Stories about my Father 1

Father’s Day - June 19, 2022

The opening night party for the Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun was held in the Tavern on the Green restaurant inside Central Park. The producers took over the whole place. They created a seating chart that scattered the performers throughout so that no one room seemed any more special than any other room. Of course, any room that Bernadette Peters who was the star of it, was going to be sitting in was going to be the main room but it was still beautifully arranged.

Most Broadway opening nights are a bit of a free for all. There never seems to be quite enough seating. People tend to congregate in clumps. After a very long workday following weeks and weeks of anxiety-provoking rehearsals and tech, all anyone wants to do when they get there is to sit down and eat for a minute before getting on to the serious business of partying. Those of us backstage, who have had to finish up back at the theatre following the performance are often left to our own devices once we get there.

This party was different. It was clear that it was being very well organized, so I decided to invite my parents. I wanted them to experience the excitement of a real Broadway opening night.

My first professional job in New York was as an unpaid production assistant on Bill Irwin’s The Regard of Flight at the American Place Theatre on 46th Street. While I was still a sophomore in college, I had written letters to several theatres offering to volunteer, and Wynn Handman had been the sole person to write back and offer me a chance to interview. During our meeting, he asked if I were interested in working on the show and without really knowing anything about it except that it involved a mime from San Francisco, I jumped at the opportunity.

The Regard of Flight was a wonderful show. It extended its run past the end of the school year, and they offered me $100.00 a week to extend with it. I stammered that they didn’t have to do that, that I’d be more than happy to keep going ahead for free. The company manager assured me that wasn’t necessary. Taking me aside, the stage manager grabbed me by the collar and pushed me into a wall, and told me to never be so stupid as to turn down any chance to make money in the theatre again. Noted. The first of many valuable lessons learned.

The show was a hit, and everyone started coming. One of my fondest memories from that time happened after the show one night while I was clearing up Bill’s costumes onstage. Bill started the show wearing about six or seven different costumes - each one underdressed beneath the one above it. He’d perform part of the show, then strip off the outer layer and move on to the next. Bill worked hard and despite the many layers managed to sweat through them all. Afterward, I had to turn them all right-side out and hang them all up to dry for the next show.

That night, as I was working on them, I heard a crowd of people coming down the hallway from the front of house. I could tell that they were all chatting excitedly about the show, but I couldn’t really hear what they were saying. Then the door to the stage opened and Robin Williams peeked in. By himself. He was completely alone. All the different voices that I’d heard were all just him. This was 1982. He had just finished filming his sitcom Mork and Mindy and I was already a huge fan. He saw me with the pile of clothes and immediately lit up. He picked up each of the suits in turn and created a character for it and then had them all talk to each other. Oh, for a cell phone to have been able to record it. It was a private performance just for me but given what I’d already heard from the hallway, I am sure he would have done it to an empty theatre.

My mother and father came to see the show, too, and enjoyed it, I think. The Regard of Flight was the first of many shows that I did at The American Place, and they came to all of them. Some of them were good, but many of them ranged from… well… interesting all the way down to nigh on unwatchable.  

I never again worked on anything for free, but, by the same token, I didn’t earn a fortune, either. I worked on a musical review in the basement of the theatre called, A… My Name is Alice that transferred to a commercial Off-Broadway cabaret theatre in Greenwich Village called The Village Gate. We ran down there for a year and a half, and I juggled the weekly performances with my classes uptown at Columbia University.

I think that to my father, all this work that I was doing seemed more like a glorified hobby. None of it lasted very long and it certainly didn’t pay very much. When I got into Columbia my father offered to pay for it all but asked that whatever it was I chose to major in that it not be theatre. He wanted me to have something solid and dependable to fall back on, so I majored in English. In and of itself, an English degree is no more or less useful than a degree in Theatre but given all the professional work that I was doing downtown while I was studying, it didn’t make much of a difference to me.

Two years after I’d graduated from Columbia, the director, and the stage manager of A… My Name is Alice offered me the assistant stage manager position on a new Off-Broadway musical called Just So! Because of that show, I got into the union. One of the benefits of membership, on top of the slightly better pay, was that I could start accruing work weeks towards becoming eligible for health insurance.

Just So! was a bomb (we closed the day after we opened) but I kept working steadily after that and my parents kept coming to see everything that I did.

I started working with the director Carey Perloff at Classic Stage Company down near Union Square. We did a whole series of utterly fascinating plays by Strindberg, Brecht, and Pinter. I was in heaven, but I think my parents preferred the musicals. We did the American premiere of Pinter’s Mountain Language on a double bill with his, The Birthday Party, and Pinter, himself, spent several weeks in rehearsal with us. I couldn’t believe that I was being paid to be in the room with him. Harold Pinter is still, to this day, one of my favorite writers, if not my actual favorite. I was on cloud nine the whole time.

