Seth's Broadway Diary, Volume 1: Part 2 (27 page)

I asked Rue if it was true that her autobiography,
My First Five Husbands… And The Ones Who Got Away
, was being turned into a stage show. She said it was and I asked her if she was nervous that somebody else would get the part. She said, "Absolutely not!" I reminded her about Carol Channing/Barbra Streisand, and she said, "Carol Channing is Carol Channing… not Dolly Levi. I
am
Rue McClanahan!" She has a point.

Paul Shaffer from
David Letterman
got up and played. He offered to play a song he wrote himself, which is usually my cue to take a bathroom break, but turns out he wrote one of my favorite disco anthems: "It's Raining Men"! I
love
that song. He said that in the early ‘80s, Paul Jbara (who wrote "Last Dance," "The Main Event" and was the "Electric Blues" soloist in
Hair
) called him and asked him to co-write Donna Summer's comeback song. They wrote it in an afternoon and sent it to Donna. Unfortunately, he said that she rejected it because she became a born-again Christian and didn't want to say "It's raining men… hallelujah." Thankfully, they hooked up with The Weather Girls, and they let the belting begin!

At my Sirius
Live on Broadway
show I interviewed the fabulous Charlotte d'Amboise, who's starring as Roxie in
Chicago
. Turns out, she started dancing relatively late (eight years old), and even though her father was the famous dancer Jacques d'Amboise (lead dancer of NYCB), she still had to audition for the school. Rude. She always wanted to be a male ballet dancer because she would watch her dad dance and felt that he always got to do the exciting stuff and the ladies always had to do the sweet, petit allegro stuff. After she saw
A Chorus Line
and
Dancin'
, she was desperate to become a Broadway dancer because she felt the women got to be powerful when they danced. The summer she graduated high school, she was a dancer at Surflight Summer Theater on Long Beach Island in New Jersey, where I also spent many a year as a music director. It was one-week-stock, where you rehearse one show during the day and you're performing another one at night. Back then, even though they only had seven days of rehearsal, they didn't do easy little shows. They would literally do all of
Sweeney Todd
in a week! Off-book and fully staged!

Charlotte was mainly in the chorus, but the last show was
Company
and she got the dance role of Kathy. That summer, the music director was David Loud. Cut to, years later, she got the role of Kathy in the Roundabout revival of
Company
and David Loud was again the music director! When she graduated high school, she asked her parents to give her a year and if she didn't get a Broadway show, she'd go to college. Right before the year was up, she got a national tour of
Cats
. Her parents accepted that as a Broadway show even though it was a tour… and even though it was
Cats
. She got the role of Cassandra and loved doing that show. She remembers that she was constantly "working it" whether or not it was her feature. She finally had to tone it down because she hit an over-the-top cat/dancer pose (standing straight up with one paw raised) during "Memory" and held it for the entire song, and afterwards, Laurie Beechman told her to get the hell out of her light!

She was in the original cast of
Song and Dance
and got to dance with her brother, Christopher. Unfortunately, it was a romantic pas de deux, which Charlotte said had a weird incestuous subtext. People would come to the show and see that their last names were the same and, thankfully, assume they were married. It reminded me of when Hunter and Sutton Foster were both in
Grease!
on Broadway. Hunter was Roger and Sutton was Sandy, but Hunter understudied Danny. They both had a provision in their contracts that he would never go on for Danny opposite Sutton because they were horrified at the possibility of having to make-out onstage.

Charlotte tried out for the role of the mean girl in
Carrie
, but Mary Ellen Stuart was cast. However, she turned it down because, à la Donna Summer, she was a born-again Christian and didn't want to curse onstage. So, Charlotte lucked out. And by "lucked out," I mean "did one of the biggest flops Broadway has ever seen." Charlotte said that they did the show in London and it got
terrible
reviews. Then, they started rehearsing in New York… and nothing was changed! The only change was Barbara Cook left the role of the mother, and Betty Buckley took over, but the concept and direction of the scenes without Betty stayed exactly the same. Charlotte couldn't believe the show was going to open on Broadway as is. She said she remembers calling her mother after a performance and saying, "Mom… I think I got booed!" The show opened on a Thursday and closed on a Sunday, and yet she feels that if it stayed open, it would have run. Even though it was on Broadway for two weeks (including previews), there were people who saw it three times within those two weeks! She finally took it off her résumé because when she was touring, people would harass her constantly at the stage door, dying to talk about
Carrie
and begging her for a bootleg!

While she was doing
Carrie
, Charlotte auditioned for
Jerome Robbins' Broadway
. He taught her a combination and, typical dancer-style, she marked through it once to see if she knew it. She was then ready to dance it for him, but he said that he had seen enough, and she got the gig! She was hired to do a song called "Dreams Come True" from
Billion Dollar Baby
that was part dance, part comedy. However, she told him she also wanted to play Anita in "America." He didn't want her for the role because of the non-Latin way she looked, but she insisted that he let her try out. She did, and he told her she got it, but she wanted a guarantee. She knew she had to get it in her contract… and she was right. It was a six-month rehearsal process, and Charlotte said that Robbins was constantly taking parts away from people and trying them on others. Essentially, you got cast in the show and then auditioned again for the next six months.

He didn't want to put "I'm Flying" from
Peter Pan
in the show because it didn't really highlight his choreography… it was really about the flying. But the producers insisted, and it was put into the show. Charlotte auditioned for that and got it. In previews, she heard that they had to cut a number, and she was terrified that it was going be "I'm Flying." When she heard the audience reaction to the number, though, she knew that they
had
to keep it. So Robbins cut "Dreams Come True," her other big number! Busted. Be careful what you wish for!

