Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle
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Authors: Denise Reich
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Front Of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle
© 2015 Denise Elizabeth Reich. All Rights Reserved.
Easter Bonnets performance photograph © 2006 Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. All rights reserved; used with permission of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
Photograph of David Belasco from public domain source:
The Life of David Belasco
by William White, 1918.
All additional photographs and cover design © Denise E. Reich. All rights reserved.
This book uses ‘theater’ to refer to the building itself or to the art form, and ‘theatre’ to refer to the proper name of a venue. A few venues mentioned in the text have names which deviate from this convention; the book uses those spellings.
Names of non-celebrity individuals have been changed.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Pay No Attention to the Elevator That Isn’t There
Shakespeare in the Park: Delacorte Theater
Chicago:
Shubert and Ambassador Theatres
The Invention of Love:
Lyceum Theatre
Def Poetry Jam:
Longacre Theatre
Keith, Billy and the Brotherhood of the Traveling Appendicitis
Hunting for Mistoffelees Beads
Mamma Mia:
Winter Garden Theatre
The Phantom of the Opera:
Majestic Theatre
Gratitude and love to Charlene Cuomo, Meave Shelton, Michael Mantell, Beth Secrist, Greg Marlow, Carolyn Hennesy and Anna Nielsen for enthusiastically supporting this project and being beloved friends.
Grazie mille, David Belasco.
Many thanks to Tom Viola at Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
Thank you to those at the Shubert Organization who made my time on Broadway so special, most particularly Mary Breillid; Dexter at the Belasco; Debbie at the Longacre; Francine at the Plymouth; Ronnie at the Winter Garden; Fran at the Imperial and Merida at the Lyceum; and the POTO orchestra crew: Cynthia, Gwen, Lee, Verieta and Margot.
Thanks as well to all the other friends I met along the way, and to the many on Broadway who treated me with kindness and respect, including those with whom I’ve lost touch, be they onstage, backstage or front of house.
I love my Mom.
I don’t enjoy theater anymore. At all. It doesn’t matter who is in the show, what it’s about, or where it’s playing. I’ve insulted some of my actor friends by refusing to go see their plays. I will actually buy a ticket to support them, but most of the time I won’t show up. There are only a handful of very close friends who can compel me to walk into a theater, and even then, even if I truly enjoy their performances, I’m always slightly uneasy about being there.
Some types of live performances are okay. Dance, for instance. I’ve been a dancer since I was two and a half years old, and in my mind, that splits off very neatly from theater. Cirque du Soleil? I have a lot of friends who do trapeze and aerial arts, so that works for me. Rock concerts? I’m there. A musical, however? A straight play? Please, no.
Maybe I overdosed on theater when I was younger. After spending fourteen years working on Broadway it would be a reasonable hypothesis. One
can
have too much of a good thing sometimes. Perhaps I associate live theater with work, since it
was
work for so long…does anyone like to go back to their office during their leisure time? I certainly don’t.
My theatrical legacy comes back to me in many ways, however. As much as I tell my brain that I’m not into Broadway anymore, I’m kidding myself. It is still into me. It shows up in the way I can still quote numerous plays and musicals verbatim. I remember music, choreography and minute set design elements from shows I saw fifteen years ago. When I read magazines and come across names I remember from Broadway, I’m immediately interested. When I hear theatrical jokes, I get the references.
I used to have a huge collection of Broadway CDs, Playbills, show jackets, cast gifts and other mementos, but several years ago, I gave almost everything away to friends. Still, theatrical souvenirs are scattered across my apartment. There are four or five signed window cards tucked away in a closet. On my bookshelf there’s a pair of dance shoes that were given to me by my friend Keith, who wore them in
Cats.
There are numerous books about Broadway theaters and shows in my library, as well as a folio from a production of
The Merchant of Venice
that was personally autographed by David Belasco. Somewhere in my jewelry box there’s a little tin filled with Austrian crystal Mistoffelees beads from
Cats.
There’s a talisman made from more Mistoffelees beads up on a shelf. There is even a snow globe from Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS that plays “New York, New York, A Hell of a Town.” It has Art Deco details from the New Amsterdam Theatre on the outside and a gaggle of Times Square buildings and show logos on the interior. At my Mom’s house there’s a gigantic whiskey bottle from the
Cats
Broadway set. I have some chandelier beads and a prop score from
The Phantom of the Opera
stashed somewhere.
