Too Much Is Not Enough

by Andrew Rannells

  Time passed, and a new restlessness set in after my twenty-fifth birthday. I was mostly recovered from my failed Taboo experience, but there was a nagging feeling deep in my soul. It was like a phone that kept ringing and ringing and I was refusing to answer it. That ringing was becoming more frequent and kept getting louder.

  I remember I was directing a recording session for my voice-over job, with an actress in her forties trying to sound like a little boy in his tweens. She was screaming the lines about some nonsense, and I just realized, I can’t do this anymore. I went into the bathroom after the session was over and I looked in the mirror. I looked sad. I looked older than I should have looked. I thought about why I had moved to New York in the first place, what I had wanted to do with my life. I thought about my dad, I thought about Grandma Josephine, I thought about the people I did community theater with in Omaha. I thought about my first acting teacher, Pam Carter. I thought about my mom and my siblings, all living their lives far away. I thought about my friends here in New York who were all chasing their dreams. I thought about Todd and how he wanted me to be happy. I thought about me at nineteen, excited to be in New York and ready for anything. I was not living the life I wanted. I had let myself down. It just clicked in my head. I was ready to answer that call.

  I walked into Norman’s office and I told him that I was quitting. He was flustered but he didn’t fight me. I went home and told Todd that night what I had done. He was shocked and weirdly angry that I hadn’t discussed it with him, and then finally, he was supportive. My first months of unemployment were exciting. I decided that I needed to move out of Queens. I needed a change, so I found an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. The whole building was filled with Broadway actors, including my friends Jenn Gambatese and Gavin Creel, and was located right by Times Square, in the heart of the Broadway theater district. It was a tiny studio, but I redecorated it to look just like Carrie’s apartment in Sex and the City. (I was Carrie, damn it. I know, I know, everyone thinks they are Carrie.)

  The excitement of change quickly became terrifying as I realized that, with the exception of my Taboo debacle, I hadn’t auditioned in years, and now I was trying to jump back in where I had left off. There were new casting directors, new assistants, new people who didn’t know me at all. I was starting all over again…again. I reached out to a few people I still knew in various casting offices and told them that I wanted to start auditioning. To my relief, a few remembered me, most importantly Rachel Hoffman and Craig Burns. Rachel got me an audition for an off-off-off-Broadway production of a spoof musical of the film The Karate Kid called It’s Karate, Kid! The Musical. (The wording and punctuation of the title were to avoid paying legal fees. It was a classy operation.) I was cast as the villain, Johnny Lawrence, and while there was basically no money involved, I was so happy to be acting again. It was a terrible production filled with talented people and I was having a blast. I remember Todd coming to opening night and being slightly horrified by the show’s content but ultimately happy to see me doing what I loved.

  In the middle of this short run of It’s Karate, Kid! The Musical, Craig Burns called me with an audition. For Hairspray on Broadway. It was the exact role I had auditioned for years earlier, and it was available once again. But as much as I was enjoying acting again, and had recommitted myself to my career, I just couldn’t do it. There was too much pressure, too much pain surrounding that show. Because I’d had friends involved in that production, including my friend Jenn, I’d seen it multiple times over the years. I’d attended their opening-night party, their Tony Award party. I’d always managed to put on a happy face and be there to support my friends, but it was painful to be reminded of that rejection. With Taboo, the show opened and closed and it was almost as if it had never happened. With Hairspray…it just kept lingering. It wasn’t going anywhere. It was my John Waters–shaped White Whale. Taunting me. Laughing at me. I decided I wouldn’t go to the audition.

  That night, after my off-off-off-Broadway performance, my friend Kevin Cahoon and I went out for a drink, and I told him about the call from Craig and the replacement audition the following day. “I’m not going,” I told him. “It’s too much.” Kevin, who is normally very mild-mannered, became very stern with me. “Andrew, you have to go. This is what you wanted and now it’s being presented to you once again. You have to go.”

