Places, Please!: Becoming a Jersey Boy (11 page)

Returning from the Dodger’s office, I highlight my new script, spend a few hours learning another scene, and have a wonderfully theatrical talk with my wife. “You are always talking about the Dodgers these days,” she says.

“Well, the Dodgers will be paying our rent for the next year.”

“Oh, I know,” she continues, “I just find it funny that we always refer to theatre producers as the somethings. The Dodgers. The Shuberts. The Nederlanders. I am pretty sure that the actual Shuberts aren’t there anymore; and were there even any actual Dodgers?”

“Don’t think so.”

“And yet we name them as if they are a family of people with the same last name running this large, theatrical business.”

“It’s a tradition, I guess. Like the Ringling brothers.”

I have no better answer than that. And I’m pretty sure Mr. Ringling and his brother (the other Mr. Ringling) aren’t still running the circus.

ACT II

REHEARSING IN NEW YORK

SCENTED CANDLES, JERSEY ACCENTS, & MASHED POTATOES

May 5th, 2009

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. (Or at least the next big chunk of my life.) I have my first rehearsals, in various locations, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. I rise very early to work on memorizing lines; I am almost to the end of the script with a first pass at knowing them. Then I have too much coffee, and pack. I throw a couple bottles of water into my backpack, along with my digital recorder, pencils, script, blank note paper, and my daily planner.

My first call is at the Upper West Side apartment of Adam Ben-David, conductor of the Broadway Company of
Jersey Boys
. He is well known for his work on rock musicals, and his job is to teach me the entire score in three hours. I can’t sight read music. I have to record somebody playing it for me, and then sing along with the recording until the parts become ingrained in my head. Due to this lack of ability, I am forever intimidated by conductors.

I arrive at his apartment ten minutes early so I will be ready to begin exactly at 10:00. I am greeted by the smell of scented candles and a furry little dog. I am very allergic to scented candles. And dogs. Awesome.

Adam is very cool to be around. He’s a fast talker, and he keeps answering his phone to get updates on the Tony Award nominations that are being announced today in Midtown. He takes a call, laughs and talks and drops a thousand theatrical names, then comes right back to the piano. Even with these fun interruptions, we manage to get through the entire score, getting every note into my digital recorder.

And there are a lot of notes. I sing in twenty songs, and each of them has pretty complex harmonies. Ron Melrose created these arrangements, and I know now that he left no rhythm, note, or phrasing untouched. When we finish the last song, Adam says something completely bizarre to me. He is possibly being sarcastic, but I don’t think so. I think these musical directors just have a different sense of how actors learn their music. Adam says, “Well, that’s it. We’re finished. There is so little music in this show; it’s easy, right?” (Ya…right.)

After a lunch break, which isn’t really a break since I spent it traveling to the Dodger’s rehearsal space in Midtown, I meet my own personal director, Shelley Butler.
Jersey Boys
is so big worldwide, and Des McAnuff is now busy running the Stratford Festival in Canada, that there are a few other directors that were hired to rehearse new people like me. These associates and assistants have memorized what Des says about every moment in the show, and it is their job to first impart that knowledge to me, and then exert their own creativity in helping me find the way to something truthful. So, they have a tricky job. They are recreating someone else’s work, but they have to have enough of their own smarts to make that work look good on me. Good luck, Shelley!

We begin with introductions. We’ll be spending a ton of time together over the next two months and we need to establish a basic working relationship. Shelley will be rehearsing me here in New York, and then will re-join me in Toronto in a few weeks, staying there through my opening. Her husband is West Hyler, who is the associate director of
Jersey Boys
and Des McAnuff’s right-hand man. West isn’t available to rehearse me because he is mounting the Australian premier of the show as we speak. Currently, I am the second Tommy that Shelley will be putting in to
Jersey Boys
. She’s really nice, humble, and very interested in finding my version of this character, as she knows the super bad-ass thing isn’t really me. (Nice. Three minutes in and she already knows I am not a super bad-ass.)

