"Focusing on 'Mean Girls'"

by Sopan Deb

[“Focusing on ‘Mean Girls’” describes the process actress Jennifer Simard went through when she took over the parts played in the new Broadway musical, based on the 2004 movie that opened on 8 April, by Kerry Butler, who opened in the original cast.  Originally published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 13 September 2018, Sopan Deb’s report falls into the category of articles I like to post occasionally that spotlight lesser-known aspects of stage production—the parts of show business that audiences seldom know about or even think of when they're sitting in the house enjoying a performance.  A number of years ago (on 28 November 2015), I posted an article from the Washington Post, “Broadway’s Anonymous Stars” by Peter Marks, that focused on actors who replaced stars of Broadway shows.  Deb’s report is an apt follow-up, depicting the work of a “utility” player (Simard, who joined  the cast on stage on 11 September, covers three roles) rather than a star.]

It was Jennifer Simard’s first day of work. Propping her elbows on a railing behind the audience in the back of the August Wilson Theater, she peered through binoculars, purchased just hours before so she could get a really close-up look at what was happening on stage during this Tuesday night performance of “Mean Girls.”

She squinted. What equation was the calculus teacher writing? Where did she put her marker? How did she then weave through the students during a dance number?

That teacher, Ms. Norbury, was one of three drastically different roles Ms. Simard would soon inhabit. She had quite a bit of catching up to do as she embarked on one of the unheralded journeys in theater — joining the established ensemble of a Broadway musical well after it opens.

“It’s my job to enter into this well-oiled machine as seamlessly as possible, almost like a ghost,” she explained.

Where her fellow cast members had months to master their parts, Ms. Simard had exactly two weeks to learn the staging for characters previously played by Kerry Butler. (The others: the mothers of queen bee Regina George and nice girl Cady Heron.) That included only one full rehearsal with the whole cast — called a “put-in” — that comes at the end of the process.

A perpetually sunny 48, Ms. Simard didn’t seem especially fazed; after all, her Broadway debut in 2007 was as a replacement in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”

She allowed a reporter to follow her during key moments — including an expert comedic consultation — as she got ready to face the Plastics, culminating in her first performance on Tuesday night.

Watch Carefully

Ms. Simard had finished her run as Ernestina in “Hello, Dolly” in March and was in rehearsal for a summer production of “Annie” in St. Louis when she read for “Mean Girls.” A hit show, it promised to be steady work.

She auditioned on July 2. A little more than two weeks later, she got the part.

She knew the basics of the script, having been part of a reading of the musical in 2016 during its development, and immediately got to work by memorizing her lines even before her contract began.

“It’s not a lot of time,” she said. “You can’t really play and find the beats you need as an actor with your script in your hand for very long.”

On Aug. 28, her first official day, she was fitted for 10 costumes, and started vocal rehearsals.

For an actor, joining a show, rather than originating a character, means your creative choices are narrowed. There’s less to discover when you’re plugged in to an existing machine.

To John MacInnis, the associate choreographer of “Mean Girls,” who would be working with Ms. Simard, that limitation can be a blessing.

“I personally think getting thrown into a show is a lot easier than going through the whole process from the beginning because everyone is concentrating on you,” he said. “You’re the main focus.”

For Ms. Simard, the most essential task was simple: watching the show as often as possible.

Rehearsal time is limited, so it’s key for performers to learn as much about blocking, choreography, how cast members navigate the stage space and other minutiae through visual osmosis.

Thus the binoculars. And, on Ms. Simard’s second night at the theater, a stopwatch, which allowed her to notate her script with timings for costume changes and transitions.

Finding Your Place(s)

During days, Ms. Simard worked on scenes and choreography mostly in a rehearsal room away from the theater. There was also a day built in for photography.

On Sept. 6, Ms. Simard was at the August Wilson with other actors and members of the creative team, including Mr. MacInnis. This is typical, especially for a musical with its many moving parts; new cast members are trained by key deputies, not the creative leaders.

