Theater Geek Page 10

  Yes, many campers from that era only spent three weeks at Stage-door Manor. Is it the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art? No. But is it a valid learning experience? Absolutely. “You learn how to learn,” says Jeff Blumenkrantz. “You can’t quantify that. Even if you spend one afternoon with someone who inspires you—that’s immeasurable.”

  Jack Romano’s fortunes rose with those of Stagedoor Manor. In the ’80s, he traded his Hell’s Kitchen walk-up for a one-bedroom apartment in the Sheffield, a tony building on West 57th Street. Jack was so proud of his new address, and the status it conferred, that he had a woodcut stamp made for all of his official correspondence. It read JACK ROMANO, THE SHEFFIELD, 322 WEST 57TH STREET. As a housewarming present, his longtime friend Irving Feldsott bought him an antique desk he’d coveted. And Jack, who perhaps never imagined he’d grow up, was suddenly playing an adult.

  Jack was the pied piper—a self-created guru—and thanks to his winter acting classes in Manhattan, the good times never had to end. Jack was a firm believer in professional training (many of his exercises were borrowed from Theater Games, a book by the noted acting teacher Viola Spolin), but he believed equally in the importance of life lessons. At one point, his friend Emily West was dating Sylvain Sylvain of the famed punk band the New York Dolls. And Jack would take his fourteen-year-old acting students to CBGBs to see Sylvain play. “Jack had to show them what life was about,” Sylvain remembers. “He said, ‘You had to learn from experience, not from a textbook.’ He was like Maria Callas. He was gorgeous like that.”

  It was a seminal time in these boys’ lives. On Friday nights—from Long Island, from New Jersey, from wherever—they’d come to Jack’s apartment and wouldn’t leave until Sunday. After class, they might catch a movie or sneak into a Broadway show. “Imagine that you were living in the paradise of your teenage mind,” says David Quinn. “There’s no other way to conceive of it. If I said to you at fifteen, ‘Go ahead and be the person you want to be and be treated as an adult,’ wouldn’t you?”

  If Jack considered directing professionally in New York, he never expressed that ambition to friends. (However, he did live through a rite of passage for directors in 1980, when the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani trashed a revue Jack directed at the Nat Horne Theater off-Broadway, writing: “The four characters … are gifted with good voices and good looks, but they are hampered by Jack Romano’s self-conscious direction, which has the effect of posing them about the stage like mannequins.”) “I’m sure if Jack had other opportunities, he would have taken them,” says Peter Green. “But I never got the sense that, for him, working with kids was somehow less than.”

  And Jack certainly had enough distractions.

  Jack moved his winter acting classes to the Sanford Meisner Studio on Eleventh Avenue and 23rd Street. He taught a fifteen-week session in the fall, and another in the spring, charging $600 per student. With seventy students each season, he was making $84,000 a year—in cash, plus whatever he was paid to be the artistic director of Stagedoor Manor (which was considerable). And Jack loved to spend money. On weekends, he’d disappear to Boston. “For sex!” his friend Irving Feldsott explains. There was talk Jack had a boyfriend, from the military no less, stationed in New England. “Jack flew back and forth on Eastern Airlines,” Irv says. “He accumulated so many points he took me on a free trip to Buenos Aires for my sixtieth birthday.” (Meanwhile, Jack told friends the trip was “research” for a production of Evita he would direct that summer.)

  Jack embraced fine dining. “He’d tell the kids, ‘Ketchup is like blood to me,’” says Michelle Federer (Wicked’s original Nessarose). “If you’re going to sit at my table, you cannot have ketchup.” He aspired to elegance. “He ruined me for life,” says Michael Larsen, a director who worked at Stagedoor Manor for two decades and also taught with Jack in the winter. “We’d go to Gallagher’s for steaks. We went to Curtain Up, which is now Esca. We went to see Angela Lansbury’s last performance in Sweeney Todd. We saw Sandy Duncan in Peter Pan. We went to the closing night of A Chorus Line.”

