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  Dana Steingold, who left Stagedoor in 2002 for the University of Michigan, recently starred in the national tour of the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. In 2009, she returned to camp to talk to the kids about a career in the theater. “They asked the most sophisticated questions,” Dana says. “They talked about what ‘type’ they were. ‘I’m a Sutton Foster type.’ ‘I’m a Kristin Chenoweth type.’ I didn’t know about type when I was a kid at Stagedoor. Or even when I was auditioning for colleges. I just picked my songs and sang. I was my own type.” Brent Wagner, the chair of Michigan’s musical theater department, has heard this often in very recent years—a shift in self-awareness among applicants—and he expresses dismay at the revelation: “It’s smart to know where you fit in. But I wouldn’t want someone to feel like that’s their destiny at quite a young age. What was a Kristin Chenoweth type before there was a Kristin Chenoweth?”

  Carl had seen the way the wind was blowing. The boldface names at Stagedoor in the ’90s attracted more talent scouts. “The camp turned into a farm,” says the casting director Mark Saks. And the staff had their own ideas about where the camp should go in this new era, about how best to harness the camp’s professional momentum and growing cachet. One of the camp’s longtime directors suggested Stagedoor Manor actually start auditioning prospective campers before the summer began, weeding out the least talented kids. Carl hated the idea. In a 1999 interview with InTheater magazine, he said, “An audition implies, ‘What can a camper give us?’ What’s more important is, ‘What can we give them?’”

  Carl was proud of the camp’s artistic program, certainly. When Vanity Fair profiled Natalie Portman in 1999, and the writer suggested Natalie had “never had so much as an acting lesson,” Carl was miffed. He gave a quote to the New York Daily News, saying: “Natalie did take acting lessons here and was taught theater. She was even in our Master Class.” But while he enjoyed playing Broadway Danny Rose, ask Carl about Stagedoor Manor’s mission, and he wouldn’t talk about talent scouts or managers or agents. He’d quote Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

  “That’s what they’re discovering,” Carl says, in an outtake from Stagedoor. “That’s what life should be.”

  Shortly before his death in 2004, Carl sat down with Barb, saying: “You are going to have to make a decision about which direction you want this camp to go in. Do you want to stay a summer camp or do you want to move in the direction of professional theater?”

  “But once Carl died,” Barb says, “there was no decision to make. It was a snowball going down the hill. In those first summers, I felt like I was betraying Carl.”

  The Samuelson daughters—Cindy and Debra—had visited Loch Sheldrake often in the thirty years since their parents woke up one day in 1975 and decided to open a theater camp. Cindy had gotten married, moved to Boston, and had three children of her own, giving up a successful marketing career to focus on her artwork. (She shows at the Blue Heron gallery in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.) Debra was a lawyer working in New York City. They both had fond memories of the camp, and a growing attachment to theater. At Cindy’s house, if someone asked “Where are you going?” she was just as likely to answer “Barcelona” (a lyric from Company) than anything else. Debra remembers painting scenery that first summer in Loch Sheldrake because she wanted to be a part of it all, and because it was late and someone had to do it. Ask Debra about Stagedoor Manor and she’ll talk about watching Law & Order reruns in the middle of the night, and laughing “when a former camper shows up.” But neither daughter had expressed much interest, at least publicly, in taking over the business.

  Yet with their parents suddenly gone, that’s exactly what happened. (“I was shocked!” says Cookie Saposnick, who worked in the Stagedoor Manor office for a decade and was one of the camp’s first hires.) It was a drastic change in the sisters’ commitment, but neither hesitated. “Stagedoor is a family, not a business,” Cindy says. And that was that. A plan was hashed out: Cindy would take the lead, handling the day-to-day each summer. Her husband, Jonathan, would be responsible for the legal, accounting, and business side of Stagedoor. And Debra would consult, coming up every weekend each summer.

  Eight weeks after her father’s death, Cindy, forty-something, moved into Tara, the decidedly quaint house at Stagedoor Manor that her mother had nicknamed after the estate in Gone With the Wind. “My daughters were juniors in high school,” Cindy says. “And I left town before they’d finished the school year.” The transition was jarring for the whole family, and that first summer was particularly crippling. “Every place I looked, I saw my dad,” Cindy says.

