Places, Please!: Becoming a Jersey Boy (5 page)

Armed with a head full of cast-change gossip, I know that my audition today probably isn’t for any current job opening. But I prepare my billion-page scene packet, two songs from the score (“Earth Angel” and “Silhouettes”), and my trusty Elvis tune. And I review all the notes I took while watching Christian Hoff. I wake early for the audition and repeat my routine: coffee, long shower, reviewing, walking to studio, re-tuning, reviewing…and I am called in. Merri is there with just an assistant and a reader. She tells me that she only wanted to bring me in because I have not done the Tommy material for her yet. Does she want me to sing? No. Play guitar? No. She just wants me to do the scenes.

So I do them. I pretty much just copy Christian Hoff as much as I can. This seems to suffice (for now) and she gives me some positive feedback. The last scene she asks me to do is the one where Tommy hits on a reporter at a bar. Because the reader is male, Merri says that she will do the scene with me. She’s a good actress, but boy is this awkward for me! I have, through this entire audition process, presented myself as “the nice guy.” Playing Tommy, though, I have to show more attitude, cockiness, and balls. And nowhere do I have to show it more than in this scene I am doing with a famous casting director, the same casting director who holds my future in her hands.

I dive in, and the scene goes well. I diffuse my own awkwardness at the end of it with a little laugh and an acknowledgment that it was a bit weird for me. Merri chuckles as well, but she is probably just being polite. She’s done this many times with many other actors and must be very used to it by now.

*         *         *

Another month passes. Regular life resumes. Well, regular life with a heavy dose of checking the
Jersey Boys
Fan Forum every morning. There is absolutely no hint of cast changes. In fact, I am getting the impression that
Jersey Boys
really just shifts people around instead hiring someone new. They are loyal to this core group of actors they have hired. Whether for financial or ethical reasons I do not know, but it is neat to see. I just have to get into that core group of actors!

I get a call from my agent, “Dan, they want to call you back for the role of Tommy.”

“Meg, can you still refer to it as a callback after all this time?” I ask her, but I think my joke gets lost in her sea of phone calls, voicemails, emails, and contracts being negotiated for folks much more successful than I.

So, off I go to refresh myself on the material. (Ok, I don’t really need to refresh myself on the material because I have been carrying it around in my backpack every day for the past year. Sure, one day I switched it from the Bob material to the Tommy material, but that manila envelope filled with scenes and music has not left my side since last year.)

The morning of the audition, I wake, drink forty-three gallons of coffee, take a thirty-six hour shower, review the material, put three vats of gel in my hair, and am ready to head on my way when my soon-to-be stepson, Mark, stops me. This is my first
Jersey Boys
audition taking place on a Saturday and, therefore, the first time Mark has seen me greased up and in my dark suit (and with attitude).

“Daniel, you look tough.” Mark, that is about the greatest possible thing you could have said to me. “Where are you going?”

“
Jersey Boys
audition.”

“Again?”

“Yup. Again.”

“For Broadway or somewhere else?”

“Well, I don’t know. They don’t tell me that.”

“When would it start?”

“Well, they don’t tell me that either. Actually, I don’t even know if there is a part available.”

“If there is no part available, why are you auditioning?”

“That’s just how they do it.”

“They have auditions when there are no parts?”

“Yup. All the time.”

“And you keep getting asked to come back to these auditions over and over?”

“Yup.”

“Even though there are no parts?”

“Yup.”

“Over and over?”

“Yup.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I.” And we both stand there with Godot-like stillness.

The callback, with all the same Tommy material, is with Merri and Richard Hester, the production supervisor. He knows this show inside and out, and tells me precisely what Des McAnuff wants to see. I am still pretty much doing an impersonation of Christian Hoff, but Richard shakes me of that when he gives me notes that are different from what Christian does. I think Richard is trying to shape a Tommy that lives truthfully in me, and I guess I should start doing the same.

