“Stagedoor provided a home for wayward kids,” says Jeanine Tesori. “Jack Romano provided a foundation for people, including me, who were floundering a bit and at a big crossroads in their lives.”
In early September 2009, Stagedoor Manor received word that the organizers of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade wanted to include the camp in that year’s festivities. They would install the Stagedoor kids on the final float alongside Santa Claus himself, where they’d perform a Christmas song written specifically for the occasion. Panic set in. Stagedoor campers, now back at home enmeshed in the new school year, were suddenly begging their parents to change long-planned Thanksgiving vacations, just for the chance to be considered for the parade. No one was more excited than Cindy Samuelson. “My mother loved the parade,” she says. “We always watched. She passed away on Thanksgiving. This will be really special for me.”
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? Was this exactly the kind of event to make skeptical alums wonder if the place was selling out? It’s not as if the Samuelsons aren’t aware of the contradictions. “The biggest challenge the camp faces,” says Jonathan Samen, Cindy’s husband and partner in the camp, “is to be true to its mission. To continue to be that place that so many kids want and need to feel safe.”
When it came to careerism, it would be foolish to think one could possibly put the worms back in the can. The talent scouts from Disney, the world premiere productions—that sure is a nice talking point, but it would never be more than just that. The heart of the summer camp experience, as an institution, has been, and always will be, about expanding minds in a safe environment. That’s the camp’s struggle. To remain a safe space for kids to be kids, which is to say, for kids to make mistakes. That is what this generation is in danger of losing.
Sometimes it takes a child to remind you where the emphasis should be.
There is a staff talent show every session at Stagedoor Manor. In 2009, Erich Rausch, the music director for West Side Story comes out onstage to deliver a monologue. At age forty, he’s returning to acting in his own life, and he took the opportunity tonight to perform a monologue about impending marriage. To set the scene, he enlists a female counselor to stand behind him in a veil. The first minute goes off without incident. But then Erich begins to flub his lines. He breaks out into a cold sweat. He reaches into his pocket for the script. Unfortunately, his cheat sheet has ripped at the seams. He is trying to piece the scraps back together on stage, in front of three hundred campers. He starts muttering to himself, “Man, I really don’t know this piece.” It is horribly uncomfortable. And the older kids start snickering.
And then, just when it appears Erich might exit the stage and write the whole thing off as an unfortunate mistake, a word of encouragement comes from the most unlikely source: a ten-year-old girl seated cross-legged directly in front of the stage who shouts, “It’s okay. It’s Stagedoor!”
Erich proudly finishes the monologue.
Rachael Singer left Stagedoor Manor for the last time on Sunday morning. Eating lunch with her family at Newark Airport shortly before takeoff, she broke down in tears. She was that sick, but also heart-broken. She barely got out of bed at home over the next week, and was still feeling run-down a week later, while on vacation with her parents and siblings to celebrate her graduation from high school and to enjoy each other’s company before this next stage of their lives begins. Finally, Rachael had time to reflect on Sweeney Todd—both the journey itself, and the time in the infirmary that threatened to hijack the hard-earned progress she’d made. “I didn’t think I could pull it off,” she says. “It wasn’t a typical Rachael role. It wasn’t tap-dancing. It wasn’t bubbly. I could have used more time to grow into the character. But I did a pretty good job, I think. I let my guard down. I wasn’t afraid to go for it.” She thought for a moment. “You can do more than your stereotypical role.” She was packing for The Boston Conservatory when we spoke last, nervous about what she’d find there. “There will be so many talented people. I’ll have to work hard. And that’s what I want. I want that push.”
Harry Katzman returned home to South Carolina. It was a tough summer. He largely retreated from his social life, preferring to spend time with just a few close friends. He was preemptively severing ties—a scary thought, but also perhaps freeing. He’d survived adolescence, which is all one can reasonably hope for.
His mother and stepfather planned to drop Harry off at the University of Michigan in September. He was hoping they’d get to speak with Brent Wagner, the head of the school’s prestigious theater department. Harry worries that his parents think that, by majoring in theater, he’s somehow majoring in being Harry. “They won’t realize what I’m getting myself into until they hear it from Wagner,” Harry says.