  I hadn’t thought about my manifesting powers in a long time. I had given up believing that there were signs from the universe or energy that one could manipulate through sheer will, but I heard Kevin’s words and they hit me square in the heart. He was right. I was asking for an opportunity and I was being given that opportunity. It would be wasteful and disrespectful to myself if I didn’t take the chance.

  The next day I went to the audition. I didn’t tell Todd I was going, for two reasons: He hadn’t been called in and I didn’t want to upset him. Also, I didn’t want to be embarrassed when I didn’t get it again. This wasn’t about a job, this was about me confronting what had scared me off years ago. There weren’t many guys at the audition. I wasn’t nervous, I wasn’t scared, I just did it. I just did the material the way I wanted to do it. I felt strangely calm, not quite confident, but calm.

  When I left that audition—and I’m hesitant to use this word—I felt a peace come over me. Not the “This is my moment” feeling that had usually plagued me, but peace. I had faced the show that had broken my heart and I was still standing. I was going to perform in It’s Karate, Kid! The Musical that night, and I felt like I was almost exactly where I had wanted to be. I got back to my apartment, and as I was entering the building, my phone rang. It was Craig Burns. “Andrew…you got it. You are going to be in the chorus of Hairspray on Broadway.” I got it. I got it. I was going to play “Fender” (the tallest of The Nicest Kids in Town). That was one of the happiest moments of my life, standing in the dusty entryway of my apartment, still sweaty from the audition and hearing those words.

  Todd was already inside my apartment, waiting to have dinner before my show. I told him the news. He was quiet for a moment. His face tightened in a way that I couldn’t quite read. Was it emotion? Pride? Indifference? Then he said, “You beat me.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You beat me,” he repeated, and not warmly. “You got there first.”

  I felt like he had punched me in the stomach. He was the first person I’d told, and that was his response. He pivoted quickly and hugged me and congratulated me, but the words had already been said. I hadn’t known we were competing. But apparently we were.

  I called my mom, I called Zuzanna. They were both so sweet and thrilled, albeit surprised, by the news. My Karate Kid castmates were all happy for me, at least to my face, and we celebrated that night. Todd even came out to meet us and joined in the celebration. I put his words out of my head. Karate Kid closed a few days later, and I still had two weeks before rehearsals for Hairspray started. They happened to be the two weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, and Todd came to Omaha with me. I am certain my family talked nonstop about Hairspray and how excited they were for me. Todd was mostly quiet about all the Hairspray business. He was sweet to my family, but he was mostly quiet.

  When we got back to the city, my good friend Sean Dooley invited us to a New Year’s Eve party at Christina Ricci’s apartment. Sean had gone to high school with her and they were still close. I had only met her a few times, but she was incredibly sweet and very funny and I was excited to get this New Year’s invite. Todd was not as excited to go, but I insisted and he finally conceded. The party was everything one would expect from a young Hollywood star. There was tons of booze, tons of food, and famous musicians and actors everywhere. I was levitating, I was so excited to be there. This is living! This is what I wanted New York to be, and now seven years after moving here, I finally found it! When strangers would ask me what I did, I proudly announced, “I’m in Hairspray on Broadway.” I mean, it wa
sn’t exactly true yet, but it would be soon. I could tell Todd was having a miserable time. He was barely speaking to anyone and hardly making eye contact with me.

  We kissed tentatively at midnight, and he asked almost immediately if we could go home. I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay and celebrate this night and what felt like a new chapter in my life. But we left. We rode home in the cab in silence. We got ready for bed in silence. We lay next to each other in silence. We didn’t have sex that night. We didn’t really touch, either. I was angry with him, and I wanted him to be happier for me than he was. I wanted him to understand what this meant to me. Broadway. Finally. I fell asleep formulating the conversation I would have with him in the morning about how hurt I was. But I was optimistic that we could move forward. This was something that just had to be addressed. I knew it could all be sorted out.