  The improvements the daughters made—at least initially—were largely cosmetic. When it rained (as it does almost daily in the Catskills), Todd Roberts, the head of the costume shop, used to come downstairs in the middle of the night to put out buckets to catch the water. “We did seven roofs in four years,” Debra says. The daughters didn’t just fix roofs, they shored up the building’s foundation, adding additional support in several spots. They replaced every window in the main building. The place needed it. Brad Simmons, a director who worked at the camp for much of the aughts, recalls these years. He lived in a room on the third floor of the main building. “And the floor would give,” he says. “It would give! Like you might put your foot through it.”

  The new owners spent hundreds of thousands of dollars rewiring these old buildings and installing an up-to-date fire alarm system. The importance of these upgrades cannot be overstated. “Carl didn’t fix anything,” says Ellen Kleiner. “It was always Band-Aids. This is a true story: Studio B was leaking. It always leaked. One summer, it was absolutely pouring in. The maintenance man took out the ceiling tiles to see what was going on—and he found a bathtub. In the ceiling! There was a hole in the roof, and someone had installed a bathtub in the ceiling to catch the water. A pipe was attached to the bathtub, and it drained out somewhere. I remember standing there thinking, I mean, A bathtub in the ceiling. You didn’t even know what to say.” (Ellis Marmor, Stagedoor’s steward and a summer camp veteran who’d been close to Carl, clarifies the thought process behind his old friend’s patchwork approach to maintenance. “Carl hadn’t always been comfortable in his life,” Ellis says. “Now that he had some money, he wanted to keep it that way.”)

  Stagedoor Manor celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2005 with a star-studded showcase at nearby Kutsher’s Hotel. It was hard to believe neither Carl nor Elsie was there. “Their legacy will be the opportunity they gave to all of these kids,” says Drew Elliott. The Samuelsons would have been proud of the turnout. Zach Braff and Mandy Moore, both Stagedoor alums, dating at the time, showed up arm in arm. “I went to the thirtieth anniversary with my wife,” Michael Ian Black says. “Michael Larsen was in the main theater playing the piano. There were probably fifty or sixty former campers of varying ages standing around the piano singing through the whole Our Time Cabaret. It was the corniest thing I have ever seen. It was also one of the most joyful and uplifting. And that’s what Stagedoor is: a combination of joyful, uplifting, and corny. Mostly corny.”

  In the winter of 2007, in their first large-scale initiative since taking over the camp, Cindy and Debra converted Stagedoor’s indoor pool into a high-end theater—a massive, million-dollar undertaking. No one used the indoor pool, they figured, and it was increasingly expensive to maintain. “I’m on board now with the changes,” says Barb. “But Carl never would have paved over the indoor pool. He never wanted Stagedoor to be anything but a summer camp. How many camps have an indoor pool? It didn’t matter that we used it once a session. It was a selling point.”

  “My father was not intransigent,” Cindy says. “He looked at things and said, ‘Does this make sense?’ Yes, the indoor pool was a selling point. But the camp was full. We had a waiting list. It was obvious the pool wasn’t being used. It was deteriorating and it cost a lot of money to
maintain. He would have been fine with closing the pool.”

  In a way, this push-and-pull is the story of this century’s first decade, when everything went corporate. The camp was still a momand-pop operation, run by the daughters of the original owner, but it was a family business for the new millennium. If Stagedoor changed in the coming years, it was merely responding to the culture at large—to yet another shift in expectations among both parents and children.

  In the ’90s, every parent believed his or her child was a star. That may still be true. But these parents are now much better educated—and more realistic—having spent the last decade watching American Idol. They’re now keenly aware that while their own child may be talented, there are a million other talented kids just like them out there (all willing to sleep outside for a shot at being insulted on national television). And so Stagedoor—once the place you sent your kid to find a manager—was now just one step on the long road to helping a child achieve that dream.

