Forever the Fat Kid: How I Survived Dysfunction, Depression and Life in the Theater (18 page)

When I began modeling, it was with visions of magazine covers dancing in my head. The reality turned out to be a lot less glamorous. Instead of GQ and Esquire, I found myself gracing the pages of such publications as the Campbell’s Soup and Toys R Us annual reports. The only magazine cover I appeared on during my modeling career was a little known industry publication called Graduating Engineer. It wasn’t very glamorous, but it paid well. My ego could’ve become quite deflated with the lack of cover boy work that came my way. Thank God that I became a favorite for runway assignments. Initially, I thought that it was my dance ability that was getting me so much of this work, or maybe my boyish good looks, or maybe even my now noticeable bubble-butt. Imagine the shock to my system when, while conversing with a show coordinator one day, I was told that the main reason I was constantly requested back was because I was easily dressed right off the rack.

CLOSING NOTICE

Dancing on Broadway brought up the old “my gay son” issues between Jamesie and me. He had never approved of my involvement in theater. Whether it was the school plays, or my performing in community productions, or even now appearing in a Broadway musical, my father had a problem with me wanting to perform. Although he never voiced it, it was obvious that the reason had to do with the whole “gay” thing. And, in his eyes, my lack of masculinity was a poor reflection of him. I was in Whorehouse for six months, doing eight shows a week, and relatives from far and near made special trips to New York to see me perform in the show; friends and acquaintances were showing up nightly at the stage door after having seen the show. Imagine how it must have felt when my own father made no effort at all to see me in my Broadway debut. If I said that it didn’t bother me, I’d be lying. I offered him free tickets, volunteered to drive him in, and tried a hundred other ways to get him there, and he still found every excuse not to come.

Did Jamesie ever make it to see me in the show? Yes, on the day that we closed. It was a Saturday, a two-performance day. He came to the matinee–alone. I bought him the ticket, still not sure whether he’d back out at the last minute or not. All through the performance that afternoon, I wondered if he was actually there in the audience. I danced, sang, and acted my ass off that day. It wasn’t until after the show when I found him standing outside the stage door that I knew he had actually showed up. To my surprise, he wasn’t alone, he was standing in the center of a group of five or six other people, none of whom I recognized. Apparently, finally seeing me in the show, he couldn’t contain his excitement and had begun telling the people seated around him–total strangers, mind you–that I was his son. They all wanted to meet me, and he graciously obliged them. He’d gone from total embarrassment to total pride in just under two-and-a-half hours. Who knew that’s all it would take?

COMMUNITY THEATER

After Broadway, I took what many might consider a step backwards; I started doing Community (local/non-professional) Theater again. Not as a performer this time, but as a director and choreographer. It turned out to be a smart move. I was a novice in those areas, and I learned and honed those skills on the community theater stages of New Jersey. It was minimal pay for maximum work, but I managed to support myself with modeling assignments and by working as an aerobics instructor.

Directors in Community Theater are usually people who work their way up through the ranks; earning the right to direct for whichever local group they’ve spent years being an active part of. That’s not how it was for me. As luck would have it, a local theater in East Brunswick, New Jersey, was planning a production of The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas. I found out about it, contacted them, and was hired to both direct and choreograph the show. Although my credentials were less than stellar, I had performed in the show on Broadway. Hey, whatever it takes, right? Then, just before pre-production planning began, the theater was refused permission to do the show. They hurriedly picked another show but still kept me on as director and choreographer. The replacement show was The Wiz.

The Wiz did very well critically and financially, getting good word of mouth throughout the community theater circuit. During the run, members of another local theater approached me about directing Hair. Again, word of mouth and the reviews of Hair were outstanding, and I suddenly found myself much sought after as a director and choreographer of local theater productions in that particular part of the state. Somehow the new producers of Playhouse on the Mall, where I had served as apprentice eight years earlier, heard about my production of Hair and came to see it. Budget restraints had turned the former professional Playhouse into a non-union theater. They ended up transferring my production of Hair to the 600-seat theater where I first began my career as an apprentice. Hair repeated its success at the Playhouse, and the producers asked me to mount a production of Jesus Christ Superstar for them. All of this is the span of a single year.

