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  Perhaps to make amends, when the family moved to South Carolina, Harry’s mother agreed to send her son to New York once a year to meet his grandmother for a weekend of theater. On one of those escapes, the pair crammed in The Light in the Piazza at Lincoln Center, Sweeney Todd with Patti LuPone, the new musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and a still-in-previews off-Broadway show, See What I Want to See, playing at the Public Theater. See What I Want to See was written by another of Harry’s favorite composers, Michael John LaChiusa, who happened to be in the audience that night. Harry cornered the artist after the show, blurting out: “You don’t know me. My name is Harry Katzman and I’m a big fan of yours.” For the next twenty or thirty minutes, the pair talked about musicals, about Sondheim. “You remind me of me,” LaChiusa said. “How old are you?”

  Yet even those weekends could be problematic. Returning home from New York, the cloud returned over Harry’s face. “He’d had his freedom taken away,” his mother says.

  If Harry couldn’t run away to private school and couldn’t stay in Manhattan forever, there was a temporary salve in the offing. In the spring of his first year in South Carolina, Harry’s mother asked her son what he’d like to do for the summer. “You can go to camp,” she suggested. “That’s what American children do.” Harry googled “theater camp” and Stagedoor popped up on his screen. What’s the longest one can stay? he wondered. Nine weeks? Okay, I’ll do that.

  In June 2006, Harry landed at Newark Airport and boarded the bus to Loch Sheldrake. His first role was Lazar Wolf in Fiddler on the Roof. The director, Raymond Zilberberg, organized a special Shabbat dinner for the cast; they sat in a private room off the cafeteria, eating challah and talking about what life might have been like for these hardworking peasants in Fiddler’s Anatevka. It was a transformative experience. Harry later participated in a workshop of Rent, produced in conjunction with Music Theatre International, the Manhattan-based firm that licenses shows to everyone from community theaters down to elementary schools. Reps from MTI were on hand for the performance. They wanted to see if a PG version of Rent (a show about AIDS and homosexuality set in New York’s East Village) might still hold water. This was serious business. Rent composer Jonathan Larson famously died of an aortic aneurysm in 1996, on the morning that Rent was to premiere, and his parents (the protectors of his vision) traveled to Stagedoor for the workshop; MTI needed the Larsons’ blessing to proceed with a version of Rent where lyrics like “mucho masturbation” were changed to “mucho medication.” (They approved.) For Harry, that kind of immersion in theater was priceless. But the nine-week program was over almost before it began. For the final session that summer, Harry played the innkeeper Thénardier in Les Misérables. He performed his last show on a Saturday evening, and thirty-six hours later he was back in math class at the Episcopal school. It was like being torn from the womb.

  Harry Katzman as the crooked innkeeper Thénardier (alongside Rachel Geisler as his wife) in a 2006 production of Les Misérables. Less than 36 hours after taking his bow, Harry was back at school in South Carolina, and the abrupt transition was unsettling.

  “In my mind,” Harry says, “I was still in Les Mis.”

  The theater can’t be a substitute for life, though. And so Harry made friends at home in South Carolina. He lived in a bedroom above the garage. He would go to the prom. But if his high school experience could be summed up in a single anecdote, it’d be this: he was the kid who called his music teacher by her first name, and she let him, because it was Harry, and because she loved and respected him, too.

  For three years, Stagedoor Manor was an escape, the long winters an unfortunate layover until Harry could return to Oz, Neverland, Hogwarts—pick your favorite childhood fantasy metaphor. The second summer, Harry’s mother and her boyfriend, Rick, visited the camp, driving all the way from South Carolina to watch Harry play Judge Turpin in a production of Sweeney Todd. They were as out of place in Loch Sheldrake as Harry had been at home. Rick, a good ol’ southern boy, asked a Stagedoor camper if he knew the score to some sports game that was going on that day. This little kid stared back at him in abject horror, saying: “Are you serious? Do you think anyone here knows about sports?”

