Theater Geek Page 9

  “It was manipulative,” Casey says. “But he saw us dressed as the Bobbsey Twins in our matching rugby shirts and thought, How am I going to teach these girls? It was effective!”

  Jack had other questionable tools to draw out a performance.

  Jack Romano was known for his passionate teaching methods, always in the service of the show. He was also known to throw hangers, soda cans, and folding chairs at small children.

  Every summer Jack directed Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, and it was an honor to be cast in these productions, even in a tiny role. One summer, while working with a female cast member on the song “My Death,” Jack told this girl the song was about losing her virginity. Years later Casey Williams saw Jacques Brel off-Broadway. “You know what ‘My Death’ is about? Death! But death meant nothing to teenagers. So Jack told that girl the song was about losing her virginity, which was as close as we’d get to understanding death.”

  There were no boundaries—least of all when it came to Jack’s improv exercises, which often included this setup: “You’re in the anteroom of a Nazi gas chamber. Okay! You all know what is about to happen. PLACES. WARNING. CURTAIN.” Jack would do that exercise with a six-year-old, says Keith Levenson, who worked at the camp in its earliest years. “He had no edit mode.”

  “Jack Romano didn’t see age,” explains the Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tesori (Broadway’s Shrek). “He saw talent, or not talent. It didn’t matter if you were eight or eighty-one. You were expected to work. And have that discipline.” If a kid wanted to go to the bathroom in the middle of a rehearsal, Jack would train his deep brown eyes on the kid. “Your body only thinks it needs to go to the bathroom,” he’d shout. “You can stand there for twelve fucking hours. Time is your problem! I’m the audience. The audience doesn’t care about your fucking problems.”

  There’s a larger point to be made here about these teenagers and their devotion to Jack Romano’s particular brand of teaching and (by extension) to Stagedoor Manor itself. In its infancy, Stagedoor appealed to the same types of campers that had flocked to Beginners Showcase.

  Jeff Blumenkrantz, who wrote the music to Broadway’s Urban Cowboy, explains. “One summer,” he says, “this twelve-year-old girl at camp was obsessed with that Elton John album Captain Fantastic. I remember sitting around with her trying to figure out how we could stage this thing as theater—basically conceptualizing what we now call a jukebox musical. I was young for my class. I was a theater fag. I always felt other than. Let’s put it this way: I used to survive the school year, and the reward was Stagedoor Manor.” Suddenly he wasn’t alone.

  It wasn’t just that these kids found each other at Stagedoor, and thus found a home. They found a better home. One whose rules made sense to them. Under Jack Romano’s direction, Stagedoor Manor—unlike high school—was an absolute meritocracy. The most popular kids at Stagedoor were always the most talented kids. Period. The social hierarchy was constructed around a set of rules these public school rejects could understand: if you were a teenage boy and you could hit an A above middle C, or you were a girl and you could belt to a high E, you were a star. The cool table in the cafeteria was reserved for the truly talented campers—not the prettiest girls, or the ones whose parents made the most money. And that was liberating. At home on Long Island, David Quinn—a child actor who’d been on a season of Sesame Street, and who much, much later sold his business, Allrecipes.com, to Reader’s Digest for a tidy sum—says, “I didn’t fit in. One summer, this girl from my high school came to Stagedoor. My worlds were colliding! But for her, it was like the Twilight Zone. She couldn’t figure it out. ‘Why is David Quinn the most popular person here?’”

  It’s no surprise that musicals like Runaways (about teenagers on the streets of New York) and The Me Nobody Knows (about poverty-stricken children dreaming of “having a million dollars”) were popular at Stagedoor, because they resonated with these campers—kids whose daily lives were so small, but whose dreams (as corny as that sounds) were so big they could only be expressed in song.

  Ultimately what these kids wanted was someone to treat them and their hopes seriously. Because the emotions were that real for them, and the stakes even bigger.

