Broadway Tails (13 page)

In January of 1991 I was asked to participate in a new backers’ audition. The title had been changed from
Annie 2
to
Annie Warbucks
. Other big changes had been made to the characters and the plot. The creators still had $1 million left of their initial budget. They were looking to raise another $3 million for a commercial production that would come back
to Broadway. We did three auditions that February, but that was the last I heard from anyone for a while.

By now it had been six months since I had lost Sandy, but something new had happened. For years, I had felt that I was just a kid lucky enough to find an exceptional dog. Even after I had done other shows all around the country, I always felt insecure about my talent as an animal trainer. Now that special dog was gone, but I found that he had left me with knowledge about how to train animals. I realized that I could either let everything Sandy had taught me die with him, or I could continue moving forward with all I had learned from that wonderful dog. In a sense, that was the real start of my career.

In September I was called by the Marriott Lincolnshire Theater in Chicago. They had agreed to produce
Annie Warbucks
. Since they were a small dinner theater, they didn’t have the budget to bring out a lot of people from New York, and they couldn’t offer me much money. It would be a real stretch for me to afford it, but since the theater was in a Marriott hotel, they offered to put us up there and let us eat in the employees’ lounge, as well as pay us a small salary. The run would be from January until April 1992. It would be another shot at seeing how the new show worked in front of an audience, so I agreed to do it.

Beau was retired from
Annie 2
, although he continued touring with
Annie
until he died a few years later. I needed a new dog to be Chelsea’s understudy. In August my vet called me. He was in a neighboring town and had been ordered to euthanize a dog by the local animal warden. He called me up from the pound to say he thought I might be able to use this dog. It was nine o’clock at night, and I had a feeling I was being set up. But even though he wouldn’t give me a lot of details, he thought this was a good-looking dog.

When I went to see the dog thirty minutes later, the vet literally had the syringe lying on the table. There in the cage sat a stray they had named Cindy, a reddish, curly-haired dog who had floppy ears and a roman nose (a nose that didn’t have a bridge to it) and a white cross on her chest. She
had been severely abused and was terrified of people and wouldn’t let anybody get near her. Cindy was going to be euthanized because the people who had abandoned her as a puppy had left a collar on her. As she grew, the collar became embedded in her neck. It would require surgery to remove it, and the town wasn’t willing to pay for it. I looked at my vet because now I
knew
that he had set me up. I couldn’t let this dog die. I told him if he could get the collar off, I would try to train her.

If I thought Chelsea was a long shot for learning how to be a trained dog, she was nothing compared to Cindy. Still, if nothing else, I wanted to save her and find her a good home. Once they removed the collar, even while she was still recovering, Cindy showed a very sweet temperament. She got along well with the other dogs, and she was really very attentive—wild, crazy, un-housebroken, and a bad chewer, but desperately wanting to be loved.

In January of 1992, Chelsea, Cindy, and I drove out to the Marriott Lincolnshire in Chicago, where we would live for the next four months. We would rehearse for two weeks and begin previews at the end of January. This theater was unusual in that the production would be in the round, meaning the audience sat on all sides of the stage. There were no real sets—just furniture, props, and costumes. They were short one actor, so Martin asked me if I would step in and be a marine guard in a couple of the scenes.

It was a strange life, living in a hotel room for four months. Lauren Gaffney, now twelve, and her parents had the adjoining room, so she could sleep with the dogs every night, and I could look after her when her parents had to be away. The show had taken a different direction, and getting used to a whole new cast, new songs, and training a dog while working in the round proved to be a challenge. Chelsea and Lauren certainly tried their best. By then, Lauren had been working with Chelsea for almost a year and a half and was very good at handling her, but Chelsea would still panic when she looked for me and couldn’t find me (because there were no wings for me to be in). There were a couple of scenes where I could be onstage with her, but it really became a very difficult situation. We made the best of it, the show got pretty good reviews, and people became more optimistic.

Even though we ran there for almost four months, the creators wanted to work on the show some more. Because the reviews had been good, we were able to move to the Drury Lane Theatre, also in Chicago, where we ran from late April through mid-July. Word of mouth started to spread, and suddenly, audiences were coming to see this wonderful play. Other producers were now coming as well, and the possibility of it becoming the hit we all hoped for was increasing.

