Theater Geek

by Mickey Rapkin

  Rachael wasn’t the only one struggling at Sweeney Todd. After a particularly unproductive rehearsal, the music director, Justin Mendoza, sat the kids down and explained how disappointed he was with their work ethic and concentration. The cast was ashamed. And Rachael and Jordan—the oldest members, the leaders of the ensemble—felt they were at fault. It was their responsibility to inspire the younger kids. And so they called their own meeting in one of the rehearsal studios to address the cast. The pep rally begins:

  “We have a solid show,” Jordan said.

  “We have to show Jeff and Justin that we care,” Rachael added. “That we’re willing to take it to the next level.”

  The actor playing Signor Pirelli spoke up: “As a group, our energy level is amazing. We support each other. We laugh together.” There is a lot of head-nodding.

  “We need to punch them in the face with our sound,” Jordan said. “This could be one of the best shows ever.”

  Rachael smiled, standing before the cast, playing the veteran. But the truth is, it’s unclear that she actually believed what she was saying. She was so lost herself.

  At one rehearsal during Hell Week, the director instructed the cast to sit around in a circle and discuss their respective roles. He asked the campers to invent a back-story for their characters. Whether they had starring roles or played nameless ensemble members, every character should have a history, he instructed. A girl in the chorus ran with it, inventing an entire biography for her previously anonymous character. “I was abused at age six,” she explained, “and now I’m homeless. And I like to pick up the scraps from Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop.” It was a wildly detailed profile. Rachael, by contrast, described Mrs. Lovett as “pretty normal” and “bubbly” until “you see her crazy side.” The room went quiet. (Shortly thereafter, the director procured a DVD of Angela Lansbury in the original production of Sweeney Todd—a sort of digital crib sheet for the young actress.)

  Hoping to flesh out the character, Rachael comandeered the Ping-Pong room for a sit-down with her co-star. While their friends sat by the pool tanning themselves or ate ice cream from the canteen, these two actors discussed the relationship between Lovett and Sweeney Todd. Why does Sweeney Todd refer to London as a “hole in the world”? Why is Mrs. Lovett the only person to recognize him? It’s character work. They talk about gestures Rachael might incorporate into the pie shop scenes. “What would you do with your hands,” Jordan asks her, “if you were baking? Wipe sweat off of your forehead?”

  Rachael is hunched over in her chair. The memory of Natalie Walker’s triumphant performance as Mrs. Lovett just two years earlier—along with the expectation that Rachael would perform just like Natalie—weighs on her. She has most of the lyrics memorized, but the meaning sometimes eludes her. Take “Poor Thing,” in which Mrs. Lovett tells of the tragedies that befell Sweeney Todd’s family during his fifteen-year absence. “This song is story telling,” the music director explains to Rachael in rehearsal. “If you don’t know what you’re singing about, you may as well be singing blah blah blah on key.” The director stops her again. “It’s not ‘poor thing,’” he says. “It’s pooooor theeeeng. Tooo baahhd. Mrs. Lovett is a big character.” Only adding to the challenge, this song is written in waltz time: 1-2-3, 1-2-3. For a generation reared on four-four pop music, it’s easy to trip over these beats.

  During lunch that final week, Rachael is dressed in a zip-up sweatshirt, and she barely takes a bite, just moving a piece of pizza around her plate while refusing to look up from the table. She shrugs her shoulders and wipes away a fistful of tears. “I don’t want to let anyone down,” she says.

  There are teenage girls at Stagedoor Manor who will cry at a costume fitting. Or when the kitchen staff runs out of ham on cold cuts day. But Rachael isn’t a drama queen, which makes this sudden display of raw emotion all the more unnerving. “I’m not ready for the dress rehearsal,” she says. Unfortunately, she’s out of time.

