Harry Katzman as nicely-nicely Johnson in a 2008 Stagedoor production of guys & Dolls. Harry was not thrilled to be cast in this role—he felt he’d done it all before—but says it was “good for his résumé.” “it’s a part i’d like to play again someday,” he says. “it fits my type.”
It’s as if these kids are living in a prison of their own digital making. While Stagedoor does its best to curtail the use of cell phones, at home every mistake is tweeted. Every gaffe is caught on video and then broadcast like some twenty-four-hour high school news cycle, with no context. Forget the loss of innocence. Spontaneity is now threatened, too.
These kids are not alone in facing this. While it is not often discussed in the open, YouTube and flipcams are interfering with live performance. It’s something Tony-winning talents with names you’d recognize are grappling with right now. And it threatens to change the face of live performance. A well-known Broadway performer tells me, “You’re onstage singing and then you see a little red light in row G on the aisle, and it takes you out of the performance. You think, Shit, this is going to be on YouTube tonight. And then you think, How did I sing that song in act one, and how did I do this?.”
This wasn’t as much of a problem in the old days. In his biography, Sondheim discusses the first preview of any show, saying, “It’s always an ordeal. I hated it because all the professional bitches come—and tell their friends how terrible it is.” But the bad word could only travel as fast as the telegram. The real problems began with Internet chat rooms, where obsessed theater fans on sites like All That Chat take swipes at performers from the comfort (and anonymity) of their own couch. But suddenly there’s a video clip to back up every insane rant on who is the fiercest Elphaba—drawing on camera-phone evidence from Wicked companies as far as South Africa. But even the best singers have rough days, where in the face of exhaustion from eight shows a week they miss the high F at the end of “Defying Gravity.”
The real problem Harry faces isn’t begrudging a friend’s success, or that he’s somehow late to the party because he isn’t a teenage superstar. He needs to get out of his own head. “I want the show to be perfect,” he says. “I have this pressure thing, of making it perfect. Everyone has always told me, ‘You’re perfect for Pseudolus.’ But can I pull this off? Will I be funny? I’m onstage and I’m thinking, Is this over-the-top? Is this too hammy? What are they going to laugh at?’”
Into the Woods rehearsal, Oasis Theater. Act two run-through. The forbidden, adulterous kiss between Cinderella’s Prince and the Baker’s Wife. “This is not right,” the Baker’s Wife says. But Cinderella’s Prince eases her concerns, taking her hands in his, singing: “Right and wrong don’t matter in the wood, only feelings. Let us meet the moment un-blushed. Life is often so unpleasant—you must know that, as a peasant. Best to take the moment present as a present for the moment.”
With that, today the Prince politely kisses her cheek.
Chris Armbrister, the director, in a backwards hat and Hawaiian shirt with pinup girls on it, stops the scene. “Remember,” Chris says, “the kiss is supposed to be passionate. The Baker’s Wife is married. The Prince has to tempt her to cheat.” They run it again, but the scene repeats itself beat-for-beat, with yet another polite peck on the cheek.
On the next go, the Baker’s Wife takes matters into her own hands, grabbing Cinderella’s Prince and jamming her tongue down his throat for all to see. Brian Muller—dressed in a gray T-shirt, one leg of his sweatpants rolled up—is watching from the seats, and shouts: “That’s awkward!” Unsure of how to react, the Prince simply puts out his hands palms up, as if to say, “It wasn’t me!”
Fatigue has set in. And if the cast of Into the Woods is suffering from low energy at this Hell Week rehearsal, well, so be it. The Wolf is in the infirmary, contending with a fever. (When he returns to the show, he’s lost so much weight he needs to hold his pants up with one paw.) Cinderella was just discharged from an overnight stay at the infirmary, and while she’s been cleared for rehearsal, she’s still wearing a VOCAL REST sticker. Little Red is on vocal rest, too. Which doesn’t mean she’s off her game. True to the precocious nature of that character, when Brian misses a line during a run-through of the prologue, Little Red points an accusatory finger at him.
