Theater Geek Page 11

  There’s an old joke in Hollywood, and it goes something like this: An exclusive party is under way on the night of the Academy Awards. It’s so exclusive, in fact, that there’s a VIP room within the VIP room. Believe it or not, in that second VIP room, there’s yet another velvet rope. If you manage to get beyond that barrier, there’s still another man with a clipboard. Get to the very last VIP room and just two people are inside: Jack Nicholson and God.

  At Stagedoor Manor, get beyond that last velvet rope, and you’d find Natalie Walker sitting with God, giving him an earful about how she would have done the whole creation thing better, and in five days. It goes without saying: when the water at Stagedoor came back on for a brief time during the outage, Natalie showered first.

  The thing is that Natalie Walker wasn’t even supposed to be here this summer. She would start at New York University in the fall, and had planned on skipping her last eligible Stagedoor summer to go traveling with her boyfriend, who was finishing up his freshman year at Yale. “Wouldn’t you rather go to Madrid with me than go back to camp?” he’d asked. Besides, hadn’t Natalie gone out on a high note?

  In Stagedoor Manor’s 2008 production of The Wild Party, Natalie starred as Kate—a devious prostitute making a play for her best friend’s man. Dressed in a red satin corset and black lace stockings, Natalie was living onstage. Andrew Lippa, the composer of The Wild Party, was in the audience that afternoon to witness Natalie’s vocal pyrotechnics. (Tony winner Idina Menzel originated the role of Kate off-Broadway and killed it. But some might say Natalie possessed a more classically legit sound.) For Natalie, The Wild Party had been a star turn, and the culmination of four good years at Stagedoor Manor. But it wasn’t a happy summer for her. Natalie and her boyfriend fought often. “And I wasn’t really myself,” Natalie admits. To make matters worse, shortly after she decided to skip 2009 at Stagedoor in favor of traveling in Europe, she and the Yalie broke up.

  Natalie Walker played the jealous prostitute Kate in a 2008 mounting of The Wild Party, a musical about a cocaine-fueled 1920s affair. Stagedoor’s production was the first officially licensed to a cast of high school students.

  Panic set in two days before Stagedoor was to begin in June of 2009. Natalie logged on to Facebook. Brian, Rachael, Harry—everyone’s status updates were all variations on the same theme, Packing for Stagedoor! It was clear: Natalie had made a colossal mistake. Thirty-six hours before the campers were due to arrive, Natalie sent a desperate e-mail to Konnie explaining that she’d had a change of heart, and please please please was there any way they’d make room for her?

  And so there was Natalie, sitting in the cafeteria, in her big silver hoop earrings—each the size of an infant’s skull. Of the jewelry, Natalie announces: “These are my bitch hoops.”

  There is a rumor going around camp that Natalie only speaks to people who are in the Our Time Cabaret. It’s not true, of course, but the lie speaks to her status on grounds as a star. Auditions at the start of each session are done in pairs. But this time no one wants to stand next to Natalie. You couldn’t blame these frightened souls. Who would volunteer to be compared to her?

  It’s not just Natalie’s talent that is legendary at Stagedoor. (And it is legendary. One director describes her instincts as “flawless.”) It’s her eating habits, too. Like Elizabeth Báthory, the sixteenth-century Hungarian countess who drank the blood of virgins to maintain her dewy beauty, Natalie subsists on a singular diet as well: Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers. At eighteen—with her sharp angles and long brown hair, exuding a sexuality beyond her years—Natalie’s metabolism is such that she can keep up her enviable figure by sampling from one food group: carbs. The way Natalie tells it, she wasn’t always so hot. When she first came to Stagedoor four years ago, she says, “I had braces, bad highlights, and no one talked to me.” She still jokes that her big break will be on NBC’s The Biggest Loser—thereby joining the long line of preternaturally beautiful actresses who insist they’re the ugly duckling.

  Rachael and Natalie have been friends and roommates for years at Stagedoor. And so when Rachael says that Natalie terrifies her, she doesn’t mean the girl herself—but rather the memory of Natalie in a 2007 production of Sweeney Todd. Natalie played Mrs. Lovett that summer and her take on the role was different wholesale: where Rachael was silly and flirtatious in rehearsal, Natalie was sexually strong and calculating. She played Sweeney like Nintendo.