  There’s a truly magic moment every session at Stagedoor Manor, when a kid goes to sleep at night and comes in to rehearsal twelve hours later to find a hulking set onstage. And suddenly he can see the whole show coming together before his eyes, glimpsing how that grueling work might now pay off. The tech staff often work until three in the morning in these Stagedoor theaters, installing the set pieces before falling into bed. Perhaps they should set an alarm for the next morning; exhaustion be damned, it’d be worth it to see these kids’s faces.

  During Hell Week, the Sweeney Todd set arrives in fits. But there is a Christmas-like atmosphere on the morning of Thursday’s dress rehearsal when the elements are finally all in place. Two big metal gates (on wheels) represent the streets of London. And there are columns. Columns that actually look like marble! But the the pièce de résistance is a massive cube, some six feet, four inches tall, ten feet long by twelve feet deep. It’s a feat of engineering modeled on the original Broadway set. One side of the cube serves as Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, another is decorated as the backdrop to her living room. But climb the stairs to the top of the cube and you’ll find yourself in Sweeney Todd’s barbershop, complete with a working trapdoor. After the demon barber slits your throat, his chair reclines and the dead body slinks off, disappearing through the floor and down into the oven.

  The set would have been awesome for today’s dress rehearsal. That is, if the thing actually functioned properly.

  The cast of The Drowsy Chaperone was invited to sit in on Sweeney Todd’s dress rehearsal. The director, Jeff Murphy, apologizes in advance for any technical difficulties they might witness. “We’ve never run through the show all the way,” he explains.

  Well, the problems (numerous) begin almost immediately. The opening number is meant to be menacing. The ensemble sings, “Swing your razor wide, Sweeney! Hold it to the skies! Freely flows the blood of those who moralize!” Sweeney Todd—center stage, creepy, lit in shadows—is seen disposing of body bags, dumping the corpses through a sewer grate in the stage floor. Unfortunately, the body bags aren’t weighted correctly and it looks like he isn’t so much disposing of victims as he is making a UPS drop-off. He looks like some deranged Santa Claus, with a shock of gray hair and bloodshot eyes.

  The cube, meanwhile, is heavier than anticipated, and it turns slowly—the scene changes between the streets of London and Lovett’s pie shop are disastrous. Dragging the thing offstage isn’t nearly as simple as imagined, and the first set change takes close to ten minutes. At one point, the director stops the show entirely, instructing the cast—still onstage in front of their friends—to “relax.” Of course there’s no better audience than one of your peers. And the Drowsy cast cheered like mad, despite the interminable set changes and missed cues. Still, there was some crowd fatigue, and who could blame them? The Sweeney Todd dress rehearsal ran more than five hours.

  Though it’s of little comfort to Rachael and the cast, it should be noted that the exact same thing happened at the first preview of Sweeney Todd on Broadway in 1979. “We were having a terrible time with the set,” star Len Cariou relates in Meryle Secrest’s biography of Sondheim. “The barbershop was directly above the pie shop, and the whole thing was supposed to be made of aluminum, so that it could be pushed around, but they had made it out of steel. It weighed a ton and nobody could move it. Every run-through we had to stop. We hadn’t gotten to the end for a week, and I said to Hal [Prince] and Steve [Sondheim], ‘I have forgotten how this fucking thing ends.’”

  Even if Rachael had known that story, it wouldn’t have been much comfort. There were other problems today. Rachael flubbed a few lines in “Poor Thing,” and the act-one finale, “A Little Priest,” whose comedy had such a light touch in rehearsal, failed to land today. The second act opens in Mrs. Lovett’s suddenly popular pie shop. (It’s made of people! People!) Mrs. Lovett is supposed to be refilling drinks while trying to keep the homeless beggar woman out of the store. But Rachael isn’t connected to the scene, isn’t reacting to what’s in front of her; s
he’s just going through the motions. For example, before she even sees the beggar woman enter, Rachael is already shouting to her assistant, “Toby! Throw the old woman out!” The ensemble did not fare much better. During “City on Fire,” the music director actually had to stop playing entirely, because the cast was so off tempo.