We spend four hours doing table work, and I feel really in my element. Table work encompasses all the preliminary talks that actors and directors have to have before actually getting up and staging anything. The table work can be about getting to know the dramaturgy of the play, deciding on motivations for actions, discussing character relationships, or just about anything else pertinent to how the show will play out. I know most of my lines as we work through the scenes, and feel proud to show her this! (This is dumb. I know.) And I learn a whole lot more about Tommy DeVito. What a guy he was. And is. He was actually in jail for a while in the 70s. That’s after having numerous Top Ten hits and selling millions of records, and was while “December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night)” was on the charts. He still lives in Las Vegas. Bad-ass. I should drop him an email someday.

Now I have to stop writing and go work on the harmonies I learned today. I am exhausted and all I want to do is go to bed, but I have to get cracking. Rehearsal never ends when I get home; it only ends when I can’t keep my eyes open any longer. Maybe I’ll just work on the music while sitting in bed with Cara. She curled up on the couch with me as soon as I arrived home tonight, asking me all kinds of questions about my day. It’s nice to be with someone who (1) understands the business, and (2) knows how hard I worked to get here.

May 6th, 2009

Today begins really early because Meg asks me to stop by her office to go through the contracts and riders she just received from the Canadian producers. I thought this would be a quick meeting, but it ends up taking an hour to get through the legal paperwork associated with working in another country, and the many and varied clauses associated with doing this particular show. For example, I am not allowed to perform any songs that are in the show in any public place while I am under contract. No “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” at a wedding or cabaret—that’s in writing.

And here’s a crazy thing: about halfway through our meeting, Meg and I realize that my contract with her expired six months ago. Neither of us had noticed the lapse until now.

“So, Meg, would you like to re-sign me?”

“Yes, Dan. Would you like to be re-signed?”

“Well... Let me consider...”

“Dan.”

“Yes?

“Dan.”

“Yes, Meg. Of course, Meg. Anything you say, Meg. You helped get me this far, Meg!” She isn’t into my little jokes, I think.

The first part of my rehearsal day was to be, according to the schedule, two hours of “scene work” with Shelley. In reality, we don’t really work on the scenes; we just lay out a lot of blocking. “Blocking” is an old theatrical term for the exact movements an actor makes on stage. This being a musical, all of the blocking is done in relation to numbers that are painted on the front edge of the stage floor. For instance, I am to say this line while walking stage left to number six, then speak the next one while walking three steps downstage and right to number two. Very precise. Shelley has a script with all of this information in it, and it is a very thick script.

After that blocking session, I have a two-hour meeting with the dialect coach, Stephen Gabis. What a neat guy! Stephen works with all the
Jersey Boys
companies throughout the world, and has done extensive research on this particular version of the mid-New Jersey dialect. He loves to tell stories, and launches into fifteen different accents while telling them. His first story today lasts a full twenty minutes, and my recorder is running the entire time.

I feel pretty good about my basic Jersey accent, but he helps me refine it to a truer time period. The specific accent for Tommy DeVito is one born of an Italian family that moved from the boroughs of New York City into the small cities of New Jersey. I would consider it more a New York accent than a Jersey accent, but Stephen tells me it is a New Jersey regionalism that isn’t really heard at all today. There are rules to follow, rules like dropping the final “r” sound in a word, but only if the next word in the sentence begins with a consonant. However, if a word begins with a vowel, you vocalize the “r” sound. This is great stuff.

To further prove how the
Jersey Boys
franchise has gone global, but remains grounded in the Tri-State area, Stephen is going to have a dialect session with the Australian Frankie Valli via Skype, as soon as he finishes with me. It is 7:00 a.m. down under, so I imagine the actor is going to appear in his bathrobe.