  Stagedoor was the ultimate parallel universe, and one of the first places a teenage boy could be an out homosexual. Michael Ian Black (Wet Hot American Summer) estimates that 80 percent of the boys at camp in his era were gay. And it was a nonissue. “It wasn’t something people talked about over breakfast,” he says. “I’m sure there were late-night circle jerks going on. I was there to hook up with girls. But the kids who were gay were obviously gay. They were pretty serious singers and dancers. And they also did the gay stuff that gay kids do.” (Seth Herzog, a stand-up comedian featured on VH1’s Best Week Ever, does a few minutes in his act about Stagedoor, pointing out the irony in the fact that the Stagedoor boys live together in one single dorm, and the female campers are forbidden from entering. “Who would care if the girls came in?” Herzog jokes, adding: “The counselors were gay. The choreographers, the directors, the teachers—they were all out. Basically, anyone who was allowed to touch us was gay.”) It was a welcome reprieve from suburbia. This was Reagan’s America, after all—that nihilistic time when the threat of nuclear war was in the air. A time when Harvey Fierstein publicly thanked his “lover” at the 1982 Tony Awards, and viewers were outraged! And yet here was Stagedoor—an oasis of freedom and expression.

  “At Stagedoor, you’d have these teenagers, some of them not yet hitting puberty, walking around wearing leg warmers and holding a cigarette in their hand,” says Adam Morenoff (now a New York City DJ better known as Mr. Blue). “Taking a drag on the cig and smashing it out with their Capezio. ‘I’m never going to make my rehearsal.’ Everyone bought into the fantasy of it all—that we were young adults learning how to deal with the stress of putting on a show. We were excited to get yelled at for not learning our lines.”

  It didn’t matter how successful Jack was as a teacher because by 1981 (five years in), Carl was in the hole for $250,000. He was fifty-five years old—fast approaching retirement age—and he was forced to take a second mortgage on his home in New Rochelle, all to make this wacky little camp work. A camp where the artistic director threw full cans of Tab soda at young children, and insisted Carl pay to outfit the women in one of his casts with red press-on finger nails, despite the cost, despite the fact that the nails didn’t add anything to the show, simply because that’s how he’d envisioned the girls looking.

  Enrollment was hovering around 150 campers per session—an improvement over the first years, certainly, but not enough to sustain the camp, at least not how Carl imagined it. Compounding matters, Carl was forced to offer scholarships to male campers. It wasn’t yet socially acceptable to send your young boy to theater camp, but Jack couldn’t exactly stage West Side Story without both Sharks and Jets. Meanwhile, to fill beds with paying customers, Carl oversaw the production of a promotional video, a sales tool he could send to prospective campers and their parents. Hoping to cast as wide a net as possible, Carl positioned Stagedoor Manor as an all-around camp experience that included swimming and horseback riding. On that first video, one can even see some campers playing softball. “That was the staff!” says Konnie, then the head of the camp’s costume shop. “We couldn’t even get the kids to play sports for the video!”

  The camp had a profound effect on Elsie, it should be noted. “My sister and I were in our twenties when they started the camp,” says Cindy who was living in St. Louis, working in marketing, supporting her husband while he went to law school. “Our mother was a housewife. And suddenly she had a whole new world. And these people were lively and funny and there was so much going on. She thrived on it.” Elsie would chastise the women in the office for gossiping about the staff—and then she’d charge in, insisting to know the latest. When Carl went to sleep, Elsie would stay up late playing Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary with Cookie, Jack, and anoth
er director, Michael Larsen.

  But Carl and Elsie recognized they weren’t the only ones with something to lose. To close the camp would have been to cut these kids off at the knees. (Where else could a kid be woken up to Jennifer Holliday? “Over the loudspeaker,” says former camper Michael Scheman, “we’d wake up to the Dreamgirls soundtrack. You’d hear ‘Bong. Bong. Bong. And I am telling you…’”) To keep the business afloat—to squeeze some fat from the land—Carl leased the property to the Sullivan County Community College one winter for use as dorms (until the undergrads trashed the place). Elsie, for her part, went on a fact-finding mission to French Woods, a well-known theater camp in Hancock, New York, to see first-hand why the competition was so profitable. Ron Schaefer, the owner of French Woods, toured Elsie around. And she wasn’t impressed. “They served food on metal trays,” Elsie said. “Like a prison!”

  And then, disaster. Stagedoor Manor’s finances nearly broke apart in the summer of 1981, when a wall near the camp’s indoor pool cracked and Carl was slapped with a $7,000 repair bill. He was apoplectic. “We didn’t know how we were going to come up with the money,” Debra says.