  The ensemble was disappointed—you could see it in their faces, now hanging so much lower than they’d been just a few hours ago when they first glimpsed the set onstage at the Elsie Theater. The director was himself frustrated. Perhaps even more so when one of the ensemble members pulled him aside with what, to the kid anyway, must have seemed like a burning question at the time. “Do we look crazy enough in the asylum scene?” the boy asked.

  Rachael and the rest of the cast stumbled into dinner, hopelessly defeated. The dress rehearsal ran so late they had to eat supper in full makeup. Stagedoor is a competitive environment, and Rachael couldn’t help but feel that people were staring at her. That the word was out. And the word was not good. A fellow cast member—frazzled, with fake blood still on his clothes—was likewise disturbed, and he approached Rachael to commiserate: “I just heard five people say our show isn’t good.”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” Rachael snapped back.

  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum had a tortured road to Broadway back in 1962. At the show’s Washington, D.C., tryout, the company sometimes performed for audiences of less than a hundred people. For a brief moment, the show featured a song called “There’s Something About a War.” While that song was dropped before the show arrived in New York, well, damn if the sentiment didn’t ring true—then in 1962, and now here again in Loch Sheldrake.

  The problems (much like over at Sweeney Todd) begin with the set. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is sharing a stage with Children of Eden. Every show here at Stagedoor must share a theater, and the sets are designed to be moved on and off with ease (between, say, an afternoon performance of Forum and an evening performance of Eden). If that’s not possible, the main backdrop is then designed to work for both shows. Unfortunately, one of the tech staff made an innocent computation error and these two sets didn’t work in tandem, nor could they be removed. While the problem is being sorted out, the cast of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum must rehearse its complicated entrances and exits ducking under, and snaking through, the Children of Eden scenery.

  “When will we rehearse on our set?” one kid asks.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Forum’s director replies.

  Rehearsals have been slow going. The cast had run “Comedy Tonight” to death, and Harry felt the scene was getting less funny each time. Somehow, by smoothing out the transitions—between the Proteans and their spears, between the full-cast kick line that ends the show’s opening number—they’d ironed out the funny, too.

  During Hell Week, they run through act one, and the choreographer is still tinkering. At this point in the show, Pseudolus, the slave, imagines what his life might be like if he could buy his freedom. He performs a duet—with his master’s son—a song called “Free.” “I’ll be so conscientious that I may vote twice!” Pseudolus sings, “Can you see me? Can you see me?”

  The song builds to a climax:

  Pseudolus: “I’ll be Pseudolus, the pillar of society. I’ll be Pseudolus the man, if I can only be—”

  Hero: “Free.”

  Pseudolus: “Sing it!”

  Hero: “Free!”

  Pseudolus: “Spell it!”

  Hero: “F-R-double—”

  Pseudolus: “No, the long way!”

  Hero: “F-R-E-E!”

  Both: “Free!”

  The choreographer has an idea. “You two should play patty-cake,” she says, slapping her hands together. “You should play patty-cake on free. F-R-E-E.”

  Harry, incredulous, raises an eyebrow. “Patty-cake?” he says. The choreographer—perhaps tired of Harry’s second-guessing—shrugs. “I’m fine with your ideas,” she says. But the director backs her up. “Try it,” he says. “It’ll be funnier with patty-cake.”

  Harry boils over. He worries that the show is overchoreographed, leaving little room for him to experiment, to play around, to put his own stamp on the role. In “Pretty Little Picture”—in which he lays out a future of marital bliss for two young lovers—he’s instructed to trace a picture frame (in the air) with his fingers every time he sings, “It’s a pretty little picture, oh my! Pretty little picture, how true!”

  “It’s too literal,” Harry says. He’s replaying the show in his mind, overthinking every scene. And it’s affecting his performance. Bits of dialogue that used to score big laughs in rehearsal are now reduced to mere throwaway lines.