  Harry’s mother was impressed with the camp. She could see the effect Stagedoor Manor had on her son, and would admit a different boy came home at the end of each summer. Harry was maturing—and not just in terms of his talent. Still, for Harry, convincing his mother to let him return was always a struggle. The camp was very expensive, and she pushed back. “There are other responsibilities in life,” she says of her hesitation. “Like taking care of academics, like being a member of the family and the school community. And I never wanted him to peak too soon. I wanted him to have a childhood.” (Harry’s soon-to-be stepfather was so concerned the boy would skip college entirely, opting to move to Manhattan and start auditioning, that in 2009 he quietly called Konnie and requested she counsel Harry on the importance of education.)

  In the four summers Harry has spent at Stagedoor, his mother has visited only once. “It’s very far, and I own my own business,” Debbie Katzman explains. In her stead, Harry’s grandmother sometimes traveled to cheer on the boy. “And the other parents would adopt Harry,” his mother says. “I was grateful for that. Parents always love Harry. I run into people in the bank here in South Carolina. They say, ‘Are you Harry’s mom?’ I’ve gotten business because I’m Harry’s mom.” But in a camp where parents are often back and forth every three weeks—and the kids develop affectionate relationships with their friends’ parents—it was an emotional divide for Harry. He simply wished he could have shown his mother off a bit more.

  Like every challenge he faced, Harry turned the absence of his parents in the audience into a positive. “Some kids think, My parents are coming so it has to be the best!” Harry says. “I didn’t have that. There was no one in particular that I was performing for. I was performing for myself. And for the entire audience.” He thinks it through. “It was more about me performing for an audience, than for an audience that had my parents in it.”

  “It’s almost as if Harry has succeeded despite me,” his mother says, immediately recognizing how harsh that could sound. “I’m kidding. But I wasn’t one of those—what do you call them?—helicopter moms. I wasn’t hovering.”

  When it came time for Harry to plan the summer of 2009, his mother hoped her son would get a job. He’d already been accepted to college, and a damn fine one at that, the University of Michigan. So why return to Stagedoor? Harry and his mother argued. They shouted. And when his mom said she wouldn’t pay for camp, Harry fired off an e-mail to Konnie: “Can I come?” A scholarship was arranged. And so, if Harry was working harder than everyone else on the first day of rehearsal for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, perhaps he had reason to be. He never once took his bed at Stagedoor for granted.

  Seven or eight hours after the cast list was posted—setting camp in frantic motion—Harry Katzman stands in front of a mirror in a toohot rehearsal studio in the camp’s main building, sweating profusely. He is dressed in a striped polo, and when he uses the shirt to wipe the sweat from his brow, one can see a white undershirt beneath, tucked into his jeans, the cotton making a valiant effort to keep Harry’s girth in check.

  The director is slowly blocking (or staging) the show’s opening number, “Comedy Tonight.” It’s impossible to underestimate the importance of this song to any production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. While the 1962 Broadway premiere would go on to be the greatest commercial run of Sondheim’s career, the show almost closed in previews in Washington, D.C. Why? Because of the opening number. In Washington, Forum began with a polite soft-shoe song called “Love Is in the Air.” The problem: The show was meant to be a broad, slapstick farce, but no one had bothered to tell the audience. Thankfully, a new opening number, “Comedy Tonight,” was swapped in, giving the audience permission to laugh, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the For
um (which had once looked dead in the water) went on to run for 964 performances.

  Today, the Stagedoor choreographer has a notebook full of suggestions for Harry. On the lyric “something expensive,” she wants him to wave his hand in the air, pointing to his fourth finger, as if he’s wearing an expensive ring. Harry complies, wiggling his digits. On “something appalling,” she wants him to put his hand over his mouth in disgust. The director, Rob Scharlow—who once played Claude in a tour of Hair and is dressed as such today, wearing a tank top and cutoff cargo shorts—interjects with his own notes. He suggests Harry might want to go out into the audience and get a little playful with the crowd. Harry looks back at Rob, unsure if this is the right move for the character.

  Rob: “Are you okay with going into the audience?”

  Harry: [hesitating] “Yes.”

  Rob: “Are you sure?”

  Harry: “Yes. Why?”

  Rob: “Because you’re looking at me funny.”