To rehearse blocking without the whole cast present — that would be a costly commitment, given union rules — performers have to memorize a virtual grid, with zero at the center of the stage.

Ms. Simard’s transitions included moving a desk on and off the stage at the end of one dance-heavy musical number. If she was in the wrong spot a colleague could get hurt.

She looked tentative as she ran through her dance moves on stage. But with each run-through she seemed to be soaking it in.

Becca Petersen, the assistant dance captain, is responsible for knowing every dance move for every cast member. She and Mr. MacInnis guided Ms. Simard through “Do This Thing” and “I See Stars,” the final two big production numbers.

“Do This Thing” ends with Kyle Selig, who plays Cady’s love interest, essentially belly-flopping directly in front of Ms. Simard. After one pass, she asked Mr. MacInnis if her spacing was correct: “I just want to make sure he has room to get around me.”

“There’s a lot of traffic,’’ she explained afterward. “You have to make sure you’re not hurting anybody. Safety first, you know?”

Getting Notes From the Source

Ms. Simard was the only performer in costume at the put-in on Sept. 7. It was four days before show time and, along with everything else, she needed to rehearse her 10 costume changes in real time.

As a gesture of good will, she ordered a box of soft pretzels for the entire cast. She was a bundle of jittery energy, her nervousness not helped by the fact that Tina Fey, who wrote the book for the show and played Ms. Norbury in the 2004 film, was there to watch.

Cast members not in Ms. Simard’s scenes frequently burst into applause when she came on stage or executed a successful number. Casey Hushion, the associate director, occasionally strolled up to the stage to adjust Ms. Simard’s spacing.

It wasn’t completely smooth — Ms. Simard stumbled on a few lines — but afterward she said she felt exactly where she needed to be. In a chat with the music director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Ms. Simard compared the one-and-done rehearsal to her wedding day: “Pay attention because it’s going to be a blur.”

Ms. Fey had some notes. One of Ms. Simard’s characters, Mrs. George, absolutely wants to be part of the Plastics, the shallow, popular and occasionally cruel trio of high school girls at the center of the show. But Ms. Fey reminded the actress that she wants to be a good mother, too.

In 2016, Ms. Simard was nominated for a Tony Award playing a gambling-addicted nun in the spoofy musical “Disaster!” Her big number had her virtually making out with a slot machine.

She’s not afraid of physical comedy. And Ms. Fey’s notes included a bit of encouragement. She particularly liked how Ms. Simard was clutching Mrs. George’s puppet dog in one of her scenes.

“Maybe,’’ Ms. Simard reported, thinking out loud, “it’s going to lick my neck in the end?”

It’s Show Time

On Tuesday, Sept. 11, hours before she was to make her “Mean Girls” debut, Ms. Simard got pointers for the first time from Casey Nicholaw, the show’s director and choreographer.

Referring to her first scene as Mrs. Heron, Mr. Nicholaw suggested that she “warm her up a little bit.” But mostly he was full of praise. “You have the best musical theater face ever,” he said. He ended the rehearsal by punctuating his encouragement: “You’re going to be so [clap] good [clap] tonight [clap].”

Minutes before going on stage, Ms. Simard was in the wings as fellow cast members hugged her and wished her good luck. “I feel ready,” she said, staring intently at the stage.

Bernadette Peters — her former “Hello, Dolly” colleague — was in the audience to see her. And backstage, the crew had laid out boxes of Tic Tacs that were specially labeled “I’m a Pusher,” a reference to one of Ms. Simard’s lines.

There was one early hiccup. As Ms. Norbury, that equation-writing calculus teacher, Ms. Simard skipped a few lines, throwing off the timing of an entrance for Erika Henningsen, as Cady.

In her dressing room right just afterward Ms. Simard took the blame. “It makes for a funny story — later,” she said.

Speaking of which, she also had a triumph: Her approach to Mrs. George’s first scene with the puppet dog earned her exit applause as she walked offstage.

