ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT – Part Five

The intensity of the lead up to my departure from Portland was almost too much to process. While there was a great deal to do in preparation for leaving, there were still some performance and directorial obligations to attend to. There were media interviews of every stripe, farewell lunches and brunches and dinners and parties and it was hard not to get caught up in all the hype. It was exhausting and not a little bit sad!

Fortunately, I’d had the foresight to reserve myself some down time at a hotel in St. Thomas for a week before starting the new adventure in New York. The contrast between the whirlwind of the final weeks in Portland and the stillness and calm of the Shibui Resort high above Charlotte Amalie was shocking and it took some adjustment. I still felt the buzz of all the departure craziness and was wracked for the first few days with homesickness. But there was no turning back.

I hit the ground running in New York. A friend had offered a room in his apartment in Inwood, a neighbourhood about as far as you can get from the mid-town action, up at 207th Street at the very end of the A Train line! But those long subway rides gave me time to adjust to a new way of doing just about everything in my life! The Portland Community had sent me off with a large financial gift from the Roast and my first order of business was to see as many shows as I could and to start auditioning. The former was easy (all I can say is thank God for the “half price” TKTS booth in Times Square – back in those days, it was a series of small joined sheds with grumpy guys cramped inside yelling back and forth to each other for what was available when you walked up to their windows; there was something very theatrical about the whole experience in itself). The latter, not so much.

What can be said about New York that hasn’t been said by just about everyone else already? What sticks in my mind most of all was the smell. I had arrived in mid-fall, when the air was getting crisp and the aroma of scorched pretzels from the street carts permeated midtown. Combined with the smell of electricity and a hint of stale urine from the subway air vents in the sidewalks, those smells grounded the city’s identity in the very core of my being and wrapped me, gradually, in a familiar and comforting hug each day.

In the first weeks, I saw a show every day, two on matinee days, and became very familiar with the Theatre District and environs. I can still feel the utter thrill of entering the tiny lobbies of those hallowed buildings, smelling the atmosphere, climbing the stairs to the balcony (which was usually where the half price tickets were) and privately wrapping myself in my profession. Show after show amazed and enthralled me. I was in Show Biz Mecca and it was everything I had hoped it would be. At least, from the front of the house.

Getting auditions was another thing altogether. It was hard! I haunted the Equity Audition Center daily, checking out the Broadway postings and making appointments. I auditioned for Austin Pendelton’s production of “The Little Foxes” with Elizabeth Taylor to no avail. I auditioned for high-end workshops of new plays, again to no avail. The supply and demand ratio was so out of whack but I knew that would be the case even before leaving Portland.

As time went on, I learned some of the ropes and managed to get myself “on the line” a number of times. Turning up at a theatre Stage Door at the crack of dawn to get a low audition number became routine. A low number is important! When there are seven hundred people trying out for five or six ensemble replacements it becomes a case of not wasting a whole day standing freezing on the street until they called your number or, mercifully sometimes, sitting in the semi-warm lobby of a theatre to get seen. A few times, I got close. But more often than not, word would circulate quickly that they were “typing out”. “Typing out” meant that only people who fit, to us, unknown visual criteria (height, weight, colouring, ethnicity) were allowed to audition. Groups of twenty or thirty were herded down to the theatre basement and lined up. A low level stage management grunt would walk up and down the line, look you over, make a note on a clip board, and then call out the numbers of those “suitable”, at least in their view, to go upstairs into the backstage area and wait to be heard. The whole demeaning process took about ninety seconds and you were back out on the street. Unless your number was called!

My big “close” was for the first National Tour of “Sweeny Todd”. It was at the Uris Theater (now the Gershwin). There was no typing-out and this was a lobby wait, so we were nice and warm by the time we got to go backstage. Nerves are an odd thing. When you don’t really know what to expect they tend to be somewhere way in the background, so, in a sense, ignorance is bliss. I had positioned myself close to one of the lobby doors into the theatre and would surreptitiously open it just a sliver to see what was going on when none of the patrolling stage management grunts were nearby.

The house was dark and the stage was lit. There was an old upright piano at left, just like in the movies!! An auditioner would come out, give their music to the pianist with an instruction or two, say their name, sing the requested sixteen bars and be told “thank you” from a voice in the dark (who, in this case, was Joanna Merlin, Harold Prince’s Casting Director) and leave. This happened over and over. It was hard to hear the voices with the door so minimally ajar, so I had no way of judging what the response was being based on. (Coincidentally, I’d sung for Hal Prince a few months earlier at a Lecture-Dem hosted by St. Mary’s Academy in Portland. He had some nice things to say about me at the time, but, of course, I couldn’t trade on that at this audition, could I?)

After a couple of hours, my group number was called and we were guided backstage and put in line to be heard. A number was called out and each would follow the routine I’d seen from the lobby door. The line was moving pretty fast as guy after guy walked on stage, got a “thank you” and exited. Some didn’t even get to finish the sixteen bars. I thought this was just another day wasted.

