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

The talent segments were great. Mr.
Tarzan
said that his plan had been to break a world record in toe touches. He then found out that there isn't one in the Guinness Book, so if he simply did two, he'd be a record holder. But instead of a world record, he decided to beat his personal best and do more than 30, which is what he once did at the theatre. Throughout his whole explanation, Nancy Opel was looking nonplussed. She later admitted that she didn't know toe touches were Russian splits (jumping in the air in a split and touching your toes). She thought it literally meant bending down and touching your toes. She thought, "What the hell's the impressive part?" Anyhoo, Mr.
Tarzan
wound up doing 51 toe touches! I thought the next day
Tarzan
audiences might hear, "At this performance, the role usually played by Nick Sanchez will be played by somebody who can walk."

The most outrageous talent was Mr.
Mamma Mia!
's (Frankie James Grande). His act consisted of him being Gollum from
Lord of the Rings
(with that crazy voice) as a contestant singing on the
Grease
reality show,
You're The One That I Want
. It was phenomenally daring because it could have bombed bigger than
The Blonde in the Thunderbird
, but the audience ate it up. As a matter of fact, he was the winner!

The interview segment was informative and funny and culminated with me asking Mr.
Chorus Line
what he would do if he was on for the role of Val and had to sing "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three." What would be the assets that he'd substitute for T and A? I ran to the piano and gave him an intro, and he launched into singing his greatest strength: "Jump spli-i-i-its!" He then demonstrated one. He jumped up, and micro-seconds later landed on the floor in a full 180 degree split. Incredibly impressive!

Then came swimsuits. As for the drunken cat-calls I had dreaded, they issued forth not from the audience, but from all three judges. Holy Moley! Mr.
Curtains
was wearing a sassy little number, and when he turned around, he was able to open the "curtains" and give everyone an eyeful! And Mr.
Chorus Line
wore a tiny suit that showed everyone you could put something extra large into something extra small.

At the beginning of the evening, we found out that when
Mr. Curtains
was a teenager, he had been thrown out of his house for being gay. But he then told us that not only has he reconciled with his Mom, but she now works at a shelter like the Ali Forney Center in Utah! Family seemed to be a big theme of the night. Tovah Feldshuh was a brilliant host and at one point told the audience that the two things you have to do as a parent is "love unconditionally and show up." She then gave a shout out to the various family members of the contestants in the audience. I was impressed that so many families came, but I know that I would have been mortified to be in front of my family, strutting my stuff in a dance belt masquerading as a bathing suit. Not because of the lurid sexiness, but because of the amount of love handle jokes I would have to endure at subsequent Thanksgivings. Being with my family is like being roasted at the Friars Club if they opened a branch in the Five Towns on Long Island.

Tuesday, I drove up to Albany with my boyfriend, James, to lobby for Gay Rights. Who knew you could speak directly to your representatives? What a great sense of power! And who knew my boyfriend had never heard my Actors Fund
Hair
CD? What a loss for him that I immediately rectified. Luckily the ride was long, so we were able to replay my favorite Shayna Steele riffs in "White Boys" and Julia Murney's amazing rendition of "Where Do I Go?" Where do I go, she asks? Straight to the lead in
Wicked
!

Wednesday was my monthly show at Cardinal Cooke Hospital. I've been volunteering for Lifebeat's Hearts and Voices for 15 years. We bring singers to people hospitalized with AIDS. It sounds depressing but it’s actually so much fun. I'll never forget when I was working in the prison AIDS ward and one of the inmates/patients was obsessed with my friend's (the triple-threated Naomi Naughton) rendition of "Nothing." He'd ask for it all the time. I finally got Priscilla Lopez to come in and sing it for him, and after the show I was talking to her about "Mr. Karp." She assured me that the whole song was real (except his name), and I asked how he died. Turns out, he killed himself! Wow. Was it left out of the song because it was too much of a downer? "Six months later I heard that Karp… had killed himself." Hmmm, I guess it also would have been too many eighth notes.

