Theater Geek Page 8

  But when it comes to Brian’s own work, he’s less focused, and certainly not close to being off book (not close to having the dialogue memorized) for act one. For further proof of Brian’s interest in good times this summer (as opposed to hard work), while Rachael Singer enrolled in Master Dance—an intensive, audition-only class that meets five days a week—Brian enlisted his friends to take a class called Master Modeling. Master Modeling culminates in a runway show for the entire camp. And in one of the first lessons, the teacher demonstrates the proper way to walk down the runway, stop, pose for the camera, and then walk back. Brian and his friends take turns doing the same.

  When the class is over, Brian—who could be a wiseass when he wants to be—asks the teacher: “Will important modeling scouts be coming to the show?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Jack Romano

  STAGEDOOR MANOR CAME TOGETHER QUICKLY, PERHAPS TOO quickly, for Carl Samuelson, who started recruiting customers in March 1976. Though Stagedoor’s inaugural season was still three months away, Carl brazenly took out a newspaper advertisement announcing “Stagedoor Manor. Now in its second year!” Technically, this was true. Carl incorporated the business in late 1975.

  “My father didn’t think parents would send their kids to a first-year camp,” explains his daughter Debra. Still, when Stagedoor opened in June, operating out of an old hotel in Windham, New York, enrollment was anemic.

  There were other problems Carl couldn’t predict. From the outset, he clashed with the tech staff, a skeleton crew recruited from the theater department at the State University of New York at Oswego, a team tasked with building scenery for thirty shows. “Carl bought us these cheap twenty-five-dollar homeowner circular saws,” says Jeff Glave (who has since worked in production design on films like Malcolm X and A Beautiful Mind). “We’d burn up those saws within a day.” Carl thought if he bought quality tools the tech staff would walk off with them. But his logic was fuzzy. Jeff: “We said, ‘Carl, it’s a summer camp. You know where we sleep!’”

  “Carl always called himself a builder,” Jeff says, and it’s true, construction was his trade. “But it struck us that Carl was a builder who never built anything himself.”

  Though Stagedoor had been Carl’s big idea, strangely enough it was his wife Elsie who fell hardest for the camp. On the very first night in Windham, Elsie was awake well past one in the morning, mesmerized as she watched the kids audition. She turned to Carl, who was expecting to commute back to New Rochelle with her at the end of the weekend, and announced: “Bring my clothes. I’m not leaving.”

  “It was like running away with the circus,” says Debra, looking back on a time when her parents were suddenly the owners of a theater camp. “They had no idea what they were getting into.” From the ashes of Berkshire Showcase—a mess of unpaid creditors, fire department raids, and a Ronald McDonald clown—Stagedoor Manor emerged. But what would make an otherwise sober businessman like Carl Samuelson invest in such a project?

  “It was that crazy Cuban,” Debra says.

  There would be no Stagedoor Manor without Jack Romano, the charismatic Cuban immigrant who served as the camp’s first artistic director. His creative vision and educational ethos—unorthodox yet undeniably effective—influenced the early work of artists like Robert Downey, Jr., Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jon Cryer, and many others, and continues to be the basis of Stagedoor Manor’s rigorous program.

  But the man himself was a mystery. “No one knew why Jack Romano came to New York,” says Jeanine Tesori, the Tony-winning composer of Caroline, or Change, who worked at Stagedoor Manor in the early ’80s. “No one knew what he’d done, or why he was at camp.” That suited Jack just fine. He relished the mystique that surrounded him and was prone to telling stories. To some he claimed to have grown up extremely wealthy in Cuba. “He said his family had a pool shaped like a guitar,” says the director Gordon Greenberg (Happy Days: The Musical). “And the house was a tourist attraction.”

  “Jack told me this story,” says the playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman (whose drama Things We Want premiered off-Broadway in 2007). “When Jack was thirteen, his father took him to a brothel for his birthday. Jack told us in Cuba it was customary to get a virgin whore for your bar mitzvah. ‘That’s how it’s done,’ he said.” Sherman was fairly certain this wasn’t true. But the way Jack said it, you felt like it ought to be. And each supposedly true story was better than the one before. “Jack claimed to have won an Obie Award,” says the playwright Nicky Silver (Pterodactyls). “I don’t even think the Obies existed then! It would be like me saying I won a Blockbuster Award in the fifties.”