Because “Sweeny Todd” requires legit voices for the ensemble, I’d had decided to sing “Her Face” from “Carnival”. It’s beautiful melody soars nicely, shows some range, and I was very comfortable with it. I walked out into the immense space and over to the pianist. He was very pleasant to me and since the sixteen bar section was pretty straightforward he nodded and said I could go to center stage and start. Two bar intro and I was into the song. Part of me was paying attention to the singing; in fact, I was luxuriating in it because the incredible accompanist was gloriously expanding the sheet music and making the piano sound like an orchestra. But the other part of me was straining to hear that “thank you” that had stopped so many before me. I kept singing! The sixteen bars I’d chosen came and went and I just kept singing … all the way to the end. Silence. I looked over at the accompanist and he raised his eyebrows and smiled just a little bit. The silence went on for a long time, a very long time. I supposed that people were conferring out there in the dark but I could hear nothing. Then it came. “Thank you very much” and it was over.

Time seemed to have suspended itself as I walked off the stage. The memory is indelible. I remember the accompanist handing me back my music, smiling at me as he said “good luck to you” and then being lost in the backstage dark again walking toward the exit. It was that long, long silence after I’d sung that held so much beautifully intense promise. I didn’t want to let it go. I wasn’t upset or angry. I was euphoric! To have gotten that close was enough of a validation for me. I was viscerally satisfied that I’d made those folks in the Broadway Theatre dark stop and talk about me if only for a minute or so. The air was cold outside, but it didn’t matter. This was where I was meant to be! Mind, it could have been that in all that silence those folks were only giving their lunch orders to stage management! I chose to think that wasn’t the case.

Then, two things happened at the same time.

I had decided to lower my sights since Broadway wasn’t welcoming me with open arms. (That wasn’t to happen until a few years later (twice) and via an unexpected and completely different route – but more of that in another posting.) I went out for the annual Trinity Players production of “A Christmas Carol” and was cast as ‘Bob Cratchit’. Trinity Players operated under the “Equity 99-seat Waiver Contract” (a contract that has since disappeared at American Equity) which allowed a company to hire Equity actors for little (VERY little) or no pay. I got “a little”, mainly to cover transportation (subway) but I was in a show!!! And then, the other thing.

Part of my plan was to see a new place or take a tour of a building or city neighbourhood each day. Lincoln Center was high on that list and one afternoon I headed up there and bought a tour of the three main buildings of the complex – Met Opera, City Ballet and NY Phil. There were about 20 people on this tour (many of them Japanese who understood little or no English) and was led by a rather stylish older woman who obviously knew the material thoroughly and had, for want of a better term, a rather distinctive “New Yawk accent”. Her name was Peggy Kaufmann (just behind me in the pic to the left here with some of The Guides). She was somewhat glib and very funny and, because I was asking way too many questions and few of the other people in the group understood what she was talking about, she started to gravitate toward me and shape the tour to my questions. After it was over, we walked back toward the Met building and I asked her if they had any volunteer tour guide positions open. “Volunteer, hell! You get paid to do this, honey”. And that began my life at “LC”.

Ethel Weinstein ran the Tours. Thank God she took a shine to me (maybe too much of one, now that I think about it) because she was the definition of the word “battleaxe”. She must have been in her sixties. Thin and wiry with large glasses perched on her nose and a cigarette always dangling from the corner of her mouth, she epitomized an old school no-nonsense New York office manager. I hate to keep writing “New York” as a descriptor, but you couldn’t find these folks anywhere else!

The Tour of all the buildings was pretty detailed. It took a while to learn and memorize it, and, as I did, I would wander freely though the buildings making sure I knew everything about the art and sculpture, the architecture and history of the build. Never one to make it easy on myself, I would search out details and stories that no one else was including in their Tours (there were a lot of guides) and personalized it from my own performance experiences. It brought my tour to life and I couldn’t wait to get to work each day.

While that was happening during the day, I was rehearsing “A Christmas Carol” with Trinity Players at night. The one sad thing about Waiver shows was that if someone got a better (or paying) job somewhere else they would just disappear! I would come in to rehearsals to find a new ‘Mrs. Cratchit’ sitting across from me or a new ‘Mr. Fezziwig’ frantically learning dance steps in the corner with the choreographer. And the Chorus parts? Don’t get me started. There was always an Ensemble vocal rehearsal going on somewhere in the building! Having come from a highly disciplined approach to putting on a production, this New York way of doing things, at least on this level, surprised, saddened and angered me. But it was just the nature of the beast. Everyone was trying to make their way and these little shows were just for biding your time until something that would give you a leg up came along. Everyone accepted the fact (even the Union) and dealt with it and no one thought any worse of someone for leaving the production.

And as the year drew to a close, this is where I was – working in New York, IN the theatres (Lincoln Center) and IN the Theatre. But, to tell the truth, down deep, this didn’t feel right for me. Oh, I told myself that I was where I’d always wanted to be and I was earning a living of sorts. I had made some good friends and seen a lot of great work, but the harsh reality of actually living in “the City” was getting depressing. What was going to happen? And when? Fortunately, some wonderful opportunities were about to present themselves!