For now, in Columbia, South Carolina, the toilets await. Harry got a summer job working for what he thought was a restaurant and catering company. He figured he’d make seven dollars an hour as a busboy. But it turns out he’s working as the owner’s lackey. This woman operates a cleaning business, too, and when Harry reports to work on some days, she sends him out with the cleaning crew. “I’m scrubbing toilets and floors,” Harry says. “Glamorous!” His boss supplements her staff with a handful of Hispanic workers, and sometimes Harry has to borrow his mother’s car to pick up this cleaning crew. One afternoon, he sits in the car with a young Mexican woman. “It was so awkward,” Harry says. “We couldn’t really communicate. I don’t speak Spanish. She looked terrified. But I wanted her to feel at home.”
What’s a theater geek to do? “I put on the CD of In the Heights,” Harry says, referring to the Latino-flavored Broadway musical about Dominican-Americans in Washington Heights. “It was the most silent car ride ever.”
Brian Muller, meanwhile, was due at rehearsals for Little House on the Prairie. He’d been cast as the wily student Clarence, a troublemaker in Laura Ingalls’s classroom, and the forty-one-week, twenty-six-city national tour would kick off in September at the famed Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. At rehearsal on the first day, a rep from Actors’ Equity spoke for an hour about joining the union, about health insurance and retirement plans. “I don’t think I have dental,” Brian says, smirking at the rush of adulthood, the absurdity of his being able to make such a statement just weeks after leaving summer camp. He was rehearsing on the third floor of a well-known Broadway studio space at 229 West 42nd Street. Luckily, he had help in easing this otherwise jarring transition. His good friend Noah Robbins, another one-time Stagedoor camper, was on the ninth floor preparing to make his Broadway debut in Brighton Beach Memoirs.
For his part, Brian impressed the Prairie director early on. “Theater camp can teach you craft,” says Francesca Zambello, who respects Brian for his obvious talent, his good manners (her words), and the thoughtfulness he brings to rehearsal. “But you need that It factor. And Brian has it.”
In September 2009, more than fifteen of Brian’s friends from Stage-door take the train to the Paper Mill to see him open the show. “We’re here to see Clarence,” one jokes to the usher, unamused, who scans his ticket without looking up. They take their seats in the balcony, sticking out among the many young families in the audience tonight.
And the show begins. Brian comes out in the first number, looking like a pioneer, carrying a leather shoulder bag and a pickax, singing about the thrill of the American frontier and the great move westward. But his featured moment comes in act two, when he tortures Laura Ingalls in her one-room schoolhouse. Clarence is the disruptive student, and Brian scoots around the stage, teasing his younger classmates, stealing one’s hat, and generally making a scene. Meanwhile, the Stagedoor campers are doing the same upstairs. Every time Brian opens his mouth, one can hear outsized laughs of approval wafting down from his cheering section.
Backstage, a cast member says to Brian, “So, I guess your friends are here tonight?”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Wylie O’Sullivan, Sharbari Bose Kamat, Syd
ney Tanigawa, Farley Chase, Howard Sanders, Jim Nelson, Michael Hainey, Mark Kirby, Thomas Alberty, Jason Gay, Mark Healy, Joshua Jacobson, Danielle Nussbaum, Marshall Heyman, Seth Fradkoff, Nicole Vecchiarelli, Jon Kelly, Rebecca Sinn, Siddhartha Lokanandi, Dominick Amista, Dominick and Maria DeNicolo, Dave Itzkoff, Cindy Samuelson, Debra Samuelson, Jonathan Samen, Konnie Kittrell, David Quinn, Mark Saks, Michael Larsen, Alexandra Shiva, Jonathan Marc Sherman, Amy Brownstein, Stephen Agosto, Marcus Baker, Bradford Carter, Travis Greisler, Justin Mendoza, Raymond Zilberberg, Corin “Pinky” Miller, Peter Green, Jeffrey Zeiner, Andrea Oliveri, Brian Bumbery, Elizabeth Spiridakis, and the many alumni of Beginners Showcase and Stagedoor Manor who graciously shared their stories with me. A special thanks to the late Kate Sullivan—the closest thing I had to a Jack Romano—and to Julio Gambuto, Jon and Erin Rapkin, and my parents, Jane and Lenny Rapkin.
