"A Star Is Made"

[The two articles below were originally published in “The New York Issue” of the New York Times Magazine of 2 June 2019.  The magazine’s cover bore the inscription: “A Star Is Made: Twelve Performers From An Opera Singer To A Subway Dancer Show What It Takes To Light Up The Stage In New York City,” and presented a dozen short profiles of performing artists and the ways they warmed up for their shows.  The performers’ profiles range across a big chunk of the performing arts, including several non-traditional forms, and I culled the two theater artists to republish their reports on Rick On Theater.]

THE BROADWAY STAR

“HOW KELLI O’HARA GETS READY FOR BROADWAY, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT”

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

30 May 2019

The Tony-winning actress takes us inside her dressing room and shares her two-hour pre-curtain regimen.

Kelli O’Hara kisses her children and husband goodbye, buys a salad and boards a train in coastal Connecticut eight times a week to star as Lilli/Kate in “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Tony-nominated revival at Studio 54 for which O’Hara herself was nominated this year, too, for Best Actress in a musical. It’s her seventh Tony nomination — she has one win, in 2015 for Best Actress in “The King and I” — and it’s her 11th Broadway show. She has been doing this for a very long time.

It’s a different crowd every night. That might seem obvious, but it doesn’t always make sense when it’s the same group of indistinct, shadowed faces. Once you’ve got the lines, the songs, the dance moves, the real work is in figuring out a way to deliver them to the people as if they were the only ones to ever receive them.

O’Hara’s dressing room is small, but big for Broadway. It’s filled with flowers sent over by people congratulating her for her nomination. But this year she is not nervous: She has what she calls the “Zen release” of already having won one. Plus, people love an underdog. The minute you’re not an underdog, yes, you won, but that’s not really the same as everyone loving you.

She arrives at the theater sometime between 6 and 6:30 each evening — earlier, obviously, for the matinees — so that she can steam her vocal cords with a personal humidifier she bought at CVS and do her vocal exercises (soft scales and consonants). That has always been part of her routine, but now she also does yoga in the hour before performance: sun salutation, high lunge, side angle pose, triangle.

During the sun salutation, she beseeches her Alexa to time her for a minute in a plank, and during that minute she holds her body in a tight line, hovering above the Oriental rug that is part of the homey atmosphere that someone else created for her. Some of the stuff is hers: the pictures her kids made that hang around the bulbed mirror, a toy box for when they visit, the collection of teas, the crepe-paper streamers from her birthday a few weeks ago. But mostly it’s someone else’s stuff: curtains, a pink velvet fainting couch, books on the shelves. The minute is almost over.

She didn’t always need to do this; it used to be that she could just go onstage. But she’s 43 now, and she’s rubbing the acromion region of her shoulder as she talks — no injury, it just hurts. So, yes, if she doesn’t warm her body up, she’ll feel it later. It never even occurred to her, except that last summer she performed in London, where they have mandatory warm-ups; it changed her thinking. Her kids are small, 9 and 5, so sometimes she might run late and shorten the warm-ups, though if she does that, she suffers: She will be achy, or she won’t have enough energy. She has worked on films and on TV, and she knows that those people, who don’t even perform every night, who rarely sing while they act and who know that they have infinite chances to get a take right, have massage therapists waiting on set.

Around 7:15 p.m., she is called down to the stage for fight call, in which she and Will Chase, who plays her ex-husband, run through the choreography of their extended fight scene, in which she kicks him in the butt several times and he kicks her butt (revivals are weird). They do this every day, no matter what, to remind themselves that there’s acting, there’s singing, but there’s also the risk of becoming so relaxed with each other — indeed, they do this entire rehearsal laughing — that they get hurt. There are so many moving parts in the show, and none of them can stop if you get hurt. Just look at her ring finger: There’s maybe about four millimeters of nail in the nail bed and nothing more because she got her hand stuck in a door one night in February, during the “I Hate Men” number. She slammed the door, and ... her finger was inside the door. She couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t coming free. She stopped for a second, but she still had one phrase left to sing. She called for help in the pause, and once her hand was released, she managed to finish, in shock. Her nail was gone. The point is, if you’re prepared on other fronts, it’s easier to handle the occasional crisis.

