Theater Geek Page 15

  While the professional opportunities increased exponentially, Cindy and this new regime managed to push back—hoping to create some balance. Under Jack Romano and Michael Larsen, there’d been a clear distinction between the Our Time Cabaret kids and the less talented campers. The OTC kids would convene in the lobby—dressed in their red, black, and white—before heading out to entertain at Kutsher’s and Brown’s. The other kids looked on, the jealousy seeping through their overactive teenage pores. The cabaret gave the other kids something to strive toward. But hearts were broken. Taryn Glist attended Stagedoor from 1989 to 1996, and was selected for the cabaret early on. Later, at Emerson College, she met a girl from the same Stagedoor era. “I didn’t remember her,” Taryn says. “She made a comment, ‘You wouldn’t know me. I wasn’t in the cabaret.’ It was one of the first times it became apparent to me: It was almost two camps. There was the crew I was a part of, and the crew I didn’t know.”

  The new administration has gone to great lengths to close this gap, introducing other programs to celebrate kids, both as dramatic actors and as writers. Previously, the Our Time Cabaret was for the best campers—of any age, from ten to eighteen. Now it’s mostly for the oldest kids, mostly something you expect to join in your final years. It’s a telling change.

  “I believe that seeing someone collapse on the floor in tears, to really want something desperately and not get it—that in and of itself is an enormous lesson to have as a thirteen-year-old,” says Eric Nightengale, founder of Manhattan’s 78th Street Lab Theater, who directed at Stagedoor Manor in the ’90s. He has a unique perspective on the evolution of the camp, having returned in 2008 for one summer after a decade away. “Jack Romano was product oriented,” Eric says. “He would stack the casts, and the kids were aware of the politics of that. If you were in Jack’s cabaret, you could flagrantly break the rules. That was the gestalt of the camp.” But under Cindy’s direction, the counselors have a curfew. The staff is discouraged from yelling—that’s written into the rule book.

  “With Cindy in charge,” Nightengale says, “your first thought when making a decision is always, How is this going to impact the kids? Some of the camp’s explosive energy is gone. But it’s a much healthier environment.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Hell Week

  IN THE FINAL WEEK AT STAGEDOOR MANOR, CLASSES ARE phased out entirely. The casts rehearse for eight hours every day. “It’s like Equity rehearsals,” one director says. “Eight-hour days with breaks for food.” Hence the nickname: Hell Week.

  It’s common for directors to “act-swap” with other shows throughout Hell Week. For example, during an afternoon rehearsal, the cast of Sweeney Todd might perform their act one for the cast of Into the Woods, and vice versa. No props, no sets, just a down-and-dirty gypsy run-through for a supportive audience of good friends—just as professional companies do. In William Goldman’s The Season, the late George Abbott explains the importance of such displays. As a director, you have some sense of what works—if a dance is particularly moving, or a piece of acting exciting. “But you don’t really know much without an audience,” Abbott says. “You have to get hot bodies out there to be able to tell.”

  The excitement of Hell Week 2009 is hampered, however, by a virus running amok through camp, sending kids to the infirmary at an alarming rate. One feels awful for these run-down thespians. (Is there anything worse than a sick kid at summer camp?) Yet there is a tinge of humor in seeing the Wolf from Into the Woods in bed next to Riff from West Side Story, down the hall from the Acid Queen from The Who’s Tommy. In an effort to nip this sudden epidemic in the bud, children are no longer allowed to serve themselves in the cafeteria; the metal serving spoons like Petri dishes. Use of Purell hand sanitizers, installed in the cafeteria a few years back, is now mandatory for staff and campers alike upon entrance and exit. And the communal supply of breakfast cereals (like a horse’s trough filled with Lucky Charms) has been replaced with comparably sanitary, single-serving disposable bowls.

  Dress rehearsals are fast approaching—for Into the Woods, for Sweeney Todd, for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, for all fourteen shows—whether these casts are ready or not. The unspoken (but obvious) question on everyone’s mind is: Will the shows get up?

  The performance weekend is coming on so quickly, there is nary a moment to take a breath, which can only mean one thing: it’s time for a montage.

  1.

  OVERHEARD AT A REHEARSAL FOR SHAKESPEARE’S A MIDSUMMER

  NIGHT’S DREAM: The director, Lawrence Lesher (thirty-something, patient), is dressed in a Washington Nationals T-shirt. “You cannot really do the work,” he tells his cast, “until you’re off book. Before we break for the night, are there any other questions?”

