Theater Geek

by Mickey Rapkin

  Believe it or not, tonight’s performance of Into the Woods at Stage-door Manor is more successful—on an emotional level—than the original Broadway company. Critics of Sondheim’s Into the Woods complain that the audience can’t possibly care about the fate of Cinderella, Jack, and the Baker, because these characters come onstage so quickly that no single entity has a chance to register. By the time act two rolls around, the audience simply doesn’t care about their crises of consciousness. (In 1987, Into the Woods lost the best musical Tony Award to Phantom of the Opera. Not because it was a better show, necessarily, but because it was clear who to root for.)

  The Stagedoor Manor production of Into the Woods didn’t suffer from any of the character development issues that may have plagued the Broadway production. And here’s why: Almost everyone in the standing-room-only audience at the Oasis Theater had watched Brian Muller grow up, from a four-foot-seven grade school kid in Barnum eight summers ago—the tyke who lost his voice on the day of the show but managed to sing his heart out anyway—to the striking, upstanding young man before their eyes tonight. Cindy and Debra Samuelson—Carl and Elsie’s daughters—made sure to be in the audience. Could this really be the same Brian who, at age eleven, used to sleepwalk so often they had to install bells on his door so the counselors could hear him stepping out? “All of a sudden he’s this full-grown man,” Debra says, “and this wonderful performer.”

  Good as Brian was in Into the Woods tonight, the emotional connection with the audience had been established long before the curtain went up. His job was simply to nurture it.

  And he does, beautifully. In act two, having delivered to the witch “the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold,” the Baker and his wife are rewarded with a child. But the joy is short-lived.

  “Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor,” Cinderella says.

  The Baker is now a single father. Who is to blame? Never sure he was ready to be a father to begin with, the Baker gives in to the impulse to abandon all responsibilities, leaving his child with Cinderella and running off into the woods.

  Brian stands on a largely bare stage, just the shadows of the trees on his face. He’s dressed in a heavy coat, having shed his white baker’s hat for something that might protect him in the woods. He runs, but does not get very far. He has lost more than anyone else onstage, but he’s grown the most. He sings: “How do you ignore all the witches, all the curses, all the wolves, all the lies, the false hopes, the goodbyes, the reverses, all the wondering what even worse is still in store?”

  In Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along (a show about a jaded film producer looking back on his life), the characters mourn the loss of innocence. But here it’s embraced. The characters in Into the Woods are no longer blindly happy; what’s still in store may be worse, but won’t the ride—the delicious and frightening unknown—be thrilling?

  In a few short weeks, Brian will begin rehearsals for the national tour of Little House on the Prairie. He deferred his spot at Carnegie Mellon, a very adult decision, to meet the challenges of his first professional job head-on, unsure of what awaits but confident he is prepared to join a company of seasoned performers with Broadway credits, not just as an actor, but as a man. He has grown up. Could there have been a better show for Brian’s good-bye than Into the Woods?

  As the Baker says: “You'll have to take care of yourself now, Jack. It's time.”

  Brian Muller (as the Baker) advises Little Red Ridinghood (Katherine Leigh Doherty) in Into the Woods. This was Brian’s sixteenth (and final) show at Stagedoor Manor.

  Epilogue

  BRIAN MULLER LOOKED EXHAUSTED, HIS EYES TIRED, HIS POS- ture strained, as he came out from the dressing room after the show to greet his family and friends. He kissed his mother and father hello. Jennifer Rudin, then the director of casting and talent development for Disney Theatrical Productions, had been impressed by Brian’s layered performance and wanted to meet him. Richard Maltby, Jr.—a Tony winner for Ain’t Misbehavin’, whose daughter Charlotte played the Witch in Into the Woods—stole a moment from Brian, too. “He asked me if I knew, in my mind, that this was my last performance at Stagedoor,” Brian recalls. “He said he could tell that this night was special.”