She spends some time with her mouth over a vocal steamer, but then Richard, the hair guy, comes in to spin her blond hair into pin curls so that he can weave a microphone through them and then seal them under a stocking and then put someone else’s blond hair on top of the stocking. Richard just did this for another actress in the room across the way. He does almost 100 pin curls a night. How long has Richard been doing this? He was the first person to ever pin curl O’Hara for her first Broadway show 17 years ago.

She spends the rest of her time doing her own makeup. Someone at the beginning of the show’s run will teach her what her makeup should be like, but from then on, it’s just her, just some CoverGirl, just some Maybelline, just some Nars, just some Chanel, just some MAC. Last year, she was performing at the Met, and on a night when they were recording the performance in HD, they did this dramatic makeup for her, but it was really too much, so she needed it taken off. The makeup is everything. You have to look like a real person so that you feel like a real person.

A man calls through an intercom that it’s 30 minutes to showtime, then 15. It’s time for O’Hara to dress. It’s time for her to find the thing inside her that is somehow able to remember that the people in the audience are seeing this for the first time, that they deserve the best of her. How do you keep a thing like that in your head? She closes the door, and now she does her real vocal exercises, the ones she didn’t want to do in front of a reporter, the reporter guesses, and now, throughout backstage, there’s the sound of opera, the sound of theater, the sound that all those two hours created and erected and built toward fortitude. Now she’s ready.

[Kiss Me, Kate, with book by Sam Spewack and Bella Spewack and music and lyrics by Cole Porter, was presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54 from 14 March to 30 June 2019.  It ran 125 regular performances and 30 previews under the direction of  Scott Ellis, winning the LaDuca Award For Outstanding Choreography (Warren Carlyle) from the Drama Desk and the Theatre World Award for Stephanie Styles’s performance as Lois Lane/Bianca. 

[The production was also nominated for two additional Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Revival Of A Musical and Outstanding Featured Actor In A Musical (Corbin Bleu as Bill Calhoun/Lucentio), and four Tonys for Best Revival Of A Musical, Best Performance By An Actress In A Leading Role In A Musical (Kelli O’Hara as Lilli Vanessi/Katharine), Best Choreography, and Best Orchestrations (Larry Hochman).

[Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the novel Fleishman Is in Trouble, to be published this month.]

*  *  *  *

THE BROADWAY ‘SWING’

“THIS PERFORMER HAS TO MASTER 14 PARTS AT ONCE, AND LET GO OF HIS EGO”

by Scott Heller

30 May 2019

[On 9 March 2016, I posted a collection of articles on “Swings” from Equity News, the members’ journal of the Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional stage actors and theatrical stage managers.  It was part of an occasional series I do on ROT intended to introduce readers from outside the business to some of the professions and jobs that are part of the business of show.  The articles were meant to describe what a Swing is and what those members of a musical’s cast do.  Here is the profile of an actual, working swing, Angelo Soriano, with a description of how he gets ready before every performance.  That’s enough introduction; he’ll tell you the rest himself.]

Angelo Soriano is a “swing” in a Broadway musical — ready to play nearly any role, night after night after night.

It was a Friday afternoon on a two-show day in a nine-performance week, and Angelo Soriano, a cast member in the hit Broadway musical “Aladdin,” was in his sixth-floor dressing room, not yet sure what he might be asked to do that night. Would tumbling be required? Sword fighting? In the exuberant “Friend Like Me” dance number, would he make a comic appearance as a game-show host (in aqua spangles) or be one of the waiters (in red)?

As what’s known in Broadway parlance as a “swing,” Soriano is paid to master a head-spinning 14 roles, though he is never certain he will go onstage in any of them. With a 12-member male ensemble powering through aerobic choreography, there will always be injuries. Add in vacations, and the flu, and the complexities of running a multimillion-dollar Disney show, and you need agile replacements who can sing, dance and not trip over one another while brandishing scimitars in one scene, nailing an exuberant nine-minute tap-heavy number the next.

His job is to make that possible, to know — in his head and his body — a dozen dance roles, or “tracks.” Since he joined the cast four years ago, Soriano has been in “Aladdin” for more than 950 performances. “You make yourself invaluable,” he says simply.