The audition ends with them telling me that they will be bring me in to see Des again the next time he is in town. This, too, seems to be part of the
Jersey Boys
thing. In order to be hired, you need approval from Des, but Des only comes in to town once in a while. So the casting team preps me (and many others) early so that when Des gets in to town we are ready to go.

*         *         *

And…another month. A lot more life goes by. I suppose everybody knows that actors often have day jobs. I am no exception. When I was in college at the University of Rhode Island, I knew that my chosen life was probably going to need a backup plan. So I had a triple major and received degrees not only in Acting (BFA), but in Secondary Education (BS) and English (BA). I later went on to receive my MFA in Acting and Directing at the University of Missouri/Kansas City with the thought that one day I may want to teach at a college; and one needs a Master’s degree to do that legitimately, right? But being a regular teacher while looking for acting work wasn’t a possibility, for it made attending any auditions impossible. So when I moved to New York for the first time in 1998, I tried a number of day jobs; jobs that were flexible, so I could wait in line for an audition in the morning and attend it in the afternoon:

Substitute Teacher: I took my teaching certification down to the Board of Education, was fingerprinted, and received the paperwork required to be a sub. But in order to get work, I needed to visit specific principals and ask to be put on the school’s roster. After visiting a number of these principals, and having most claim they had enough subs already, I received calls for work from only one. And the work was unreliable. As you probably realize, a sub gets a call early in the morning to come in that day. These calls were sporadic on days I had free and could not be accepted on days when I attended auditions.

Subway Musician: This remains the most lucrative hourly wage I’ve ever made. I started taking my guitar down into the subway to sing and play music for money. It was perfect in that I could set my own hours and work only as much as I wanted or needed to. I became aware that a certain structure exists in the underground music world. For example, I learned that people who play in the subway stations have to audition and register with the city if they want to play in certain key locations or if they want to play with amplification. I did not want to be terribly official, so I found a nice, unregulated, high-traffic area in the tunnel between 7th and 8th Avenues along 42nd Street, a tunnel that resonated enough that I didn’t need amplification. There was a reggae player there who usually stopped playing around 2:00 p.m., and I would try to take over after him each day. He was a big stoner, lived in Harlem, and loved to tell me about his many girlfriends. He also played the same song (“Redemption Song”) for an hour or more, asserting, “It’s the song that makes me the most money, bro.” So I stole this technique; my guitar rendition of “Piano Man” (with a harmonica strapped around my neck) could be heard every day for way, way too long. After me, there was a clarinet player who paid rent on his West Village apartment by playing down in the tunnels, and was always trying to get me to hang out with him. Nice guy, but I didn’t think it wise to mingle too much with the underground world. I enjoyed this time of my life. I enjoyed having a hundred songs memorized and ready to play. And I loved how my guitar became splattered with blood because I would literally play until my fingers bled. I only stopped using this as my day job when I began to feel the effects of singing balls-out for four hours every day. It was fun, but it started to hurt.

Telephone Psychic: Yes, that’s right. I was a psychic on a telephone hotline and it was a complete scam. I thought it’d be the perfect job when I applied. I could sit at home and make money while I watched TV! I could set my own hours, at any time I could call in and say that I was “on the clock.” And then I would wait for the phone to ring. Did I have to be a real psychic? No. For the interview, I was asked to give a tarot reading over the phone to a company representative. Tarot cards are images, subject to the interpretation of their dealer, and so I gave a wonderfully positive reading to my boss, a reading that I made up off the top of my head. She said I was great and I was hired. But after a few days of listening to how many people actually believed in this stuff, and after seeing how few times my phone rang each hour (for employees are paid by the minute), I quit. Despite my quick tenure, I still tend to favor these stories more than any others when I’m at a party.