Into the Woods clocks in at close to three hours, and the cast has yet to complete a single full run-through. The goal today, Tuesday of this final week, is to plow through without stopping. But when one actress steps out of a scene to ask a question, and then another follows suit, the momentum dissolves. The director looks over at Brian and Leah Fishbaugh (the actress playing the Baker’s Wife), displeased. They’re holding their “newborn baby” sloppily, and the director shouts: “I don’t want to see the top of the baby’s plastic head, please.”
The problems continue. There is a very distinct difference in tone between act one and act two of Into the Woods. The first half is a fairy tale in which the forest is a place of wonder. But after intermission, the Giant shows up, and the forest becomes a dangerous place where the beast’s errant footfall can kill. Cinderella, her Prince, the Baker, and Little Red all head back into the now-precarious woods, and here in the Oasis Theater the actors circle the stage, peering around, singing:
Jack: “Into the woods to slay the giant.”
Baker’s Wife: “Into the woods to shield the child.”
Little Red: “To flee the winds …”
Baker: “To find a future …”
The director stops the parade, interjecting: “The woods are a dangerous place, and it looks like you’re all shopping for groceries.”
Brian wipes his forehead, his shoulders slouching in on themselves. The Baker, a beta male struggling with forces beyond his control, was a different role for him. It’s easy for a confident teenager to play the aggressor—to bark instructions, to be worshipped. “We talk about characters as having A status or B status,” Brian says. “The A status character is dominant. I can play A status.” This is different. In act two of Into the Woods, the angry Giant, busy searching for the boy who stole his harp and his beloved golden goose, kills the Baker’s Wife. Suddenly, the Baker—a man terrified of parenthood—is left a single father to a defenseless baby.
Brian had the script memorized; he could be seen walking around camp shouting his lines at people passing by. But he was struggling with the climax of act two, when in the wake of this death, the Baker comes to recognize just how difficult and complicated and awful life can be. At his wit’s end, he abandons his infant son to Cinderella—saying the child will have a better life in the care of a princess than with a baker.
But the Baker does not get very far before his own long-absent and mysterious father suddenly appears. “Trouble is, son, the farther you run, the more you feel undefined,” he says, “for what you have left undone, and more, what you have left behind.”
Into the Woods is a show about taking responsibility, about growing up. At eighteen, was Brian out of his emotional depth? Where would this character come from?
Sometimes, it was hard to believe Brian Muller—intelligent, square-jawed, well mannered—had ever had a bad day in his life. He’d been charmed, stumbling into theater camp by chance and finding out he was not just a good actor, but preternaturally good. He’d been accepted to the acclaimed program at Carnegie Mellon, a coup, but deferred when a role in an Equity national tour fell in his lap.
Though it seems unlikely now, impossible even, Brian—a hair shy of six feet tall—had once been the smallest kid in his class. Being an adorable twelve-year-old had its advantages, but the novelty wears off. “As a freshman in high school,” Brian says, “I was maybe five feet tall.”
“I was worried when he first went to camp,” his mother says, “because he was so small. He was always small.”
Puberty never arrives on schedule. But at some point, Brian’s parents had to admit, the boy should be growing by now, shouldn’t he? Experts were consulted, followed by research, disagre
ements, and consultations.
Brian, full head shorter than his classmates, still played on the basketball team, but he knew the floor was no longer equal. Which was the least of his problems, truth be told. Teenagers are often betrayed by their bodies, with overactive hormones wreaking havoc on their skin, playing fast and loose with their emotions. But the only thing worse than going through puberty is not going through it. That you and your friends are experiencing that hell together is the only thing that makes the ordeal bearable.
Brian Muller played George Gibbs in a production of Our Town, following his freshman year in high school. He considers this production a turning point in his life, helping him decide to pursue acting as a profession.
For Brian, whose shoulders at fifteen didn’t yet square, whose voice hadn’t yet dropped, the impact was emotional as much as it was physical. “I’d go to parties,” Brian says, “and I’d be mistaken for a middle school kid.” He was an otherwise well-adjusted, even-tempered kid forced to confront a lesson head-on, feeling anger maybe for the first time.