  Harry, meanwhile, is pulled away from rehearsal early in Hell Week for a final costume fitting. Forum hasn’t been performed at Stagedoor in over a decade. And so Todd Roberts, the head of the costume shop—a man who made his own chaps for a staff costume party—is building the pieces for this show himself, from scratch. The Pseudolus getup, designed with Harry in mind, is a maroon tunic, with mustard-yellow pants and a braided belt. Black Roman sandals and an elastic headband complete the look. The costume is beautifully made. Todd is a perfectionist; he not only designed and executed Harry’s Pseudolus costume himself, he’ll even dye an undershirt to match. And yet Harry pushes back. He stares at his reflection in the mirror and pulls at the pants. He tugs at the tunic, his face scrunching up.

  Excerpts from the conversation in the costume shop:

  Harry: [pulling at the tunic] “Can you take this in? It feels too loose. What I do is physical. I’m worried it’ll get lost.”

  Todd: “How physical?”

  Harry: [exasperated] “I don’t know. Can I just see what it looks like?”

  Todd: “Well, I’ll have to take in the side, recut it, and then put the sleeve back on. Which is fine …”

  Harry: “If the costume is tighter, I’ll feel pulled together.”

  Todd: “Honey, if it makes you feel better we’ll do it. This is a Todd Roberts original! But don’t worry about what I want.”

  Harry: [beat] “Where did you get the material for these pants?” Todd: “From half the couches in Loch Sheldrake.”

  And scene.

  The hits keep on coming. At rehearsal—the day before Sneak Peek—Harry is surprised to find that the cast of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum will be doing an act swap with Into the Woods. “We’d missed so much rehearsal already,” Harry says, “with me being away, with the director being sick. I’m embarrassed to do the show in front of Brian and Charlotte [Maltby] and everyone from Into the Woods.”

  The pressure has caught up with Harry—and it’s a much larger issue than simply the costumes or the tragicomic goings on at A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. “It’s the expectations,” he says. “This is going to show up on YouTube.”

  Bingo.

  It’s a very modern issue, this monkey on the back that Harry and this generation of aspiring performers face. When Harry showed up at the University of Michigan orientation a week ago, not only was he well acquainted with his classmates—they’d been chatting on Face-book since their acceptance letters arrived—but he’d also already seen most of them perform. “Everyone has clips on YouTube,” he says. More than that, he’d formed opinions about their talent. How could he not? And he wasn’t alone. Harry knew of people who’d already ranked the incoming musical theater freshman classes—across rival programs like the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, and Elon University in North Carolina—by comparing and debating You-Tube links.

  The unique problem facing this generation: Everything is recorded. There is no longer a safe space to make mistakes, which is perhaps the most essential step to growth. Brent Wagner, the head of Michigan’s musical theater program, strongly suggests his students remove their YouTube clips, because no one should be judged in the training stage. “Technology can put a scrutiny on
your work that is intimidating,” he says. “I don’t think high school students have a perspective on technology, and what is in their best interest to post. YouTube is what, three years old? We’re all at its mercy. We’re all learning. But these young people are growing up without a sense of privacy.” They don’t know what they gave up.

  Over lunch at Stagedoor one afternoon, Harry got increasingly defensive over a clip from a 2008 camp production of Guys & Dolls, in which he sang “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat.” The quality of the video is grainy, but it’s clear to any watcher that Harry is exceptionally talented. Yet he tightens up at the mention of this short clip. Not because he wasn’t proud of the show—he was, immensely—but because, if you scroll down, amidst a stream of celebratory plaudits, one snarky commenter on YouTube wrote in: “changing keys=unimpressive.” It’s true, the music director at Stagedoor had transposed “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat” for Harry, so it would fit more comfortably in his range. (This is a no-no on Broadway, where it would cost too much money to reorchestrate a score for a single performer, unless you’re such a big star that your name is selling tickets.) But it didn’t take away from his talent.

  “Everyone is starring in their own Truman Show,” Harry says, exhausted. “When you know someone is filming a performance, you think, This is how people are going to remember you doing it. But that might not be me at my full potential. And that’s not what the theater is about. That’s why we do theater and not film. Because it’s live!”