Seth's Broadway Diary, Volume 1: Part 2 (4 page)

The winner of the evening was Marty Thomas, who was Mr.
Xanadu
. He sang an amazing version of "Proud Mary" that sounded like it was in the original Tina Turner key. I remember seeing him years ago on
Star Search
when my friend Billy Porter was on a winning streak. Marty was in the kids’ category and was up against a buck-toothed brunette who sold it a little too hard. He wound up winning… and the girl who lost wound up becoming a mom with two kids. She also wound up in the Off-Broadway show
Ruthless
,
The New Mickey Mouse Club
and the film
Riding in the Car With Boys
. Yes, his singing won him
Star Search
over Britney Spears' performance... which incidentally may have been the last time she didn't lip synch.

I had so much fun judging with Hunter and Susan. First of all, I'm so obsessed with their "
[title of show]
Show." It's these ten-minute movies they've filmed over the last few months with amazing Broadway guest stars. I love the episode entitled "Snake Eats Tail" and Susan's seriousness when she talks of "sexperts." It's not a word and/or profession! How dare she infuse it with such gravitas? Brava on the line reading.

At the
Broadway Beauty Pageant
, Hunter asked the contestants what he called "tough questions," such as "Tyne, Bernadette or Patti?" I focused solely on the latter and asked one contestant a string of Patti questions which hit him like a machine gun:
Evita
or
Anything Goes
?
The Old Neighborhood
or
Noises Off
?
Life Goes On
or that TV movie about Lady Bird Johnson? After each option I threw out, Hunter would nod his head and mutter "tough questions…"

Speaking of Patti, on Thursday at the
Chatterbox
, I had two of
Gypsy
's sassy strippers: Alison Fraser, who plays Tessie Tura, and Marilyn Caskey, who plays Electra. Alison grew up in Natick, MA, where Bill Finn is from. After Bill graduated college, he came back to town and saw a high school show where Alison was singing "Stormy Weather." Why do so many theatre kids perform stuff they need 30 more years of life experience to be able to perform with any understanding? Why, at 13, was I one of the 27 (!) performers in my camp's production of
Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris
? Did I need to know that the "old folks never die… they just put down their heads and go to sleep one day…"? Why was that my solo? Devastating.

Anyway, Alison and Bill began performing together in the town square (he'd play piano and sing with her, and they'd get tips), but then she went off to Carnegie Mellon University. She hated the way they taught there, which she thought was sort of based on the theory, "You've all been the stars of your high school, so let's tear you down completely and then build you up again." She wound up leaving and moving to New York. Bill started working on
In Trousers
with Mary Testa and Alison. Alison said that she told Bill they should do a concert of the music in his apartment and see if anyone's interested. She remembers that they borrowed chairs from the local synagogue. Borrowed? I asked if she barged in and said, "I'm Christian. I'm taking these." But she claimed Bill was a member. Ira Weitzman, who was developing projects for Playwrights Horizons, came to the apartment concert and gave them a date to do a show. I'm obsessed that their allotted time for rehearsals was 12-4… in the morning! It was in the Times Square area during the terrifying 1970s when anything went.

Alison said she remembers that Bill, at around 3 AM and exhausted, was super thirsty and walked up to an assistant, begging, "Get me some Coke!" The assistant ran out and came back an hour later. He said that he couldn't get any right then, but was promised some tomorrow. Bill said "Why'd you go outside? There's a machine right in the lobby!" Yes, that ol’ chestnut about mixing up Coke/cocaine actually happened.

Alison also talked about auditioning. She absolutely hates it. She said that she's one of those actresses who really needs to delve into a role for a while to finally nail it. She thinks it takes a brave director to watch her audition and say, "Hmm… she's terrible… but might one day have it." She got cast in the original
The Secret Garden
and cut her hair super short as did Rebecca Luker, who was playing the ghostly wife. Rebecca is from the South and would hold hands with Alison when they left the theatre. One day, they were being interviewed for the radio, and the interviewer turned the tape off and asked, "So, you can tell me off the record. How long have you two been together?" It's that old equation: short hair + hand holding = hot girl-on-girl action.

Speaking of auditions, Alison didn't have to audition for
Gypsy
. Arthur Laurents saw her at the Bay Street Theatre last year, took her out to dinner and offered her Tessie Tura. And it was a perfect role considering her life now as a student. Yes, she regrets dropping out of college and has recently decided to finish her degree. She's going to John Jay and studying every night. Literally. The strippers don't enter 'til the middle of Act Two, so they have a lot of time on their hands. Alison was supposed to read
The Odyssey
, but it was hard to take in, so she started reading it out loud. Marilyn heard her and asked if she could play one of the parts. Soon they read the whole thing, as well as
The Iliad
, and Marilyn spends the beginning of the show testing Alison's knowledge of those classic snoozefests… I mean, masterpieces. Marilyn brought her notes on Thursday to the
Chatterbox
and tested my audience. For every question that the audience got before Alison did, they donated $20 to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Turns out the audience knew everything, and they gave a donation of $160! I was onstage the whole time and found out after that Alison was giving the audience the answers as Marilyn was reading! Pret-ty sneaky, sis.

