Theater Geek Read online

  As a young teenager, she auditioned for the Dreyfoos School of the Arts, a magnet program forty-five minutes from home. Rachael’s voice had developed a bluesy quality. And in the eighth grade, a teacher there pulled her aside to ask, “You do know you’re not black, right?” Rachael loved the school, yet even in an intensive arts program, she never quite felt as if she could discuss her ambitions with her classmates. If she had an audition or an extracurricular performance, she sometimes told her friends that she had a family commitment that weekend, rather than go into detail and further separate herself from the pack. If Rachael had a complaint it was this: some of the students at Dreyfoos lacked a significant work ethic. No one at Stagedoor Manor questioned Rachael’s work ethic.

  For her first Stagedoor audition in 2006, Rachael sang “When You Got it, Flaunt It,” from The Producers. It’s the song that introduces the Swedish secretary, Ulla Inga Hansen Benson Yansen Tallen Hallen Svaden Swanson; Uma Thurman played the part in the 2005 film. “The character is tall, blonde, Swedish, and beautiful,” Rachael says. “Everything I’m not.” (When Rachael utters this, over lunch before camp begins, her mother shakes her head, giving her daughter a troubled look, one that says I’ve heard this before, one that pleads, Why can’t you see what I see?)

  “I’m not legally a midget,” Rachael adds. “At least there’s that.”

  It is a hallmark of teenage years to feel betrayed by one’s body. But this kind of insecurity is compounded for young actors, Rachael concluded. In the summer of 2008, the casting director for the Jason Robert Brown musical 13, a then-Broadway-bound show about middle school brats in the Midwest, showed up at Stagedoor Manor to audition select campers. Rachael had three callbacks before she was cut. “Too old,” the casting director wrote next to her name (on a piece of paper the girl was never meant to see). Too old? “Sweetie!” Konnie said, pointing to Rachael’s chest. It wouldn’t be the last time she heard that. When a scout for Broadway’s Spring Awakening came to Stagedoor, Rachael auditioned but was labeled “too developed.” Well, that was that. Over the winter, she worked hard to lose fifteen pounds, not an insignificant sum for a compact frame—much of it coming off the top.

  If the professional opportunities weren’t exactly panning out, they certainly kept coming. In 2008, Stagedoor Manor put up a production of Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party, a gem about two vaudeville performers on a cocaine-fueled bender in Manhattan. Lippa’s musical (based on a Roaring Twenties poem by Joseph Moncure March) premiered off-Broadway in 2000, and while it has since been produced regionally and at colleges, Stagedoor’s production would be the first licensed to teenagers. The composer himself doubted that such a risqué show as The Wild Party would be palatable for high school students, or really, the parents of high school students. But Konnie pursued the rights aggressively and, along with the camp’s head of music, Jamie Mablin, worked closely with the composer himself and representatives from Music Theatre International to tailor the content.

  In The Wild Party, Rachael was cast as Mae, the petite, bubbly bride of a dim-witted boxer played by a camper who was at least two heads taller than her, which was part of the joke. Dressed in a purple 1920s dress, her dark hair tucked under a platinum wig, Rachael was a revelation, cavorting around the stage with her man. “Show’em your muscles!” Rachael shouted, in a high-pitched squeak. “Show ’em your muscles!”

  Rachael Singer was cast as Mae, a petite spitfire in Andrew Lippa’s musical The Wild Party. A scout from Disney Theatricals was in the audience for this 2008 Stagedoor production, and later invited Rachael to New York to audition for a new musical with designs on Broadway.

  Lippa, whose next show, The Addams Family, was scheduled to open on Broadway in 2010, happened to be in the audience that afternoon. A lightbulb went off. He was working on a new musical, Man in the Ceiling, for Disney Theatricals and was in the midst of casting that show’s workshop. Might this five-foot-nuttin’ girl be right for the obnoxious older sister? And so, in the fall of 2008, Disney’s Jennifer Rudin called Rachael and invited her to come to New York to audition for Lippa and Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatricals. There was a caveat, though. Before Disney went down this road, they’d need a commitment from Rachael’s family. If the girl got the part, they’d agree to relocate to New York for the duration of the production, however long that might be. Rachael would have to leave high school (in her senior year, no less) and be tutored in Manhattan. Her parents discussed it. Dropping out of school? Uh, okay. Who would move with her? Could one of them even afford to quit their job? And what of Rachael’s two younger siblings? Still, the opportunity was too good to pass up. Rachael and her father flew to New York in October 2008 to audition for Man in the Ceiling.

