Theater Geek

by Mickey Rapkin

  Or maybe not. “The Playhouse is a barn,” Harry says, dramatically. “It echoes. Dialogue lingers. And comedy gets lost. I’ve heard of shows being moved inside before.” Dramatic pause. “But this is a nightmare.”

  1:30 P.M.

  When the curtain went up on A Little Night Music that afternoon, when Natalie Walker emerged onstage as Desirée Armfeldt dressed in a Marie Antoinette–style gown and towering wig, Rachael Singer was quarantined in the infirmary with her parents, who’d flown in from Florida for their daughter’s final performance at Stagedoor Manor, the end of a successful and happy four-summer run. They were relieved to find that Rachael’s throat strain had eased by the afternoon; she could now carry on a conversation, could now be heard above a whisper. Unfortunately, their daughter was still shaky on her feet, in part from the fever still working its way through her system. In the shower, Rachael warmed up her voice, but to mixed results. She’d never go on that evening, she felt, and the tears welled up in her eyes.

  Meanwhile, if Natalie hadn’t entirely wanted to step in for Rachael before, something would happen to change her mind. For two hours, Natalie performed beautifully in A Little Night Music—you could almost forget she was probably thirty years too young for the role of Desirée, the aging actress at the show’s center. And it’s a testament to her skill (and Raymond Zilberberg’s direction) that at eighteen years old Natalie was able to find the humanity in the role of an absent single mother who seduces two married men and still manages to play the victim.

  Unfortunately, with thirty seconds left in Natalie’s climactic second-act number, “Send in the Clowns”—with Fredrik onstage rejecting her advances, with the tears welling up inside of her—Natalie takes a deep breath, and sings, “But where are the clowns? Quick send in the clowns. Don’t bother [pause] they’re—”

  And then the fire alarm went off.

  The show’s smoke effect was to blame, not that it matters. Because the damage was done. A garish strobe light flickered on, coupled with a deafening and shrill noise. Younger siblings put their hands up to their ears, shielding their delicate eardrums from the awful sound. Natalie, for her part, let out a laugh. When the siren finally cut off—after an impossibly long minute—she finished the song, and the audience applauded, both for her assured performance and her grace under fire (alarm). But backstage, Natalie couldn’t help but cry. “I’m devastated,” she says. “This was the last song I’m ever going to sing at Stagedoor.”

  Natalie Walker appears as the actress Desirée Armfeldt in A Little Night Music—part of the camp’s 2009 Sondheim festival.

  Unless, of course, Rachael couldn’t go on.

  As instructed, Natalie collected her belongings, left her wig cap in place, and found the music director of Sweeney Todd to run through the score. It was 4 P.M. In a little over three hours, Sweeney Todd would go up at the Elsie Theater. But who would play Mrs. Lovett was still very much in doubt.

  4 P.M.

  The cast of West Side Story finishes their matinee at the Playhouse, and the Stagedoor Manor tech crew immediately begins the arduous process of loading out that show’s elaborate set—Maria’s balcony, the drugstore—and loading in the flats for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’s 5 P.M. curtain. It turns out the changeover takes longer than anticipated. The upshot: Harry Katzman and the company of Forum are now able to at least take a stab at running through act two’s chase sequence in this new and unfamiliar space.

  At 6 P.M., Harry—dressed in Pseudolus’s maroon tunic—takes his place onstage for the show, a full hour behind schedule, the anticipation only building. He can hear the director out front, greeting the parents, cracking, “Welcome to the newly built Forum stage.”

  And just like that the overture begins.

  From the first measure of “Comedy Tonight” it’s obvious just how much the surprise change in venue has messed with the rhythm of the show. Previously, outside at the Forum Theater, Harry had practiced jumping into the audience on certain lyrics in the opening number. He planned on sidling up to someone’s weirdo relative and pointing, “something familiar, something peculiar.” At the performance for parents on Friday afternoon, the joke got a huge laugh. But tonight, at the Playhouse, it flatlines. It just looks like Harry is pointing into the blackness of the theater, and the motion is greeted with dead air. Sensing the disaster that is “Comedy Tonight,” Harry starts to speed up, swallowing lyrics in the process. When he shouts “Open up the curtain!” the red drapes slowly creak apart.