  OBERON: “Yeah, what are the Nationals?”

  LAWRENCE: “A Major League Baseball team.”

  OBERON: “Oh.”

  2.

  Evening recreation: Aaron Albert, a camper departing imminently to film a TV series, fights with his girlfriend. They are the Brangelina of Stagedoor Manor, and their teenage ups and downs are chronicled with that same exhausting level of intrigue. Outside the cafeteria, in the heat of a disagreement, Aaron, seventeen, shouts, “I give you the world!”

  3.

  Players Ensemble rehearsal, Elsie Theater. The camp’s audition-only dramatic troupe. Director Rob Scharlow is out sick. The stage manager, Elaine, addresses the cast.

  ELAINE: “I’ll be running rehearsal. Rob’s not gonna make it.”

  CAMPER: [gasp] “He’s gonna die?”

  ELAINE: “No … He’s not gonna make it to rehearsal today.”

  4.

  Overheard at Stagedoor Manor, afternoon recreation.

  Boy #1: “Where are you from?”

  Boy #2: “Manhattan.”

  Boy #3: “I thought you were from Long Island?”

  Boy #2: “I sleep on Long Island. But the city is my home.”

  5.

  Players Ensemble rehearsal, Elsie Theater: Two teenage white girls rehearse a scene from John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. It’s the moment in the Pulitzer Prize–winning play when an aging nun informs a black, single mother that her son may have been sexually abused by a priest. The girl shouts back, “You can’t hold a child responsible for what God gave him to be.” Later that evening, the Players Ensemble cast runs through a scene from a new play about genocide in Darfur. It’s a moving piece of theater which includes a dramatic description of rape at the hands of the Janjaweed, the armed gunmen pillaging Darfur. Rape? Genocide? One kid issues his gleeful verdict: “This scene is so Players!”

  6.

  There is an Upstairs, Downstairs quality to life at summer camp. And while it is the nature of young children to believe their teachers cease to exist after class—that these dedicated men and women simply disappear into thin air once the tap shoes are stowed away—this is of course not true.

  At Stagedoor Manor, they disappear to the “library.”

  The library is not a library at all. Unless your local memorial book-stop serves $7 pitchers of domestic beer and chicken fingers. The library’s formal name is Bum & Kel’s Lakeside Tavern, a bar and grill on the shores of Loch Sheldrake. What’s the crowd like? “Some have teeth,” says Larry Nye, the head of Stagedoor’s dance department. “It’s male-heavy. Blue-collar. A lot of them are prison guards. There’s a prison thirty minutes away. We’re the summer folk. They tolerate us.”

  Though the camp’s staff goes to great lengths to conceal their nighttime activities from the kids, some of the more in-the-know campers like Harry Katzman enjoy teasing them. “How was the library?” Harry will ask at breakfast. “Check out a lot of books?”

  7.

  Overheard at Stagedoor Manor: “I would take a role in SVU for the paycheck.”

  8.

  The lobby. One of Stagedoor’s handsome young directors walks by two male campers and waves hello. Once the director is out of earshot, the following conversa
tion unfurls:

  Boy #1: “That director? He’s my boyfriend.”

  Boy #2: “No, he’s not.”

  Boy #1: “I know. But [mock hair flip] a girl can dream.”

  9.

  Wednesday, Stagedoor’s sandpit, cast-on-cast beach volleyball tournament. The rules? There are no rules. There is no limit to the number of players allowed on the sand at one time, no limit to the number of taps allowed to get the ball back over the net. It’s a theatrical free-for-all. The only rule, a twelve-year-old child explains, is to avoid the wire. “If the ball hits that”—he points to the camp’s intercom wire—“yell ‘Wire!’ and there’s a do-over.” Today, some twenty-seven cast members of The Drowsy Chaperone—with tar blackouts drawn beneath their eyes in an ironic nod to the faux-competitive nature of Stagedoor’s lone sporting event—take on the cast of West Side Story. Barb, the camp’s director: “Every summer, I call the athletic supply company and order one volleyball and a couple of cans of tennis balls,” she says. “The guy on the phone laughs, ‘This is a summer camp?’”

  10.