She would remember to keep it in. It was time to leave the theater and go to bed. After all, she had two shows the next day.

"Broadway's Anonymous Stars"

by Peter Marks

[On 3 January 2014, I came across a 19-year-old article on the New York Times’ website that struck me as an interesting glimpse inside professional theater.  I’ve posted several such articles from various sources over the years now, pieces about stage managers and dance captains   My friend Kirk Woodward wrote an article on being a Broadway investor in “Broadway Angel” (7 September 2010).  This time, I thought a look at the actors who replace the original stars in long-running shows, the actors who have all the chops of the famous stars (some of whom became stars because of this role) but whose names we often don’t know.  It’s not a Ruby Keeler world, as you’ll read: These actors didn’t go on stage as youngsters and come back stars.  They just did their jobs, excellently in most cases, and went on to other roles.  Peter Marks’s “Broadway’s Anonymous Stars” was posted on 2 Feb. 1996 (http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/02/theater/broadway-s-anonymous-stars.html).]

They have no entourages, no bodyguards, no marquee billing. They are headliners who make no headlines, household names who are known chiefly in their own households. When they walk the streets, no autograph hounds seek them out. When they go to work, it’s not by limousine, but on the IRT.

Oh, for the life of a Broadway star.

Yes, Julie Andrews can pack them in for a lavish musical and Ralph Fiennes can cause a stampede for Shakespeare and Carol Burnett can fill a theater with the promise of a Tarzan call. But there is another breed of star on Broadway these days, one for whom the relationship to an audience can best be described as stranger to stranger. The parts they play are big: they are among the most demanding and familiar in the contemporary musical theater. But talk about the fleetingness of fame. Here are actors who are famous only in costume.

It is a whole new category of celebrityhood: anonymous Broadway stardom. It is conferred, most often, on actors who take over the leading roles in the long-running mega-musicals, shows like “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Beauty and the Beast,” which were built to survive through time without having to rely on big-name players. By the time these replacement actors are cast, the original performers are long gone. The only remaining star is the show itself.

You know the roles, but probably not the people who fill them. Does the name Craig Schulman ring a bell? At the Imperial Theater, Mr. Schulman is Jean Valjean, the epic role at the heart of “Les Miserables” originated by Colm Wilkinson. How about Joan Almedilla? She is the unknown who was recently cast as Kim, the Vietnamese heroine of “Miss Saigon” and the part that made Lea Salonga a known. Or Davis Gaines? An actor from Florida with a powerful voice, he has played the Phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera” in Los Angeles and New York 1,675 times, a record unmatched by Michael Crawford or any other actor in modern Phantom history.

“I’ve counted the number of Christines I’ve acted it with,” Mr. Gaines said, referring to the character with whom the Phantom falls in love. “It’s now up to 10.”

But no matter how many times Mr. Gaines professes the Phantom’s devotion for this, that or the other Christine, the part will never really be his, in the original-cast-album sense of who puts his stamp on a musical role. It is the poignant problem that every anonymous Broadway star faces: despite getting the role of a lifetime, they still pine for a role of a lifetime that they can call their own.

“When I found out that I got the part, my sister goes, ‘You’re a Broadway star,’ “ said Liz Callaway, who for three years has sung the show-stopping “Memory” as Grizabella in “Cats,” the part that earned Betty Buckley a Tony. (Ms. Callaway’s sister, Ann Hampton Callaway, is a singer with whom she has performed in cabarets.) “I’m like: ‘What? Yeah, right.’ I don’t feel like a star at all. Not at all.”

Ms. Callaway is no stranger to Broadway. She herself was nominated for a Tony for her performance in the 1983 musical “Baby.” (Such is the roller-coaster nature of the business that 18 months later, a jobless Ms. Callaway went to work in a gift shop on the Upper East Side.) But the stardom question does not weigh too heavily on her. She commutes to her Grizabella job from a house in Westchester County that she shares with her husband, Dan Foster, a stage director, and their 4-year-old son, Nicholas. The part she owes to talent. The house she owes to “Cats.”