I still get chills when I see a photo of a ghost light glowing alone on a dark stage.
Even though I don’t like seeing shows anymore, I’m still a theater geek of a different sort: I love the architecture. If I find a random old theater as I’m walking down the street, I immediately grab my camera to photograph it. If I end up in a theater, whether it’s being used as a live entertainment venue or a swap meet, I always spend a lot of time walking around and exploring. The more original design elements are extant, the happier I am.
I became a Broadway usher by talking my way in. I mean that quite literally. As I racked up a year of experience ushering on staff at two Off-Broadway venues, I did my homework on the theater owners who ran Broadway. I even walked into theater lobbies and asked the ticket takers who had hired them. Once I had the names I needed, I showed up at their offices, put my best foot forward, and convinced them to hire me. Afterward, I did my best to make sure they wouldn’t regret it.
I was trained at a show called
Into the Whirlwind
at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. It was entirely in Russian and starred a number of women who were real-life survivors of Soviet gulags, prisons and persecution. They assigned me to the mezzanine, and there was frenetic activity everywhere I looked. Nobody knew where they were going, and a lot of the patrons had limited English language skills. When the show started and I was allowed to sit and rest in the gorgeous second-floor lobby, I almost melted into my chair.
What was I in for?
The title was prophetic; I was indeed thrown right into the whirlwind. Within six months I would be working as a substitute usher all over Broadway, and within two years I would be assigned to my first permanent theater. Within four years I’d be a regular sub at a Broadway blockbuster. In eight years I’d be so disenchanted that I wouldn’t enjoy seeing theater at all. In fourteen, I’d be walking away completely.
By the time I was in my late twenties I’d walked across thirteen different Broadway stages and actually performed on two of them. I’d also ushered at more than fifty different shows and worked in twenty-five Broadway theaters. It was more Broadway than many people experienced in a lifetime. During the same period of time I graduated with a four-year degree, did post-graduate work, traveled to five continents, was published in numerous magazines and books, said goodbye to my sixteen-year-old family cat, adopted two silly kittens, and lived in seven different places. I had four major operations and struggled with all manner of health issues.
While I was a college student, ushering allowed me to work and attend school full time. I gave up my weekends, but I had steady employment that didn’t interfere with my class schedule. Since I was attending college on a 75% academic scholarship and my family wasn’t rich, I needed the money. It was that simple. I had my own apartment, since it was actually cheaper than living in the dorms, and I had light and grocery bills to pay.
It was sometimes an arduous task: I’d get up at dawn and travel for an hour and a half to get to school, go to classes all day, walk from the Upper East Side down to the Theater District, work until almost eleven, and get home around midnight. Toward the end of my college career, when I was ushering almost every night and taking demanding classes, I was so permanently exhausted that I was almost hallucinating. The fatigue left me so drained that I wrote poetry about smiling shark heads dancing down the street and painted neon monsters. However, I still maintained an A average and I earned enough money to pay my bills in my own apartment. Did I miss out on the “college experience?” Absolutely. However, it wouldn’t have meant anything to me at that time.
After I graduated with my BA from Marymount Manhattan College, I realized that majoring in Theatre Arts had been a horrific mistake. Unfortunately, it was a little too late to do much about it at that point. If I could go back in time, I’d honestly shake my seventeen-year old self and tell her to at least do a double major in Pre-Med, for God’s sake. My only saving grace was that I had a BA instead of the even less commercially viable BFA. The job market was horrendous, and between the unpaid internships and the low-paying entry-level gigs, nothing I found would pay me as much or give me as many benefits as ushering did.
With that, the choice to stay on Broadway was an easy one for me. I didn’t see the point of working sixty hours a week in an entry-level job in an office to earn the same income, or less, that I made as an usher. I wasn’t lazy and I gave 110% to everything I did, but I did expect to have a life-work balance. Ushering afforded me the time to do things I wanted to do outside of work, and that was important. It was a survival job, not a career.