  The applause for “Comedy Tonight” is the worst kind: polite.

  Standing safely offstage just after this opening number, Harry wipes some flop sweat from his brow and adjusts his headband. Theater performers often talk about the thrill of doing a musical. It’s like a bullet leaving a gun’s chamber: once the overture begins, the show’s impossible to stop and, for better or worse, you better run with it. “But I wanted to cry,” Harry says. “The staging deteriorated.” What to do? Harry—the one afraid of making a mistake, lest it wind up broadcast on the Internet—remembered a cardinal rule: There are no excuses in the theater. And so he started to improvise, throwing everything at the wall, recalibrating his gestures, his glances, to the new space. He went bigger, and why not? There’s a reason all three men who played Pseudolus on Broadway over the years won Tony Awards for it. Who did the role best is a matter of how you like your ham cooked.

  And Harry’s only getting started. Early in the show, Pseudolus is accused of “parading” as a citizen. “Believe me, master,” Pseudolus states, “I was not parading.” With that, Harry throws his left hand in the air and does an exaggerated jaunt across the stage. [beat] “This is parading.” The cast can barely keep it together.

  Pseudolus soon agrees to help his owner’s son pursue his true love—a courtesan in the House of Marcus Lycus. To lure this woman out of the brothel, Pseudolus asks to preview this man’s wares. Onstage, Harry reclines on a chaise lounge as the inventory of women is presented to him, one by one. Gymnasia, he’s told, is “a giant stage on which a thousand dramas can be played.” The young girl emerges cracking a whip, and Harry takes that as his cue. He drops to the floor, lying on his back with his feet up in the air, pawing at the whip like a cat playing with a piece of yarn. Harry pants. He swats at the whip again. He throws in a girlish giggle.

  Longtime friends Harry Katzman and Ben Blackman display true chemistry in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Stagedoor Manor.

  When Vibrata, “exotic as a desert bloom, wondrous as a flamingo, lithe as a tigress,” appears, Harry snuggles up to her breast before taking her measurements. “She may be the right length,” Harry says, “but is it right for me?” He stands back-to-back with her. “How often would we find ourselves in this position? Or this position? Or this?” Harry suddenly picks the girl up and hugs her; he turns her around and grabs her from behind. “Or this position! Or this!” The actress looks surprised, but goes with it—and is rewarded with shouts of approval.

  In the opening number tonight, Harry—so spooked by the stage—was asking for laughs. And when an actor asks for laughs, they never come. Harry knew that. He just needed a reminder.

  But there is something more impressive happening onstage: Harry (the Zero Mostel of Stagedoor Manor) is suddenly generous with his co-stars. When a fellow actor earns a laugh, Harry steps out of the way and happily lets them enjoy the moment. One of Harry’s best friends, Ben Blackman, was cast as Hysterium—the head eunuch—and his well-tuned comic timing is on perfect display tonight, his performance only enhanced by an endearing (if slight) speech impediment. Instead of beckoning for Hero, Ben shouts for “He-wo!”

  In rehearsal, Harry had struggled with the pressure of leading this cast. But now he saw the way to succeed together, to play off of each other. In act two, Pseudolus and Hysterium duet on the song “Lovely.” For Pseudolus’s plan to work—to spirit away the lovers in secret—he has to convince Hysterium to masquerade as a courtesan.
More than simply putting on a dress, he desperately needs Hysterium to play a convincing woman. In short, he needs Hysterium to feel pretty.

  “He’ll never believe I’m a girl,” Hysterium cries. “Look at me. Just look at me!”

  And so Harry—suddenly the straight man—begins to sing, earnestly showering his friend with lavish praise: “You’re lovely. Absolutely lovely. Who’d believe the loveliness of you. Perfect, sweet and warm and winsome, radiant as in some dream come true.”

  Ben warms up, and mines the comedy from the situation—demanding jewelry! and flowers! to complete his Sapphic transformation. Harry steps back, reveling in Ben’s triumph.

  “I’m lovely,” Ben sings, “Absolutely lovely. Who’d believe the loveliness of me?”

  With ten minutes left in the show, there’s a rare moment of calm for Pseudolus, who is otherwise in nearly every scene. Harry stands at the back of the Playhouse, sweating through a quick costume change. And for him, time suddenly stands still, and he’s able to take the enormity of the scene in. The parents in their seats. His friends onstage. The roar of laughter rolling through the Playhouse.