Whether it was the style of the shows that I was directing, or the fact that I had appeared on Broadway, I seemed to attract the cream of the crop of New Jersey’s local talent to my auditions. Audiences accustomed to seeing obviously amateur actors, were blown away by the talent of those performing in my shows. Lest you think that I exaggerate, some of those appearing in my early community theater shows were later seen on Broadway in A Chorus Line, and The Who’s Tommy; in the National Tour of Les Miserables; and one even became a Fly Girl on TV’s “In Living Color.”

With the Playhouse production of Jesus Christ Superstar, my new best friend, James Rivera, and I finally got to work on a show together. Soon after our dinner at Curtain Up!, James was hired as a (g-string clad) male dancer at The Playboy Club in Atlantic City, but we still managed to get together whenever we had the opportunity. He even drove up after one of his shows to come with me to the re-opening of Whorehouse when it returned to Broadway after an engagement in Boston. Ever since we’d met, we had been anxious to work on a show together. Immediately after our production of Jesus Christ Superstar closed, James got his first professional theater job in a production of West Side Story. This was no surprise as his Latino good looks and dance abilities made him a shoo-in for any production of this classic. One of his fellow cast mates was dating a European producer putting together a tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. He was looking for a choreographer with prior experience of the show, and guess who, through that whole “six degrees…” thing, got the job?

EUROPE – Part One (1985)

One of the things you absolutely must possess to be successful in theater is the ability to uproot your entire life in a matter of hours. Although I was aware that I was under consideration for this unique opportunity, I was sure that I would be given at least a day or two to make a decision, and another day or so to prepare to leave should I accept it. Not so. I got the phone call around 7 p.m. on a Sunday evening offering me the job. I had to make a decision on the spot, because if I accepted, I would have to be on a plane to Europe the very next evening! Of course, I accepted the offer, and spent the next twenty-four hours washing and packing clothes, calling friends to give them the news, catching an hour or two of sleep, saying goodbye to family and friends, getting to a photo store to have photographs taken for the passport that I had yet to obtain, and dealing with every other imaginable detail. Talk about hectic! But I pulled it off, and with a minimum amount of stress.

The cast had been in rehearsal in New York for a week at the time I was hired. I met them at the airport on our way to Munich, Germany; I felt like the odd man out. Thank God that I was vaguely acquainted with one of the actors in the company; at least there was one person there that I could share a bit of small talk with. On the airplane, I watched as the cast laughed and joked with each other, pretty much ignoring me, the new kid on the block. It was intimidating. Already nervous as hell about the job that lay before me, I found myself with a group of people who didn’t seem to want to give me the time of day.

Arriving in Munich after far too long a flight, we were herded onto a bus for an even longer–and most uncomfortable–bus ride into Bad Tolz, the small German town where we’d be lodged for the final week of rehearsals before being shipped to Italy to begin performances. Slowly the cast began to warm up to me and, after recognizing my knowledge of the show and being impressed with my work, I began to make friends. The show was a success and I spent two months with the tour seeing and experiencing Europe at someone else’s expense.

EUROPE – Part Two (1986)

After the first European tour ended, a second producer obtained the rights to Jesus Christ Superstar. I was contacted by this new producer and offered the position of both choreographer and director, and in the fall of 1986, I found myself back in Europe again. Some of the actors from the first production were re-hired by the new producers, but there were other roles, particularly in the chorus, to be filled. I contacted some of my friends and offered them the jobs. It felt great to be able to help out some of the people who had worked so hard–and for free–for me in the past. Again, I stayed with the show for a few months, seeing even more of Europe before returning home.

