Theater Geek Page 12

  The night before Camper Showcase, Brian and his friends collaborated on the lyrics to this opening sketch, staying up well past curfew, which explains why Brian doesn’t yet know his lines for Into the Woods. Still, judging by the audience response, it was time well spent.

  In the original prologue to Into the Woods, Jack begs his cow to offer up a few drops of milk, singing “Please pal … squeeze pal.” In Brian’s comic version, the sexually confused character stands onstage singing: “Please jorts, squeeze jorts.” Where the Baker sings, “I wish we had a child. I want a child,” tonight Natalie belts: “I wish I had a guy. A straight guy!” The laughter drowns out much of what comes next.

  Was the skit Sondheim? No. Was it clever? Undeniably. More important, was it Stagedoor? To the bone.

  Brian was pleased with himself and his hosting prowess at the Camper Showcase. How could he not be? But at rehearsal the next day, his lax attitude toward this summer finally caught up with him.

  The director of Into the Woods, Chris Armbrister, asks to run the prologue again. Brian takes his place, at number 6 on the clock, alongside the Baker’s Wife. He is preparing to head into the woods in search of the four items the Witch demanded—the four items that will break the curse and deliver them a child. “The spell is on MY house,” Brian sings, throwing his red knapsack over his shoulder like a fashion model and posing in tableau.

  The director interrupts. “It’s not a JCPenney ad,” he says to Brian, eliciting a laugh from the cast.

  If the sharp critique—insightful and spot on—hit home with Brian, perhaps it’s because he’d heard something similar before.

  Brian came to Stagedoor Manor on a lark eight years ago. When camp ends this summer, he will take a few weeks off before beginning rehearsals for the national tour of Little House on the Prairie—his first professional credit, his first Equity tour. Brian’s mother still isn’t sure when her son’s acting went from a hobby to a career, or to put it another way, from one Tostitos audition at age thirteen to a life plan.

  Brian Muller participated in a workshop of Avenue Q at Stagedoor Manor in 2005. Jeff Whitty, the Tony-winning book writer for the show, traveled to Loch Sheldrake to advise the young cast.

  Brian, however, remembers the precise moment that seed was planted. And refreshingly, it wasn’t when he got an agent. Or cashed his first paycheck. Rather, he made the decision independently, with all the thought and care a choice like that merits. In 2005, Brian was cast in a Stagedoor production of Our Town. The show’s director, Michael Raimondi, was teaching the camp’s Master Acting class that session, and Brian enrolled. In class one afternoon, the teacher went around the room asking each camper a different highly personal question. It was awkward, it was challenging—it was all of the things a serious acting class should be. And then the teacher turned to Brian and, in front of his young peers, he zeroed in on a tic in this boy’s personality. “Brian,” he asked. “Do you know when you’re bullshitting?”

  That tendency to slide by on charm when introspection was called for, to crack wise in serious situations, the teacher recognized that in Brian. And he wanted to scratch beneath the surface to see if there was anything there worth mining. “Do you know when you’re bullshitting?” this man repeated. (“It’s not a JCPenney ad,” he might as well have said.)

  “Yes,” Brian insisted. He did know.

  And from that moment on, Brian worked differently—harder, but also smarter and with intention. In Our Town, Brian had been cast as George Gibbs, the doctor’s son, and he tore through the pages. “It was one of the first times I looked at a script and thought, Why is my character saying this here?” Brian says. “What am I thinking here? I wasn’t just memorizing a monologue. I wasn’t just getting through it.” The work showed. Finally, there was something behind Brian’s eyes onstage. He wasn’t just a cute kid. There is a scene in act three of Our Town where George kneels over his wife’s grave; she’s just died giving birth to their child. The scene was staged during an evening rehearsal on Stagedoor’s front lawn. “It was dark,” Brian says. “I got down on my knees and I started hugging the ground and crying.” Brian caught even himself by surprise. “That was the first time I’d had an emotion like that onstage.”

  After the rehearsal, Brian spoke with the director, looking to share the breakthrough with him. “If I’m crying like this during rehearsal,” Brian said, proudly, “I’ll be a mess during the show!”