  Of course, no one remembers the long hours Natalie put into the role. Or that she worked so hard that she alienated herself from her friends, who accused Natalie of being a snob. Ever since you got Mrs. Lovett, you’re too cool to hang out with us. Actually, she’d just been locked away in her room studying the lyrics and Sondheim’s syncopated rhythms, much in the same way Rachael was now. But no one remembers the sweat. What they remember was the result: Natalie’s dazzling performance.

  Natalie Walker (seen here with co-star Miles Jacoby) was a dazzling Mrs. Lovett in a 2007 production of Sweeney Todd—a performance much of the camp is still buzzing about.

  Not only was Rachael now struggling with the role of Mrs. Lovett, she also had to contend with the expectations of Natalie’s delivery—so fresh in her friends’ minds. If Rachael felt the pressure mounting, well, perhaps she was right to. “The buzz,” one camper says, “is that this Sweeney Todd isn’t as good as the one from ’07.”

  Rachael had started to doubt herself, and worse, now feared others did, too. This feeling was familiar. When Rachael first came to Stagedoor four years ago, she was cast—out of the gate—as the lead in Me and My Girl. Landing that role was a coup for Rachael, an untested, new face at camp. But it came with an unexpected consequence, like when some of the more established campers froze her out. “I hadn’t paid my dues,” Rachael explains, with a shrug. That emotion—that her peers somehow felt she didn’t deserve the role—was tough on her. And now, once again, that same fear was creeping back up in rehearsals for Sweeney Todd, at least in Rachael’s mind, anyway. Actors can be their own worst enemy. At one point, Rachael went into Konnie’s office to ask why she gave her this role. “Jeff cast you in this before you even came to camp!” Konnie told her. “We all know you can do this. You’re ready!”

  Natalie, meanwhile, who sometimes describes herself as “a gay man,” is oblivious to the situation at hand and wanders into the Sweeney Todd rehearsal room one morning during a break from her own (she’s playing Desirée Armfeldt in A Little Night Music). The Sweeney Todd score was laid out on the piano. Natalie, who’d taken to wearing chunky black eyeglasses—no prescription, just costume frames—glanced at the music for “The Worst Pies in London.” “I remember how hard this was to learn,” Natalie says, to no one in particular. And then she begins to sing the song—pitch perfect, in character, that textured voice of hers practically floating above the notes. “Mind you, I can’t hardly blame them—These are probably the worst pies in London. I know why nobody cares to take them—I should know, I make them.”

  Slowly, one by one, the cast members wander over to the piano to listen. And Rachael, thumbing through her script, actually flinches—as if someone went to punch her.

  And to think, Harry Katzman missed all of this.

  The night before the pipe burst and the water supply went out from the main building, Harry stood on stage at the camp’s open-air 150-seat Forum Theater running through “Comedy Tonight,” the opening to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the familiar strains wafting through the air. “Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone a comedy tonight!”

  There’s a moment in the song where Pseudolus, a Roman slave, is joined onstage by the Proteans, a troupe of foot soldiers, who serve as comic relief throughout the piece. “Only three,” Pseudolus announces to the audience, “but they do the work of thirty.” The Proteans, three young teenage boys, promptly stumble over each other. After disappearing offstage, these Roman clowns return with prop swords, generally making a ruckus. And from
somewhere—it’s unclear—a baby doll materializes on stage. The Proteans hold this Cabbage Patch Kid in the air, tormenting the plastic infant. Harry breaks up the scene, grabbing the baby from these clowns.

  “Tragedy tomorrow …” he pronounces, caressing the doll fondly. “Comedy tonight!”

  Stephen Sondheim’s mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, once told his protégé, “If the opening is right, you can read them the telephone book for forty-five minutes and they’ll still enjoy the show.” If so, Harry was in good shape. “Comedy Tonight” was killing in rehearsal. The rest of act one was looking up, too. And so director Rob Scharlow pushes on.

  In the next scene, Pseudolus is accused of petty robbery, and his master insists he return nine Roman coins to the man he’s fleeced. Harry counts the coins out one by one, placing them in this man’s hand: “One, two, three, four.” Harry stops to complain: “I’m being cheated out of money I won fair and square!” When he continues counting, he skips ahead to “seven, eight.”

  “What happened to five and six?”, the man asks.

  “I’m coming to them …” Harry mutters, begrudgingly counting out: “Nine. [beat] Five, six.”