  It has been an arduous path to this point in his life. “I’ve been through more than a lot of people my age,” Harry says, preferring to let the comment sit there, rather than wallow. Ask Harry about his childhood in London, about surviving his teenage years on two continents, about his application to Michigan, and the same phrase comes up: “I never thought I was what people were looking for.” Four years ago, Harry arrived at camp with a (some might say) obnoxious level of bravado. He was so eager to fit in, he overcompensated. But over the next four years, the true joy was watching him learn to drop the act. To lose the armor. He could be himself, and not a caricature of himself. Watching Harry shine in The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Or in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum? For the staff at camp, that was just gravy.

  “Graduating from Stagedoor means more to me than graduating from high school,” Harry says. These people accepted him when he didn’t accept himself, when he was more comfortable seated in a West End theater full of strangers than in his own skin. That feeling of not being good enough never really goes away. (What artist isn’t fighting the undertow?) But Harry has learned there was something he could do about it. He could work harder. He could prepare himself so that when the rejections come (and they come for everyone) he’ll know he’s done all he could. “A lot of my friends,” Harry says, “when they don’t get a job, they think: It’s not me, it’s them. It’s the casting director. It’s the producer. It’s their problem. But I don’t think that’s it. Sometimes it is you. You need more training. You need more experience.” His parents didn’t have to worry about Harry dropping out of school and trading his dorm room for a Manhattan sublet. Harry had reconciled his ambitions. Stagedoor Manor confirmed that he had the talent to succeed beyond his high school drama program. His camp friends inspired him, showing him what was possible in New York. But Harry would succeed on his own timetable.

  And just like that, Harry is right back in the show. “Release that man!” he shouts from the back of the Playhouse, charging through the aisle and leaping up onto the stage. When the show is over, he takes his bow, throws on his jeans backstage, and in the pouring rain he runs to the Elsie Theater. He is proud of his performance in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, of what he pulled off in this short time. There would be time to reflect further, but for now he had to know: What happened to Rachael Singer?

  6 P.M.

  Rachael pulls herself up by the bootstraps of her character shoes and makes her way over to the camp’s makeup studio. The nurse had taken her temperature one last time, had administered the final dose of steroid. The staff was not happy to let her go, not at all sure that this was the wise move. Watching his daughter leave the infirmary, Mike Singer wasn’t convinced she’d make it to the stage, or that he was even right to let her try.

  Rachael sits down in front of the mirror and squints, her face bathed in the harsh light of a dozen or so round bulbs. She ties her hair up in a bun and tries to smile. There is a line of twenty-five kids waiting behind her—the casts of Into the Woods, The Who’s Tommy, and The Children’s Hour among them. The makeup artist applies foundation first, then a little rouge to warm up her face. Rachael doesn’t say much as she puts on her wig cap, fastening Mrs. Lovett’s funny red hair into place. She looks herself over. The wig still looks silly, she thinks, like a homeless Raggedy Ann.

  Rachael hugs her body tight and wonders out loud whether she’ll have the strength—or the voice—to perform. In the minutes before the doors open to the Elsie Theater on Saturday evening, she leans against the piano, more for balance than anything, and attempts to sing through the first bars of “The Worst Pies in London.”

  “You can screech through it,” says the director, Jeff Murphy.

  “Push it out,” the music director says. “You have the notes.” But Rachael cuts the warm-up short. Natalie Walker looks on, waiting in the wings, not wanting to make her friend uncomfortable, but ready to perform if need be.

  No one in the audience knew for sure who would walk out onstage as Mrs. Lovett; the character isn’t in the show’s opening number. As if the prologue were written specifically to add suspense to this performance tonight, Sweeney Todd sings: “What happened then—well, that’s the play, and he wouldn’t want us to give it away.”

  Blackout. The cast exits the stage. Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop is wheeled out. A woman in a red wig emerges with a rolling pin in hand.

  “A customer!” she shrieks.

  Lights up on Rachael Singer, smiling broadly, beneath that hideous wig—to deafening applause.