  There was no limit to his exaggerations. “When Jack’s mother showed up one summer,” says the casting director Mark Saks (TV’s Medium), “we thought he’d hired an actress. She looked like an Hispanic Estelle Getty.” And then there were the well-placed malapropisms. Jack would go to Burger King and order a “Whipper.” Some actually suspected his thick Cuban accent was fake, just another theatrical embellishment. That he suffered from a series of mysterious ailments—a limp, an incessant cough—only added to the impression.

  More curious, perhaps, was this man’s temper. Jack—whose compact frame seemed much too small to accommodate his explosive energy—could be wildly inappropriate. He cursed at children. He threw chairs. “He threw a metal hanger in my direction,” says Josh Charles (Dead Poet’s Society, CBS’s The Good Wife), who spent five summers at Stagedoor Manor in the ’80s. No one was spared from Jack’s outbursts. Jack’s niece, Ana del Castillo—she wasn’t actually his niece, but that’s another story—appeared in Jack’s Evita one summer. “I had this monologue,” Ana says, “and I messed up my lines. Jack comes backstage during intermission and screams at me: ‘Thank you for ruining my fucking show!’”

  Carl knew little (or none) of this when, in the summer of 1975, he stumbled upon Jack’s acting class on that fateful tour of Berkshire Showcase. Jack was addressing a small group of kids: “One thing that I really always want you to remember is that whenever you—the actor—is onstage, remember that the character that you’re playing always wants something. Always. The moment you stop wanting, the audience stops being interested in that character.”

  Carl may not have had theater in his bones, but he understood this was no ordinary educator. “I found a fascinating director, a crazy character, a hypnotizing, mesmerizing teacher,” Carl says in an un-aired interview from Stagedoor, a 2004 documentary about the camp.

  Jack Romano, a Cuban-born immigrant with a fiery disposition, was Stagedoor’s first artistic director. In acting class, he often told the kids: You have to be superhuman.

  “I walked into his class and I couldn’t walk out. Again and again and again.” With Berkshire Showcase in shambles, Carl invited Bob Brandon (Ronald McDonald) and Jack Romano to his home in New Rochelle to discuss how this all might work. In the end, Carl wouldn’t assume any of Brandon’s debt. (Nor would he work with someone who so brazenly misappropriated funds.) But Carl would happily take on that camp’s lone asset: Jack Romano.

  Jacob Behar Romano was born in Havana, Cuba, on July 1, 1937, the son of Turkish Jews who’d immigrated to Cuba. His father was a street merchant who sold clothing in town; his mother was a housewife. There was no guitar-shaped pool, no mansion in Santiago (another story he liked to tell the campers at Stagedoor Manor). Rather, Jack Romano grew up in a modest two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a four-unit building, where he lived with his parents and his sister, Hilda.

  From childhood, it was obvious that Jack was not like the other boys. “I was with him all the time as a little girl in Cuba,” says Reina del Castillo, his neighbor from that era. “He made me laugh. He made me cry. I am a little bit different. I like art. I saw that in him. And I saw that his mother—she was screaming at him for nothing.” In matters of parenting, Jack’s father took a backseat. “His father was sitting in a rocking chair all the time,” Reina says. “His mother was dominant. I think Jack left Cuba be
cause of that. He wanted to, let’s say, have the freedom to be himself.”

  In 1959, at the age of twenty-one, Jack flew to Europe to study acting at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. At least that’s what he told people. (The exclusive British drama school has no record of his attendance.) What is certain is that Jack traveled extensively overseas. And the timing was good. Back home, Cuba was in the midst of its own revolution; Jack reached his father, who advised him to stay abroad. Castro’s macho Cuba was no place for a young gay man in the arts, he reasoned. And so Jack sought refuge in New York, working a series of clerical jobs to pay his bills, including a stint as a secretary for the Manhattan Shirt Company, a retailer based in Paterson, New Jersey. “Jack was bilingual and well read,” says Jeffrey Zeiner, who once shared an apartment with Jack on West 21st Street. “He was good at typing. He had office skills.” For a spell, Jack lived in Jersey with a boyfriend, and that man’s mother. But when the relationship ended, Jack moved to Manhattan for a position at a travel agency, Fun in the Sun.

