Places, Please!: Becoming a Jersey Boy (23 page)

There’s always going to be someone who doesn’t like the way you do it.

49th Show

I enjoy a life of routine. I always arrive at the theatre one hour before curtain. I sign in, say hello to the stage management office, and briefly check in with any cast members that already arrived. I go to my dressing room and fill out a status board that I placed outside the door: “Dan Sullivan is…having a bad hair day.” “Dan Sullivan is…feeling bloated.” “Dan Sullivan is…wondering which one of you placed the five-foot high picture of Frankie Valli in his bathroom.” This is my way of reaching out to those cast members that I don’t see in the pre-show hubbub, and usually inspires someone to use the pen I provide to write some snarky comment in response. (At my expense, of course. Always at my expense.)

I arrange my small props: a deck of cards, a necklace, guitar picks. I do some pull-ups on my costume rack. (If anybody from the wardrobe department reads this, they are definitely going to stop me from doing pull-ups on my costume rack.) By a half-hour before the show, I am in the shower and singing. I leave my hair a little wet, put on my special black underwear (so colored in case I happen to leave my fly unzipped someday), strap on my microphone rig, and slick my hair back. I put on my first suit, smear on some Covergirl foundation, pencil in my eyebrows, and brush my teeth. This last part makes me feel fresh and ready to go, and helps me feel less disgusting when I have to kiss two of the actresses later in the show.

All of these steps are done alone. I leave my dressing room door open whenever I am not doing embarrassing things (like trying to locate a six-pack underneath my soft belly), but most people are busy with their own routines and have no time for visits.

So I bring in a television and a Wii. And now they have time for visits. Intermission is game time.

“Power serve!” I am sweating already.

“Coming back atcha…There ya go!” Michael Lomenda is sweating even more. (But still not quite as much as he does when onstage.)

“Ooo, backhand coming…Score!” I am winning.

“Ok. Serve it up again.”

“Forehand and score!”

“Damn. Game point for you?” Michael seems sad as he says this.

“Yup. Here it comes…Serve and score! Game, set, and match!” I am gloating. “I killed you, man! Easiest game ever! You want a rematch?”

“No. I’ll just go back to my room and get ready for Act Two.” (Note: The above conversation is entirely fictional. Michael is an unbelievable Wii tennis player and I have not beaten him a single time. But I figure that publishing an account of me winning will make me feel better about not accomplishing the task in real life.)

My dressing room is also full of
Scientific American
and
Skeptic
magazines, books by A.J. Jacobs and Michael Lewis, DVDs of Broadway shows, a dart board, an iPod player, and a five-foot high Scooby-Doo I rescued from the building next door’s dumpster and hung from my ceiling. I have wireless internet access, a comfy blue couch, and a bathroom with a shower. And a cleaning service. If this was New York, my dressing room could be a $1600 per month studio apartment. Toronto’s
Eye Weekly
newspaper actually did a feature on it. (Yes. I haven’t received any press in the newspapers around here, but my dressing room has.)

53rd Show

After many weeks, the show still exhausts and injures me. We perform at night from Tuesday to Saturday, and in the afternoons on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday; with Monday being our only day off. This is a very typical Broadway schedule, and grueling enough to force me to be conscious of resting my body and voice when I am not onstage.

Often, I will find a large cut on my arm or a serious pain in my foot and not know the cause until the next performance. I’ll do a move during the show and say, “Ouch! That’s how I did that to myself!” My knees are especially injury-prone, for I run up and down two hundred and fifty-two stairs per show. That’s over two thousand stairs per week. Running around the stage like that is dangerous, as one of the other
Jersey Boys
can tell you. Quinn VanAntwerp was in his third month of doing the show as Bob, and wailing with that powerful voice I first heard so long ago. One night, he was given new shoes to wear. Sounds nice, right? New shoes are comfortable, and the wardrobe department spends a lot of time breaking them in and re-rubbering the soles so they have more traction. However, the rubber used on these shoes doesn’t provide great traction on the metal bridge section of the set. But nobody knew that yet.

Remember, the metal bridge is ten feet in the air. Quinn sang the first verse of “Oh, What A Night,” then ran across the bridge to sing the second verse a little further upstage. In the space between the two verses (which is exactly 3.55 seconds), he slid under the safety railing and halfway off the side of the bridge, broke his left hand, caught himself with his right hand, pulled himself back up again with that right hand, and sang the second verse without missing a beat.

That, my friends, is simply unbelievable. But totally true. During Quinn’s next quick-change, our dresser Andy had to help cover the blood that was pouring out of a large gash in Quinn’s side. And Bob Gaudio played piano with a cast on his hand for the next month. (Because this story is so manly and cool, I’m going to leave out the part about how long and loudly Quinn screamed when Andy cleaned the wound with alcohol during intermission. Quinn wouldn’t like it if I published how long and loudly he screamed. Because it was quite long. And quite loud.)