  “My father always said it took ten years to build a business,” Cindy says. But the decade mark seemed to be further away than ever.

  To save Stagedoor Manor, Carl would have to tap into the rich history of the Catskill Mountains.

  For those unfamiliar with the golden age of the Borscht Belt, the Catskills was a bustling summertime resort area. Lillian Brown, owner of the nearly Brown’s Hotel, used to brag to anyone who’d listen that she spent a million dollars a year on entertainment. And she probably did. Bob Hope, Sammy Davis, Jr., Liberace—they all performed at Brown’s. And if Carl had his way, so too would the kids from Stagedoor Manor.

  Troubled by the upside-down balance sheet at Stagedoor, Carl would often escape to the coffee shop at Brown’s, where he struck up a friendship with the nightclub’s emcee, Bernie Miller. Never one to miss an opportunity for exposure, Carl regaled Bernie with stories of the talented campers at Stagedoor Manor. Carl had a plan: if he could get his pint-sized stars up on the Brown’s stage, perhaps the liver-spotted old-timers staying at the hotel would think, Hey, my granddaughter should go to that camp! Carl, a lover of big ideas, envisioned a touring cabaret of Stagedoor Manor kids as a regular act on the Borscht Belt circuit. Bernie seemed receptive. But then, nothing.

  The summer of 1981 was nearly over, and Carl (strapped for cash) decided to force the issue. He piled two precocious campers—Gordon Greenberg (who’d already appeared on Broadway in The Little Prince) and Caroline Greenberg (no relation)—into the car and ambushed Bernie, whose office was so small the four of them couldn’t all sit down at once. In the face of Carl’s resolve, Bernie crumbled and finally offered up a time slot, sort of. “Bring the kids over tomorrow night,” he said. “Lillian Brown doesn’t stay up for the late show.”

  At eleven o’clock the next evening, well past bedtime, these two Stagedoor kids returned to the Brown’s Hotel to sing their hearts out for the up-all-night crowd. “I don’t remember what I sang,” Gordon says now all these years later. “I just remember being upset that we performed in the small cabaret room, and not on the hotel’s glamorous main stage.”

  B-list venue or not, it was a fortuitous evening. Murray Waxman, once a child actor of some renown, happened to be in the audience that night. He was responsible for booking acts for a hotel called the Aladdin. Perhaps catching a glimpse of his former self in these underage performers, Murray pulled Carl aside: “Can you give me a show?”

  Rehearsals began immediately for a musical revue conceived by Jack, featuring songs like “If We Only Have Love,” from Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and Sondheim’s “Broadway Baby.” Jeanine Tesori wrote an opening number for the revue—stitching together a medley of familiar snippets from A Chorus Line, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Cabaret, and many others.

  Jon Cryer was in that first hotel-bound troupe, which Jack christened the Our Time Cabaret (after a lyric in Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along). “We performed in the bar at the Pines,” Cryer says. “The crowd was eight or nine people watching TV and drinking. The cast vastly outnumbered these patrons who, God help them, just wanted to drink. They didn’t ask for showtunes! But the management liked it so much they put us on the big stage a few weeks later.”

  Some parents would complain that Jack’s troupe was elitist. And so Carl very happily expanded the program, creating cabarets of different skill levels. It wasn’t as if those old-timers at the hotels knew the difference between the top-tier cabaret and the lesser talents anyway. In fact, Carl rarely turned down an opportunity to put the kids in front of an audience. He once took a gig at an Orthodox Jewish bungalow colony. “We had to borrow long-sleeve blouses and long skirts from the camp’s costume shop,” says Julie Stevens, who came to Stage-door directly from the Broadway company of Annie.

  “Carl sent us to perform at the Homowack Hotel,” Michael Scheman says. “The Homo wack. You can only imagine the jokes.”

  Very quickly, Carl’s ingenious plan to boost enrollment was in full bloom. “We performed at Brown’s,” Carl says, in an outtake from a documentary about the camp, beaming. “Sammy Davis, Jr., was in there on Saturday night. We were there Tuesday. And George Burns was in the following Saturday. One night, I had 180 kids out performing at the same time.” And enrollment at Stagedoor Manor spiked. In 1981, some 229 kids passed through (staying four or eight weeks). In 1987, that number more than doubled to 490. Carl updated his signature advertisement in the back of the New York Times Magazine, (the place so many first discovered Stagedoor Manor) adding the sales pitch: “Our campers PERFORM AT MAJOR RESORT HOTELS.”