  Like many gay men in those years, Jack took to the bathhouses. He loved the drama. He dated (among others) a police officer who used to pick Jack up at night in his cruiser. “Jack loved anything that sounded a little dangerous,” Zeiner says. “He’d come home from the baths and say, ‘Honey, are you awake?’ I’d say, ‘Yes, Jaclyn.’ I called him Jaclyn. He’d come in and start squealing. ‘Oh, he hung his uniform on the back of the door.’”

  Jack began teaching acting classes out of his apartment, and in the mid-’60s he took a job directing children’s theater at the Gateway Playhouse in Bellport, Long Island. That’s where he met Zeiner (another director there). The Gateway kids gravitated to Jack immediately, Zeiner recalls. “Jack was extremely popular. His incredible passion was so sincere. And that accent!” When a kid did something impressive, Jack would clap his hands together and giggle. “He’d get so excited, he’d be on fire. And he’d light a fire under you.” Through a connection at the Gateway Playhouse, Jack found himself at Beginners Showcase in New Hampshire, and then at Stagedoor Manor.

  It was a strange and lawless time in the history of Stagedoor Manor. Carl moved the camp from Windham to the former Karmel Hotel in Loch Sheldrake, a sagging property that had been closed for five years. Though the hotel was dank and musty, Carl recognized something essential in the place: it had space for theaters. The barn, the nightclub, the health club—all three could be converted into performance venues. “My dad was able to visualize it all,” says Debra, now a lawyer in Manhattan. Carl bought the property out of foreclosure, signing the papers on May 3, 1977. With the aid of the U.S. government’s Small Business Administration program, he took a loan of $105,000 from the Sullivan County National Bank.

  Carl and Elsie lived on camp grounds, in a tiny yellow house that Elsie dubbed “Tara,” an ironic nod to the palatial estate from Gone With the Wind. Jack continued to run the artistic program. Carl concerned himself with the business negotiations. And Elsie, meanwhile, saw to the safety of the children. She was tireless in this pursuit. Late into the night, she and Carl would put on their bathrobes and grab their flashlights, stalking the camp in search of children out past curfew. “Elsie had radar like NORAD,” says David Quinn, a camper from that era. He isn’t exaggerating. One day early in the camp’s tenure, Elsie went to lunch in town with a friend. At the time, Carl still believed athletics was a crucial part of any camping experience, and so he’d hired a tennis instructor to take these tiny actors off grounds for lessons. One afternoon this coach decided he’d had enough tennis, and if the Stagedoor kids could keep a secret, he’d let them loose for an hour in ShopRite. Unfortunately, Elsie happened to be doing a little shopping of her own that afternoon, and was understandably disturbed to find an eleven-year-old camper in the supermarket. “What are you doing here?” Elsie asked the young girl.

  When Carl Samuelson purchased the Karmel Hotel, the resort’s Club Oasis nightspot would be converted into Stagedoor’s Playhouse Theater.

  “Uh, we’re at tennis?” the girl answered, sheepishly.

  “Obviously you’re not at tennis,” Elsie replied. “You’re in frozen foods.”

  But Carl and Elsie couldn’t be everywhere at once. Not even close. Excerpts from the extracurricular activities they missed:

  As a camper, Jeff Sharp—who later produced the Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry—used to get drunk with the staff. “We would sneak out of camp,” Sharp says, “and go to the bar at the end of the road.” From time to time, he’d see Cookie Saposnick, the camp’s first office manager, there, too. Here’s how Cookie remembers nights at the local watering hole: “For one dollar you could get this mixed drink. It was six liquors. They called it the Colorado Motherfucker.”

  This was a time when teenage campers were actually having sex with staff members. For example, Shawn Levy, the director of the Night at the Museum franchise, remembers: “I was sixteen. And I dated the dance counselor. She was British and twenty-one. I’m not sure how much more I should say. I’m married now with three daughters. But it was crazy. Stagedoor was a bit like the Wild West. There was an anything-goes mentality.” Well, not anything. Adam Pascal, who originated the role of Roger in Rent on Broadway, attended Stage-door Manor one summer with a childhood friend, “who got involved with one of the male instructors in an inappropriate way,” Pascal says. (That instructor was fired midsummer.)