  When I woke up on New Year’s Day, Todd was gone. He wasn’t in the bathroom, he wasn’t in the kitchen, he was gone. I looked at my phone, and I had a voicemail from him from 5 a.m. that morning. I was afraid to listen to it, but I did.

  “Andrew, I can’t do this. You are clearly on your way to someplace else, someplace without me. And it seems like you are going there fast. I’m happy for you. But that was my dream, too. I just don’t think I can stand here and watch someone else do it before me. I’m sorry. I love you.”

  That was the first time, and the worst time, I had my heart truly broken. Everything was supposed to be falling into place now. I had a job I loved, I had an apartment I loved, and I was with a man I loved. This is what I had been dreaming of, trying to manifest, journaling about for years. This was supposed to be my time to have it all and keep it all. I was reminded of Tales of the City. No one gets all three at once. It took me a while to realize that my plans were not everyone else’s plans. That I couldn’t, and I still can’t, force everyone else onto my vision board. That’s not how life works. I was certainly learning it wasn’t how my life worked.

  I was devastated. There were phone calls to Todd and tears and shouting and more tears. Phone calls to Zuzanna and Sean and talking and speculating and switching violently between being angry and being broken. Trying to piece together what I had done wrong. It was dark out, and I was still in the clothes I had slept in the night before. I sat on my couch, confused and lonely. But there was a voice inside me, rising. It was the voice of my very practical, very stoic, very Midwestern ancestors again. While they may not have known anything about callbacks or headshots, they knew the value of hard work and getting back up even after you were dealt a blow. I realized that ethic had been passed on to me by my parents and their parents and their parents before them. The voice said:

  “You are still here in the city that you have always wanted to live in. You have created a home and a life in the wild frontier of Manhattan. You have taken many risks, and while it was never on your time frame, those risks have paid off. You left Omaha and the safety of your family, you left school, you left a job that provided you with security, and it all led you to exactly where you wanted to be. You are going to be on Broadway. You are going to be in the chorus of Hairspray on Broadway. You got it, Andrew. And you deserve it. Now find yourself a plot of land and a good woman and start a family, god damn it! Spread our family seed!” (Okay, I didn’t hear that last part, but I imagine my rural ancestors might have been slightly confused by some of the details of my life.)

  I knew I was going to be heartbroken over Todd for a long time. I also knew that I would never get back together with him again. This was too hurtful to forgive. I couldn’t compromise myself and my dreams again for anyone. It was New Year’s Day 2005, and it was time to take stock of what I had: I had incredible friends. I had a great place to live. And I had a job that I had always wanted. I might have been missing a few things on my list, but that was okay. That list was going to have to keep changing anyway.

  “Hairspray, Wow!”

  The thing about ambition is that while you can imagine many of the details of your dreams with great specificity—the joy of performing, the applause, the feeling of walking through the stage door every night—there are plenty of details that you couldn’t possibly imagine correctly. The tediousness of learning complicated tenor harmony lines. The twinge of suspicion and self-doubt when you find out you are miraculously the same size as the person you are replacing and can wear all of his costumes without a single alteration. The feeling of being an outsider in a group of people who have been working together for years, and never being sure when or if you will ever break into their circle.

  I quickly learned that rehearsing a Broadway show alone is a lot harder than I’d thought it would be. I had never replaced anyone in a show before; I’d only started from scratch with everyone else in the cast on the first day. Hairspray had been running for three years at this point, and most of the people I had known in the show had moved on to other projects. And while I was friendly with the actor I was replacing, he was moving on to another Broadway show. I was on my own.

  The actual act of learning the show was odd. I rehearsed with a stage manager and a choreography assistant who was a swing in the show. A “swing” is neither a crass nickname like “The Village Bicycle” nor is it a comment on one’s bisexuality, it is a title. Generally speaking, swings know every role that the ensemble plays—all the choreography, all the staging, all the music and lines. Every Broadway production has them, in case anyone in the regular cast is out of the show because of sickness or a scheduled day off, and they can go on for any role at a moment’s notice. It’s an extremely difficult job that requires a lot of mental acrobatics to keep all of the roles straight in your head.