While we were there I had the chance to get to know and really train Cindy, whose name had been changed to Cindy Lou by one of the cast. At first Cindy Lou was a handful. She was bouncy and inquisitive, and on more than one occasion, Lauren Gaffney and I had to sneak chewed-on furniture out of our hotel room in the middle of the night, switching it with furniture in the lobby so we wouldn’t get charged for the damage. By July her chewing problems had gone away. At first she was frightened of strangers, but the cast was wonderful with her, and she was soon friendly with everyone in the show. Although the scarred area on her neck remained a little sensitive, she really was becoming a very fun, outgoing dog. And as I started to train her, she proved to be a very quick learner. One of my favorite memories of Cindy Lou took place at the Drury Lane Theatre. While we were onstage rehearsing, I had to tie her in the back row because we didn’t have a dressing room where I could leave her. When we looked out over the audience, we would see her peeking her nose up over the seats to watch the action. We also had a chance to do understudy rehearsals. In the first few rehearsals that Cindy Lou was onstage, she was actually more relaxed than Chelsea had been in over two years doing the play.

While we were at the Drury Lane, we learned that there would be a five-city national tour of
Annie Warbucks
. The show would be recast with Equity actors out of New York, and everyone hoped it would lead to a Broadway opening. At this point I made an important decision—I decided Cindy Lou should do the tour. I went to Martin and asked him to watch an understudy rehearsal. I said, “I want to use this dog for the tour.” He looked at me and said, “Are you sure she has what it takes? You’ve been
working with Chelsea for a year and a half.” I said, “Martin, she hasn’t gotten any better. She’s not happy. I think Cindy Lou would be right.” He said, “Okay, kid. I hope you can pull it off.”

Cindy Lou was almost flawless in rehearsals. Four months later, come opening night in California, she did a nearly perfect show. I was so pleased that in less than a year, this dog—a stray with a collar embedded in her neck, unsure of humans—had gone from being minutes from death to performing in a huge theater in California. Toward the end of the tour we were contacted by a New York producer named Karen Goodwin, who said she would be setting up a production for Broadway. We were going to open on April 21, the sixteenth anniversary of
Annie
’s opening night, and we would be opening in the same theater

Then, in January 1993, the opening was postponed for four weeks. In February it was postponed indefinitely. It was a huge blow for those of us who had been with the production from the beginning, to get so close to Broadway again without opening. Finally, new investors came forward to produce the show off-Broadway, with the opening set for August. By that point, I had found Chelsea a home in Pennsylvania where she would be much happier. I adopted a new dog named Cosmo to be our understudy. And Lauren Gaffney, now thirteen, had outgrown the role of Annie. She was replaced by one of the other orphans, Kathryn Zaremba. I take pride
in saying I first saw Kathryn while I was doing a summer stock production of
Annie
. It’s not my place to make casting recommendations, but I told Martin he had to see this girl. He hired her to play an orphan in the tour and now gave her the leading role.

When we finally had our New York opening, the show got good reviews. We were even invited to do a special performance at the White House for President and Mrs. Clinton at a Christmas party for the staff.
Annie Warbucks
was a wonderful show. In many ways, I think it was just as good as the original—maybe better—but because of its long, rocky road and the fact it never played on Broadway, it never got the recognition it deserved.

I also remember it for another milestone—Cindy Lou got to “sing” on cue to the music. Never before and never since has a dog been asked to bark in a musical number. But you won’t hear Cindy Lou on the cast album. The album producers wouldn’t pay for her to come to the recording session, so that’s Martin Charnin barking on the album. Just another example of how crazy this business can be.

In the fall of 1990, I was still reeling from the loss of Sandy, just trying to regroup, get my head together, and focus on what my training career would be like without my best friend. I heard rumors of a new play,
La Bête
, that had an animal in it, but no one had called. I found out that the general managers for
La Bête
were the people I had worked with for many years on
Annie
. The director wanted exotic birds onstage, but they decided they didn’t want to spend the money to hire a professional animal trainer just to handle the birds. The company manager, Wendy Orshan, had lined up a friend of hers, an actress named Dorothy Hanrahan—they had been friends for many years, since their days together in dinner theater. Wendy knew that Dorothy had owned birds for years, so she convinced Dorothy to go out and find the birds and train them for this play.