  The indoor pool at Stagedoor Manor was a nice selling point, and was prominently featured in Carl’s brochures. But with the exception of a 1992 camp production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical The Frogs—which was staged in the pool—the thing was rarely used.

  Over the winter of 2007, the indoor pool was converted into a high-tech theater in the round. Cindy Samuelson (seen here in the renovated space), christened the new venue, the Oasis Theater.

  The change among campers was more dramatic. Carl used to quote Hamlet: “To thine own self be true.” But the camp needed a new lesson. Because these kids—living in an America where you could come out in high school, likely without incident, where you could submit your auditions to casting directors on YouTube—knew who they were. And more important what they wanted: an intensive summer training program.

  To that end, under the new regime, Stagedoor’s artistic program was amped up. Players Ensemble, the dramatic equivalent of the Our Time Cabaret, was introduced. The audition-only dramatic troupe would meet every afternoon for two hours, crafting a show of short scenes culled from a range of plays. In 2008, Stagedoor also introduced Dramafest, a playwriting competition for campers—produced in conjunction with Stephen Sondheim’s Young Playwrights, Inc. (This harked back to a Jack Romano program, Festival Week, where playwrights like Jonathan Marc Sherman and Ivan Menchell got their start.) Suddenly, for these kids, being in a drama—as opposed to the more high-profile Stagedoor musicals—didn’t mean you were a second-class citizen. In these years, the minimum age for campers was upped from eight to ten, because the program was becoming too intense for the youngest kids. (Jon Foster, star of ABC’s Accidentally On Purpose, was one of the last eight-year-olds at camp. His older brother, 3:10 to Yuma’s Ben Foster, watched over him. “My roommate was crying hysterically,” Jon recalls. “He said, ‘I’m sick of camp and I’m sick of you!’ He put a black jelly bean on my pillow and said it was rat poop. I was in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Just before the show, someone told me, ‘These people called managers and agents will be watching the play. Do a good job.’ I thought, I don’t know what you’re talking about and I’ll just go out there and do what the director has been telling me to do for the last couple of weeks.”)

  Lest one think the revolution was merely theoretical, the revised credo was suddenly in writing. One of Carl’s favorite phrases to describe Stagedoor was, The only summer camp of its kind. It had adorned the literature. Still did. But now every reference to “summer camp” was taken out of the camp’s promotional materials. Instead Stagedoor was referred to exclusively by its original (and formal) name, the Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center. And it was, legitimately, that. “The place has credibility,” says Bernie Telsey, a top Broadway casting director, whose credits include Rent, The Drowsy Chaperone, and many others. “Kids who come out of there—you know they can sing. And it doesn’t feel like one of those teens-put-ona-show fake acting.”

  It was tough to argue with the numbers. The summer after Carl died was the first time Stagedoor had a waiting list. The camp now sells out nine months in advance. In 2009, there were two hundred names on the waiting list—enough to open a second camp, it should be noted. (A bit of trickle-down economics: there’s also now a waiting list at the Lazy Pond Bed & Breakfast in nearby Liberty, considered the place to stay on performance weekends. This is where the mother of Jonah Hill—he of Superbad fame—stays when she drops off her daughter.) “I get offered bribes all the time,” Barb says. “I’ve had parents say, ‘I’ve got two checks, one for $4,945. How much should I write the other one for?’ Demi Moore’s kid was on the waiting list!”

  Shortly after her father died, Cindy stopped advertising altogether. “We didn’t need it,” she said. Instead she hired a publicist, a former camper named Amy Brownstein, “I felt very strongly that we were a well-kept secret,” Cindy says. A spot on NBC’s Today show soon followed, as did a story in People magazine. (“Carl’s idea of publicity was sending a few photographs to a camper’s local town newspaper,” Barb says.) As sure a sign as any of Stagedoor’s unprecedented popularity, in 2008, four new rooms were built onto the boys’ dorm. It was a far cry from the 1980s, when Stagedoor Manor had to offer substantial scholarships just to get boys through the front door.