  Jack lived on credit cards—a habit he developed late in life. In 1982, Mark Saks happened to be in London at the same time Jack was overseas recruiting staff for Stagedoor Manor. “Jack and I had dinner with my grandmother,” Mark recalls. “And I paid. With a credit card. Jack said, ‘Oh baby, you have a credit card?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m an adult now. I have a credit card.’ He said, ‘I don’t have a credit card. I write checks.’ And that inspired him to get every credit card they made. Macy’s. Barneys. He had an Ann Taylor credit card! I said, ‘Why do you have a Barneys credit card?’ He said, ‘I just have to have it.’ He loved gadgets. He bought a photocopier. Jack called me one day. ‘I bought a car!’”

  In the late ’80s, Mark Saks was in Los Angeles working in casting for Warner Bros. “Jack came to town with this beefy young actor,” Mark says. “Jack called. ‘I’m going to bring Tom to L.A. Could you meet with him?’ I said, ‘Okay. Where are you staying?’ Jack said, ‘The Bel-Air Bay Club.’ That’s where Elaine Stritch stays! Well, they were there for two nights. Then Jack calls me. ‘We moved out. We didn’t like that place. We’re at the Beverly Hilton.’ Two days later he called again. ‘We’re at the Ramada Inn on Hollywood Boulevard.’ He was running out of money. I expected him to call back and say, ‘We’re at the Y.’” One time, Jack’s mother came to visit from Cuba. It had taken thirty years for her to secure a tourist visa. “But he was ready for her to go at the end of the trip,” Michael Larsen says. “She was buying appliances and washing machines for everyone in Havana—on his credit card.”

  Jack made money, but he was living beyond his means—oftentimes trying to keep up with his friend Irving who, like Jack, had champagne taste but also the old money to pay for it. (Irving’s family was in the sporting goods business; the gun that Lee Harvey Oswald used to kill JFK was traced back to the Feldsott family distributorship.) Carl and Elsie used to refer to Irving as Broadway Irv. “We walked into Sardi’s,” Cindy recalls, “and Irv knew Gene Barry, who was playing the lead in La Cage. Irv had his own table at Petrossian.”

  Jack was prone to fits of jealousy, and as the camp’s prestige grew, so too did Jack’s résumé. Perhaps he was threatened by the education level and background of the younger staff, the up-and-coming directors who’d begun to flock to the now well-regarded camp. Or maybe he was just insecure. But when the New York Times sent a reporter to Loch Sheldrake in 1987 to do a piece on Stagedoor Manor, Jack suddenly identified himself as Dr. Jack Romano. The newspaper didn’t specify exactly what Jack’s doctorate was in, and with good reason: he didn’t have a doctorate. At the same time, Jack liked to remind the campers of his past successes. Randy Harrison (Showtime’s Queer As Folk) spent two summers at Stagedoor Manor in the late ’80s. “Jack taught the best acting class,” Randy recalls. “We did sense memory exercises, where we had to pretend we were waiting for the subway. The lip of the stage was the subway platform. Jack said, ‘When a young Robert Downey, Jr., did this scene, he jumped off the stage right when the train was coming.’ If only we’d thought of that!”

  Jack Romano would brag about his previous students, including former campers like Robert Downey, Jr., pictured here in an early photo from Stagedoor Manor. Long before Downey, Jr. starred in Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes, he'd played Mr. Deusel in a late 1970s Stagedoor production of The Diary of Anne Frank.

  But the party had to end sometime. Jack Romano’s health was a topic of concern throughout his adult life. He had his first heart attack at thirty-four. He suffered often debilitating circulatory problems, and he ignored the advice of his doctors. He had gout. He limped. “You’d be walking with him and he’d lean on a pillar and say, ‘Go ahead! I’ll catch up,’” Michael Larsen recalls. Jack would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and he’d light up a cigarette on the way. “He smoked with such conviction,” Irv says, “which is how he did everything.”

  In the late ’80s, Jack
was diagnosed with lung cancer. Steven Chaikelson, now chair of Columbia University’s School of the Arts Theatre Division, was helping Jack with his winter classes while Jack underwent chemotherapy. “I have a vivid memory of him being nauseous all the time, and on a couple of occasions running to the bathroom to vomit,” Chaikelson says.