Mom and Dad came to see that one as well. They weren’t as impressed with Pinter as I was, but in the cast was the actress, Jean Stapleton. Growing up, All in the Family was one of the TV shows that we all watched together. I think that Jean was the first person I worked with that was famous enough that my father knew who she was and admired her.

I had become very friendly with Jean while we were working together, and we’d had many wonderful talks together. She referred to her salary as her “car fare” while for me it was the only thing keeping me off the streets. Her huge success playing Edith had stopped her from getting any serious work after the show finished its run because everyone just assumed that she WAS Edith. In truth, she was a spectacular actress. While there were certainly elements of the character of Edith in who she was, as I got to know her, most of that dropped away. She was incredibly grateful to be taken seriously and she was as excited to be in the room with Pinter as I was. We talked about how lucky we both felt all the time. For opening night, she gave me a book about Pinter that I still treasure.

When I told her that my parents were coming, she asked me what they thought about my working in the business. I told her that while I thought my mother enjoyed it that my father worried about me. He always supported me, but I think he always hoped that I’d grow out of it.

I don’t know what my parents made of the performance itself, but afterward I was able to introduce them to Jean. That night, Jean gave me a gift that will never be able to repay. When they met, she took my father’s hand and said that she thought that I was doing exactly what I should be doing with my life. She told him that I was very good at my job and that she, herself had started out in the same way and that she believed I was on the path that I should be on. It may be all in my imagination, but I honestly think that having someone like Jean Stapleton say that to him made a difference. At any rate, while I doubt that he ever really stopped worrying about me, I think he slept better at night knowing that Jean, at least, thought I was going to be OK.

Eventually, the jobs I got started paying better. I got on my first Broadway show, Lend Me a Tenor, which was followed by The Secret Garden and The Phantom of the Opera. All my parents’ friends had heard of them, so Mom and Dad finally had some bragging rights. I had health insurance and had longer-running gigs. In 1999, I ended up as the first assistant stage manager on the new production of Annie Get Your Gun and it was opening night.

The show was beautifully designed by the late Tony Walton, and it sounded glorious. Bernadette and Tom Wopat were sublime together. It was a fantastic performance.

Each of the rooms at Tavern on the Green was decorated in its own style and it was all very over the top and full of shiny crystal and brightly colored everything. Carrying through the Wild West theme of the show, each table had a centerpiece on it made with a model stagecoach and horses. I cannot remember who we were seated with, but we were surrounded by an assortment of performers, crew, and guests.

As dessert was being served, when she thought nobody was looking, my mother quietly reached out and took one of the horses off the centerpiece and slipped it into her purse. My father was horrified.

“Angela! What are you doing?” he whispered in a panic.

“They’re just going to throw them away,” my mother sensibly responded. 

When my father got agitated, his fingers twitched. I am not sure that my father during his life was ever very comfortable in fancy surroundings, and this was no exception. His fingers were now dancing a jig.

To change the subject, I suggested that we all go into the central room so that I could introduce them to Bernadette. When we got there, there was already a line of people waiting.

We found ourselves behind the next table over from her. As we were standing there behind the chairs, a man who was much the same age as my father stood up right in front of us saying to his wife, “What on earth are you going to do with that? For heaven’s sake put it back.” She was also putting one of the horses into her purse.

“My wife just did the same thing,” my father said to the man.

The man turned and looked at my father and said, “What are they going to do with them?”

They both laughed and while we waited there, my father and the man started chatting. He asked how my father came to be there, and Dad responded that I was one of the stage managers. I can’t remember what the other man’s immediate connection to the show was, but he had a wonderfully warm and rich voice, and it was a pleasure listening to them talk. They introduced themselves to each other and kept it up until we moved closer to Bernadette’s table.

I think that by the time my father passed away that he wasn’t all that worried about my survival anymore. I’d had a couple of very lucrative years that I think amazed him. It always made him nervous when I was unemployed, but he accepted it because I did. Being unemployed in my business is just part of the regular ebb and flow of the work. It wasn’t in his. In his work, you got a job and moved up in that company for life. Losing your job was earth-shattering.

My father experienced and was witness to a lot of traumas in his life. He was born just before the Great Depression, fought in the trenches during World War II, and was right across the street from the Twin Towers during 9/11. He told stories about his life all the time. Some of them he wrote down and some of them I am going to have to try and remember as best I can. He was witness to a lot of history and a lot of just plain life.

Who my father was, is very much a part of who I am now. There were times I’ve tried to pretend otherwise but I find that as I get older, my respect for him and what he lived through continues to grow. I will say that it never fails to make me smile when I remember him standing there that night at that party, chuckling about my mother with Gregory Peck.