When Stephen’s Skype session begins (on a giant, flat-screen monitor in the Dodger’s conference room), I go down the hall to my first choreography session. Caitlin Carter is my own personal choreographer, and she scares me. She’s nice! Very, very nice! But scary. She is fast and fierce and wants to barrel through these moves at a quicker rate than I am ready for. (She doesn’t know how long it took me to learn that stuff on YouTube.) She wants the moves close to perfect right away, and she doesn’t pause very often to give me time to write stuff down. Just like I need to record my harmony lines so I can reference them later, so too do I have to write down every move of choreography so that I can remember the details when practicing back at my apartment. I don’t learn the moves by doing them a few times in the rehearsal studio; I learn the moves by reviewing them a hundred times in my bedroom.

“Caitlin, you do know I’m not really a dancer, right?”

“But you’ve had dance classes?”

“Well, sure, but...”

“And you’re a musical theatre actor, right?”

“Yeah, of course, but...”

“And you’re playing a lead in
Jersey Boys
, right?”

“I sure am, but...”

“So, you’re a dancer. Stop talking and repeat what I do.”

We begin with “I Go Ape.” This is a very quick bit in the show, with very minimal choreography. Caitlin teaches it fast, lets me run through it a few times with her, then stands back to watch me do it by myself. The choreography amounts to eight counts of eight, and I think I mess up five of them. My feet go the wrong way, my guitar neck goes up instead of down, my butt doesn’t shimmy hard enough (it can shimmy more?). All in all, I am no good. But, rather than fix things right there, Caitlin decides to leave me with my notes and move on to another song.

She tells me we’ll start learning the Big Three. The Big Three is a climactic section of the first act that includes the Four Seasons’ first three No. 1 hits performed back-to-back with hardly a break in between: “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and “Walk Like A Man.” The choreography for “Sherry” is divided into two parts: Sherry One and Sherry Two. Sherry One is pretty simple to do (just a lot of shuffles back and forth), but looks incredible onstage because live video cameras show the guys as if they were on
American Bandstand
. Sherry Two comes across as more presentational because it moves to the front of the stage as if the Seasons are giving a concert, but still pretty easy to do. What is not easy to do, however, is memorize these moves when I don’t know yet exactly what I will be singing. In other words, I am taught these moves as they correlate to the main lyric of the song, but Tommy DeVito does not sing the main lyric of the song, he sings backups and echoes and repeats. So, I know that a big task in front of me will be to figure out where these moves fall with the words I will actually have to sing. Work to be done on my own, I guess. Work I should probably be doing right now instead of writing this entry.

We finish “Sherry” in a couple hours and move on to “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” I like the beginning of this song because, for just a little bit, I can actually just stand there and play the song on the guitar. While I don’t know yet exactly what I will be playing live and what I will be faking, it seems clear to me already that some of these songs have far too much dancing around to be able to play well on guitar! But at least “Big Girls” seems possible. For now.

I feel pretty good about my learning curve with this song, for I am picking up the slick moves fairly quickly. I am frustrated, then, when we get to this part in the middle where I am supposed to do a little solo dance bit. I am supposed to look cool. I am supposed to look like a rock star having a bit of fun. But I do not look cool. And I do not look at all like I am having fun. The dance solo is a variation on the Mashed Potato, and it just does not look good on me. Caitlin says that I may be able to do a different dance solo instead, but that I should work on this one first, to see if I can get it. And when we move on, as if to pour salt on my wound, I realize that I have to do this little solo twice in the song. More homework.

May 7th, 2009

Today begins with four hours of table work with Shelley. We really should be doing a blocking rehearsal, but the studio is being used for another project. Shelley compliments me, “You are really picking up on the beats of these scenes. And you seem to be getting the overall character of Tommy. I’m impressed at how quickly it is happening.”

I would like to take credit for this, but the truth is I have been studying a bootleg of Christian Hoff’s performance. (Anything is available on the internet these days.) While I can’t possibly copy him directly, because we are very different people, I find it extremely helpful to see where the rhythms of the scenes and speeches should be.
Jersey Boys
is tightly scored, and too much rhythm differential would cause the underscoring to either run out or finish too early. I won’t ever tell Shelley this, but so far I am just copying Christian’s rhythms until I figure it all out for myself.