Gambler: By now, everyone must have heard of the MIT Blackjack Team. I too became obsessed with the idea of outsmarting a casino, albeit with far fewer credentials than those guys at MIT. With a gem of an idea from a Kansas City friend, I believed (don’t make fun) that I could minimize the casino advantage in mini-Baccarat to its lowest possible point and keep wins at the highest possible dollar amount. I believed I would win 49% of the time with straight, structured play. I’m not a foolish guy. And I love math. And I know that gambling systems never work in the long run. Even though the casino still had an advantage in this game, I felt it was a small enough one to risk, so I spent a couple months turning a $2000 stake into $21,000 in my free time. I say again, I am not so dumb as to have believed it could have kept working, so I stopped just in time. It was a strong high to sit there in a smoky room and throw down chips while the pit boss doled out comps. I earned so many free blueberry muffins and cups of iced tea from the casino deli that I lost count.

New York City Tour Guide: I took a test to get my official tour guide license and began narrating tours of the city on those double-decker busses you see everywhere. That was a neat adventure. Tours were given on an uptown or downtown route and a guide could talk about whatever seemed appropriate or interesting. We had to purchase our own microphones (for sanitary reasons, I guess) and were allowed to ask for tips. Asking for tips was, in fact, a necessary part of the job, for the wage we received was very, very low. I had some good jokes, I’d throw in lots of theatre trivia, and I generally liked being in control of the tourist’s experience. I was an entertaining guide, but not an extremely knowledgeable one; I pointed out the Chrysler Building on my first nighttime tour and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you look to your left you’ll see the Empire State Building all lit up.” I’ve learned since then.

Shakespeare Ticket Line-Sitter: Every summer in New York, the Public Theatre offers free tickets to their Shakespeare in the Park series. Seeing a performance of such high quality in a setting as beautiful as the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park is a quintessential New York experience. The catch to these free tickets is that you have to wait in line for about seven hours; and the wait begins around 6:00 a.m. An entrepreneurial business developed in which many people without anything else to do (i.e. actors between jobs) would wait in line for you, for a fee of $100–$150. I spent a few weeks of a summer doing just this, and am thankful that I did it before Attorney General Andrew Cuomo began publicly cracking down on the practice.

Knock-Off Purse Re-Seller: (I shouldn’t be writing about this one.) I spent a period of time going down to Chinatown and buying knock-off Coach handbags from secret rooms and the back of vans. I’d talk them down to a rock-bottom price, then re-sell them online for a $20 profit on each one. I did not pretend they were real Coach products, for as good as they looked on the outside there was no way they could have been real for that price. I once bought a handbag with a statement stamped on the inside that read, “This is an authentic Coach scarf.”

Teaching Artist: My greatest day job. A day job that has been so fulfilling, lucrative, flexible, and interesting that it has now turned into a side career. I have worked, on and off, since 2000 as a Master Teaching Artist with the Roundabout Theatre Company. Roundabout is one of the nation’s largest non-profit theatre companies, operating three Broadway and two Off-Broadway theatres. My work there has varied, including teaching arts-integrated residencies at New York City High Schools, leading professional development workshops for teachers, leading public speaking workshops for corporate managers, coordinating partnerships between Roundabout and certain partner schools, delivering dramaturgical lectures before the Roundabout’s Broadway shows, and moderating post-show discussions at those same performances. What a gift to be able to balance the art (and health insurance) from my work in small regional theatres with the intellectual challenges (and salary) of this Roundabout job.

*         *         *

After months of waiting, I finally get a call saying Des will be in town and would like to see me perform the Tommy material. I am nearly certain that there are no actual jobs available at this point, but I go through the old routine of preparation anyway. I realize too late that I have run out of ordinary hair gel, and begin looking for something to give my hair the wet and dark look I have gone with all along. (I’m a pale, blond, Irish guy, so I need to do whatever I can to look more like the dark Italian they want.) I find only one product in our apartment that will do the job, but it frightens me a little—Murray’s Pomade.

Those that have used Murray’s Pomade know that it requires a month-long commitment. The stuff just won’t wash out. You can scrub it, comb it, scour it, or hit it with an industrial-strength sand blaster and it still won’t come out. I run a palm-full through my hair and ask Cara if she will cut some of it out later. She digs around for the electric carving knife just in case I’m serious.