La Bête
was scheduled to open in Boston in December 1990, and then come to Broadway in January 1991. When I heard the animals were birds, I wasn’t too upset about not getting the job. I had never had a bird, I had no experience with birds, and, quite frankly, I didn’t think birds were trainable. In October Dorothy went to a bird store she knew in Stamford, Connecticut, her hometown. She bought two one-month-old cockatoos. They were infants, and at one month old, they were still being hand-fed with eyedroppers. She got two so she’d have an understudy. She named the main bird Cicero, and the second was called “B,” or B-Bird, since he was “second best.” She started hand-taming them and training them, bringing them into New York City to get them used to travel and to the company. The director wanted the character of the prince to hold one of the birds on his arm for a good part of the second act, so the bird was going to have to be calm and quiet onstage for half an hour or more at a time.

At that point, having Dorothy handle the birds seemed to be working well for everyone. The production was saving money by having an amateur animal handler on the show. As an unemployed actress, Dorothy was happy to have the work. Rehearsals in New York ran till mid-December, and then the company traveled to Boston for their out-of-town tryout. As with any new show, the play needed a lot of work. At some point the director decided the second act had problems, and he felt the solution would be to have a dog come out and do a trick. There have been many times in my career when I’ve been contacted by a show that was in trouble, when someone had the bright idea that putting an animal onstage would turn it into a hit. In this case, the director wanted another character to hand the prince an old shoe. When the prince throws it across the stage in disgust, a door suddenly opens, a dog comes in, picks up the shoe, brings it back to the prince, and runs off.

Near the end of December I got an apologetic call from the general managers. They had to admit that they had gone with another animal trainer in an effort to save money, but now, at the last minute, they needed a dog. They were still trying to save money, so they wondered if I would train their bird handler and just rent them the dog. I was taken aback on many different levels. On the one hand I was angry that they hadn’t come to me first, but on the other hand I was happy they came to me as the only person they thought could fix the problem.

At that time I had a little dog, a schnauzer mix named Bugsy, who had done a few shows for me. She was smart, very well trained, and very
attentive. Because the show was already up and running and they needed the dog immediately, Bugsy was the only dog I had that I felt could walk into a production, not be frightened by the audience, and do the behavior that they needed. But I was unsure about training someone I didn’t know. When I heard that Dorothy was a friend of the company manager and that her only qualification was that she had owned birds, I wasn’t at all sure this person would be able to handle Bugsy.

Even if I could train her to handle the dog, because of my experience with
Anything Goes
, I thought it was a bad idea, but I wanted to help. The lead producer on this show was a gentleman by the name of Stuart Ostrow. He had been producing on Broadway for many years, and, in fact, his daughter had been an apprentice at Goodspeed when I was the house manager there. I called Stuart and he was very happy to hear that I would be working on the play. In an effort to cement our relationship for further productions, I offered him a deal unlike any other contract I had signed. I said to him, “Look, I know this is a stretch. I know both financially and artistically, it may or may not work for you. So, instead of my normal contract, pay me a guaranteed amount through the Boston run. Then once we get back to New York and open on Broadway, if at any point you feel the dog isn’t working, you can let me go with one week’s notice and that will be that.”

Stuart and the general managers were very appreciative that I understood what they were going through and that I was interested in helping the production. So a day later I went up to Boston to have Bugsy audition for the director and to meet the bird handler. I remember arriving at the Wilbur Theater, where the show was running, early in the evening. They had a dressing room set up for me. I met the director onstage, and I was able to show him what Bugsy could do. I was invited to watch the show that night.

My dressing room was up on the fourth floor. As I was walking up the stairs, I saw Wendy with two people. One was the stage manager—she introduced the other as her good friend, Dorothy Hanrahan. I had been
expecting to meet some conniving gold digger trying to steal my work. Instead, I saw a beautiful woman with emerald green eyes and a sincere smile who said “It’s an honor to meet you” as she shook my hand. I immediately became suspicious. My intuition was telling me this was a good soul, but my experience was telling me not to trust her sweet face. Dorothy offered to help me with my bag and with Bugsy. I think I mumbled something stupid, excused myself, and went up to my room. I wanted to watch the show before I made any decisions.