  And it was, for endless reasons, but most immediately because it was the last time these friends would perform onstage together. At 11:30P.M. Brian, Harry, Rachael, and the members of the Our Time Cabaret assembled in the dressing room at the Playhouse Theater—in their reds, whites, and blacks, the colors Jack Romano chose for the cabaret troupe almost thirty years ago. These cabaret members never knew Jack (some hadn’t even been born when he passed away) but they paid homage to him, to the world he helped create for them. At the end of the cabaret performance, they kneel down and knock on the stage three times—knock! knock! knock!—kissing their knuckles, and then throwing their hand into the air. “That was Jack’s thing,” says Konnie. “Knocking on the stage three times.” That’s how you knew you did something right. Jack would knock his knuckles on the stage. When the kids do it now, Konnie says, “they’re sending their love up to heaven.”

  Rachael’s voice was shot, she knew that. She’d left blood on the stage of the Elsie Theater just an hour ago—her Mrs. Lovett a triumph of determination over health—but refused to miss this last performance of the cabaret. “I gave up my solos,” she says. “I’ll lip-synch the show, but I’ll still get to dance.” Which she did, the adrenaline carrying her through.

  Rachael Singer and Jordan firstman in a triumphant performance of Sweeney Todd in the elsie Theater. Rachael nearly missed the show due to illness, but pulled herself out of bed, saying: “i’m not going out like that.”

  The Our Time Cabaret revue didn’t end until after midnight, with a wave of applause that threatened the structural integrity of the Playhouse. Outside in the brisk air, waiting for his daughter to appear, Rachael’s father brushed tears out of his eyes. It was the culmination of so many things—his daughter’s four years at Stagedoor, the impossible truth that she’d be heading off to college in a few weeks. “It was all of that,” Mike says. When Rachael sings, sometimes he still sees that little girl seated in the backseat of the car, singing along to the Beatles. “This has been a journey for us, too,” he says.

  The Stagedoor Manor awards ceremony began shortly after 1 a.m. The youngest campers, some just ten years old, were escorted down to the Playhouse. Harry, Brian, and Rachael paraded in alongside their friends—all eighteen graduating seniors, all dressed in red graduation robes. Each was given a chance to make a short speech, the impossible task of reducing a life-affirming experience to a few breaths. “I was born in England,” Harry told the younger campers, who hung on his every word. “I moved to South Carolina when I was fourteen. I was the Jew at the Episcopal school. I didn’t know if there was any place for me.” Rachael talked about the friendships she’d made over the years. Natalie thanked the camp for letting her return this summer. Cindy was onstage, pulling numbers from a hat, the order of speakers drawn at random. But it seemed appropriate that she pulled Brian’s name last. He’d been there the longest, was one of the only campers left who’d met her father, and really, he’d grown up at Stagedoor in every sense.

  “I’ve been here for eight years,” Brian says. “I’ve done sixteen shows. When I came here, I was this tall.” He held his hand out at his waist, like that marker at an amusement park that measures whether a child can safely ride the roller coaster. “Now I’m this tall. This place has changed my life. I had no idea what the next eight years would have in store for me.”

  And just when one suspected he might get wistful, Brian publicly apologized for chipping his friend and roommate Ben Blackman’s tooth on the camp Ping-Pong table when they were seventeen.

  “I wish they had Stagedoor for adults,” says the singer and actress Mandy Moore. “That would be wildly successful.”

  I know what she means.

 
The morning after the Our Time Cabaret performance—the final morning of the session—I had breakfast in the cafeteria with Harry, Rachael, Brian, and a handful of their friends. They were red-eyed but hungry, tearing through single-serving bowls of Apple Jacks like the younger selves they were when they first showed up at camp years ago. At some point a fistful of black Sharpie markers appeared, and we all went downstairs to the Oasis Theater, where twelve hours before Brian played the Baker. At some earlier time, these kids scrawled their names (and their entire Stagedoor Manor résumés) on the wall in a backstage dressing room. Brian’s footprint is large: Tintypes. Barnum. Big River (original Stagedoor Manor company). Avenue Q (original Stagedoor Manor company). Dark of the Moon. Guys & Dolls, to name a few. This morning, he proudly added Into the Woods.