In time, Brian’s body caught up with those of his peers. Brian never had a growth spurt per se. He never woke up a man in boy’s clothing. His development was more deliberate, a slow burn. And he was once again comfortably part of the majority. But it was an experience—a rejection, a sense of alienation—to draw on. It was a tool in an actor’s arsenal.
Standing in rehearsal for Into the Woods, alone on the bare stage during Hell Week, Brian was preparing to sing through “No More”—the show’s climax.
“No more questions, please. No more tests,” Brian sings. “Comes the day you say ‘What for?’ Please—no more.”
The Baker is throwing up his hands. There was just a handful of his fellow actors seated in the audience that afternoon, but everyone in the room fell silent. The actress playing the Baker’s Wife knew what she’d seen, and broke down in tears. It was a stunning performance.
What changed?
“I was staring at the baby,” Brian says, “and I was just angry. The character was angry at the world, angry at what happened, angry at himself. And it clicked.”
CHAPTER 8
Performance Weekend
8 A.M. SATURDAY.
She knew before she opened her eyes. It was Saturday morning, the day of her final Stagedoor Manor performance, and Rachael Singer could barely breathe. She could feel it in her throat—a tightening—and a full-blown panic set in. Her friends and roommates asked what they could do to help; Rachael sent them downstairs to fetch her breakfast and they returned with seven different kinds of cereal. “We didn’t know what you wanted,” one girl said. “So we got you all of them.” Rachael took one look at the haul and turned her head away. The variety wasn’t the problem. She was feeling so sick that even the sight of Special K made her nauseous.
Rachael forced herself into the shower. She tried to make a sound, to sing a note. But nothing came. Three weeks of hard work. For what? She eased into a pair of sweatpants and a gray Emerson hooded sweatshirt—she was moving so slowly—and a counselor walked her over to the infirmary.
Nearly this same scene had played out the day before. Rachael woke up on Friday with a sore throat. She tried to ignore it, and gamely struggled through her first official performance of Sweeney Todd—worrying less about her parents in the audience or the scenery changes (which had been ironed out somewhat in the twenty-four hours since the dress rehearsal) than about just making it through to the curtain call. Rachael had been so preoccupied with hitting her marks that she barely noticed the talent scouts from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, who were passing through Stagedoor that day in search of a squeaky-clean act for a new float; instead, at Sweeney Todd they found children with fake blood dripping from their mouths. “Still, we were trying to look perky!” one girl says.
Rachael took her bow on Friday afternoon and walked directly from the Elsie Theater stage to the infirmary. The nurse took her temperature: 103 degrees. She put the girl on a round of antibiotics, plus the anti-inflammatory drug prednisone, then hooked her up to a nebulizer—a miracle machine typically used by asthmatics to shoot medicine directly into the lungs. It was a high-tech treatment plan for a summer camp, and a course of action Rachael prayed might do the trick (despite all evidence to the contrary). As she sat in the infirmary, Rachael’s thoughts turned from self-preservation to the task at hand: Saturday evening’s performance of Sweeney Todd. “What if I can’t go on?” Rachael said to herself, allowing her mind to go to that terrible place for the first time.
While Rachael was resting on Saturday morning, while her friends were fetching cereal for her, a rumor spread through the dining hall: Rachael was sick, and if she didn’t recover, the director of Sweeney Todd had asked Natalie Walker to go on in her place. The rumor turned out to be not so much wrong as premature: it wasn’t until after breakfast that Jeff Murphy tracked Natalie down. A closed-door meeting was convened in the camp’s main office. It was too soon to tell if Rachael would be able to perform, the nurse had told Jeff. She still had another dose of prednisone to take, and of course that might help, but Jeff had the show to think about.
“If Rachael can’t go on,” he asked Natalie, “will you do it?”