  Paula Lawson, Loch Sheldrake’s first black camper (1977–81), recalls a wild display of drugs in the dorm. “I remember sitting across from four white kids and watching them drop acid,” she says. “I’d never seen anything like that!” Paula came to Stagedoor from the Virgin Islands and it was culture shock for her, encountering these wealthy kids with bad habits and the disposable income to support them. Paula, who would play Ben Vereen’s role in Pippin at Stagedoor, hung out with the kitchen staff after curfew. She was looking through an old photo album recently and came across a snapshot from one of those nights. “This kitchen staff guy was an Italian kid from the Bronx,” she says. “And above his bed was a Confederate flag. A Confederate flag! It never dawned on me until years later what that meant.”

  Stagedoor Manor’s kitchen was populated by wayward boys from a Bronx Big Brother program. But there were, believe it or not, doctoral candidates cleaning the toilets. True story: An ashram opened at the old Gilbert Hotel, three miles down the road from Stagedoor Manor. “People would come from all over the world to meet Swami Muktananda,” says Cookie. The swami preached the joys of simple tasks to free your mind. “So the people who lived at the ashram got jobs as the maintenance crew at Stagedoor. There was an architect, a doctor, a plumber from Belgium—all cleaning toilets.”

  If Stagedoor was a circus—and no one disputes it was—Jack Romano was the ringleader. He was also the only reason kids returned to Loch Sheldrake in these years. Because the educational program he designed for the camp was game-changing, and worlds apart from your local after-school acting class.

  The Stagedoor Manor ideology was Learn by doing. And more often than not: Learn by doing age-inappropriate material. For a time, Equus, the story of a psychologically disturbed teenage boy who blinds horses, was a staple of the season. Likewise, Stagedoor was perhaps the only summer camp where fourteen-year-old girls regularly played Mama Rose, the sexually aggressive, control-freak stage mom in Gypsy. For a time, the camp actually used a scene from Gypsy for auditions. Girls would line up outside the playhouse, waiting to perform for Jack, each one muttering that memorable speech under her breath, “Nobody laughs at me, because I laugh first. At me. Me from Seattle. Me with no education. Me with no talent, as you’ve kept reminding me my whole life!”

  You have to be superhuman, Jack would tell these kids. “He didn’t want to see people grinning from ear to ear, belting their brains out with nothing behind it,” says Michael Scheman, an early Stagedoor Manor camper. “He wanted you to dig deep.” There was a difference between being an actor and being a performer, Jack wo
uld say. Scheman played Daddy Warbucks in Annie at Stagedoor Manor in the mid-’80s. “Jack and I went through the script, page by page, talking about Daddy Warbucks,” Scheman says. “Warbucks was a Republican during the FDR administration, and what did that mean for him as a human being? And this was Annie! Jack didn’t care if you were singing ‘Put On a Happy Face,’ he wanted you to find the truth in that character. And if the writer didn’t supply it for you, you had to figure it out for yourself.”

  Jack could be unorthodox in his teachings, but rarely without purpose. Everything he did was in the service of the show. Casey Williams, now an actress in Los Angeles, explains. One summer she was cast in The House of Bernarda Alba, a 1945 Federico García Lorca play about an aging matriarch and her five daughters. Casey would play the sixty-year-old housekeeper, Poncia, while her best friend was cast as Bernarda, the titular mother who tortures Poncia. One afternoon, the two girls showed up to Jack’s rehearsal—dressed in matching striped rugby shirts, as was the fashion of the day. Jack took one look at them and exploded. “You should have rehearsal skirts on!” he shouted. “You show me no respect!”

  “Jack had a huge fit,” Casey says. “And I ran out of the rehearsal because I didn’t want to cry in front of him.” For the next week, the girls barely looked at Jack, let alone exchanged pleasantries with him. Finally, Jack pulled Casey out of a dance class one afternoon to talk. “Casey,” Jack said, “you’ve been hating me and cursing me under your breath all week.”

  “Yes,” Casey said. “I have been.”

  “Well,” Jack shouted, “that’s how Poncia feels about Bernarda!”