  I was tempted to scrawl my own name up on the wall. I hadn’t appeared in a show, but I had lived through a session at Stagedoor Manor, a rare and special gift. Ellen Kleiner, who has worked in the camp office for more than fifteen years, often describes the people who pass through these walls as being one of two types: there are people who work at Stagedoor, she says, and then there are Stagedoor people. “If you asked me to tell you the definition of a Stagedoor person,” Ellen says. “I don’t know that I could.”

  After packing up my belongings, I took a final tour of the place, trying to figure out what she meant. I passed through the costume shop. Through the lobby. Past the Jack Romano Playhouse. And as I walked, stories flooded my brain, stories of the people who’d passed through these halls, who’d left a part of themselves on these stages as every actor does.

  Jennifer Jason Leigh scored her first professional credit at age nine, opposite Jason Robards in the film Death of a Stranger, and since then, in projects as varied as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Road to Perdition, she has earned a reputation for perfectionism. In 1981, shortly after leaving Stagedoor Manor, she played an anorexic in the TV movie The Best Little Girl in the World, starving herself down to a frightening weight of eighty-six pounds. No one who met Jennifer Jason Leigh (née Jenny Morrow) at Stagedoor Manor in the summer of 1977 would have been surprised by this display of determination. At a young age, her work ethic was already well established. That summer she’d starred as Laura Wingfield, the physically and emotionally crippled center of The Glass Menagerie. “You’d see her limping into the cafeteria,” says Todd Graff. “She was already into Method acting then.”

  Caitlin Van Zandt (Guiding Light) spent ten summers at Stage-door. In her last, she starred in Sondheim’s Assassins playing Sara Jane Moore, the former nursing student who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975. “Sara Jane Moore did one interview—in Playboy,” Caitlin says. “I was desperate to read it.” Her character research wouldn’t be complete without it. And so (with permission from Stagedoor) she logged on to a computer in the main office and bought that issue of Playboy off eBay. “There I am at Stagedoor,” she says, “reading a vintage 1976 Playboy for research.”

  Jon Cryer (CBS’s Two And a Half Men) is flanked by Jack Romano (left) and Carl Samuelson at an early Stagedoor manor awards ceremony.

  “Everyone at camp was always losing their voices,” says Amy B. Harris, a writer for Sex and the City. “And so, one summer, everyone sucked on garlic. Garlic! Someone said that garlic helped clear sore throats or laryngitis. So we asked the kitchen to order it for us. We were sucking on garlic 24/7. It was disgusting.”

  Yancey Arias, who played Thuy in Broadway’s Miss Saigon (and more recently starred in NBC’s reboot of Knight Rider), was in a production of The Me Nobody Knows at Stagedoor in the late ’80s. He had one line—and in the dress rehearsal for the show, he flubbed it. “You will never make it if you can’t remember one fucking line!” Jack Romano shouted. Yancey, who was already auditioning regularly in New York, was so embarrassed, so disappointed in himself, that he considered giving it all up right then. He ran outside the Playhouse. “I looked up to the sky in tears,” Yancey says. “Give me a sign! Am I supposed to be an actor?” At that moment, a star shot across the sky. Yancey rubbed his eyes and demanded another sign. “Five seconds later,” Yancey says. “another shooting star. And I never questioned it again. I went running around camp shouting my one line.”

  Shawn Levy, whose film Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian made $177 million dollars at the U.S. box office while I was researching this book, recalls his first show at Stagedoor. “I was Danny Zuko in Grease at thirteen years old! First show! First audition! Lead role! I could win an Academy Award and I wouldn’t have the pride I still feel over playing Danny Zuko. I sang ‘Corner of the Sky’ from Pippin in the Our Time Cabaret. I owned that shit. To this day, I will on occasion sing ‘Corner of the Sky’ for my daughters. I’m too ashamed to belt it out in front of my wife, but I’ll let it rip for my girls. I wasn’t blessed with sons. I won’t know the joy of playing catch in my backyard. But running lines and singing harmony with my daughters is a close second.” It’s not hyperbole. Shawn Levy bought a summer home not far from Stagedoor, and in 2009 he stopped in at camp see a show. When he touched Jack Romano’s photograph hanging in the Playhouse, he broke down in tears.