  She didn’t get the job.

  Though just eighteen, Rachael is already brutally aware of how tough this business can be. She is young enough to have a favorite sweatshirt (a Day-Glo yellow item she’s convinced is infused with magic restorative powers) yet mature enough to have someone with the keys to her career insinuate she’s too busty. “I’m trying to figure out where I fit,” Rachael says. “What my type is.” At five feet tall, she reasons, she’s not quite an ingénue, but more likely a character actress. In the fall of 2009, Rachael was scheduled to enroll at the esteemed Boston Conservatory to study musical theater. But the great character roles don’t come around for an actress until her thirties—if then. Did she have the resolve to stick it out? To fight?

  “I’m always doubting it,” Rachael says. “I’m always terrified of the rejection. I don’t know.” Her father shares similar concerns. “I worry every day,” he says. “Are we making the right decision?” Tuition and expenses for one year at The Boston Conservatory can run to $60,000. “The job prospects are not good,” Mike Singer says. “The economics don’t make sense. But I believe in her talent. And I want to give her that shot.”

  On that first night of camp, shortly before 11 P.M., Rachael steps out on the Playhouse stage to sing for Stagedoor’s casting committee. It’s dark in the 300-seat theater. Looking out into the audience, Rachael can see little more than shadows cast by the piano lamp. She chose sixteen bars of “With One Look,” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard. Tonight, it’s not Rachael’s best work. She flubs the lyrics, making something up on the fly. While her tone is clear, that’s about all one can say of the audition. And Rachael, dazed and excused, takes the sheet music back from the piano player and shrugs, as if to say, “What was that?” before exiting stage right.

  But the performance wasn’t the problem. Konnie has known Rachael for close to five years, and is well aware of her talent. From Konnie’s perspective, the problem is the song Rachael chose. Barbra Streisand often performs “With One Look” in concert, and this only confirmed Konnie’s suspicions. “Rachael thinks she’s Fanny Brice,” Konnie says, referencing the awkward, offbeat heroine of Funny Girl. “Rachael is content to play short Jewish girls for the rest of her life.”

  And that won’t do.

  No, Konnie has her own plans for Rachael. Perched in front of the casting chart—an oversized piece of oak-tag listing every major role up for grabs that Stagedoor session—Konnie picks up her pencil and writes the number 150 in one of the small squares.

  “Sometimes the numbers move,” Konnie says. “But this one will stick.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Beginners Showcase

  ALMOST UPON ARRIVAL IN JUNE 2009, KONNIE KITTRELL dropped a bomb on these already wound-up campers. She had something unprecedented and ambitious planned for this session, she said: Stagedoor Manor would put up a Sondheim festival. “Six Sondheim shows!” she says. Upping the drama, publicity was expected, she said, with reporters making the trek to Loch Sheldrake from Manhattan. “Playbill.com will be coming,” Konnie says.

  The idea of a Sondheim festival for teenagers (by teenagers) is at once ludicrous and inspired. Stephen Sondheim is the most important composer-lyricist working in musical theater today, and his mu
sic is tricky business, all intricate, dissonant harmonies, many in minor keys, plus mouthfuls of complicated lyrics. This is the man who rhymed liaisons with raisins in A Little Night Music—and won a Tony for it. “I told Konnie she was crazy,” Harry Katzman says with a laugh. “You may have enough talent to cast the leads, but you need to fill out the ensemble, too.”

  So, why Sondheim? For one, Konnie wanted to challenge these kids—perhaps the most talented graduating class, collectively, the camp had seen in some time. But there was a secondary reason Sondheim might hold their attention. The rap on the composer is that his work is cold, arrogant even. But Sondheim is really a spiritual cousin to these theater geeks. His characters are desperate for emotional connections. “Being Alive” from Company, “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park with George—these are songs about unapologetic need. Bobby in Company, the bachelor who won’t settle down, eventually begs, “Somebody crowd me with love, somebody force me to care, somebody make me come through, I’ll always be there, as frightened as you, to help us survive being alive.” It’s worth noting that Sondheim’s first musical, Saturday Night (written at age twenty-three), was about a young man in Brooklyn aching to be touched. While Sondheim described himself as “the boy in the bubble” to his biographer, Meryle Secrest, like these kids, he wasn’t a loner. As an undergrad at Williams College, he was so eager to fit in that he pledged a fraternity.