  Lunch, dining room: A staff member addresses the entire camp—staff and children alike—with a concern about the laundry. Apparently, someone accidentally left a red sock in a bag of whites, and the full contents of that bag came back a lovely shade of pink. “Please be careful when you are doing laundry,” she says over the lunchroom PA system. “Some people will be upset with pink clothing. [beat] But not everyone!”

  11.

  Overheard at Stagedoor Manor.

  Boy #1: “I saw August: Osage County with Phylicia Rashad.”

  Boy #2: “Who is that?”

  Boy #1: “She was in The Cosby Show. She was fierce.”

  Boy #2: [rolling his eyes] “I don’t believe in color-blind casting. [beat] Unless it’s Audra McDonald.”

  12.

  Sweeney Todd rehearsal, Studio D. In the corner of the room sits a pile of gold, New Year’s Eve style party hats. They are props for some show that session, no doubt. But the cast of Sweeney Todd, on a break, suddenly takes notice of them. Jordan Firstman picks up a hat, presses it to his chest, and sings, to himself at first: “One [pop] … singular sensation, every little step she takes.” He moves through the choreography, so famous from the film of A Chorus Line, running his fingertips along the brim of the hat. The musical director, noticing Jordan, picks up the cue and plays along on the piano. One by one, members of the cast join in, until the entire room has wandered over, as if answering a siren call. It is the least self-conscious moment of the entire summer, and a breath of beautiful calm.

  13.

  Dramafest, Oasis Theater: The entire camp has turned out to watch a performance of five original short plays written by their Stagedoor peers. The topics of today’s works (in no particular order): Alzheimer’s, suicide, writer’s block, a botched wedding engagement, and Mark David Chapman.

  Spotlight on Arielle Baumgarten and Leah Fishbaugh—“the Meryl Streep and Glenn Close of Stagedoor Manor,” Konnie says—playing mother and daughter. This play, The Things We Never Said, written by seventeen-year-old Austin Sprague, is set in a nursing home. The mother, confronting the depths of dementia, has taken to labeling everything in her hospital room with Post-its.

  A welcome bit of (albeit unintentional) levity arrives during the final piece, the one about suicide. The audience, though engaged, can’t help but notice that the talented young actor currently breaking down onstage is wearing a navy shirt embossed with a number: 69.

  14.

  Garden Room, lunch. A rule of thumb: If a boy you’ve never seen before is suddenly invited to eat a meal in this exclusive section of the cafeteria, there is a good chance it’s because a member of the Our Time Cabaret has a crush on him.

  15.

  Sweeney Todd rehearsal, Studio D: The knives come out. A prop master from the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd drops in to deliver a set of “blades” modeled on the ones Len Cariou used in the show’s 1979 premiere. Plastic tarps are laid down. And the cast of Sweeney Todd practice slitting each other’s throats. Director Jeff Murphy is pleased. “These blades have some weight to them,” he says, holding one in his hand. “And the lights will catch on the metal. We’ve never had blades that looked this menacing.” Which is to say the killing won’t look like some cartoonish Halloween massacre. Still, Jeff pulls the prop mistress aside: “Should we add a little Karo syrup to make the blood thicker?”

  16.

  Lobby. Late night. Stagedoor Manor’s directors (a community, if there ever was one) console each other. Stephen Agosto—who played LeFou in the national tour of Beauty and the Beast—is directing West Side Story this session, and he’s bleary-eyed. While he has been working tirelessly with his cast in rehearsals, drawing out performances of shocking nuance, he sums up his thoughts on directing a teenage production of West Side Story: “I want the parents in and out in ninety minutes. Give them the balcony scene, give them Rita Moreno, give them ‘I Feel Pretty,’ and if they’re still awake in the second act, give them ‘Chino, give me the Gun!’ and call it a day.”

  17.

  Monday evening, Jack Romano Playhouse, and a performance of the Our Time Cabaret, the camp’s celebrated revue: Jordan First-man (a talented actor who otherwise plays Sweeney Todd this session) steps forward to sing a snippet of “Being Alive,” an emotional plea for companionship from the 1970 musical Company. The lyrics, as Sondheim originally wrote them: “Somebody to hold me too close, Somebody to hurt me too deep, Somebody to sit in my chair, And ruin my sleep, And make me aware of being alive.” Tonight—be it nerves, exhaustion, or a temporary lapse in concentration—Jordan blanks on the words, repeating “somebody to sit in my chair” two or three times over the melody. Backstage after the show, there is much hugging and celebrating and applause—before the conversation inevitably turns to teasing Jordan about that infraction. For the rest of the night (and much of the week), his best friends walk around camp, changing the lyrics of every song to “sit in my chair, to sit in my chair, to sit in my chair.”