  He wasn’t alone. That same weekend, the actor Sebastian Stan (a Stagedoor alum) returned to camp with his girlfriend, Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester. “Sebastian warned me that he might get emotional,” Leighton says. “And at that cabaret thing, he and his friend were crying. So I started crying, too.”

  Being a Stagedoor person? As opposed to someone who just passed through Loch Sheldrake? Perhaps it starts with appreciating these anecdotes. Because the commitment to suck on garlic (for the good of the show), to limp into the cafeteria (for the character!), to rely on celestial intervention—this passion for the craft and zeal for performance is what Stagedoor people live for. Why do anything in life if you won’t commit completely? Where’s the excitement if there are no stakes?

  But going on to a successful professional career in the arts isn’t a prerequisite for being a Stagedoor person. Sometimes, maybe helping a Stagedoor person is enough. Ally Hilfiger, Tommy Hilfiger’s daughter, appeared as an old woman in a Stagedoor production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan. She strains to remember the details of the show. What she does remember is an incredible young actor from England whom she’d met that summer. “He was really passionate about the play Death of a Salesman,” Ally Hilfiger recalls. “But he was poor! I heard he was coming to New York after that summer. Death of a Salesman was playing on Broadway. And so I bought him tickets—and sent them to him anonymously.”

  When I spoke with Stagedoor alumni, there was a concern that the culture of the camp had somehow changed: the idea that Stage-door must now be populated by robot kids bent on fame. That being a Stagedoor person was becoming synonymous with having the drive, talent, and determination to make it. And there was some of that. Natalie Walker, one of the most talented kids in 2009, expressed similar concerns. “When you get leads at Stagedoor Manor,” she says, “it can start the wheels spinning.”

  There’s a fear among parents and alumni that having high expectations creates bitterness and disappointment later in life, that the camp encourages kids to set unrealistic goals. “There are a lot of damaged people out there, damaged for being so emotionally involved for three weeks at Stagedoor Manor,” says Keith Levenson (who has conducted the New York Philharmonic). “The people who wanted to be in show business but who aren’t and are bitter about it—they’ll be harder for you to find. But there are probably many, many more of those out there. Fifteen percent of these kids would have been stars anyway. Eighty-five percent were lost kids, and their parents were just paying for them to be in a show.”

  But after my three weeks at Stagedoor, I couldn’t help but ask: What would be so wrong with that? I’d come to realize that being a Stagedoor Manor person has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with heart. Theater people tend to be superstitious, not religious, but I’ll risk quoting script
ure to make a point. Psalm 68: “God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing.”

  “Most of these kids have never been, and never will be, involved in theater in a remotely professional way,” says Eric Nightengale, founder of Manhattan’s 78th Street Theater Lab, who directed at Stagedoor for four summers. “That doesn’t matter here any more than it matters at a soccer camp. What matters is the expectations set by the peer group, where they find themselves in an environment being asked to do something they have secretly loved and have had to hide from their friends at home. Whether or not you attain the dream of Broadway doesn’t matter. Just beginning to entertain that kind of dream is transformational.”

  Supremely talented or just enthusiastic about theater, these kids at Stagedoor Manor—like the kids at Beginners Showcase in Georges Mills, New Hampshire, forty years earlier, like me sitting in the orchestra of a Broadway show crying at the overture—wanted a second home where they could be accepted and loved for who they are. The Stagedoor Mafia? The so-called job network? Sure, it exists—to a point. The name alone won’t get you in the room, but it might help you stay in the room for a few extra minutes. What $5,000 in tuition gets you is a family and a support network. No matter how easy it is now to connect with other theater geeks on the Web, nothing could ever replace the feeling of a teacher really seeing you for the first time.