Over the weekend I saw
The Pirate Queen
, and brava to Stephanie J. Block for perilous ship climbing across scaffolds and perilous high belting across Ds and Es.

Sunday was my mom's birthday, and I threw her a surprise brunch with some of my friends. Stephen Spadaro (one of the Weissler company managers) got her a shirt that says "C’hai Maintenance." L’chaim! After the brunch, it was 2:30 and my mom wouldn't stop hocking me (Jewish expression for nagging) that we were going to be late to see
Talk Radio
, and she "hates being late for anything." I assured her that she was crazy and that we had more than enough time to get downtown. We got into a cab on 74th Street at 2:40 PM, and the traffic was suddenly horrific. By 3 PM were at 65th Street. So in a sense, we weren't late seeing
Talk Radio
. We simply never saw it. The good news is, she has a new story to add to her repertoire that includes her warning me to change trains at Jamaica when I take the Long Island Rail Road and me forgetting to do it one time, which landed me in the wrong station (that one's good for multiple "tsk-tsk-tsks" and head shaking from an elderly Jewish woman).
Happy Birthday.

All right, I'm off to prepare for three Jennifer Hudson concerts this week. Let the belting begin!

May 15, 2007

This week was chock full of belting.

First of all, on Monday, I played piano for Jennifer Hudson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a fundraiser for their costume collection. I got to the sound check early and a beautiful African-American woman asked me if I was going to see Jennifer later. I told her I would, and she asked me to say hello for her.

ME: Sure. What's your name?

HER: …Naomi.


ME: (Naomi? As in supermodel Naomi? Ah! I can’t remember her last name. Something with a C. Collins? Must clarify. Let me phrase question without using name) Um…aren't you famous for modeling?

HER: (Laughs.) Well, not that much anymore. (She leaves.)


SOUND MAN: Seth, you know that was Naomi Campbell, right?

ME:
That's
her last name!

SOUND MAN: (Glares)

Ooh! Just realized, I never gave the message. Jen, if you're reading this, Naomi says, "Hi." Wait. Is this my future? Intermediary between supermodel and Diva? Patti, if you're reading this, Iman says, "What up."

For a Met event the organizers asked Jennifer to sing "La Vie En Rose" because they were honoring somebody French. Now, while I think the song is pretty, it's not known for bringing down the house. Since it was the opener, I refused to let Jen do a mellow Piaf
fin.
Instead, I made up an arrangement for the ending. She sang it through, and then we did a tag:

(Slowly building) La vie en…
(more) La Vie en…
(Tremolo in piano) And-I-am-telling-you-
(Fermata in the piano as she riffs à la "You're gonna lo-o-o-ove") La vie-e-e-e-e-e-e-e en-
(Pause, then à la "me-eeee!") Ro-ose!!!!!

It made no sense, but got huge applause. Then she belted out two more songs ("Run to You" and "I Am Changing"), took her bow and exited. Well, the audience went
wild
! They demanded an encore. We hadn't planned one, but luckily, because I was too lazy to separate out what she was singing that night, I brought all of her music to the gig. She came back onstage and knew the audience would go crazy if she hauled out a certain song. Yes, she took center stage and belted a fierce "It's a Scandal, It's an Outrage" from
Oklahoma!
Anybody? No, actually I played three G octaves, and she launched into "And I Am Telling You." Brava!

Tuesday, I interviewed Stephanie J. Block and Alain Boublil for my Broadway show on Sirius. I spent a good part of the hour trying to pronounce the first and/or last name of Monsieur Boublil and essentially turned it into a combination of Eileen Brennan, Michael Bublé and Bebe Bensenheimer.