  But the thrill of seeing this girl shine is quickly dashed. Halfway through “The Worst Pies In London,” her voice gives out. Rachael drops the melody a full octave, growling: “Mrs. Mooney has a pie shop, does a business but I notice something weird. Lately all her neighbors’ cats have disappeared.” Rachael’s father, seated out front, fears his daughter might walk off the stage at the end of this number and not return. He is right to be concerned. “You know when you feel really sick,” Rachael says later, “and your body gets hot and you feel like you might pass out? That’s how I felt. I couldn’t even think of what words were coming next.”

  Mrs. Lovett has a difficult first act; “The Worst Pies in London” transitions directly into “Poor Thing.” In rehearsal, even in good health, Rachael had struggled with the lyrics—not just with spitting them out, but with their meaning. For three weeks the director had encouraged Rachael to make choices. He’d given her a copy of the video of Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd, hoping she might be inspired. For Rachael, a breakthrough came, finally. But it had nothing to do with the DVD.

  Tonight, with her voice taken from her, Rachael needs to rely on another instrument: her body. She does not walk offstage, as her father feared. Instead she makes smart, bold acting choices to get through the next two hours. On her pie shop counter, Rachael installs a ceramic mug of water, a prop she returns to often to revive her voice; after each sip, she lets out a big Cockney sigh of relief, an obnoxious “aaaaahh.” It begins to get laughs—the good kind—adding a level of crazy to this character.

  In “Poor Thing,” Rachael is teasing Sweeney Todd. “You poor thing,” she says caressing this man, pronouncing poor like paw. “You paw paw paw paw thing.” When the Beggar Woman appears—singing her signature refrain, “Alms! Alms! For a miserable woman”—Rachael mocks her, mimicking, “Alms! Alms!” Where are these ideas coming from? Every syllable is drawn out. Every gesture exaggerated. When Mrs. Lovett realizes, at the end of act one, that Sweeney Todd killed Signor Pirelli, Rachael says, almost flirtatiously: “Mr. Teeeeeeeee. You didn’t!”

  Rachael’s energy is flagging—offstage she bites into a candy bar for a boost—but she uses the fatigue to her advantage. Walking up the stairs to Sweeney Todd’s barbershop, she holds on to the railing and says, “My knees aren’t what they
used to be.” Acting is being authentic in inauthentic situations. And Rachael nails that tonight: she isn’t merely reciting memorized lines, she is in the moment, reacting to what is directly in front of her. And it makes all the difference.

  Hugh Wheeler, who wrote the book for Sweeney Todd, once addressed the difficulty in showcasing this modern American opera about a murderous barber and a woman who bakes flesh pies: “The hardest thing of all was how to take these two really disgusting people and write them in such a way that the audience can rather love them.” Tonight, the audience loves Mrs. Lovett, a woman with few redeeming qualities, because Rachael makes her a pathetic character. But a pathetic character whose motivations we can understand. This grotesque woman is so lonely, so in love with Sweeney Todd that she’d happily dispose of dead bodies to remain in his life. And the audience sympathizes with her despite her unconscionable actions. It may be absurd for an eighteen-year-old to be cast as Mrs. Lovett, but she’s a woman these love-starved teenagers can more than relate to.

  In the end, Natalie wouldn’t need to go on. She watched act two from backstage—because Rachael asked her to stay, because Rachael needed the reassurance of a friend waiting in the wings. But halfway through the second act, Natalie packs up her things. She scrawls out a note to her friend, “I’m so proud of you,” and pins it to the Styrofoam head where Rachael will later stow her wig. Natalie knows this girl won’t quit now.

  What made Rachael get up out of bed finally? What made the nice girl from Florida, the one who was supposedly content to play short Jewish girls for the rest of her life, push herself out onstage for that final night at Stagedoor Manor?

  It was simple, Rachael says: “I’m not going out like that.”

  9:30 P.M.

  There’s something beautifully perverse about a theater camp production of Into the Woods. In short, parents will have paid a princely sum for their teenagers to put on a show where everything that goes wrong for these characters is the fault of an overprotective parent. Little Red Ridinghood, Cinderella, Jack—each comes alive here only after separating from their parents. (It’s a common theme for Sondheim. In Gypsy, Mama Rose sings “Mama’s gotta let go!” Cinderella in Into the Woods sings to Little Red Ridinghood, “Mother cannot guide you.” Same sentiment, different scrim.)