EUROPE – One Mo’ Time (The Final Chapter) (1987/88)

I was barely home for two months when I got another trans-continental call with an offer to direct and choreograph West Side Story. Who was the first person that I called? My friend, James, of course. If anybody knew West Side Story, it was him. He had, by now, appeared in three or four more productions of the show and probably knew the original staging better than Jerome Robbins himself. I gave him the role of Bernardo and asked him to serve as assistant choreographer.

CASTING CALL

After casting most of West Side Story in New York, James and I were off to London to hold additional auditions to complete the casting for the show. There were a number of chorus roles still available and one lead, the role of Anita. Since almost everyone in the show was required to be strong dancers, we had everyone dance before making the first round of eliminations for the open positions. Those who made the cut were then asked back to sing. We then made further eliminations, hoping to find a performer in this final group who could play Anita. After breaking for lunch, we asked those who had survived the earlier cuts to read scenes from the script, to see what, if any, acting ability they possessed. There was one young lady, in particular, who had made it through the first two eliminations and was a strong contender for the role of Anita.

After lunch, this young lady performed a prepared monologue from a contemporary play. She was very good, but we wanted to hear her read one of Anita’s scenes from the script. Unfortunately, by this point we had dismissed all of the others and had nobody to read opposite her. Since James and I had to watch, we found ourselves in a bind. As it turned out, this young lady had a friend waiting for her outside and asked if we wanted her friend to come in and read the scene with her. Her friend happened to be one of the dancers that we had eliminated earlier in the day. A young, tall, and very attractive black woman, the friend had danced well, but we didn’t feel that she had a strong enough singing voice for the show. The two girls had lunched together during the break and the one whom we had eliminated had a few drinks. Our potential Anita went to the door and called out to her friend, “Abby, would you like to come in and read with me?”

Somewhat annoyed that she had been eliminated earlier in the process, Abby had to be coaxed into the room. The person that did finally step through the door was a far cry from the “adequate singer/strong dancer” that we had eliminated that morning. The lunch break booze, along with the fact that she was no longer in the running for a job, had given this girl an attitude that definitely hadn’t been there earlier in the day; basically, she didn’t give a shit. We hadn’t cast her, she didn’t like us, so what did it matter to her now? The former nervous hopeful was now a cocky, reckless, and aloof individual with attitude to spare! Although definitely “throwing shade,” she did it in a playful, flirtatious, and strangely appealing way. In short, she was everything that we wanted for the actress who would play the role of Anita. And in one of those 42nd Street-type scenarios, where the understudy gets the part and shines, it was Abby who received the phone call later that evening offering her a job, not her friend in whom we were originally interested.

Although she seemed a bit overwhelmed at the beginning, Abby worked her butt off to give us what we knew she was capable of and, ultimately, managed to bring all that we loved about her that afternoon to the stage. Because she was inexperienced, I became nurturing and protective of her. Not surprisingly, we became very close in the time that we worked together. Later, when things started to fall apart, Abby was one of the few people that stood by me.

YOU’RE FIRED!

I did many things right when mounting the European Tour of West Side Story. However, I did one major thing wrong. I became intimately involved with one of the cast members. This affair served as the catalyst for a chain reaction of events that led to me being fired from the production. With my inflated ego–here I was directing my third major European tour–I made the mistake of thinking that I was irreplaceable. I had yet to learn that everybody is replaceable. There’s always someone else who can do the job you were hired for, perhaps even better. And they’re just waiting for you to screw up so that they can step in and take your place. When I was fired from the production, it was little consolation that James, the cast member with whom I had the affair, and our dance captain, also left the show out of loyalty to me. Others, people who had been good friends prior, chose to stay. Needless to say, those relationships were forever tarnished. Feeling defeated by the whole situation, I wasn’t ready to return home right away with my tail between my legs, so I spent a week in London clearing my head before coming back to the US. When I did return, I moved in with James in the apartment that he had previously shared with a girlfriend; a girlfriend that he broke up with via telephone while we were in Europe. Although I certainly wasn’t averse to living with James, I moved in out of obligation as much as anything else. After all, he walked away from a well-paying job in the name of our friendship. He wasn’t sure how he was going to be able to afford his rent now that he was unemployed again. The least I could do was share the expenses.