It was a very interesting show—a modern-day verse play, very dramatic, a high farce in the style of Molière. I thought it was brilliant, but it wasn’t a Broadway-type show. After the performance I went back to see Dorothy and meet the birds. I was impressed by how well she cared for them. They were only two or three months old then and still needed to be hand-fed. I was amazed at how they had bonded to her. She would kiss them and pet them like they were little puppies. The training was much more complicated than I was used to with a dog. When I asked her where she had learned so much about birds, she said she was self-taught. Interesting, I thought, just like me. For a moment I was enjoying watching this woman show genuine affection for these creatures. Seeing the ease with which she handled them and the care and love she gave them, I thought given the proper training, she could easily be responsible for Bugsy.

Now, there were a couple of interesting things about training the dog for this show. First off, I was able to put some stipulations in the contract about the rehearsal time that I would need. Unlike shows in the past where getting the dog in would have the lowest priority, I made sure they put in writing that the dog would have high priority. I wanted guaranteed rehearsal time at least four times daily in a large space, plus stage time. I would have to rehearse once a day with the actor who played the prince. Dorothy would have to be available to work with me every day.

This production had a box set, which means that it had walls on the sides and in the back. Bugsy had to make her entrance every night through a
door, which posed a problem because she would be in the wings behind the wall and wouldn’t be able to see the shoe being thrown. We had to make sure the door was cracked open or that a hole was created so that she could see the shoe. She then would have to go out the door into this space, pick up the shoe in her mouth, bring it to the prince, drop it, and go back to where she had entered. They agreed to my conditions, and I decided to stay.

In an effort to keep my training on
Annie Warbucks
going forward, I brought Chelsea with me. I wanted her to get used to the road, living in hotels and possibly getting onstage. I had the two dogs with me when I arrived in Boston in January to begin rehearsals. Because I was being brought in so late, the show had only two weeks left in the Boston run. I told them I would take most of those two weeks to get Bugsy ready and then show them the behavior onstage for the last two Boston performances. The first week I would train the dog onstage, the second week I would train the dog to listen to Dorothy. By the end of the second week, I would then step out so they could look at it and decide whether it worked and whether they wanted to bring it back to New York.

The first day of rehearsal I was ready to start working with Dorothy and Bugsy, only to find out Dorothy had to leave. Her mother and aunt had been in a very bad car accident. They had survived, but they were in the hospital and both in very bad shape. Dorothy had to rush back to
Connecticut because the doctors were worried that her mother might not survive. Because it was an emergency, I agreed to take care of the birds and handle the show while Dorothy was away. Dorothy and the producers were very grateful I was willing to help. Dorothy showed me the birds’ medication, how to clean them, and how to feed them with an eyedropper—then she left to be with her family.

I wasn’t familiar with large birds. (In fact, the only birds I had ever been around were the chickens in my Uncle Gino’s backyard when I was a kid.) Cockatoos usually bond to the people who raise them, so Cicero and B were not happy that Dorothy wasn’t there. They made their displeasure known to me. It was a really rocky start to taking care of them. I fed them, made sure they were clean, and got them to the theater. The stage managers helped get them onstage, but I was responsible for their care the rest of the time. I remember thinking, “I hardly know this woman and I’m already doing her job.”

Dorothy’s mother stabilized, so Dorothy was able to return to the theater after a few days. I was doing okay but was glad she was back. I had an even greater appreciation for her—she was obviously concerned but her mother insisted she go back to the show. That week I spent every day in the theater working with the director, the dog, and Dorothy. We worked on getting Bugsy into the pattern of entering from the door and deciding what object she would pick up. We would have her bring it to a person. We used stage managers, stagehands, anybody we could find as stand-ins, just to teach her the pattern. Dorothy would always be next to me while we did this. At first Bugsy was a little confused and reluctant, but then she started to get used to the pattern.

Besides spending four hours a day together in the theater, Dorothy and I got to go on a little road trip. Once I committed to the show, I needed an understudy. The press agent for the Wilbur Theater was a lovely woman named Nance Movsesian. She was one of the leading press agents in Boston and knew my rescue work from
Annie
. She helped me call around to the
Boston shelters for an understudy dog. We located another small, scruffy mix at the Animal Rescue League in Boston. When we met Nance to get the directions, she said, “You two are so cute, are you a couple?” It was one of those moments when you wonder, does this stranger know something I don’t? Dorothy and I both laughed in an embarrassed way and went off.