harry sang “Where E’er You Walk” by Handel—accompanied by a harpist.

  And then his world fell apart. It happened quickly, Harry says. His parents separated. His mother later reconnected with her childhood sweetheart. And those dreaded words every child fears came: We’re moving. Harry was suddenly forced to trade the freedom and thrill of the West End for the reserved swampland of Columbia, South Carolina. (At the time, Harry was so unfamiliar with United States terrain that for a moment he thought the family was moving to Manhattan—to Columbia University.) One of the last things Harry did before leaving London was to take the Tube to Southwark station, to the National Theatre archives, dragging his mother to watch a video recording of that Dame Judi Dench production of A Little Night Music, the one that started it all. For Harry, it seemed like a fitting way to say good-bye to all that he knew.

  And then, America. In the fall of 2005, Harry enrolled at Heath-wood Hall, a private school in Columbia. “I was the Jewish kid from London at the Episcopal school,” Harry says, summarizing his grand entrance. The culture shock was only compounded by the language barrier. He remembers taking an algebra test in ninth grade—his first semester on these shores—and making a computation error. Harry raised his hand, politely asking: “May I have a rubber?” The class broke into guffaws. Harry’s math teacher addressed his new pupil. “Harry,” he said in front of the class, “if you ask for a rubber, people will think you want a condom. What you need is an eraser.” Ouch. (Harry’s sisters were of some help in adjusting, but they had already graduated from high school and could only relate up to a point. Plus, Harry says, “They were the British girls in town. And they could drive.”)

  Surprisingly, even at a religious school in the deep South, it was the theater that helped Harry make inroads. In the spring of his freshman year, Harry was cast as Teen Angel in a school production of Grease. When it came to talent, he more than held his own, and the upperclassmen in the drama club soon adopted this outsized personality from Britain as their own. This association with the older kids conferred some measure of cool on Harry. Still, was he their friend, or some freshman curiosity? Even Harry will admit he wasn’t quite himself that year. “I tried to fit in with my idea of what a normal American teenager was,” he says. But the only place he felt comfortable, truly, was up onstage. “There’s no way to describe the high you get from being in front of a group of people,” Harry says. “Not in a vain way. But you can give something back to them. And they can see something through you.”

  The academics at Heathwood Hall were rigorous, and the structure of the program certainly benefited Harry. But it was a small consolation. This was not an easy transition, and the anger was bigger than he could handle. “I threatened my mom that I was going to leave,” Harry says. “That I was going to get on a plane and fly back to London.” At the end of his freshman year, in secret, Harry applied to a private boarding school for th
e arts called Walnut Hill, located outside Boston. The tuition was something like $40,000 a year. He knew his parents couldn’t afford it. He knew better than to even ask. It didn’t matter. The application was more a wish than anything, as if simply sending that thought out into the universe was enough. It was a declaration of future independence, whenever that might arrive.

  “Harry cried a lot that first year,” his mother says. “It was awful.” Of course she sympathized with her son, being marooned in a strange place. She was building a new life for herself, too, taking a job with the South Carolina Philharmonic to meet people before eventually launching her own communications agency, Unlimited Marketing Solutions. Harry, meanwhile, consoled himself with souvenirs. Harry’s mother had kept every program from every show she’d seen in London. “I gave them to Harry,” she says.

  In these years, Harry clung tight to Stephen Sondheim’s music, feeling a kinship with the characters in his shows. Those people onstage—the desperate Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, the lonely, love-starved Bobby in Company—were much worse off than Harry. “I related to Sondheim because everyone was having problems in his shows,” Harry says. “It made my own life seem a little bit better.” Harry read Meryle Secrest’s biography of Sondheim and picked up on the parallels in their two worlds. In the book, Sondheim recalled falling in love with theater from a very young age, at a matinee of Very Warm for May. “The curtain went up and revealed a piano,” Sondheim says. “A butler took a duster and brushed it up, tinkling the keys. I thought that was thrilling.” Harry said much the same about seeing Guys & Dolls at age seven. Sondheim’s parents had also divorced, and as a boy he’d been dispatched to military school; Sondheim was as displaced there as Harry was now in South Carolina.