  The Stagedoor campers understood Jack was sick—but only to a point. “Jack was always hunched over and coughing,” says Michael Ian Black. “He looked sallow. I knew him as a chain-smoking Cuban. It didn’t occur to me that he wasn’t healthy. I mean, he was healthy enough to throw things and tell us what idiots we were.”

  True story: After catching a rehearsal of Zach Braff in a Stagedoor production of Once Upon a Mattress, Jack delivered this crushing critique in front of the entire cast, shouting at Zach and his co-star: “Did you two have a lobotomy?”

  “I had to look up the word lobotomy,” Zach says. “But I knew it was bad.”

  Michelle Federer remembers Jack trying to quit smoking: “Do you know how a Twizzler is hollow? In rehearsal, he’d cut both ends off and hold the Twizzler like a cigarette. He would suck air through—like he was taking a drag.” Jack’s health concerns were too troubling to be ignored anymore, and he was forced to cut back on his directorial duties. He still ran the camp’s increasingly demanding artistic program, but only directed one show each summer. Naturally, it was always the last show of the summer—the J show, they called it—and rarely did it begin before midnight. It was a diva move. (“Jack was an egomaniac,” says his protégé, Michael Larsen, smiling.) But Carl humored him, agreeing to the late-night curtain call. The third session had always been the toughest to fill. And suddenly there were campers who refused to come to Stagedoor for any session but third—just for the chance of being cast in one of Jack’s musicals.

  Jack had his detractors. But more often than not, they were campers he’d ignored in some way. “Jack had the best people in his shows,” says Jon Cryer. “But he didn’t cast me in one of his shows for the first two years. I took that personally. Finally he put 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. If you wanted me, you could well have had me.’”

  Few held grudges, however. “Jack told me I was ‘just a voice,’” says Jeff Blumenkrantz. “Later, he came to see me in Into the Woods on Broadway, and I remember thinking, There! Just a voice, eh!” Still, Jack’s teaching stayed with Blumenkrantz. “From Jack, I learned about acting a song. I still use that—both for myself and when I teach classes. It’s the ABCs. Here are the things you need to have considered before you get up and sing a song: Who are you singing to? What just happened? Why are you expressing this in this moment?”

  “This memory will never leave me,” says the playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman. “I was fourteen years old, rehearsing Jacques Brel. It was me, Jack Romano, an eleven-year-old girl, and the lighting designer—who was some stoned college kid working at the camp. Jack was screaming about the lights. ‘It’s all wrong! All wrong! I told you: I want it to look like a big red bloody vagina!’ I remember thinking, I’m not sure I’m old enough to have heard that sentence. And I’m pretty sure she’s not old enough to have heard that sentence. And in that moment I aged. I went through a growth spurt. My height was the same, but something expanded in my mind.”

  Sherman puts a fine point on Jack’s legacy—the invented stories of a glamorous life in Cuba, the advanced degrees conjured out of thin air, the shouting at young children. “I think of Jack in parental terms,” Sherman says. “You go from blind love to thinking, Oh, you’re just human. You get a little dissatisfied. But by the time I was old enough to think, Maybe half of what Jack said was bullshit, it didn’t matter. Because without him, I wouldn’t have done any of that stuff I did. I guess if that’s bullshit, bullshit works.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Week Two

  LUNCH. TUESDAY. WEEK TWO. 2009. LIGH TSUP ON THE Garden Room—the exclusive dining area commandeered by the camp’s oldest, and most talented teenagers. If the temperature in here seems a bit hotter today, if the smell is more pungent than usual, it has nothing to do with hardscrabble rehearsals. It’s something more elemental. As in, the water. It’s not working. For two days in the summer of 2009, the main building at Stagedoor Manor—the one that houses the cafeteria, all two hundred female campers, and the costume shop—was without water. Considering that Stagedoor is the kind of summer camp where even the boys might change outfits three times a day, this drought comes with biblical consequences.

  “This is like some social experiment,” one teenager says, as if she’d wandered into the Stanford Prison Experiment.