“I could never have bought it without ‘Cats,’ “ Ms. Callaway said on a recent weekday evening before getting into costume. During the house hunting, a mortgage broker had expressed doubt about the couple’s financial stability after Ms. Callaway gave her occupation as actress. But the broker perked up, she said, when she explained that she was in the now-and-forever production of “Cats.”

“This was very impressive to a mortgage broker,” she said.

And this, of course, is one of the great things about landing a mega-part, no matter how many people have played it before. The role may be a bit frayed around the edges, but the paycheck is always crisp. (The weekly salary for a replacement actor in a major role can be quite substantial, sometimes in the mid-four figures.)

What follows is a brief Broadway tour through the lives of five actors who day in and day out must put thoughts of their theatrical legacy aside and try to find ways to make their famous roles their own. It is not an easy job. In fact, it is one of the toughest assignments on the street.

Craig Schulman

Some people may think that a big part means a coddled actor. Mr. Schulman once imagined that, too. “I was thinking Champagne and limos,” he said. “Here I am, riding the 104 bus.”

“Les Miserables” has been a part of Mr. Schulman’s life since September 1987, when he was offered a role in the ensemble and as understudy for the actor playing Jean Valjean in the show’s national tour. Having trained as an opera singer, Mr. Schulman, a native of Commack, L.I., did not fully appreciate what the part could mean to his career. When he wavered, a friend yelled at him: “What are you, nuts? Take it!”

He did, and so began Mr. Schulman’s immersion in what he calls “the ‘Les Miz’ community.” (Mega-musicals are not just shows, it seems; they are tight social networks.) Not long after he joined the show, he took over the lead in Boston. And on Jan. 15, 1990, three years after the musical made its Broadway debut, Mr. Schulman made his.

Sometimes, being a replacement can seem a little like trying to shout in a soundproof room: does the outside world ever hear? “Even though I haven’t gotten the publicity or media accolades I’d like to have had, the buzz within the ‘Les Miz’ community is that this is the performance to beat,” said Mr. Schulman, 39, adding that he was chosen from among the various Valjeans to represent the United States at the show’s 10th anniversary concert in London last October.

Having established a reputation as a standout Valjean -- some critics have said his performance is on a par with Mr. Wilkinson’s -- Mr. Schulman leaves and returns to the show like a professor on sabbatical. Recently he signed a new six-month contract. He had tried to negotiate a better deal for himself, but was successful in only one area.

“I got them to pay for my parking,” he said.

Davis Gaines

Like Mr. Schulman, Mr. Gaines had worked his way up the musical ladder to become the eighth Broadway Phantom. But there is a mystique to the Phantom that makes it even more of a star purn than the other big mega-musical parts. (Norma Desmond, in “Sunset Boulevard,” is in a different league, in that the show’s producers have frequently gone to well-known actresses for both the original casts and replacements. Only for the road company have the producers hired an unknown.)

Thus Mr. Gaines has his own cult following and fan club. Even he is a little stunned by the part’s magic. “It still amazes me, the power that the Phantom has,” he said. “When people find out that’s what you do, they act as if they’re meeting the President.”

Since his face is obscured by a mask for much of the show, the 37-year-old actor often has to explain, out of makeup, exactly what it is that he does. It certainly is an icebreaker. “I was flying back to New York from Los Angeles,” Mr. Gaines said, “and the stewardess said: ‘Excuse me, were you the Phantom? You’re the most important person I’ve ever had on my flight!’”

The actor has a hard time squaring the Phantom’s charisma with his decidedly un-Phantomlike image of himself growing up in Orlando, Fla. “People look up to me as something bigger than life,” he said. “I see myself as this scrawny little nerd in glasses that everyone made fun of.”

And yet, despite the job’s perks -- “It’s changed my life,” he said; “I bought a home in L.A.” -- Mr. Gaines is not anxious to take on someone else’s part again any time soon. What he craves is a role for which he would have to be replaced. “I’d like to originate a role,” he said. “I’d like to do a new show, or even an interesting revival.”