RANDALL

After moving in with James, I started contacting people to let them know that I was back home again, and to give them my new phone number and address. I called a number of people from the earlier tours of Jesus Christ Superstar, and was asked by many if I had spoken with Randall. Randall was the actor who had played the role of Pontius Pilate. Finally, around the fourth time I heard the question, I asked, “Why is everybody asking me about Randall?” The person with whom I was speaking said, “You didn’t hear? He’s been really sick; he was even in the hospital a few times.” When pressed for more information, nobody seemed to have a clear idea what exactly his illness was. So, I called him.

Strangely enough, I hadn’t spoken with him since the Superstar tour had ended. This was odd, because during the second tour, Randall and I had become close. When he answered the phone, he sounded fine; actually, he sounded great. We spent the majority of the conversation catching up on our lives since the tour. With him not mentioning being sick, I finally asked, “Are you okay?” To which he answered, “I’m fine.” I told him that I’d heard he wasn’t well and that, whatever the problem was, it was serious enough to put him in the hospital. He said that, yes, he’d had some kind of stomach virus since getting back, but that everything was okay now. I dropped the subject. At the end of our lengthy conversation, I asked if we could get together sometime soon. “That would be great!” he replied. We finished the conversation by agreeing that one of us would call the other the following week to make more definite plans. I hung up the phone with a sense of relief that he was okay and the illness, whatever it was, had been greatly exaggerated by the other cast members that I had spoken with.

Life can get hectic. Especially when you’re trying to juggle many different things at once, as anyone pursuing a career in the theater is forced to do. Neither Randall nor I picked up the phone to call the other and set that date. I had totally forgotten that we had even agreed to do so by the time I got the phone call from Randall’s lover, Mark, a few months later. Mark had played Jesus in both tours of Superstar (that’s where he and Randall met). I was surprised to hear from Mark, as we hadn’t exactly been members of each other’s fan club. Though I respected his talent–the boy could sing his ass off!–I found him difficult to work with. And our relationship was, at best, civil but distant. In contrast, the Mark on the other end of the line that day was soft-spoken and sincere. He began the conversation by saying that he was calling because he knew that Randall and I were close. He recognized that the relationship between him and I was less cordial, but said he couldn’t not contact me at a time like this. Then he dropped the bomb; he told me that Randall was dead. As he continued speaking about how brave Randall had been through it all, how he kept up a good front until the end, and how he just kept getting sicker and sicker, it became clear that Randall had died of complications from AIDS.

Since it wasn’t until a number of years later that I found out about Peter who had died a few years earlier (and since I never really knew the exact cause of his death), Randall got the distinction of being the first person that I knew personally who lost their life to this disease. From that day until now, every time I hear of another death, another drug, any kind of statistic, I think about Randall. I think about how he kept the truth about his illness from me, about how he must have suffered physically, about the emotional turmoil the whole ordeal surely must have caused him…but mostly I think about how funny he was, and about the many private conversations we shared during that second tour that brought us closer together. He had been so open and honest with me then, why wasn’t he comfortable telling me that he was sick? His death also raised other questions, questions with no real answers. Why some and not others? Why him and not me? How different would my life be if there was no such thing as AIDS? How different would the world be? I got angry, I got sad, I got upset, and again–as is my pattern in life–I got over it. What other option was there?