One way to do that is to be comfortable with anonymity. Yes, when you’re in the show your name goes up on the board in the lobby (Also appearing in the ensemble: Angelo Soriano). But backstage the track is identified with the performer who handles it regularly (“You still doing Dickey today?” “I’m Dickey both shows”).

If he’s lucky, and things go wrong — meaning right for him — Soriano will get to take on a part with a name in the Playbill, a role with lines that get the audience laughing, like Omar or Iago, the rotund sidekick to the evil Jafar. But that’s not today — at least not so far. He is paid to stay in the New Amsterdam Theater in case he has to go on. He could be texted at any minute to pick up any of the 14 roles. But when that doesn’t happen, he has to stay practiced at another aspect of the Broadway swing’s skill set: waiting.

Inside the New Amsterdam, they call “Aladdin” a “government job,” as it’s still running strong after five years. Disney treats its employees well, and per the union contract, ensemble members earn a minimum of $2,095 a week; swings get $104.75 on top of that.

Soriano, a 29-year-old Californian by way of the Philippines, earned his Equity card performing at Walt Disney World, where he also met the woman who is now his wife. But even after several auditions, he never got a role in the 45-minute version of “Aladdin” that ran several times a day at Disney California Adventure. Which made it sweeter when, after a year on tour with “Flashdance the Musical” and six confidence-testing months of unemployment, he stepped into an audition for the Broadway production and got a job in the musical’s cast. He didn’t know then that Disney wanted him to swing.

“To be a really good swing, you have to have an incredible mind,” Susan Stroman, the Tony Award-winning director, has said. And while several ensemble members marvel at his ability to learn so much material, Soriano doesn’t see himself as remarkable. He’s one of five swings in the show, and he’s always been a multitasker, a visual thinker, a team player. “Put me in, coach,” he’ll sometimes whisper before leaving the darkness of the wings for the spotlight of the stage.

The night before the two-show Friday, he knew his job ahead of time: the track typically handled by Tyler Roberts, who was “swinging out” for one performance to let Soriano refresh his muscle memory on the most athletically challenging of all his possible assignments. He hadn’t done it in nine months. “It’s my asthma track,” he said. “It’s sometimes hard to sing.” That’s no more true than in “Arabian Nights,” the show’s breathless opening number, which would require Soriano to move downstage in a series of choreographed knee slides. Thirty minutes before curtain, he was on the floor in the wings — stretching his legs as wide as he could, bending his torso forward to loosen his hip flexors — while reviewing reference videos on his phone that pictured, from overhead, how the number would unfold. This is where I’ll be. Then here. Now here. Carry the carpet. Exit with the chicken cage. Enter with the pink cart....

He delivered his one line of the night with a comic sneer: “Go away, filthy beggar!” But his star turn came in “Friend Like Me.” With backstage help, he climbed into a turntable lift that twisted upward from below and deposited him, with a pop, into the can-you-top-this choreography. Dance, smile, exit stage left. Off with the crimson waiter’s jacket, on with the gold-spangled one instead. Tap back onto the stage. Grab a cane. Keep tapping. Big finish!

Soriano still goes on auditions periodically so that the industry doesn’t forget about him, but he’s in no rush to find another job. “As an artist, I have an ego, yes,” he admitted. But the needs of the show come first. “If you ask me to lead, I will. If you ask me to stand back and put my feelings aside, I will.” Being a swing, right now, is just fine. “It doesn’t feel like you’re struggling in New York City,” he said. “It feels like you belong here.”

[Disney’s Aladdin, with book by Chad Beguelin, music by Alan Menken, and lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice, opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on West 42nd Street on 20 March 2014 and is still running after 21 previews and 2,374 regular performances (as of 17 November).  Directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, the production has won a Tony for Best Performance By An Actor In A Featured Role In A Musical (James Monroe Iglehart as the Genie) and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor In A Musical (Iglehart).  It also received four other Tony nominations and six more Drama Desk nominations.

[Angelo Soriano is currently performing as a swing in the cast, which he joined on 17 February 2015.  He also understudies Iago and Omar.  Previously, Soriano toured with the musical Flashdance.

[Scott Heller is the theater editor at the New York Times.]