Joan Almedilla

Miss Almedilla’s story could be the basis for a musical on its own: with virtually no previous acting experience, she landed a lead in “Miss Saigon.”

It has all happened so quickly to this 22-year-old from Cebu city in the Philippines that she seems almost unable to take it all in. She says that even after the producers’ representatives told her last June to start learning the part, she did not fully grasp that it was hers. “When people asked, ‘Did you get the part?’ I didn’t really know at first,” she said.

Sitting in an office a block from the Broadway Theater, where “Miss Saigon” is playing, Miss Almedilla laughed at her own naivete. When she made her debut last summer, she was filled with the sort of self-doubt that even her more experienced colleagues in replacement roles often feel: could she handle such a big part? Did the producers simply want a re-enactment of the role as played by Ms. Salonga? (This is the most oft-repeated complaint among the replacement actors. “When you replace someone, they want you to do a carbon copy,” one said.)

Miss Almedilla, who says that she has a lot to learn about the theater (she is taking acting lessons at the moment), knew enough to perform it as she saw fit. “Every day, I try to create more technique, learn how to be more natural,” she said. “I never get tired.”

Still, it is a solitary sort of life. She lives with her parents in East Meadow, L.I., and each afternoon, she takes the train into the city and walks over to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Deeply religious, she sits there in silence to “get my strength.” And after each show, her parents sit in their car by the stage door, waiting to drive their daughter home. 

Jeff McCarphy

Mr. McCarthy’s 6-year-old daughter, Anna, has an original reply when asked what her father does.

“My daddy is the Beast,” she says.

This is no reflection on Mr. McCarthy’s skills as a parent. He is, indeed, the character of that name in “Beauty and the Beast,” a role originated by Terrence Mann, and for which Mr. McCarthy is rendered all but unrecognizable eight times a week under a mane and fangs and breastplate. They take about 45 minutes to put on.

Mr. McCarthy, 40, had done a number of musical roles onstage over the years, but he was working in television, and living with his family in California, when the offer came to play a big hairy creature in a Disney musical.

Like the other actors, he is pragmatic about the tradeoff the role requires. “I have children now, and I have some financial responsibilities,” he said; he and his wife had a second daughter, Juliet, seven months ago.

At a time when musicals run for decades and longer, a part like the Beast or the Phantom can become a pleasant sinecure.

But for an ambitious actor, such a comfortable position can become a trap. Mr. McCarthy is quick to point out that no options have been closed to him as a result of taking the role, and that he would not stay long enough to be regarded in the industry as an actor who replaces other actors.

But then again, it’s a tough gig to relinquish. “God knows,” he said, “the money’s good.”

Liz Callaway

Ms. Callaway says playing a role that others have played, singing a hit song that others have sung and not having the responsibility for filling the seats the way above-the-title stars are expected to is not a bad way to earn a living.

And yet there is something missing. “They don’t give Tony Awards for replacements,” she said. “That’s the only thing different about being a replacement. There’s nothing like opening a Broadway show.”

She knows of what she speaks. In the New York production of “Miss Saigon,” she created the role of Ellen, the wife of the American serviceman who falls in love with the Vietnam bar girl. As the latest in a long line of Grizabellas, on the other hand, there is nothing much left to patent. The satisfactions come in performing well and in keeping up the quality of the show, long after friends and neighbors and most of the inhabitants of the metropolitan region have seen it.

Ms. Callaway, 34, has found a cozy niche. And though she is in no particular rush to leave, there are nights when she hankers for a different life. “Sometimes, when I sing my song at 20 after 10, it’s exhausting,” she said. “I think to myself: I should be home watching ‘Law and Order.’”

It just goes to show you: a job is a job is a job.

[Marks was the New York Times’ Off-Broadway theater review-writer from 1996 to 1999.  Since 2002, he’s been the chief theater reviewer for the Washington Post.]