  The director stared back at Brian and offered some advice. “Don’t talk about it,” he said. “Don’t talk about what happened tonight. Because if you do, it’s gonna lose its meaning. And by the time you get to the performance, you won’t be able to cry.”

  “Sure enough,” Brian says now, looking back on the formative experience, “I didn’t cry from that point on—because I thought about it too much.” In high school, an acting teacher later broached this same concept. He called it leaking. Every time you tell someone about a moment, you are giving part of it away. The thought stuck with Brian, who’d come to see acting as a craft. During Brian’s junior year of high school, a teacher asked him why he wanted to go to college. He didn’t hesitate: “I want to learn to be an actor.”

  It was decided. This would be his future. “I feel different when I’m onstage,” Brian says. “It’s hard to explain.” Yet that’s enough.

  In some ways, that idea of giving it away—what the teacher called leaking—had become part of Brian’s persona. When he got the job in Little House on the Prairie tour—in a cast with Melissa Gilbert, directed by Francesca Zambello—Brian kept the news to himself. He told very few people personally. “I’ve been in situations where people start a conversation,” Brian says, “and the entire basis of the conversation is so they can tell you about their success. Like, ‘Hey, how are you?’ And before you can answer they say, ‘Guess what, I got this job!’” He didn’t want to be that guy.

  Two weeks into the summer of 2009, after that rehearsal for Into the Woods—in which he didn’t know his lines, didn’t know much more than the traffic patterns—Brian didn’t make some big pronouncement about committing himself to the show, or some big phony speech. Instead he opened up the script and started asking questions. Who was the Baker? Why was this character so unsure of his future? Did he really want to have a child, or was he merely placating his wife?

  A flubbed line here or there didn’t get under his skin. “I’m fine not being spot-perfect,” Brian says. “As long as I can still gain something from rehearsal. But I didn’t know the script well enough to be productive.” And so back in his dorm room—consisting of a few bunk beds and a bathroom he shared with Harry Katzman and three other campers—Brian now stayed up well past curfew, borrowing a flashlight to study his script. He put in his headphones and listened to Into the Woods, rewinding to go over the rhythms, the accents, the lyrics, the pauses.

  And the next day Brian Muller showed up at rehearsal ready to work.

  CHAPTER 6

  Carl and Elsie

  ON MARCH 21, 1991, JACK ROMANO COLLAPSED IN THE LOBBY of the Sheffield on West 57th Street. He’d suffered a heart attack and was rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital where he was pronounced dead. He was fifty-three years old.

  Carl and Elsie Samuelson began the funeral arrangements, and joined Debra, David Quinn, Michael Larsen—some of Jack’s closest friends from Stagedoor Manor—in cleaning out his apartment. They found tickets for upcoming shows. “We found clothing he never wore,” Larsen says. “Shoes he never wore.”

  “He spent everything,” says David, still teary-eyed almost two decades later. “That’s how he lived.”

  Jack’s funeral was held at Riverside Memorial Chapel on Amsterdam and 76th on Sunday, March 24, 1991, and it was standing room only. “It was like the end of Mr. Holland’s Opus,” says Michael Ian Black. “The place was full of these people whose lives you knew he’d touched.” They came for many reasons, but mostly because without Jack, who knows where they’d be?

  No one suf
fered any delusions that Jack’s passing was a minor event. “I cried often that summer,” says Konnie, who was later promoted from the costume shop to the title of Stagedoor’s production director. “I said, ‘Jack, Why did you leave me? I can’t do what you did. I can’t get those performances out of those kids.’” In the wake of this untimely loss, Jack’s final show, Man of La Mancha, took on mythic proportions. That production starred a young Danny Gurwin (Broadway’s Little Women) as Don Quixote and Michelle Federer (Wicked) as Aldonza, and Jack’s backstage histrionics were extreme—even by his own perverted standards; it was as if Jack knew this would be his final show. During rehearsals, Jack now-famously asked the stage manager if she could procure a live dove—a dove!—for Quixote to hold while singing “The Impossible Dream.”

  “I want it to look like he’s been communing with nature,” Jack shouted.