APPENDIX
To the eBook reader:
I returned home from Stagedoor Manor in July 2009, exhausted but engaged, and furiously set about writing Theater Geek, trying to make sense of what I’d seen over three unforgettable weeks in Loch Sheldrake. For a long time, the camp was all I thought about. It was also all I talked about (Apologies to friends and family). I looked for any excuse to bring it up, the name Stagedoor Manor constantly on the tip of my tongue.
Thankfully I wasn’t the only one eager to talk about Stagedoor. Much to my relief, the camp’s alumni—actors, directors, producers, and civilians alike—came out swinging (uh-oh! sports metaphor!), sharing with me their favorite stories of Beginners Showcase, Jack Romano, Carl and Elsie Samuelson, and the Our Time Cabaret.
Their memories made me laugh. They also made me cry. While there wasn’t room for all of that material in the book itself, I’ve included some of it here. For everyone out there like me who can’t stop talking about Loch Sheldrake, allow me to present ten short conversations about Stagedoor Manor.
1.
Name: Jon Cryer
How you know him: Established his theater credentials with Brighton Beach Memoirs on Broadway in the ’80s; cemented his pop culture status playing Duckie in Pretty in Pink. Now he’s one of the highest-paid actors on television, starring in Two and a Half Men.
Summers at Stagedoor: 1979-82
Memorable role: The title character in Pippin
Jon, you were at Stagedoor Manor early in the camp’s history. Tell me about those years.
At that time, the counselors and such were college students. Towards the late seventies, political correctness had not quite set in yet. You could bribe a counselor and get a gallon of Ernest & Julio Gallo chablis. It was a wonderful era.
Your parents were actors. Had you always been a theater geek?
I used to be backstage at the original Broadway production of 1776. I remember all of these women in huge hoop skirts. They’d be very grand onstage but they’d scurry off into the wings, foul-mouthed and bumping into each other. It was fascinating to me.
Were you the star of your high school drama club?
The first school play I did was West Side Story. I had one line: “But the gym’s neutral territory!” I think I fucked it up one night. One line! I was a shy kid until I went to Stagedoor Manor. But there’s a point at which you can’t be shy anymore. At Stagedoor, you have to do a show every week. You can’t be shy and exist at that camp. It brought me out of my shell.
What was your first Stagedoor audition like?
I didn’t know I had to audition. And they said, “Well, worst case you can sing ‘Happy Birthday.’” I decided to try a song and a monologue. I forgot the words to the monologue and stumbled and muttered. Also, I could not get through the song. I sang four notes. It was a disaster. It was an abortion.
What happened next?
I was cast as Unnamed Orphan Wastrel #3 in Oliver!
Hilarious. Were you bored in rehearsal?
No. The director had us do really intense actor work—even to be in the chorus.
Come on.
Really! We had to come up with names for our characters and a backstory. I remember my name was Toby Felcher. I had an extensive backstory that involved having diphtheria and dead grandparents. At any rate, the show was terrific. It ended up being a very good production of Oliver! Though not because of me.
There’s an entire chapter in Theater Geek devoted to Jack Romano—the camp’s original artistic director, a Cuban refugee who used to throw chairs at kids. What was your relationship like with him?
For the first two years, Jack never cast me in one of his shows. I took that personally. He was the big guy and he had the best people in his shows and that’s where you wanted to be. Finally, he cast me in Working. He said, “Jon, I always wanted to have you in one of my shows.” I said, “Well, Jack, you’re in charge of casting, so if you wanted me you could well have had me.” I blurted that out in front of other people. I thought I got on his bad side. What I realized was that he ended up respecting me because of that.
He had a very thick accent. What did you make of it?
He was prone to malapropisms. In rehearsal, he’d say to the tech guy, “Steven, can we have some genital lighting?” He meant general lighting.
Some people I spoke with suspect these slip-ups were all part of Jack’s act.