  Before dismissing the company, the choreographer asks the cast to run “Comedy Tonight” from the beginning, putting Harry through his paces. “You’ll get tired of doing this one,” the director says. “Because we’re gonna work it and work it and work it.”

  Perhaps, but there’s not a groan of displeasure at tonight’s rehearsal. The kids are so eager to please. Yet, while there’s been a lot of laughter in the room, that’s not necessarily an indication of this production’s potential. Everything is funny on the first day. The cast is thrilled to be there. The choreography is inspired. And the director’s vision remains untainted, not yet threatened by compromises or by the ticking clock. Tonight everyone is too busy patting each other on the back to truly notice how uncomfortable Harry is.

  But for this young actor, rest assured, the panic has already set in. Pseudolus has been his great wish, and he was intimately familiar with both the book and the music to Forum. He suspected where Nathan Lane had the score transposed for the 1996 Broadway revival; he knew the different inflections Lane used to distance himself from Zero Mostel, who originated the role on Broadway in 1962. Harry had begged for this part. But now that he was lacing up Pseudolus’s Roman man-dals, he’s not so sure. “There are so many expectations,” he says, reaching for his ever-present bottle of water. “Everyone is saying, ‘You’ll be so funny! You were born to play this role! You are Pseudolus!’”

  And just like that, the two-hour rehearsal is over.

  When Brian Muller spotted his name on the cast list for Sondheim’s Into the Woods—he’d play the Baker—he felt as if this decision had been preordained. Into the Woods was the first show Brian saw at Stagedoor seven summers ago. That 2002 production—which would have been memorable anyway because it was the first to be staged in the camp’s Elsie Theater, built to replace the Barn, which burned down the year before—also happened to feature an all-star cast. Erich Bergen (later one of Vegas’s Jersey Boys) played Cinderella’s Prince, Dana Steingold (the national tour of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) starred as the Witch, and Caitlin Van Zandt (Johnny Sack’s daughter on The Sopranos) was the Baker’s Wife. Brian and his father still talk about that production.

  Into the Woods is often described as Sondheim’s most accessible show, perhaps because the characters are familiar to any child. They include Little Red Ridinghood, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Jack of the beanstalk fame—who hopes to trade his cow Milky White for cash so he can feed his worried mother. Sondheim ties the plot together with an original fairy tale about a Baker and his wife. A Witch has placed a curse on the Baker’s house, and the young couple will remain barren unless they can deliver to her ugliness “the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold.”

  Act one follows this quest and ends like any nursery rhyme should: with everyone fat and happy. The first half of this show feels so conclusive, in fact, that when it opened on Broadway in 1987, Sondheim himself used to stand outside the theater at intermission chasing people down the street shouting, “It’s not over!” The second act, well, that’s the dark half. The show was inspired by the research of Bruno Bettelheim (a child psychologist who analyzed nursery rhymes for Freudian impulses). In act two, Little Red Ridinghood is reborn as a violent Lolita type. Jack’s mother becomes drunk on their newfound (stolen) riches. And Cinderella’s Prince is painted as a philanderer, running from his new wife straight into the arms of any woman he meets. “I was raised to be charming, not sincere,” the Prince says (which surely qualifies as the best pickup line Sondheim ever wrote).

  In a sea of self-absorbed caricatures, the role of the Baker—which Brian would play in 2009—stands in stark contrast. His is the most layered: the Baker both drives the plot and functions as the emotional center of the show. Cinderella? She talks to birds, and they talk back. The Baker, however, is on a different emotional plane. He’s bullied by his wife, unsure of his life’s work, unsure he even wants the baby she desires so desperately. There is a challenge here for Brian, even more so than handling the notoriously difficult rhythms of Sondheim’s score. Brian is used to playing alpha males, typecasting even he admits. But the Baker is just the opposite. “The Baker isn’t controlling the situation,” Brian says. “That’s harder to play.”