  A man named Rusty taught me every number, every scene, in a rehearsal room located blocks away from the lights of Broadway. Since these sessions were always just the two of us, I had to try to imagine a stage full of people around me at all times, which was a real challenge, since I was already struggling to remember all of the dance moves and music. And I didn’t have much time to learn it all. I would rehearse eight hours a day with Rusty for only ten days, and then I would get one final rehearsal with the entire cast on stage. A couple days later, I would be in my first show in front of a Broadway audience.

  After I rehearsed all day, I would go to the theater at night and watch the show, comparing what I had learned that day to what was actually happening on stage. I had never worked that hard in my life. I was terrified about forgetting something or losing my place in the show, and anxiety was quickly overtaking excitement in my brain. I had also never been in the ensemble before. I had only played principal roles. It was immediately clear that this was going to be a totally different experience for me. There were little featured moments for everyone in the ensemble, but for the most part you were there to support the leads and blend into the background. There was a lot of humility involved.

  But who am I kidding? I wasn’t that humble. A large part of my job at Hairspray was also to be an understudy. I would cover three of the lead roles in addition to my nightly job of playing Fender. I understudied Corny Collins, the host of the Bandstand-like show that The Nicest Kids in Town were a part of; the utilitarian “Male Authority Figure,” who played every character part from the “Hobo Flasher” in the opening number to “Mr. Spritzer,” the president of the hairspray company; and most important, I understudied Link Larkin, the Frankie Avalon–like heartthrob who Tracy Turnblad, the show’s irrepressibly optimistic heroine, falls in love with.

  Link was the role I was most right for, and it’s the one I most wanted. While learning my Fender duties, I was secretly already teaching myself the Link Larkin track. Link was also one of The Nicest Kids in Town, so most of his choreography was similar to mine, and in some cases simpler. Plus Link got two numbers, a solo in the first act and a quartette in the second. I desperately wanted to play that part; I knew I would nail it if just given the chance. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was quic
kly turning into someone that I had only seen in movies. I was going from understudy to HUNGER-study. I was Eve Harrington. I was Nomi Malone. I was instantly frustrated Broadway chorus boy Andrew Rannells.

  I was not alone in my hunger. Most of the other members of the ensemble covered lead roles and wanted them just as badly as I wanted Link. For many of us, it was our Broadway debut. For others, it was their fifth or tenth Broadway show. Two people intimidated the hell out of me: Barbara Walsh and Jonathan Dokuchitz. Barbara was playing Velma Von Tussle, the controlling and bigoted producer of The Corny Collins Show, and Jonathan was playing Corny Collins. I had seen Barbara on the 1992 Tony Awards as Trina in Falsettos, and I had seen Jonathan on the 1993 Tony Awards as Captain Walker in The Who’s Tommy. I couldn’t believe that I was going to get to work with these people. The Tony Awards had been my window to Broadway from Nebraska, and the fact that these actors were also in my first Broadway show made this dream all the more surreal.

  Before I knew it, my rehearsals were coming to an end and the night of my Broadway debut was fast approaching. Zuzanna was still in Cambridge at this time, so I knew she couldn’t make it to my first night. It might seem strange, but I don’t recall discussing a visit with my mom or the rest of my family for my opening in Hairspray. At this point I had been in New York for seven years, and I think in that time I’d had four or five visits from various family members. It was easier for me to go there to visit them. They all had lives and some had small children, and the idea of them visiting for my first night on Broadway just didn’t seem practical. It didn’t make me sad, exactly, it just seemed like a given. I knew they would come eventually. And I didn’t have Todd, so there would be no roses from him that evening. I told myself that it was better that I wouldn’t know anyone in the audience my first night. I was nervous and stressed, and I just needed to focus on getting through the show. I would give myself the gift of having this experience alone. It was my dream; I had dreamed it by myself, and I would achieve it by myself, too.