  What happened? Well, the main building was aging, and a pipe burst. While the maintenance staff worked through the night to remedy the situation, the water had to be turned off. In the morning, a kid would put a plastic cup up to the juice machine, and a drizzle of thick syrup would come out. Cases of bottled water were brought in, and restocked frequently. Kids were brushing their teeth with Poland Spring. The tap was turned back on intermittently, with announcements made so the girls would know when to shower. Brian Muller and his friends, sensing an opportunity for laughs, took matters into their own hands, setting up a hose outside the boy’s dorm (a building mercifully unaffected by the outage).

  “We invited the girls over to shower on the lawn,” Brian says, smiling. “We even put out shampoo bottles.”

  The stifling heat—coupled with the Urinetown like scarcity of water—contributed to some already-building strife. Aaron Albert, who would leave camp to film his Disney XD series, I’m in the Band, in a few days, had perhaps the best perspective on the suddenly tense environment. “In the real world,” Aaron says, “hot air rises. But Stagedoor is a bubble. The hot air hits the ceiling, comes back to the floor, rises again and gets hotter. It’s theater camp. People are dramatic. I once heard a camper have a disagreement with a director over some part of a show. The girl was complaining. She was going on and on. Finally the director shouts, ‘I have HIV!’ How does a disagreement get to that point? Because Stagedoor is a bubble. And the hot air has nowhere to go.”

  Chances are, if you spotted Rachael Singer walking around camp that second week—between rehearsals for Sweeney Todd and her Master Dance class—she’d be muttering to herself. This wasn’t method acting. She wasn’t channeling Mrs. Lovett’s insanity. Rather, Rachael was repeating bits of dialogue to herself, lyrics from the show recited out loud until she couldn’t get them wrong. “I’m not a words person,” she says over a lunch of ham cold cuts (her favorite). “I’ve just never had this much dialogue.”

  And so Rachael did what she always did; she took out her Hi-Liter and her headphones and she went to work. The Cockney accent had, in fact, been an issue for her. Luckily, the Sweeney Todd stage manager happened to be a charming Brit himself, and he was happy to sit with Rachael, dissecting vowel sounds and inflections as they pored over the script.

  Rachael was making significant inroads. In a rare moment of free time, the show’s music director, Justin Mendoza, offered to help Rachael with the pivotal song “A Little Priest,” which closes act one. It’s here that Mrs. Lovett hatches a plan to dispose of Sweeney Todd’s victims. Standing over Signor Pirelli’s dead body, she begins to outline the scheme, singing to Sweeney Todd: “Seems a downright shame … Such nice plump frame wot’s his name has … had … has!”

  “What does that mean?” Rachael asks the music director. “Has, had, has? Why does she say that?”

  “She’s thinking about her plan,” Justin explains, answering the girl with a question: “What does Lovett want to do with the body?”

  “Make pies,” Rachael says.

  “Right. She’s going to use Pirelli’s body for meat for the pies, right? She sings has … had … has. She’s thinking out loud. Pirelli has a plump frame. But now he’s dead. Oh, but wait! She can still use that body. Has … had … HAS. It’s a good plan, th
en a great plan, then the best plan.”

  “The lightbulb goes off for Lovett,” Justin adds.

  And today for Rachael, too. She sings through the rest of the song with a new understanding, outlining the specifics of her plan to make use of the corpses. It begins:

  Lovett: “Seems an awful waste—I mean, with the price of meat what it is, when you get it, if you get it—”

  Sweeney: “Ah!”

  Lovett: “Good, you got it!”

  It was a breakthrough.

  Rachael is improving hourly. By the second week, she’s memorized most of act one. Her throat had been unusually dry, but she’s taking care of that, employing a liquid product called Singer’s Saving Grace, which comes in what looks like a nail polish bottle. “It’s a saving grace!” she says. Rachael had gone for a costume fitting: She put on Mrs. Lovett’s apron. She held the rolling pin in her hand, feeling its weight. And for the first time, she saw herself as Mrs. Lovett—even if she hated the character’s orange wig. “I look like Annie,” she says in the mirror, smiling to herself.

  But at night, up late with her Hi-Liter, reading through the script, she admits there’s maybe too much work left to be done. She’s still rocky on act two, still dropping lines. But press her and she will admit there’s a more immediate roadblock to her success. A more troublesome antagonist than Sondheim’s score.

  “I’m terrified of Natalie,” Rachael says.

  Ah, yes. Enter Natalie Walker.