  Konnie has given the graduating Stagedoor seniors—eighteen of 291, with Harry, Brian Muller, and Rachael Singer among them—each a chance to request a role in a specific Sondheim musical. In a sign of just how in-the-know these kids are when it comes to musical theater history, one smarty-pants camper cracks, “Can I be in Road Show?”—referencing a troubled Sondheim property that, after a decade in the woods, had a brief off-Broadway run in 2008. As if returning a well-played volley, another kid asks if he can do John Doyle’s staging of Sweeney Todd; when Doyle directed that show in London and New York a few years back, he was applauded for bringing a new intimacy to the work by having the actors double as the orchestra, accompanying themselves onstage. “I should have brought my cello,” someone jokes.

  Still, Sondheim? On five stages? What sort of theater camp is this? To understand the ambitions of both Stagedoor Manor and its campers, to understand what need the camp fills in their lives, one must go back to the beginning—to the deranged, corrupt, unlikely, and heartfelt operation that first inspired Carl Samuelson to open Stagedoor Manor.

  In the summer of 1971, a reporter from the New York Times traveled to a seemingly idyllic summer camp called Beginners Showcase, which was run out of an old homestead near Georges Mills, New Hampshire. The camp was in its fifth season and thriving. “With a brisk nod to the ancient Greeks,” Howard Thompson wrote, “the youngsters were preparing a full-length outdoor Medea—flooded with strategic tree-lighting, on barbecue-pit rock slabs by a brook that trickles into Lake Sunapee.” Thompson went on to describe the educational opportunities at Beginners Showcase, and the sheer determination he identified on the faces of these campers. “The big question at Beginners Showcase is simple and virtually unanimous: to act or not to act, professionally.”

  Dorothea P. Fitzmaurice, the executive director and co-founder of Beginners Showcase, explained the camp’s mission to the Times: “What we offer is a thorough, accredited training setup where the kids can learn stagecraft, taste actual theater performing and then make up their own minds.”

  “With parental help,” added Bob Brandon, the camp’s president and director of admissions.

  What the New York Times described was nothing short of a no-judgments summer stock for the next generation of talent waiting to (as people said then) tread the boards.

  And from ten thousand feet, Beginners Showcase was utopia. Every few days, it seemed, a new show would premier at one of the camp’s theaters. Finian’s Rainbow. Mame. The House of Bernarda Alba. “I directed A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in four days,” says Peter Green, now a social worker in Rye, New York. “I don’t know how it is possible, but I did it. We all did.” At the time, the camp was unique in its ambitions. When Beginners Showcase Theatre and Music School/Camp, Inc. first opened its doors in 1967, it was one of just ten U.S. summer camps devoted to the dramatic arts. (By 2009, there would be more than eight hundred offering such programs.) And there was much to be admired about the place. The choreographer, Thommie Walsh, who later appeared in the original company of A Chorus Line on Broadway, taught dance at Beginners Showcase. Sally Lee, who’d danced in the film version of The Music Man, was imported from New York to choreograph a production of Cabaret. Despite the talented staff Beginners Showcase attracted, theater camp wasn’t yet a finishing school for Broadway or Tinseltown. The campers didn’t expect to be seen by the right people. That wasn’t in their vocabulary, because there was no precedent. “There was no sense that you might be discovered at Showcase,” says the playwright Nicky Silver, a Showcase camper in the 1970s who later contributed a new book to the 2002 Broadway revival of The Boys from Syracuse. “There were no agents or casting directors passing through.” With that, he pauses, apparently to muster the dirtiest analogy possible with which to characterize that era at Beginners Showcase. “If you were talented,” he says, “you might get a blow job behind the theater; if you weren’t talented, a hand job.”