  A second memorial was organized for July 28, 1991, at the Raleigh Hotel in South Fallsberg. The quintet from Jack’s last West Side Story performed (a cast that included Broadway’s Julia Murney as Anita). The guests joined together to sing Jack’s favorite song, “If We Only Have Love,” from Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Back at camp, hundreds of black helium balloons were released into the air. And, in a short ceremony, Carl renamed the Playhouse Theater in Jack’s honor. In the lobby of the newly christened Jack Romano Playhouse, Carl hung a framed black-and-white photo of Jack alongside these lyrics from Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along: “Years from now, we’ll remember and we’ll come back … This is where we began, being what we can.” For three years after Jack’s death the maintenance crew would have to wipe that very frame clean daily. Because the kids—heartbroken, still reeling—would kiss Jack’s photo, leaving streak marks all over the glass.

  For pop culture historians, the ’90s didn't begin until September 24, 1991—the day Nirvana’s Nevermind was released. At Stagedoor, it was March 21, 1991, the day they lost Jack Romano.

  It’s almost poetic that Jack Romano died in 1991. The sea change was that sharp. Throwing chairs? Cursing at students? Behavior like that passed muster in the ’70s but was certainly out of fashion by the time of his passing. “I don’t want to admit it was another era, but it was,” says Jack’s protégé, Michael Larsen, who worked at Stagedoor for twenty-four years. “We made our kids hyperaware of the bad things that adults can do to them. Which is good and bad. There’s that old joke among teachers, ‘You gotta bring a lawyer with you to work.’ You need five witnesses to pat a kid on the back and say, ‘Job well done.’” Perhaps it was better that Jack never had to compromise.

  In many ways, Michael filled the role vacated by Jack. He was the defining teacher of that next decade. “Michael Larsen was everything to us,” says Drew Elliott, now the vice president of marketing for the downtown Manhattan magazine, Paper. Larsen attempted to keep Jack’s stricture alive. And he could be just as unorthodox. When Michael directed a production of Hair one summer, the show actually began outside the theater. Parents watched the cast of make-believe hippies roll around on the grass, kissing and hugging each other, before they skipped over to the theater to begin the show. Todd Buonopane (who later starred in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on Broadway) was in a production of Applause that Michael directed. “He was shouting at me, ‘Pick up your cues! Pick up your cues! You’re losing people!’ I wasn’t talking fast enough. In front of everyone, he said to the stage manager, ‘Give me the cast list! I need to pick someone from the chorus to replace Todd.’”

  “I still think about that in rehearsal even now,” Todd says. “Why are people speaking so slowly? Spit it out!”

  But in the wake of Jack’s death, Carl and Elsie became the dominant personalities. And that had profound effects on Stagedoor Manor. “We were discouraged from pushing the kids too hard,” Michael says. Carl was getting older, and he had less patience for these theatrical personalities—especially since the camp was making money hand over (bedazzled) fist. The Our Time Cabaret continued touring the area hotels under Michael’s direction, and the young girls on campus were so eager to please him that they’d stay up way past curfew rehearsing their harmonies in the stairwells. “We’d have arguments in the office about the kids staying up so late,” says Ellen Kleiner, who continues to work at Stagedoor. “Carl wanted the kids to go to bed.”

  Carl could afford to push back. If Jack Romano had been the selling point for the first fifteen years of Stagedoor Manor’s history—and some campers from that era express outright shock that the place could possibly carry on without him—Carl had a different pitch now.

  In 1984, a former camper, Todd Graff, received a Tony Award nomination for Baby on Broadway. That same year, Helen Slater—another alum—was cast in the title role of the big-screen Supergirl, opposite Faye Dunaway. Robert Downey, Jr. was starring in Back to School and Less than Zero. Jennifer Jason Leigh. Mary Stuart Master-son. In profiles and publicity, these names were linked to that funny theater camp in, of all places, Loch Sheldrake, New York. As Stagedoor Manor’s profile rose, casting directors and talent managers started making the trek upstate. “I used to call the camp a gold mine of talent,” says Jean Fox, who managed young actors through her firm Fox/Albert and often scouted at Stagedoor. An August 6, 1987, segment on CNN’s Showbiz Today had presaged a new era. “We have no flagpole,” Carl says in the TV piece. “Our camp song is all the songs that have ever been written for Broadway. And we have 250 fabulously talented kids. Kids who love theater.” The camera cuts to David John, a young tyke about to depart Loch Sheldrake. Why? “I got a part in Les Misérables,” he says. On Broadway.