61st Show

The
Jersey Boys
are asked to do a lot of special events and appearances, some for charity and some for publicity. When approved by all parties, we are allowed (and often required) to perform special medleys of
Jersey Boys
songs. Recall that we are contractually forbidden from performing these songs anywhere on our own, but exceptions are made for charity and publicity events, if approved by the Canadian public relations firm, the New York public relations firm, the Canadian producers, the New York producers, stage management, company management, Bob Gaudio, and Frankie Valli. (As you can guess, there are a lot of conference calls in the
Jersey Boys
world.)

For charity, we have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in the lobby through the generosity of our audiences; whenever a “cause” comes up, I am surprised at the amount of people who will drop $20 bills into our buckets. For publicity, we have appeared on countless news programs, commercials, and even
Entertainment Tonight
, teaching one of the hosts our signature moves. We have performed at large festivals, each one requiring us to have a police escort. That’s right. A police escort! Rachel was with me for the first of these and asked, “What do the police need to protect us from?”

I was wondering the same thing, Rachel.

A police escort actually seems a bit silly, doesn’t it? No real need for these escorts, I think to myself as we perform at another large outdoor event. It’s cool, but unnecessary. It’s not like we’re going to be mobbed by thousands of screaming…

Wait. There are a lot of people at this event today. Thousands, actually. And they are screaming very loudly and pushing quite hard to get up to the front of the stage. Wow! This feels great. I’m like a rock star! I guess this is why we have these police escorts, because young girls do go crazy when they see… (It is about here I realize the Jonas Brothers are behind us waiting to take the stage. And that explains everything.)

We performed at this outdoor fundraiser, and the Jonas Brothers appeared after us!

©Daniel Robert Sullivan

62nd Show

OMG. We totally opened for the Jonas Brothers yesterday.

70th Show

It is August, and today marks the one-year anniversary of
Jersey Boys
in Toronto. It isn’t the one-year anniversary for me, of course, but I do get to take part in the festivities and publicity. The greatest part? Bob Gaudio, the real Bob Gaudio, comes to see the show and invites us to lunch.

He and his wife, Judy Parker, are classy and kind. Their fame and fortune has not removed their graciousness. (And Bob orders the same risotto special that I do, making me feel like I’ve made a proper choice.)

We are told a great story: “December 1963 (Oh, What A Night)” is one of the band’s greatest hits, but it may not have made it were it not for Judy’s input. Apparently, this song was written by Bob with a lyric celebrating the repeal of prohibition. Bob was not entirely happy with the lyric, but on the eve of the recording session he had yet to come up with a better idea. The historical narrative lyric would have to do. (“Late December, back in thirty-three…”)

At 3:00 a.m., Judy Parker rises from bed with an inspiration. She goes to the living room and writes a new lyric for Bob’s melody, a lyric that alludes to a boy’s first sexual encounter. The following morning, the band records this lyric and the song rises to No. 1 on the charts in March, 1976.

Behind every great man, there is a great woman…or at least a great lyricist.

Hanging out with the real Bob Gaudio.

©Daniel Robert Sullivan

88th Show

And speaking of great women, it is time for my two to go home. Cara begins a new season helping to create wigs for
Saturday Night Live
, and Rachel starts school. Mark returns from his first job at the summer camp in a few days, and I am left in Toronto. Alone again.

I predict that Rachel will be going through a bit of
Jersey Boys
withdrawal. She became quite obsessed with the show in these past months. We initially debated whether or not to let her see it because of the bad language, but eventually decided that the show was too much a part of our lives not to let her experience it. We talked about the swear words and how she should not repeat them. We told her I am playing a “bad guy,” and that’s the only reason I speak this way. So what did she do? She began repeating her favorite line in the show, a line that has no swear words at all: “I want you inside me.”

How do we explain that one? Our solution was to tell her that some of the lines in the show are adult jokes, and that she should not repeat those either. She seemed to understand and we didn’t hear her say anything undesirable again.

Until today.

Rachel’s first day of school. She attends a Catholic school and there is one (only one) nun on staff. Rachel loves Sister Margie. So much so that she wants to tell her all about her summer in Toronto. But first Rachel wants to tell a joke that Sister Margie is bound to appreciate because it is an “adult joke.” So Rachel pulls Sister Margie down to her knees and whispers in her ear, “I want you inside me.” And Rachel laughs and laughs and laughs. We have to explain that one very carefully to Sister Margie.

104th Show

I take the bus home to New York on this Sunday night in September. I leave Toronto at 7:30 p.m. and arrive in Manhattan at 6:00 a.m. the following morning. After arriving back at our apartment for the first time since rehearsing the show, I crawl into bed next to my beautiful sleeping wife who I have not seen in two weeks. We just have one day together before I fly back to Toronto at 11:00 a.m. tomorrow.

We quickly realize that this is not enough time together.

“Cara, I can’t go two weeks without being home with you. We need to do something different.”

“I know. Screw the budget. Let’s just get you tickets to come home every week.”

So I begin coming home every week, taking the bus on Sunday and flying back on Tuesday. The bus trip saves us money.

After some time of this Cara says, “Daniel, I love that you are willing to take the bus to come home to us, but seeing you only on Monday is not enough.”

“I know. But we don’t really have extra money for me to fly both ways. The bus is cheap!”