  For some young actors, rehearsal is a matter of the director pointing out how to get from stage left to stage right while speaking. But for Harry it’s a chance to make choices, to throw a bunch of comedy against the wall and see what sticks. And Harry is growing comfortable with the role. Initially, he’d resisted stepping out into the audience, but he’d since found the humor in it. (For example, on a lyric like “something repulsive,” he decided to point at some camper’s weird uncle.) What the cast had was funny. But in terms of blocking—in terms of staging the show—Harry was keenly aware that they were running behind the camp’s other productions. “We should have finished act one by now,” Harry says. When he is reminded that the first performance is twelve days away, he responds: “Too real.”

  Harry wasn’t being dramatic. He was legitimately concerned, and with good reason. Because he is about to leave Stagedoor Manor for an unheard of three nights, mid-rehearsal period.

  On Sunday afternoon, at the end of week one, while the rest of the camp boarded the bus to the movies for a scheduled day off, Harry and his friend Chelsea Burris (in rehearsal to play God in Children of Eden, naturally) climbed into the backseat of a black sedan bound for Newark Airport. Harry and Chelsea were both due to enroll at the University of Michigan in the fall. Unfortunately, that school’s three-day orientation fell smack in the middle of Stagedoor Manor’s first session. “Chelsea and I were really upset,” Harry says. “Neither of us wanted to go. We were uncomfortable leaving our shows. We were uncomfortable with the place they were in.” On the flight to Michigan, Harry did his part, studying the lyrics to “Pretty Little Picture,” an act-one song where Pseudolus plays matchmaker to a pair of would-be lovers. But he was, admittedly, distracted from the task at hand. And who could blame him? He was off to meet the wildly talented classmates he’d spend the next four years with. Leaving Stagedoor Manor for college orientation—much like leaving London four years ago—Harry once again felt he was caught between two worlds. “I feel guilty about going,” he says.

  For three days in Ann Arbor, Harry and Chelsea kept their distance, neither wanting to use the other as a social crutch. But when they’d drift back to each other—in the Michigan cafeteria, at a meeting—one would invariably say: “Where are we right now? What’s Stagedoor?” Monday night passed, and then Tuesday night. While the water was intermittently out at camp, Harry and Chelsea toured the dorm at Michigan, picked classes for the fall, took their piano placement tests. They sat through educational theater. You know, skits about the dangers of drunk driving, skits about recognizing the signs of depression. Harry and his incoming musical theater classmates turned this into their own Rocky Horror Picture Show, shouting along with the proceedings. Between fits of laughter, Harry managed to turn around to glimpse the rest of his Michigan class—the engineers, the math majors. “They were asleep,” Harry says. “But we”—the musical theater kids, he means—“were having such a good time.” Which is to say, these were Harry’s people.

  The trip was a thrill on so many levels. Harry had been planning his escape from South Carolina since the day he stepped foot below the Mason-Dixon Line. (Harry meant no offense; some people are just built for a different climate.) Yet when it came time to apply to college, he fought with his mother. She’d asked that he not apply to Michigan at all. “You’ll go where we can afford,” she told him, asking him to consider a local arts school. Harry balked. When he was accepted to Michigan—overcoming insane admissions odds—he still remained only cautiously optimistic; he didn’t let himself exhale until his financial aid package arrived and he was certain he and his family could swing it. In the end, Harry was awarded a partial merit-based scholarship, and he was genuinely floored by the idea. That feeling of self-doubt, that phrase that rang through his head years ago in London, had returned with a vengeance. “I thought scholarships were for pretty people,” Harry says. “For tenors. For people who could play Marius in Les Mis.” Would that feeling ever go away? What would he have to achieve, he wondered, to feel whole?

  Harry had spent four years dreaming of college; his escape from purgatory was now penciled in. But at 3 P.M. on Wednesday, he and Chelsea returned to the Detroit airport and set off on the long journey back to summer camp. It was jarring, to say the least. “We’d been free,” Harry says. “It was my first taste of college life. And now I’m going back to Stagedoor.” Harry missed six rehearsals for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—a full three days of camp. If it doesn’t sound like much, Harry clarifies: “Three days at Stagedoor is like two months in the real world.”

  Harry felt a momentary disconnect with his Stagedoor friends. It didn’t help that he reentered Loch Sheldrake’s orbit looking like he’d mugged the Michigan mascot. Harry walked into Barrymore dressed in a Michigan sweatshirt and a Michigan baseball hat—with his Michigan campus ID card swinging from (yes) a Michigan lanyard.