  It has been an unusually rainy week at Stagedoor—even by Catskill Mountains standards—and on the first truly glorious morning of the summer, Brian (dressed in red gym shorts, T-shirt, baseball cap cocked just so) and the cast of Into the Woods sit belowground in a windowless room off of the Oasis Theater, plodding through the show’s twelve-minute prologue. (Belowground? If a kid doesn’t have greasepaint in his veins, Stagedoor Manor is probably not the place for him.)

  The prologue to Into the Woods is practically a play within a play, introducing each of the characters, and it’s a tongue twister. To wit, the following is meant to be spoken and sung—in its entirety—in under thirty-five seconds. Set your watch:

  NARRATOR

  Once upon a time

  CINDERELLA

  I wish …

  NARRATOR

  in a far-off kingdom

  CINDERELLA

  More than anything …

  NARRATOR

  lived a fair maiden,

  CINDERELLA

  More than jewels …

  NARRATOR

  a sad young lad

  JACK

  I wish …

  NARRATOR

  and a childless baker

  JACK

  More than life …

  CINDERELLA AND BAKER

  I wish …

  NARRATOR

  with his wife.

  JACK

  More than anything …

  CINDERELLA, BAKER, AND JACK

  More than the moon …

  BaKeR’S Wife

  I wish …

  CINDERELLA

  The King is giving a Festival.

  BAKER AND WIFE

  More than life …

  JACK

  I wish …

  CINDERELLA

  I wish to go to the Festival.

  BAKER AND WIFE

  More than riches …

  JACK

  I wish my cow would give us some milk.

  BAKER’S WIFE

  More than anything …

  CINDERELLA

  And the Ball …

  JACK

  Please, pal …

  BAKER

  I wish we had a child.

  BAKER’S WIFE

  I want a child …

  CINDERELLA

  I wish to go to the Festival.

  JACK

  Squeeze, pal …

  JACK

  I wish you’d give us some milk or even cheese … I wish …

  BAKER AND WIFE

  I wish we might have a child. I wish …

  CINDERELLA

  I wish …

  The melody repeats throughout the twelve minutes, but often with different inflections and different pacing
. Brian stumbles over the rhythms, not to mention the accented syllables.

  “The spell is on MY house,” Brian sings. “Only I can lift the SPELL. The spell is on MY house.”

  The Baker’s Wife argues: “No, no, the spell is on OUR house. WE must lift the SPELL.”

  The show’s music director, Jamie Mablin, interrupts Brian. “It needs to be quicker,” he says. Brian lets out a quiet huff, a rare hint of frustration. “That’s the fun of Sondheim,” Jamie responds. “It changes every time. That’s why we rehearse.”

  Expectations for this production were off the charts. Brian was the de facto leader of what many people at Stagedoor had immediately identified as “the most stacked cast on camp.” Katherine Lee Doherty, who starred in the original company of Mary Poppins on Broadway, would play Little Red Ridinghood. Charlotte Maltby, the talented daughter of Tony winner Richard Maltby, Jr., was cast as the Witch. Leah Fishbaugh (an enviable soprano with comic chops) would play the Baker’s Wife.

  Brian chose to deal with the pressure of these expectations in a unique way: by playing iPhone games during rehearsal instead of studying his lines.

  “It wasn’t just Brian,” the director Chris Armbrister says. “He’s lax. But I see that a lot from the kids who’ve been here before.”

  The Baker was the heartfelt core of the show, but as the first week went on, it was clear that Brian had not yet devoted much time to character study. Ask him about the Baker’s motivation and he’d joke: “The Baker used to be a rock star, and the Baker’s Wife was a groupie. Now he runs a special bakery—making pot brownies. But his wife backed him into a corner, and now he needs money.”

  Frankly, Brian is enjoying himself too much to worry. “I’ve done this before,” Brian says, admitting as much. “I feel more confident playing a leadership role.” After rehearsal one afternoon, the actor playing Cinderella’s Prince comes to him for advice. This younger camper is having trouble finding the laughs in his scenes, and Brian is happy to help. “You’re a prince,” Brian told him. “Don’t ever doubt what you say. Even if it’s bullshit. You’re the Prince! If you say it, it’s now true.” That slight adjustment worked wonders, and the kid was soon finding laughs where there’d only been yawns.