Seth's Broadway Diary, Volume 1: Part 1 (29 page)

Christine did the show for around a year and right after she gave her notice, she was asked to audition to replace the woman playing Guinevere opposite Richard Burton in a big tour of
Camelot
. At her audition, she was suddenly joined onstage by… Richard Burton! She said it was one of those moments where she was shaking hands and politely saying, "Nice to meet you," while inside she was screaming, "It's Richard BURTO-O-O-O-O-ON!!!!!!!!!!!"

À la
On the Twentieth Century
, she had to learn the part in less than a week, but instead of it being the role of the maid (and then understudying a lead), it was the actual leading lady with tons of dialogue and songs. She did her final performance of
Oklahoma!
on a Sunday matinee and then flew up to Canada on Monday. She was looking forward to finally getting to do her one run-through on Thursday night, but unfortunately Richard Burton came up to her before and said in his signature accent, "These lights are killing me. You don't mind if I skip the run-through, do you?" That's right, her only time doing the whole show from start to finish with her co-star would be opening night! And because the woman she replaced was short and she's tall, the first time she got to wear her costumes was
also
opening night. She told us that in the middle of "The Lusty Month of May," she suddenly heard a devil voice in one ear saying, "You have
absolutely no idea
what you're supposed to do next, do you? Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" In the other ear she heard, "Be here now. Be here now." Both voices fought it out and obviously the good voice won because, at the exact last second that Christine had to sing something, the correct words came out.

She remembers most of 1981 as a blur because she had three major things happen that are on the high-stress list: she got divorced, she moved
and
she got a new job (
Saturday Night Live
). All in one week!!!!! People thought she got
SNL
because she was related to producer Dick Ebersol, but she is not. Note the difference in last name spelling.

In the speech she made when she won the Tony Award for
Grey Gardens
, she remarked that she was told in L.A. her career was over. I asked for elaboration on that devastating comment. She recounted that, in the late ‘90s, she asked her agent why she wasn't getting any auditions, and he laughed condescendingly and simply said, "Christine, you're 45." Three neutral words that, when said with excitement, can add joy to a birthday party, but when said with derision can make you want to quit the business… and life.

A little while after that, she was driving to see a producer who, ten years earlier, had handed her a script and asked her to star on a TV show with Rosie O'Donnell. Only now she wasn't being handed anything. She was auditioning for him for a part on
Ally McBeal
… that had six lines. She got it, but was shocked when she was in the courtroom scene, and Lucy Liu said to the judge, while pointing at Christine, "Why can’t I say anything? You let that old lady speak." The whole cast then laughed because Christine did that ol’ gag of looking over her shoulder to see the old lady Lucy was referring to. But Because Christine hadn't read anything in the script but her own part, she really thought Lucy was pointing at someone else. She wasn't. Then Christine looked at the cast and saw how skinny they were. Then she looked at the stand-ins and saw they were skinnier!

Christine went to her dressing room and looked in the mirror. She started pulling up her cheeks to see how she'd look with a face-lift. Suddenly she thought, "I am defining myself through things that I have no control over: my age and how my body looks." But she knew that she still had her talent, and if anything, it had gotten even better. She looked at herself again and thought, "I gotta get outta here!" She decided to hightail it back to NY… and two years later won the Tony Award for
42nd Street
! And now she has
another
Tony Award to add to her collection!

Finally, let me just say that my mother had yet another traumatic audition. If you don't know, a few years ago, my agent met my mom and decided that she'd be great for commercials. Also, if you don't know, she's 75 years old and has no (zero) acting experience. Yet she's managed to parlay that combination into numerous auditions that always end in disaster(s). P.S. Please don't think that she's the victim of the disasters. On the contrary. Most of the problems at the auditions stem from her stubbornness and hubris. She proudly told me that she refused to say DQ instead of Dairy Queen at a recent audition because "no one my age would call it DQ." And at a deodorant audition last month, she was asked to pretend to drive on a parkway but instead of having her hands on the steering wheel and watching the road, she spent the whole time checking and re-checking the side-view mirror. When the director cut her off and exasperatedly asked her what she was doing, she explained "I have friends who don't drive as well as I do and they always do that before entering a parkway." He asked her to just get on the parkway and wave on the car in back of her. She got on the parkway, but thought it would be funny, instead of doing what the director said, to do a Queen Elizabeth wave to the car behind her. Apparently, from her lack of a callback, it wasn’t.

And don't forget! I'm soon doing a reading/signing of my novel
Broadway Nights
with Christine Ebersole, Cheyenne Jackson, Kristine Zbornik, Denis O'Hare and Andrea McArdle. And next week I'll be able to tell you about the opening of
Lend Me a Tenor
! Uh-oh. I'd better learn my lines.

Broadway Nights
and a West End Star

January 21, 2008

Shh! I'm sitting backstage at The John W. Engeman Theater.

It's about to be "places" (or "beginners" as they call it in London… or shall I say, as they call it "across the pond" for full pretentiousness). I'm sitting in my bellhop outfit, and I just finished warming up. That's right, I do a vocal warm-up every night because my first entrance consists of me barging into a hotel room and singing part of an aria from
Figaro
. It ends on a high A and even though I'm not belting it, I got so nervous during the final dress rehearsals that my A came out sounding like a dry wind in the Sahara — replete with sand particles. Anyhoo, I've found that if I run it onstage before half hour, it comes out fine. Also, it's
a cappella
, so I think I was starting the first pitch too high in some of the run-throughs and wound up belting Idina's last note in "Defying Gravity." Now I use a pitch pipe right before I go on so I have the note in my head.