  18.

  Playhouse Theater, a run-through of West Side Story: Before the rehearsal, director Stephen Agosto issues one command to his actors: “Every time you come out onstage,” he says, “think about why you’re coming out onstage.”

  Thirty minutes later, a blackout marks the end of a scene in the bridal shop where Anita works. While there are hired stagehands at Stagedoor, sometimes the children are asked to take small props on and off. Like now, when a young boy in glasses—one of the Sharks—is asked to quickly remove the dress form from the set.

  KID: [pauses]

  STEPHEN: “What is it, Boo-Boo?”

  KID: “Um, I have a question, Stephen. Why am I coming onstage right now?”

  STEPHEN: “To remove the dress form from the shop.”

  KID: “I know that … [innocently] But why am I coming on-stage?”

  STEPHEN: [beat] “Please take the dress form off of the stage.”

  19.

  Sneak Peek, Elsie Theater, Wednesday evening, two days until Performance Weekend. Sneak Peek is just what it says it is: a first look at that session’s fourteen shows. Each cast is invited up onstage to perform one number in front of the entire camp. John Stefaniuk (who came to Stagedoor in the ’90s directly from a post at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and has since gone on to be the associate director for The Lion King) came up with the idea back in 1996, and it’s a wonder no one thought of it earlier. These Stagedoor Manor campers spend three weeks rehearsing elaborate shows but almost never get to see their roommates perform.

  For Sneak Peek, the directors are instructed to select a group number—so that every kid in the cast will feel included. Yet the program can become a pissing contest between directors. It has been ever thus. “Word would get around very quickly at Stage-door,” Stefaniuk says. “There’d be sleeper hits, and shows to miss.” Stefaniuk recalls one camp director—so proud of his own work—leaning ov
er to another and whispering, “Did you see that choreography!” The other, unimpressed, sniffed and replied, “Yeah, I did. Like, forty years ago.”

  The competitive nature of the evening (among staff, anyway) leads to sometimes surprising scene selections. A few years back, Harry Katzman played Parchester, a supporting role, in Me and My Girl. He had only one song in the entire show, “The Family Solicitor.” That song didn’t introduce the musical, didn’t really make sense as a stand-alone piece. But still, that was the number the director chose to put up for Sneak Peek. Why? He knew it was the best thing he had. It’s a common occurrence. When Stagedoor mounted Elton John’s Aida one summer, in rehearsal the music director worked closely with the actress playing the character Amneris. She had a huge voice, but he counseled her to inject some nuance into her performance—to hold something back in a song so she could build to the climax. “Don’t give it all away,” he’d say in rehearsal. That was smart direction for the show, but not necessarily for Sneak Peek, where the cast has just a few moments to impress. And so, just before the cast of Aida went onstage to perform, this music director pulled that very same teenage girl aside to lay down a new law: “Forget what I said in rehearsal. You better belt your face off tonight.”

  This is just further proof that Stagedoor Manor is a microcosm of the New York theater scene. Consider this: Every summer in Manhattan, casts from the various Broadway shows perform in Bryant Park through a free lunchtime program called Broadway in the Park. “Broadway in the Park is Sneak Peek all over again,” Stefaniuk says. “It’s like, You go show those Wicked people what real acting is.”

  Sneak Peek 2009. Rachael Singer sits upstairs at the Elsie Theater, alongside the cast of Sweeney Todd. It is Wednesday evening and just thirty-six hours before her first performance as Mrs. Lovett. Tonight, the Sweeney cast is scheduled to perform “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”—the only number from the show where Rachael’s not featured. She will stand onstage tonight and sing along, but to be honest, she’s happy for the too-harsh glare of the spotlight to shift to someone else for a moment. Because Rachael would be the first to admit that, despite the extra rehearsal time she’d put in these two weeks, she wasn’t finding the character. She still didn’t understand Mrs. Lovett. The Stagedoor directors may have been preoccupied with tonight’s showcase, but Harry, Brian and Rachael were too concerned with their own progress to worry much about bragging rights. If Sneak Peek was a wash this year, so be it.