Natalie ran her hands through her long dark hair, and pouted. “I’m nervous,” she said. Still, she had to admit, it would be quite a send-off, stepping in for Mrs. Lovett at the last minute. Plus, she hadn’t really been given the chance to show off much that session. She’d been cast as Desirée Armfeldt in A Little Night Music. And while Desirée is a lead role (that show is ostensibly about her romance with Fredrik), she sings just one song. And that song is “Send in the Clowns,” written originally with the actress Glynis Johns (and her inability to sustain a note) in mind. That’s why every line ends with a short note. “Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?” One can’t really belt rich. It’s a gorgeous piece. But no one ever leaves the theater thinking, “Wow, that actress really talked the shit out of that song.”
Natalie, her eyes blinking dramatically the way they do when she’s lost in thought, considered Jeff’s request and finally issued her reply: “I had a dream two nights ago that I went on as Mrs. Lovett.” A rehearsal was arranged, tentatively, for 4 P.M. on Saturday afternoon. Natalie could play Desirée Armfeldt at 1:30 P.M. in the camp’s Oasis Theater, and still tie on Mrs. Lovett’s apron for a 7:30 P.M. curtain in the Elsie.
The director was relieved, of course. And terribly nervous for Rachael, adorable as she rested in the infirmary, draped in her favorite sweatshirt. Still, when he relayed this anecdote—about Natalie’s prescient dream—to some of the camp’s artistic staff just minutes later, these catty men couldn’t help but unleash a barrage of All About Eve jokes, citing the original scheming understudy. “You know Natalie doesn’t even need that script,” one director laughed. It wasn't true. But far be it for a member of the artistic staff to pass up a chance to make an Eve Harrington reference.
12:30 P.M. LUNCH.
After several hours in the infirmary, Rachael mustered the strength to return to her room temporarily, shower again (the hot water always made her feel better), and get some tea from the cafeteria. On her walk back she passed Harry Katzman, who gave her a hug and some words of encouragement, though Harry’s mind admittedly was elsewhere. At that moment, a voice came over the camp loudspeaker: “Would the cast of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum please report to the Camelot courtyard for a meeting?”
Harry, dressed in rolled-up jeans, his sunglasses hanging from his polo shirt, rubbed his face (already flushed) with both hands. He looked up at the sky. A comically large black cloud—like something out of a Peanuts cartoon strip—was rolling in. The disappointment was written all over Harry’s face. What would become of his show, which was scheduled to play the camp’s outdoor Forum Theater that night?
Harry Katzman—the actor consumed with fear of imperfection, of his lesser work being made public on YouTube—was about to discover just ho
w little control he actually had over this show.
The Forum cast assembled in the courtyard as directed, and the show’s stage manager confirmed what even the youngest kids already guessed at: “We’re going to a rain schedule.” The Saturday evening performance (Harry’s last at Stagedoor) would now be performed in the Playhouse, at the decidedly less glamorous time of 5 P.M. Harry shook his head and let out a sigh. The camp owner, Cindy Samuelson, tried to put a positive spin on the last-minute venue change. “It’s a good thing!” she said. “More people will get to see the show!” If nothing else, that was certainly true: Stagedoor Manor matinees are at 1:30 P.M. Evening performances at 7:30 P.M. At 5 P.M. Forum would have nothing to compete with but the steak-and-eggs at the Liberty Diner.
Harry’s friends would get in to see the show. But would it be any good? A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a farce—with entrances and exits piled on top of one another. For two and a half weeks, Harry had massaged those scenes, those songs, to play in the camp’s intimate Forum Theater. Now what? Comedies are nothing if not delicate. Plus, Harry’s Pseudolus was mischievous, and at the Forum he was never more than a few feet from the front row of seats. He could easily come out into the audience and play off the parents. That simply wouldn’t be possible at the Playhouse—a 300-seat standard proscenium where the front row is ten feet from the stage.
Harry took a deep breath. Perhaps the rain was just that thing Orson Welles used to talk about, that bad thing, he sometimes called it. The legendary artist—extremely superstitious, known to be afraid of numbers—was unsure of a production’s potential success until something went spectacularly wrong before opening night. In rehearsal, he’d look for it, pray for it. He needed it. Maybe the rain was just Harry’s bad thing.
Theater Geek Page 17