Stephanie is such a cool person who has been plagued by opening-night
nacht
mares. First, the night before she was supposed to open
Wicked
in Toronto, they were trying a new entrance for "No Good Deed" where she would fly in on a broom. It was a late-night rehearsal and, suddenly, one of the wires that was holding her up broke. The crew tried to get her down, but the computer kept overriding anything they did, so she was swinging around repeatedly above the stage, literally crashing into the light poles!

During
Pirate Queen
previews, everyone in the cast was spreading around a debilitating virus. She was able to avoid it until the critics came. She started the show on the big critics night, and ten minutes in had to have her understudy take over. Take this in, people: she was starring in a show and couldn't perform on a critics night! Do you know how sick you have to be to let yourself miss one of those nights? She was
devastated
. I was then obsessing with Alain about how much I love Frances Ruffelle as the original Eponine. He said that at the time of her audition, she was in
Starlight Express
in London, and they didn't think she'd be right. But when she walked in, she literally looked like those nineteenth-century illustrations of French waifs. And, I might add, she could belt an E ("I'm gonna scream, I'm gonna warn 'em here!") I remember interviewing Frances, and she told me that she was only 19 when she first did the show and didn't feel totally comfortable onstage. When they were staging her number, she didn't know what to do with her arms, so she folded them across her waist. Like a clichéd movie scene, everyone said, "That's it! Don't move!" That's right. The signature Eponine pose was really because of her uncomfortableness onstage. Brava, Mme. Ruffelle! Way to "take it from where you are"!

Wednesday, I went to Washington to play for Jennifer Hudson (again) at an event for the National Lupus Foundation. The event went long, and I wound up missing my train home. I took a flight the next morning that left at 6:50. Let me repeat that. My flight
left
at 6:50 AM. I haven't been up that early since high school drivers’ ed. Not cool.

Thursday, I had Julia Murney on
Chatterbox
. I'm so proud she's starring in
Wicked
. I asked her about her sassy slide during "Defying Gravity" at the end when she goes, "No one's gonna bri-i-i-i-ing me down!" She claims it was because she was nervous belting the crazy high "me" out of nowhere, so she decided to slide up to it instead. Like I always say, out of fear of belted high notes comes brilliant phrasing. She also talked about her lucrative voice-over career. Particularly, the one time she needed some extra bucks, so she was the voice of a porn cable channel. She did one of her signature commercials, and let's just say I never realized what the first syllable of the month of October could rhyme with. We were trying to think of other dirty months that they could have used. I pitched "Janu-hairy."

Thursday night, I had one more Jennifer Hudson gig. It was for the Candie's Foundation, and before the show I was talking to Jennifer about how hard it must be to sing these big showstoppers for every live gig. She said it would actually be easier if she was doing it more often. When she toured with "American Idol," even though she was doing a show every night of the week, she didn't really have to worry about warming up. I knew what she meant. One would think that if you do 11 o'clock numbers all the time, you'd tire your voice out. But it's actually much better to be consistently doing them. I remembered doing my Actors Fund concert of
Dreamgirls
and how Lillias White always wanted to sing all the Effie songs full out during rehearsals so she'd get it into her body and not go into a state of shock on the night of the show. I still can't believe that Effie has to sing "And I Am Telling You" and follow it with "I Am Changing." Even though plot-wise it's many years between those songs, it's only around 25 minutes in real time.

That afternoon, my mom and I finally got to see
Talk Radio
. Christine Pedi is my co-host on Sirius radio and in
Talk Radio
, and she does a slew of the different voices who call Liev Schreiber. Her acting and comic timing were both so great, and it was fun trying to figure out which characters she was voicing. It was also fun to see producer Jordan Roth in the audience taking his mother, producer Daryl Roth, and
her
mother to the show. Three generations of Roths. It was very "Gilmore Girls."
P.S. Years later, I was in the audience of MOTOWN with my Mom on Mother’s Day and Jordan and Daryl were also there. Why are we being stalked by Broadway’s top producers? And why won’t they simply produce one of my shows?