This whole week has been
exhausting
! On Monday I traveled to Long Island to rehearse in the afternoon for
Lend Me a Tenor
and then left halfway through rehearsals to take a train back to the city to go to the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble for a reading/signing of my novel,
Broadway Nights
. The great news is the reading was
packed
, and I'd love to think it was because I have such a loyal fan base/household name recognition, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was because I had a slew of Broadway folk performing with me. Speaking of which, when I first sent out an invite to my email list, I advertised that Cheyenne Jackson would be playing the part of my best friend. Ten minutes later I got an email from a guy who meant to forward it his friend, but pushed "reply" instead. It said, "Hey! Do you want to see Seth at Barnes and Noble? Do you think Cheyenne will show up?" I sent back a sassy reply saying, "I got your email by accident… and
yes
, Cheyenne is showing!!" Cut to Sunday, Cheyenne emailed me saying that he suddenly has to do a publicity event for
Xanadu
that he can't get out of and it conflicts with the reading. I begged and pleaded with him to work it out somehow. He was devastated that he was letting me down, but I explained that it wasn't about letting me down; it was because my reply to that email was so sassy and certain. Why did I have to be as brazen as the architect of the "unsinkable" Titanic? Well, Cheyenne was able to arrange a car to take him from the event to Barnes & Noble, so he
did
show up! I asked if the email writer was in the audience and got severe silence in response. Maybe the email should have read, "Do you want to see Seth at Barnes and Noble? Do you think
I
will show up?"

Anyhoo, the event went
great
! I read the lead character, Stephen, who's a piano sub on Broadway, desperate to conduct his first Broadway show. Kristine Zbornik (about to be in
A Catered Affair
) played my psycho governess, Mrs. Remick. Kristine and I worked together in the ‘90s doing a weekly variety show we put together called
Saturdays at Rose's Turn
. She does a character named Anita Lomax, who's an aging alcoholic singer, and my favorite sketch we'd do featured Anita raging about her latest audition.

SETH: How'd your
Sunset Boulevard
audition go?


ANITA: It stank! They had their minds made up
way
before I fell in the orchestra pit. (Laughs derisively.) It's all prejudice, you know. I mean, think about it; a man's graying at the temples, he's sexy, right? I drink a case of vodka, I'm an alcoholic! You do the math!

SETH: I'm sorry…

ANITA: (snorts). Andrew, Lloyd and Webber. Who the hell are they anyway? Three guys trying to make a buck, they stink!

I also had Christine Ebersole, who played Stephen’s narcissistic opera-singing mother who’s always on tour. She got a
huge
laugh at her line-reading of the section we did together where she's talking to a 13-year-old Stephen and reveals that she and my Dad are getting divorced: "Now, I know this is a big shock for you, as it is for me, Stephen. If there's anything you want to discuss, anything at all (
she takes my hands in hers
)… Mommy will be back in two-and-a-half weeks."

Denis O'Hare was fantastic as the horrible agent, Ronald. Right now, I have a student named Sam Heldt from my alma mater, Oberlin, doing his winter term project as my intern. When I asked him to find Denis in the Barnes & Noble café and ask him to meet me for a script change, Sam went into a state of star shock (immobile and slack-jawed). It was adorable. I remember how star-struck I was when I was in college and I met the bass player from
Carrie
. I was like, "Wait a minute, wait a minute… you were actually
in
the orchestra pit when Betty Buckley sang. Oh. My. God." I’m not exaggerating!

Speaking of Sam, I took him to the
Chatterbox
and we ran into Jackie Hoffman. When she heard that Sam was my intern, she looked at him and asked, "So, Seth is taking you 'under his wing'?" Then, she lowered her glasses and voice: "Do I need to contact the authorities?"

Of course, Cheyenne was great and, after we read his chapter, I asked him to sing one of his signature audition songs. He sang "The Proposal" from
Titanic
, which he sang for his Radames understudy
Aida
audition. I love how there are so many Broadway stars that began as understudies. Did you know that Lillias White was the understudy for the gym teacher in the mega-flop
Carrie
? She told me that people would say, "We hope you get to go on!" and she'd say "Um… that's OK! Trust me."

When I got to Barnes & Noble, I bought all the participants gift cards. The man who rang me up said that he was going to leave his station and come to my reading because his idol would be there… Andrea McArdle. I love that there are people like me all over the city!

After the reading, I had dinner with David Bedella, who's in town to play the devil in
Jerry Springer: The Opera
at Carnegie Hall. We dated back in the ‘90s, and we both remembered how the movie
Hook
ruined our relationship. We had gone to see it with my college friend Tim, and Tim and I spent the whole time making fun of Julia Roberts' inappropriate close-ups… which culminated with her, for some reason, standing in a full evening gown ("Tinker Bell… you look beautiful."). David was raging that we were talking throughout the whole movie, and I was raging that he liked it, and that was the beginning of the end. Actually, it pretty much was the end.

I asked him to give me a full catch-up of the last decade-and-a-half. He had gone to Nashville in the mid-‘90s to start a country music career (!), and right when he got there, he got a job offer to understudy on Broadway. His partner convinced him to take it since it had always been his dream. But, as the old adage says, be careful what you wish for… and by "wish," I mean dream. And by "for," I mean "of." He said it wound up being a debilitating experience because he was constantly being told by various people involved that he was an understudy because he wasn't good enough to have a role. Ouch! By the end of the run, he doubted his own talent. His partner, who had recently finished divinity school, got an offer to go to London and asked David if he would move with him. Since David had such a bad experience on Broadway, he said yes.