It could be. It was awfully cute.
Jack taught acting classes in Manhattan over the winter. You took some of those classes. What was that time in your life like—running around the city with so many Stagedoor kids?
We were New York theater urchins. We’d “second-act” shows.
Meaning you’d sneak in at intermission, without buying a ticket?
Right. This was the heyday of Dreamgirls and Evita. Of course in Dreamgirls, if you second-act the show you miss “And I Am Telling You.” But I saw plenty of “Step into the Bad Side.” It’s astonishing, really, that I’m not gay.
At Stagedoor, Jack introduced a traveling troupe of campers that would perform show tunes at the area hotels. What do you remember about those first shows at Kutsher’s and the like? Were they well attended?
I was in the first cabaret and we performed at the Pines. There were about eight or nine patrons sitting around watching TV and drinking. And then thirty kids crowded on this stage—this dance floor, really. God help these patrons. They didn’t ask for show tunes. They just wanted to drink.
Your sister went to Stagedoor, right? Did she have a good experience?
My sister went for a month. She did not flourish. She was in The Sound of Music. As I remember it, the director had been rude to a couple of tech guys. The director had these rotating sets—these big rotating triangles on rollers. In one scene, the triangles were the Austrian Alps. Turn them and Ooh, it’s a church! Turn them again, and Ooh, it’s Nazi headquarters! Well, the director pissed off the tech crew. And so, secretly, in retaliation, the tech guys took the rollers off of the spinning triangles. Show night comes along. In The Sound of Music, the nuns are in charge of changing the set. These sweet nuns. They didn’t know what happened. They were singing, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” and throwing themselves against these huge triangles. You have these twelve-year-old Jewish nuns trying to push the Austrian Alps around making these horrendous noises. Stuff like that happened all the time.
You were at Stagedoor at the same time as Mary Stuart Masterson, who, like you, did her own share of Brat Pack movies. How was she at camp?
We didn’t know each other. She was in Babes in Arms. She was pretty great, actually. But we didn’t hang out.
Last question: There were very few boys at camp in your day. It wasn’t socially acceptable for boys to go to theater camp back then. What was it like to be one of the few boys?
There was something like two hundred forty girls and forty guys. In terms of one’s romantic situation, for straight guys, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
How did you fare?
I was a stoop-shouldered version of myself. I hated getting my hair cut. I had terrib
le posture. And even I scored!
2.
Name: Josh Charles
How you know him: Made his big-screen debut in Dead Poet’s Society; went on to star in Aaron Sorkin’s critically acclaimed series Sports Night; now stars in CBS’s breakout hit The Good Wife, opposite Julianna Margulies.
Summers at Stagedoor Manor: 1982-86
Memorable role: The title character in Oliver!
You came to Stagedoor early in its history—when Jack Romano ran the artistic program. Jack was a character. Let’s get this out of the way: Did he ever throw anything at you?
He threw a hanger in my direction. But I never felt in danger. I remember the first time I met Jack. I wasn’t a real big singer. For the audition, I prepared a song from a jingle. “I like bread and butter. I like toast and jam.” Some song from the sixties. Other kids were singing selections from Cats. Jack was rolling off his chair. The next summer, I sang “King of Pain” by the Police. I have a lot of great memories about Jack. He was so passionate. He was a character. But he treated us like real human beings.
That seems to have been his appeal. How did you hear about the camp?
I was into local theater and comedy in Baltimore, where I grew up. My parents read about Stagedoor in the back of the New York Times Magazine. We were sent the brochure and I went for it.
Did you have to push your parents to send you?
My parents were very supportive of my acting and performing. But I’d just graduated from fifth grade. My parents were splitting up. Looking back on it now, I should have realized: You want to go to camp? Of course you can go. I was supposed to go for three weeks. I was nervous the first couple of days. Then I begged my dad to let me stay for the rest of the summer. I stayed for the whole nine weeks, and went back for four more years.
What hooked you?
Everyone was really serious about performing. I don’t know that everybody wanted to have a career in the theater. But I know that I did. And my core group of friends wanted that, too.
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