  Carl developed other schemes to improve the camp’s finances. Namely, he tacked an extra week onto the summer. Previously, the camp season consisted of two distinct four-week sessions. But with a sudden demand for beds, Carl switched over to three, three-week sessions each summer. “That ninth week was all profit,” explains Jason Teran, Stagedoor’s camp director for seventeen summers, who helped Carl work out the logistics of the nine-week program. “You’ve already paid your staff. You’ve already paid for the grounds work and the upkeep. The ninth week is your gravy week.”

  In 1982, a four-week session cost $875. By 1986, the price for three weeks totaled $1,350. Beds were filling up. And Carl would stand in front of the cafeteria each morning watching the parade of campers pass by, welcoming each kid with his standard greeting: “Good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning.”

  And suddenly Stagedoor Manor was in the black.

  If we are lucky in this life, we will each have one teacher like Jack Romano, one teacher who can open our eyes. “I grew up outside Washington,” says Amy B. Harris (who wrote the famous “Post-it” episode of Sex and the City). “My parents were very cultural. We’d go to the Kennedy Center and see every play that came through. But Stagedoor is why I wanted to move to New York City—to be in a creative cultural environment. Stagedoor makes it possible. Like, Oh, you can make a living at that. You can make that your life’s work.”

  Jonathan Marc Sherman had his first play staged during the camp’s Festival Week, an early Stagedoor educational program where the kids would write and direct. So did Ivan Menchell, whose play The Cemetery Club opened on Broadway in 1990. (He now writes for the Jonas Brothers sitcom, Jonas.) The number of former campers who feel like they wouldn’t be where they are now—wouldn’t be in the city they’re living in, in the profession they’re working—if it hadn’t been for Stagedoor Manor, is legion.

  Jack never lost sight of the importance of the camp as a meritocracy. He wanted to be loved by all, but he was judicious with his praise. He would encourage a camper to see his talent through—but only if he believed the kid had talent. “Jack Romano took me aside after a workshop one day,” says Michael Ian Black. “I had no relationship with him. I hadn’t been in one
of his shows. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something to the effect of I think you have potential. I think you have something to contribute to this. That was the first time in my life that anybody expressed that kind of belief in me. And it was overwhelming. Even talking about it now, it’s an emotional moment for me. After that conversation, I wrote a rambling letter home to my mom, basically saying, ‘This guy who is a demigod thinks I’m talented. And this feels like a first step to me. And I think I can do this.’”

  It wasn’t just the campers whose lives were set off in a different direction by Jack. Jeanine Tesori was a musical director at Stagedoor. When she wrote the introduction to the Our Time Cabaret, Jack threw the first draft back in her face. “You stage this!” he shouted. “I can’t stage this.” It was too complicated, not visual enough. It was more than just that one lesson. Jeanine had been a Barnard pre-med student at the time she came to camp and had given up on music. She landed at Stagedoor by chance, spotting a job listing in a binder at the student service center. She could have easily turned the page. Yet after one summer at Stagedoor, she returned to school and changed her major to music. “For me,” Jeanine says, “Stagedoor was the first proof there was a chance of making a living in music. It had not occurred to me.” This, from the Tony-winning composer of the ambitious Caroline, or Change—a show that transferred from the Public Theater to Broadway in 2004, not because any of the producers involved believed it would actually make money, but because they felt this important piece of theater simply belonged on Broadway.

  Jeff Glave, who worked in the tech department for two summers, thinks back often on his time at Stagedoor. He built an industrial set for Berlin to Broadway—out of scrap metal he found at the garbage dump in Liberty, New York. He’s a set designer still, and on jobs like HBO’s Bored to Death or the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, he’s reminded of those early years working for Jack. “A film set is more like Stagedoor Manor than anything else,” he says, “because it’s a whole group of people, freezing outside with hideous jobs to do, but everyone keeps doing it because you don’t want to let your buddies down. You want to come up with the best. We pulled a rabbit out of the hat enough times at Stagedoor. It gave us our legs, it taught us to be resourceful.”