In the ‘90s,
Chicago
called her to audition… for Velma! They wanted her for that role because there's more dancing in that part than Roxie. Charlotte called and said that she felt she was really right for Roxie, but they told her, "No." She had to audition for Velma. So, she prepared all the Roxie stuff and when she showed up for her audition, she launched into Roxie. They stopped her and said, "Aren't you auditioning for Velma?" and she acted confused and said, "No! Really? I don't think so. I thought it was for Roxie." They, of course, felt bad, told her not to worry about the mix up and just do what she prepared. The trick worked and she got Roxie!

At the beginning of the week, I hightailed it to Long Island to do a reading/signing of my two books,
The Q Guide to Broadway
and
Broadway Nights
. On the way home, I was waiting for a subway in Penn Station and ran into… Adam Pascal! While we were talking, I was blinded by his teeth and asked whether they were caps or if he just had them whitened… and he said neither! How dare they be so gleaming? He and Anthony Rapp are about to do the national tour of
Rent
. We talked about the
Chess
concert I put together for The Actors Fund in 2003 (directed by Peter Flynn and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli), where he played Freddie and Josh Groban played Anatoly. He recently did it in London and, turns out, the reason he got it is because someone put up a bootleg of Adam singing "Pity the Child" on
YouTube
, and the director saw it! Brava illegality!

OK, I'm out. I'll write next week… after the election and before I fly to Ithaca to launch the new season at The Hangar Theater. Peace out!

Sunnybrook Farm
's Bounty

November 10, 2008

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
ruined my diet. There, I said it. I rehearsed
Rebecca
for a week and last Monday was the reading. Once I showed up I discovered that Kelly Gonda, one of the producers from East of Doheny, loves home cooking, so instead of the food spread at the reading being a typical cheese and fruit platter (AKA stuff I'm not interested in), it featured
everything
I love. Cakes, brownies and my personal obsession, cookies. I'm obsessed with cookies, and I ingested about eight chocolate chip ones over the course of both acts. Then, on my way out, I shoved more in my pocket, praying there wasn't an electronic tag attached that would start beeping as I left the rehearsal room.

The reading went great, and the audience loved everything... including my broad comedy moments. There's nothing more devastating than doing a bit that gets big laughs in rehearsal and then getting crickets when you finally perform it. What was stressful was that all my comedy moments came near the end of the show, so I had to be nervous the whole time, hence the eight cookies.

Henry Krieger was the composer and, as many of you know, I'm obsessed with
Dreamgirls
. Here's some fun trivia. I had heard that the first song he and Tom Eyen wrote for that show was "One Night Only." They started talking about the show at a Manhattan diner and Henry wrote stuff down on a napkin.
However
, I was listening to a bootleg someone had of the pre-New York tryout of
Dreamgirls
and it had a totally different song where "One Night Only" normally went. I asked Henry if he really had written "One Night Only" first or if he wrote it only when the show came to Broadway. Turns out, it
was
the first
Dreamgirls
song, but it was
cut
in Boston by Michael Bennett. Why? Because Michael thought it sounded too Jewish!!!! I know that sounds crazy, but if you listen to it, especially the minor introduction with the oboe, it does have the essence of my Bar Mitzvah. However, people in the cast were so devastated when the song was cut that they begged Michael Bennett to put the song back in. When the
ushers
joined in with the begging, he knew that "One Night Only" was too good to cut.

And now, some
Dreamgirls
movie trivia. I heard that certain executives didn't want the amazing through-sung fight scene (featuring the memorable "You're lyin', you're lyin', I never been so thin") that leads up to "And I Am Telling You" in the film, so Bill Condon filmed one version with the fight as dialogue, and one version with the fight totally sung. Thankfully, the belting triumphed. I listen to that fight scene almost every day at the gym. Brava!

At my Sirius
Live on Broadway
show, I interviewed the Marvelous Wonderettes. Backstage, I was talking to two of the ladies in the show and learning their names. Bets Malone pointed out that she was not related to fellow cast member
Beth
Malone. "You're not siblings?" I asked. She laughed and said, "What mother would possibly do that to her child?" My lower lip started trembling as I informed her that my name is Seth Rudetsky and my sister's name is
Beth
Rudetsky. She was mortified, and I then proceeded to tell her the many different ways it was annoying. Once, I put Beth in a benefit I was doing (she's a
great
singer), and more than one person said to me, "I saw the name Beth Rudetsky on the poster. Is that your drag name?" What the-? They think that the most creative drag name I can come up with for Seth Rudetsky is
B
eth Rudetsky? A single letter change? Come on! If anything, I'd use my favorite (and most offensive) drag name I've ever heard: Amber Alert.

One of the Wonderettes, Farah Alvin, said that she tried out for a small regional theatre a year ago and the director looked at her résumé and her four Broadway shows and asked her if she was in Actors' Equity. She laughed at his joke. He wasn't joking. She explained that since she had been on Broadway… four times… it meant that she was in the union. She didn't get the gig. What did he think the Broadway credits on her résumé were? Shows she'd been called back for?

I also interviewed three of the stars of
13
. The role of Evan, the Bar Mitzvah boy, is played by Graham Phillips. I told him that his name did not indicate "Bar Mitzvah" to me, but rather someone at a Country Club who is in charge of keeping it "restricted." He acknowledged that he is indeed
not
Jewish and I told him that the last time I was this outraged at a casting choice was when Michelle Pfeiffer got the lead in the film version of
Frankie and Johnny
… He was blank-faced and I soon realized that the film was made in 1991… two years before he was born. Yowtch. I knew then that I had to throw out the next few bits I had planned featuring riffs on Agnes Moorehead, Erin Moran and Tab. Essentially, my frame of reference had to be limited to
The Last Five Years
… and not just the show. For my next interview, I might as well get a microscopic camera and interview a triple-threat zygote.