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

My motto is: when the going gets tough, the tough get going…straight to the box office to buy themselves a ticket to a Broadway musical. After all of the West Side Story trauma, my personal escape was still the theater, always the theater. I found myself going to the theater three or four times a week during this time. I went to see anything and everything. I wasn’t picky, I just went. There was so much going on that I did not want to deal with. Friends were dying, I wasn’t achieving the success I wanted, I was obsessed with a man who was a total nut case, and the list went on and on. One of the shows that I saw during this period was Carrie, the Musical. Actually, I saw it twice. Carrie is legendary in the annals of musical theater as the flop by which all other flops are measured. Was it a mess? Yes, it was. Was it totally without merit? No way! Among other things, it gave me the opportunity to hear Darlene Love singing live, an experience close to heaven. Although I was familiar with Darlene from her pop recordings of the early 1960s, I had no idea of the true power of this woman’s voice. As I sat mesmerized watching her perform in Carrie, little did I know that the next time I’d hear her singing live would be two years later in a small rehearsal room on West 43rd street and the audience would be, basically, just me.

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

Inspired by music videos, which were beginning to take the world by storm in the 1980s, I began hatching the idea for a stage musical using the music video format. I was able to convince one of the local theaters to allow me to present an evening of dance vignettes called Offbeat. Using the music of Supertramp, Boz Scaggs, and Nona Hendryx among others, I created what were essentially music videos for the stage. Each piece ended with some odd twist, hence the title. The positive reaction to Offbeat led me to conceive a full-length theater piece using this same idea. I decided that using the material of a single performer and/or writer would add a sense of cohesiveness to the project (this was prior to Mamma Mia, Moving Out, and the popularity of other “jukebox musicals” that came years later) and after considering a number of different artists, I settled on Elton John. In addition to songs that were highly theatrical and easily lent themselves to various interpretations, he had an extensive catalog of material to pull from. I went to work and came up with a stage piece that I titled Goodbye Yellow Brick Road after one of his more popular albums.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was a two-act, high-concept musical centered on the rather odd fantasy lives of a young brother and sister. I set the first half of the show in the late 1950s. As the show opens, two children are seen dressed in pajamas and sitting in front of an old black and white TV. Their mother enters, turns off the television, and sends them to bed. Alone in their respective rooms (raised platforms on both sides of the stage) they begin to play. For each game that the children play, a related story unfolds onstage, each with an unhappy and/or bizarre twist ending. The second half of the piece was set twenty years later, in the 1970s, and the children were now young adults. At the start of the second act, the now-adult boy and girl came down from their respective bedrooms and onto the stage. As we watch their adult lives unfold, the characters from their childhood fantasy games return to comment on, guide, and coerce the brother and sister into their own similar, unhappy endings–all to the music of Elton John and Bernie Taupin. I conceived the show as a sort of anti-family piece; my way of lashing back at the typical, non-dysfunctional, white bread world that mainstream entertainment had thrust down my throat for most of my life. A world that, for most people, is as far away as you can possibly get from “reality.” And I conceived all of this without the use of any mind-altering drugs of any kind. All of my theater friends thought it was genius.

I knew in my heart that if I could get this show into production I would be hailed as the new genius of the American musical theater! And I was determined to see that happen, despite any obstacles I might encounter along the way. The first–and what would surely be the most difficult–was that I had to get permission to use all of this music. These weren’t songs by some unknown composer hoping for a big break; this was ELTON JOHN! When people saw that I was serious about doing this, that’s when the negativity started to creep in. Though still supportive to my face, I heard about the comments many of them made behind my back about how I should “just give it up” or how I “must be crazy thinking that Elton John would grant a nobody like me permission to use his music.” I began with a letter-writing campaign to Elton’s publishing company, Rocket Music, and I was able to get their ear. They seriously considered my request, and asked me to supply more specific information about what it was that I wanted to do. After many more rounds of written communications over a six-month period, everything came to a screeching halt. Suddenly they just stopped communicating with me. This, after initially showing interest in what I was proposing. Frustrated, I picked up the phone and called London to see what the problem was.