  The camp was suddenly on the radar of professional organizations in Manhattan in ways that would have been inconceivable to Carl. The thing is that Stagedoor is not just a place to be discovered. It’s now a place for multinational corporations to workshop new material. In 2006, Disney Theatricals began the long process of repurposing the mega-hit movie High School Musical for the stage, hoping to launch a national tour. If successful, high schools and community theaters would line up to license the show. But would HSM even work on stage? Would the show need more songs? A fleshed-out script? To find out, Disney turned to Stagedoor Manor for a trial run. The campers had less than three weeks to put up the show. It was not a simple transition. Bryan Louiselle, the original HSM writer, penned two new songs, “Cellular Fusion” and “Counting on You,” for the Stagedoor production. Steve Fickinger, the vice president of licensing for Disney Theatricals, drove up to Stagedoor for the premiere—with twelve members of his team in tow. They made notes. They whispered. If what they saw wasn’t a finished product, it was enough to glimpse what it could be. “Never underestimate the value in just getting the thing up,” says Fickinger. In the two years that followed, High School Musical would be performed at more than two thousand schools across the country, not to mention the Equity national and international tours.

  “We were the ship that launched it all,” says Stagedoor’s Larry Nye.

  These opportunities are now part of the DNA of Stagedoor Manor. In 2007, campers at Stagedoor Manor participated in a youth-friendly adaptation of Sweeney Todd, with Sondheim himself e-mailing changes to the score. Which is to say, what these children do is no longer happening in a vacuum.

  Careerism aside, in some ways, these kids haven’t changed at all. They may talk about their prescription medications over lunch, but like Jack Romano’s most die-hard students, their hearts still beat to the rhythms of Rodgers & Hammerstein. It’s the culture that’s changed, and maybe jaded these kids. In 2009, on the second day at Stagedoor, a panel discussion was held for the entire camp in the Elsie Theater, consisting of an agent from Buchwald & Associates, the casting director for the Broadway musical 13, and the New York talent agent Nancy Carson. The panel was moderated by a Stagedoor director and it was an informative afternoon—though it’s unclear what the ten-year-olds sitting in the front row must have thought when the moderator opened the session with this highly specific question: “We all want to know, What’s the difference between an agent and a manager?”

  When a casting director for FX’s Damages and another for Kansas City Rep (scouting for an upcoming production of Into the Woods directed by Moisés Kaufman) passed through Stagedoor one week later, two girls from the Our Time Cabaret practically ignored them. “Casting directors
come all the time,” one said. “It’s not a big deal.” There’s a reason shows like The Me Nobody Knows and Runaways—so popular in Jack’s era—no longer held sway over these kids. Their real lives are bigger than those fictional characters.

  The Internet erased the physical distance between theater geeks. And this generation—reared on MTV’s Real World, which arguably did more for sexual freedom than Will & Grace—was more secure in their identities. Todd Buonopane attended Stagedoor in the early ’90s. “I came out of the closet at fourteen,” he says. “I told my mom it wasn’t a big deal, because it wasn’t. There were gay couples at camp who were like other married couples.” Todd was something of a pioneer in his day. Now, the coming-out story isn’t even part of these kids’ stripes. In some cases, that declaration happens between commercial breaks. This generation of theater geeks is post-gay. At a Stagedoor rehearsal, if a director is taking attendance, instead of announcing “here” a gay kid might say “queer.” They’re out in high school, out to their parents. Yet they’d rather not be out in print, for fear of what it might do to their career. Perhaps that’s not all that surprising. When the musical Chicago opened on Broadway in 1975, it was seen as sharp critique of political corruption in the judicial system. In 2002, when the movie opened—with Richard Gere and Renée Zellwegger—it was interpreted as a treatise on tabloid culture. Same musical. Different generational lens.

  These kids are in some ways infinitely more mature than their predecessors, but they are lost in other ways. When cell phone use became rampant at camp, the Stagedoor brass started taking the phones away for the first week. It wasn’t so much that they were afraid the kids would call their parents and complain. Rather, they wanted them to unplug and reconnect to their environment. The policy became dogma when, one summer not long ago, in the midst of a crippling asthma attack, a female camper called her mother a hundred miles away to ask what she should do. “Uh, open your door and get a counselor!” her mother replied.