  It wasn’t just Beginners Showcase’s bona fides that attracted these campers, or the glossy brochure promising “a summer guidance training program … at an altitude of 1,200 feet.” To be blunt: these kids often enrolled because no one else would have them. “At Showcase, you weren’t going to be ridiculed because you liked to sing in public, or you were moody, or you threw tantrums,” says David Edelstein, now the film critic for New York magazine, then Fagin in a Showcase production of Oliver! “You might not be especially charismatic or well liked or talented. But you were now a part of that great theatrical community.” What these kids were searching for, desperately, was some confirmation that they weren’t alone. “In high school,” Edelstein says, “you’d walk into a rehearsal room and all of your defenses would fall away. At Showcase, it was like that for a full eight weeks.”

  Ronald W. Weich, whom President Obama appointed assistant attorney general for the Office of Legislative Affairs at the Department of Justice, was a Showcase camper, perhaps despite his father’s wishes. “My father was never quite comfortable with us going to theater camp,” Weich says. “He’d say, ‘My friends go visit their children at camp, and their kids run to greet them in the parking lot carrying footballs and baseball bats. But you and your brother run to meet me in leotards and tights, coming from your dance class.’”

  Still, these exasperated parents, it seems, were so relieved to find a place where their children belonged that they happily paid a then-wild sum of $1,150 in tuition for the eight-week program. “There was this network of parents,” explains Charles Busch, a former camper and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, “who didn’t know what to do with their sensitive children. But they heard through the grapevine that there was this wonderful place where your creative young boy will feel at home. And they didn’t do much investigation. They just sent him there.”

  “There was no swimming,” Busch adds, as if further explanation were needed to separate Beginners Showcase from traditional summer camps in the area. “You were rehearsing all the time. The camp was this microcosm of showbiz—with stars, and hangers on, and wannabes, and power brokers.” Without missing a beat, Busch, who has made a career of performing in drag, adds this assessment of his own status at Showcase: “I was a B-movie actress. I could never quite get into the prestige picture.”

  But all was not well in Glocca Morra.

  Presiding over this supposedly idyllic scene was one Bob Brandon—full name Robert Brandon Fuller—a man who should not have been entrusted with the welfare of children. And yet there he was making recruiting trips on behalf of the camp, dropping
in on prospective Showcase families in the tri-state area. Among the many suspect claims Bob made was that he’d been the original Ronald McDonald clown. “He showed up at my house with photographs of himself dressed as Ronald McDonald,” Edelstein says.

  “That was the claim that made the camp legitimate,” adds Richard J. Allen, now the head of the film, television, and digital media department at Texas Christian University. “That Bob Brandon had been Ronald McDonald.”

  In that 1971 New York Times article about Beginners Showcase, Bob Brandon talked a mouthful about the importance of “parental help.” But help or supervision wasn’t exactly his forte. Bob was quick with a balloon animal, and made frequent appearances at area birthday parties performing under his clown name, Tickles. The problem came when Tickles would return to Showcase drunk, still in full clown makeup. A former camper recalls Bob Brandon—overweight, gay, with a nasal falsetto voice approaching Truman Capote’s—walking into a dorm room for young girls and making this lewd comment: “Flip ’em over and they all look the same.”

  If nothing else, Bob, who claimed to have written a book called Sawdust and Lace: The Confessions of a Gay TV Clown, was of a piece with the era at camp. “Beginners Showcase was a hotbed of sex and drugs,” says Nicky Silver. “There was a group of people—ages twelve or thirteen—who thought they were decadent. As far as I can tell, everyone was stoned and having sex.”

  It’s worth pausing to take the temperature of that time outside the camp’s walls. The Vietnam War raged on. The musical 1776 was a hot ticket on Broadway. But when the cast of that show was invited to the White House to perform for Richard Nixon, the president’s staff insisted the producers agree to drop an antiwar number first. (The producers balked; only when Nixon subsequently caved—he must have really wanted to see 1776—did the cast travel to D.C.) Meanwhile, Hair transferred to Broadway’s Biltmore Theatre where Leonard Bernstein walked out of an early performance. Richard Rodgers publicly trashed that show, too. But they were out of step with the public and Hair ran for more than four years. (True to that show’s trippy roots, the creative team made no secret of hiring an astrologer to assist in casting.)