  Carl Samuelson behind his desk in Stagedoor Manor’s main office. Carl would often come out to greet the children on their way into breakfast, famously repeating this phrase: “Good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning.”

  Seth Herzog (a comedian who now warms up Jimmy Fallon’s studio audience nightly) puts a fine point on it: “Jon Cryer left camp to do Brighton Beach on Broadway. And then he did No Small Affair, the Demi Moore movie. He went from the guy in my bunk to being a film star. Scott Schustman—who went by Scott Tyler—left camp in the middle of the summer to do Once Upon a Time in America. He played the young Bobby De Niro part. There was this vibe: This is happening.”

  Carl, sniffing yet another marketing tool, compiled a list of every camper who was cashing a paycheck—in theater, in film, in television commercials—and that list was mailed out to prospective campers and their parents. If anybody did something of note, it was included in that letter. It started as a skinny packet. And then it wasn’t. The message: Stagedoor Manor might be more expensive than other summer camps, but the tuition is nothing short of an investment in your child’s future.

  And for the first time, talented suburban children with no connections to show business could see a through line to Hollywood. In the ’90s, the big opportunities for child actors were The Mickey Mouse Club and Kids Incorporated—both run out of Orlando, Florida. “If you wanted to be discovered,” says Marshall Heyman (now a journalist covering Hollywood for glossy publications like W magazine), “you went to Orlando. But our parents weren’t moving us to Orlando. There weren’t any Disney Channel sitcoms. And even if there were, our parents wouldn’t have wanted us to be on one. We went to auditions for game shows like Steampipe Alley and Kids Court.” No one expected to be discovered scooping ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery—as Long Island’s Nikki Blonsky later would be for the movie Hairspray. Unsure of what to do, parents sent their kids to Stagedoor.

  This dovetailed nicely with a change in the nation’s attitude toward summer camps, which (as an institution) had previously been about little more than nature hikes and canoe trips—not to mention an eight-week reprieve for weary parents. But the 1990s saw a boom in specialty camps across the United States, from wildly expensive athletic programs to NASA-sponsored space camps. “Previously, kids would go to the same camp year after year,” says Peg Smith, the
CEO of the American Camp Association. “But kids started to collect a menu of experiences—they’d go to soccer camp for three weeks, then music camp for three weeks, and then a traditional camp for three weeks.” The number of specialty camps in these years exploded—you no longer had to send your kid to a theater camp run by a drunk Ronald McDonald clown. Parents were now employing professional camp advisors, in the same way they might enlist a college counselor to guide them through the labyrinthine university application process. These parents now came armed with questions: they wanted to know about staff-to-camper ratios, retention rates, and other quantitative metrics of a camp’s success. Carl had all the right answers. And whether you were serious about acting professionally, or just serious about that immersive experience of theater-as-oxygen for a summer, Stagedoor was the name on everyone’s lips. “If you wanted to act,” Marshall says, “you went to Stagedoor. Everyone was cast in a show.”

  Stagedoor Manor took on a surreal quality in these years, as Carl became something of the Broadway Danny Rose of theater camp owners. “Carl would call me and say, ‘You have to meet this twelve-year-old girl. She’s incredible!’” says Nancy Carson, a well-known New York talent agent who regularly scouts at Stagedoor Manor. “I’d say okay. And this girl would come into my office. And she’d be terrible! Carl didn’t know about talent. He just loved that little girl.” Executives from Disney came to audition kids for the 1994 film Blank Check, about a twelve-year-old who somehow cashes a check for a million dollars. Drew Elliott recalls Carl sitting in on the audition. “Let him do it again!” Carl said. “Let him do it again!” And parents, convinced of their children’s talent, sparked to Carl’s go-get-’em-kid moxie.