Sure, some people looked down on it, but that was their prerogative. For a time I suspected that my mother was ashamed to tell her friends what her college-educated, supposedly brilliant daughter did for a living. Once, at a party, someone actually walked away from me when I told them I worked as an usher. I really didn’t care about that; I wasn’t going to shape my life around someone else’s expectations for me. If someone was snobby enough to dismiss me out of hand because I worked a blue-collar job, I probably didn’t want to get to know them anyway. The bottom line was that ushering provided me with a higher quality of life, more money, and more free time than a so-called “professional” job would have done.
The one thing that you might notice missing from this narrative is an explanation of my vast love of theater. That’s because it wasn’t there. When I was growing up, one of my greatest passions was dance. I was never the bunhead that went to the studio for ten classes a week, but I consistently studied dance up through college. As a kid, when my family moved to new areas, one of the first things I usually wanted to do was find a dance studio where I could take classes. Eventually I performed in some reasonably high-level dance events, including the opening ceremonies of the 1994 World Cup at Giants Stadium.
Theater was never part of the mix. I saw shows here and there, helped write a musical in junior high and performed in school plays, but it was something that I could take or leave. I shrugged off the idea of joining the Drama Club in high school. I started doing extra and bit part work in films and TV shows when I was about sixteen, and when I got my copy of
Backstage
every week I skipped right over the listings for stage auditions.
Where did the Broadway love originate, then? Before I started my first semester of college, my mother and I decided to take in a Broadway show. I hadn’t seen one since I was six years old, when we’d gone to
Annie
for my birthday. The TKTS half-price ticket booth in Times Square was offering up
Cats,
so off we went. Our seats were toward the back of the orchestra and off to the side, but they were good enough.
I don’t think it is any coincidence that I was enchanted by a dance show. The entire production bewitched me, and I walked out of the theater dancing myself.
From then on, I was interested in Broadway, and particularly
Cats.
I was so obsessive about it that I hunted down cast recordings from various productions around the world: Australia, Germany, Hungary, France, Norway and Japan. I developed a crush on one of the cast members. Much of the money I earned from working went to the TKTS booth for more tickets to the show. I also discovered that other Broadway productions had student tickets and standing room. And suddenly, a new world had opened to me.
It wasn’t enough to go to the show; I wanted to be a part of it. However, to be completely frank, finding a way to be in a Broadway show was not going to be easy for me. I had a lot of talents; none of them were particularly marketable on Broadway. I’d danced since I was a toddler, but Broadway choreography tended to be a bit out of my league. Since I only stood 4’11” and was, shall we say, round despite my athleticism, there wouldn’t have been a lot of spots in the chorus for me anyway. I wasn’t exactly going to be a Rockette. Singers didn’t need to be tall, slim and leggy, but nobody was going to pay to hear my on-key, but totally unmemorable, voice on Broadway. They might have paid me to
stop
singing.
I still showed up for a few Broadway chorus calls, where I dutifully executed my double pirouette and heard my ‘thank you for stopping by’ as I was typed out. The auditions gave me the chance to stand on a few Broadway stages and get an inside glimpse at the way chorus calls were handled, so even though I didn’t have a prayer in hell of being cast, I still think they were worthwhile experiences.
What about backstage? I had neither the skills nor the interest in becoming a stagehand. When I took a stagecraft class in college I was bored stiff. I could barely sew a button so Wardrobe was out; and I didn’t even know how to put on eyeliner, so a job in the Makeup department wasn’t happening. I couldn’t play an instrument at an advanced level, so I could scratch working in a Broadway orchestra, too. As for the front of the house, since I looked about fourteen years old for a long time, there was no way anyone was going to allow me to be a bartender. Someone would have called Child Protective Services on the theater, I think.
My attention to detail, photographic memory, ability to deal with lots of different personalities and dogged determination probably would have made me an absolutely wonderful stage manager or dramaturge. I had no idea how to get into either of those professions, though. What was left? For me, the most plausible, and easiest, route to Broadway employment was ushering.
And so it went. I was determined to work on Broadway, and I found a way in.
If the seventeen-year-old fangirl I was had ever known that she was going to be able to go backstage at
Cats
and get paid to see so many shows, she would have fainted with joy. If she’d known that she was still going to be ushering when she was thirty, however, she might have been slightly concerned.