Marilyn grew up in Utah and studied voice in college and then went to ACT in San Francisco. She played Cunegonde in a production of
Candide
at Arena Stage in DC, but had very little money when she got to New York, where she had moved. She was on a bus going uptown and saw someone she had just done
Candide
with. She was mortified because she had just come from a temp job as a secretary and saw her former castmate, who was now in
Phantom
, get on the bus. Marilyn tried to hide, but the woman came over. And it's a good thing she did, because she told Marilyn that she was gonna try to get her an audition! Marilyn said that the woman moved mountains to make it happen and it finally did. She got an audition for Carlotta and prepared the managers' scene (which goes to a high E!) and the speech that Carlotta says when something almost falls on her head in the first scene and she storms out. ("These-a things do happen? Well, until you stop these-a things from happening, this thing does
not
happen!") She inhaled to start the speech, and Hal Prince yelled, "Stop! This is not a comic monologue… She takes this very seriously. Her life was just threatened." I agree with him, but how did he know she was going to have a comic take on it from one inhale? Was her inhale hilarious? How do you inhale and make it funny? I'd ask Bill Clinton, but we all know he
didn't
inhale! That's right, now that it's election year, expect a string of numbingly unfunny jokes from me.

Marilyn said that she spent a year visualizing herself in that part: imagining how it felt coming to the theatre, seeing her name in the
Playbill
, having her picture outside. It was
The Secret
back when "Secret" just meant a deodorant strong enough for a man, but made for a woman. She had five auditions and was told that she had to go to Trump Tower to give her final audition for Sir Andrew (The Lordship came later). She had borrowed a pair of shoes for the audition that were too small, and they messed up her whole back. She remembers riding the bus home, leaning against the window and weeping because her sciatic nerve was flaring up so badly. When she got home, she got a call saying that she didn't need to do the next audition… she got it!

She also covered the role of Norma Desmond in the Toronto production of
Sunset Boulevard
. The role was being played by Diahann Carroll (who, you remember, was the first black female star of a TV series,
Julia
), and Marilyn said that there were certain performances where she (a red-headed white girl) would go on for the second act. My
Chatterbox
audience gasped, and Marilyn said, "That was pretty much the reaction of the audience up there." I remember doing
Forever Plaid
in Toronto and running into Marilyn. She made me laugh so hard because, as the standby, none of the front-of-house staff knew who she was because she was always backstage. So when she was scheduled to first go on, she heard one usher tell another, "Marilyn Caskey is playing Norma tonight." Marilyn walked up and said, "I hear she's fan-tastic! I drove from Florida to Toronto to see her." Marilyn explained to me, "Rumors are going to happen, why not start them yourself!"

The good news is that last Monday, I started recording the audio version of my novel,
Broadway Nights
, for
Audible.com
. I'm playing the lead character and I have a ton of actors coming to play all the others. Audible felt that in case an actor suddenly cancels at the last minute, I should first record the
entire
book! It's more than 350 pages!! I did the whole thing in four days and have the nodes to prove it. Now that I've recorded everything, I'm going to keep the narration parts, and I just started bringing in Broadway people to play the other roles. Last week, I had Ann Harada come out and play the cheap, nightmarish producer character, Bettina Geisenshlaag. Ann was fantastic and was joined by Kristin Chenoweth, who played Francoise, my assistant music director who is obsessed with the harpsichord... or, as she says, the "harp-see-chord," which is the way she claims it was originally pronounced. I paid for Kristin’s car service there but then neglected to mention she’d be joining us on NJ Transit for the way home from Newark. We were all exhausted slash devastated.

On a side note, I did
Grease!
years ago with Marissa Jaret Winokur and I am super proud that she's on
Dancing with the Stars
. Well, cut to, she's desperate to stay on that show and just sent me an email asking me to beg my friends to vote for her! The best part is, you don't even have to watch the show! You can listen to your CD of
Hairspray
and just keep your finger on the re-dial button.
She told me a few years later that the show pays up a storm and every week you remain on the show means an even higher paycheck. Sign me up ASAP!

All right, everyone, this week I finish recording
Broadway Nights
, see
South Pacific
and celebrate my mom's birthday.
And
I got an invite to the opening of
Glory Days
, the last show before the Tony cutoffs. I feel like such an insider — if an insider has to wait a complete theatre season to finally get an invitation to an opening night. Anybody? Nobody
.
I wound up not being able to go and I so wish I had. It was one of those shows that opened and closed on the same day!

Glory Days
and Nights

May 12, 2008

I finally finished the audio version of my book
Broadway Nights
! Oy, what a headache I had… and what manipulation I had to pull. First, I had to ask all these actors to be voices on my book… then I had to drop the bomb that it was being recorded in Newark. I was walking down Amsterdam Avenue in the West 70s mulling about how I couldn't find the right actor to be the voice of the horrible, shallow agent character. I needed somebody with amazing comic chops. Suddenly, I ran into Richard Kind. The next thing he knew, he was on a New Jersey Transit train heading to Newark at ten in the morning. I also had James play one of the roles and I was talking about it in front of Juli. I thought maybe she'd want to come watch us record, but I felt bad she couldn't play anyone in the book. Hmm, I considered, maybe the ex-alcoholic star who married a Mafia Don? Then I remembered there is a role for a seven-year-old who's trying out for the role of Young Cosette! The scene in the novel takes place when the lead character is playing auditions for
Les Miz
and this girl walks in and asks him to transpose a Charlotte Church song… and then blames her clanky singing on him! As she walks out, she turns to him and passive/aggressively says, "Thanks, anyway." Juli told me before she recorded that she decided the first word should be sweet and the second one sassy. Brava on the acting beats! To make sure another female in my life wasn't jealous of a seven-year-old, I also cast my mother on the recording. She actually read
three
roles: a rude usher, a pretentious actress and an anxiety-ridden usher. I decided to cast my mom according to the theory, "act what you know."