  His Stagedoor friends had previously accused Harry of being elitist, of talking about Michigan too often that summer. So he tried not mentioning the trip at all. “I thought I was being respectful,” Harry says. But his reserve only fed the fire. Harry’s friends pushed him to share stories from the trip, and so he launched into tales of the fascinating people he’d just met. “Taylor Louderman is my soul mate,” Harry announced. “She’s so pretty.”

  Harry’s Stagedoor friends didn’t miss a beat, mocking him: “Oh, of course! You know Taylor Louderman! So fierce!” One couldn’t blame them for putting up their guard. Harry was a walking reminder that their childhood was ending. That they were being evicted from Eden. And it was an awkward night at the boy’s dorm.

  Further compounding the problem, while Harry was playing freshman, Forum’s director missed nearly as many rehearsals himself, battling the flu. The cast still hadn’t finished blocking act one. The work resumed. Harry had taken a step back. He was dropping lines, still using his script—not as a crutch, but for full paragraphs. Pseudolus is the show’s rudder, and without his direction, the ship was listing. At least Harry was able to force a smile when one of the eleven-year-old kids at camp approached him in the cafeteria, inquiring about his Michigan orientation.

  “Harry,” the little tyke asked, “how was your inauguration?”

  Harry grinned at the boy’s mistake. “Well,” he said, “it was quite grand.”

  Forget for a second just how challenging the score of Into the Woods is. Because, as if Brian Muller and his cast mates needed more complications, this show would be performed at Stagedoor in the round.

  Working in the round is a distinct discipline, complete with its own difficulties. The show’s director, Chris Armbrister, begins to block the piece, explaining the bumpy road that awaits these kids. In a standard proscenium stage, he says, an actor must be concerned with directions like stage left and stage right. But wo
rking in the round necessitates a different language. An actor must learn to think of the stage as a clock. You may enter at, say, number 9 and exit at number 12. Chris (dressed in a Hawaiian shirt with flames on it) likens blocking this show to “getting traffic patterns down.” Adding insult to serious injury, you’re also now acting in 360 degrees. “You’re learning how your left shoulder should be lined up with the other person’s left shoulder,” Chris says, “so that you’re not blocking each other.”

  Though the dress rehearsal for Into the Woods was fast approaching, though Brian had never worked in the round before, though he didn’t yet know his music, he still didn’t seem ruffled. If anything could be said in Brian’s defense, the kid was at least inspired by the music of Into the Woods. Though perhaps not in the way Konnie had imagined when she cast him as the Baker.

  It is the middle of week two, and the Camper Showcase is upon us. In an effort to let younger, newer talent on camp shine, spots in this evening’s talent show—held in the Playhouse Theater—are off limits to the more established Stagedoor names, namely the members of the Our Time Cabaret. Rather, the Camper Showcase is a chance for the next generation of all-stars to show off. What’s so thrilling about tonight is the surprises. A supporting player from Sweeney Todd sings “It Sucks to Be Me” from Avenue Q, and—amazingly and convincingly—he does all seven different character voices himself. (From backstage, the performance is nearly indistinguishable from the original Broadway recording.) Then a shy teenage girl so painfully awkward she probably wouldn’t look you in the eye as she was shaking your hand, sits herself down in front of the piano and performs a pop cover, “Almost Lover.” “Good-bye, my almost lover,” she sings, hauntingly, “good-bye, my hopeless dream. I’m trying not to think about you.”

  And then there’s Brian. It’s become a rite of passage for a select group of older kids to host the Camper Showcase—a job not unlike hosting any awards show. One must write an opening sketch, plus comic interludes between the acts. Tonight, Brian, Natalie, and two of their friends handle the duties. For the opening skit, Brian hit upon the idea of adapting the prologue from Into the Woods, transporting the action from the forest to the halls of Stagedoor Manor. Rather than the song telling the story of Cinderella, Jack, and the Baker, Brian and his friends would recast the lyrics to introduce four Stagedoor archetypes: The dim athlete who couldn’t sing, the frustrated hot single girl amidst a sea of gay men, the confused boy wrestling with his sexuality (while trying to squeeze into a pair of tight-fitting jean shorts), and the tech camper coming to Stagedoor to apprentice in set design. (Tech campers are an urban legend; no one has any proof they really exist.)