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Hello from backstage at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, NY. I'm about to do Rhapsody in Seth, the play I wrote about my childhood, which I did at the Actors Playhouse back in 2003. It was directed by Peter Flynn, and now he runs the Hangar Theatre, so he asked me to come up here and put it up again. The nice part is, I was given a large dressing room backstage. The odd part? It's literally the ladies dressing room — and they left the men's dressing room vacant. Passive/aggressive. Anyhoo, it's very weird to do a show again that you haven't done in a while. I started "rehearsing" it last Monday, and I put rehearsing in quotes because the show is an hour and half of me talking, and I had to have 40 percent of the lines literally fed to me. Not just the first few words of the lines, the whole line. Then, the next day I ran it again, and I suddenly knew almost all of it by heart. It's as if the words were behind a door in my head, and even though I needed help opening it, once I did, they all just came out. I wonder if that's the case for every show I've ever done. Are they all in my head somewhere? If so, does that mean that the horrific Broadway revue I did in summer camp entitled Broadway Rainbow is lurking in my cranium? Is that why I keep getting vertigo attacks? Speaking of which, I finally went to an ear, nose and throat doctor because I wanted to know why the H I keep getting random vertigo attacks every six months. She checked me out (including a hearing test) and finally told me that I have "Benign Positional Vertigo." Yay! A diagnosis! She said it can be brought on by various things like airplane trips (just took a ten-hour trip from Europe) and, here's the kicker, sodium. Devastating. Why? Because James has been telling me for years that I can't keep ordering in Chinese food every night of the week because the sodium is terrible for me. I couldn't believe I had to tell him he was right. The doctor told me I could look up more info online about "Benign Positional Vertigo" and the more I read about (i.e. nothing definite brings it on, nothing definite stops it, it lasts for indefinite periods of time), I finally realized I have what used to be referred to in Victorian times as "the vapors." Maybe now I can finally be cast in a Merchant/Ivory film.
photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN |
photo by Robb Johnston |
When Michael Urie was in a Texas community college, he visited NYC. His teacher recommended that he try out for Juilliard and he got in! While he was on that first trip to NYC, he saw tons of shows. One of them was Ragtime, and afterwards there was a talkback with various members of the cast. The little girl in the show had a very frank talk with the college students about what it was like doing eight shows a week and various other "I'm-a-Broadway-vet-in-the-body-of-a-ten-year-old"-type things. Michael completely remembers her no-nonsense show biz talk. Later on, he figured out it was…Lea Michele! Even back then she had seen it, done it, been it, lived it. Brava! Michael also told us that he was doing a movie recently and was asked to audition for the upcoming production of The Cherry Orchard. Since he was filming, he didn't have a lot of time to prepare the audition scenes and was about to cancel the audition. Finally, though, he decided to go anyway and wing it, since he knew the director because he was at Juilliard when Michael was a student. Cut to: the director didn't even want him to read the scenes. He just had Michael do really fun acting exercises as the character…like, "as you enter the stage, you notice your shoes squeak." Michael had a great time and got a call back for the following week. A day later, he was filming his movie in an underground locale where his cell phone didn't work. When he finally got reception, he had tons of messages from his agent. Turns out, the call-back was not in a week, it was that day! Michael hoped he could come in another day, but Dianne Wiest (who is slated to star in it) was only available that day. Since he was deep in the heart of Brooklyn and there was no way he could make it to the callback, he decided to just let it go. Cut to: the director called him and offered him the gig! Michael said that the moral is to work with people you know. Is it? Could it actually be: don't prepare for an audition? Turn off your cell phone for long periods of time? Skip callbacks and hope for the best? Or is it literally pure happenstance? It reminds me of the article in the Onion where a 114-year-old woman is continually asked the secret of her longevity and she angrily keeps saying it's simply chance. So hilarious.
I'm gearing up for some shows this fall: Deconstructing Broadway on Oct 24 at Drexel in Philadelphia, and Oct. 27-30 at City Theatre in Pittsburgh, and then a big Broadway revue on Nov. 1 at the Westbury Music Fair in the afternoon. For Westbury, I'm bringing out my belter friends (and one high soprano) and we're doing tons of Broadway solos, duets and group numbers. It's essentially a cruise ship-style I Heart Broadway show on dry land. You can get tickets by emailing [email protected]. P.S., that's the theatre I played last year that has a round stage that continually spins the whole time. Another cause of vertigo? Yay. Tonight, I'm headed to the Laurie Beechman room to see the fabulous Carole Demas do her act. Carole was the original Sandy in Grease on Broadway, and I spent many mornings in the 1970s watching her on TV because she and Paula Janis were the hosts of TV's "The Magic Garden." If you don't remember, take a gander and come see her tonight at 7 PM! Peace out!
(Seth Rudetsky has played piano in the pits of many Broadway shows including Ragtime, Grease and The Phantom of the Opera. He was the artistic producer/conductor for the first five Actors Fund concerts including Dreamgirls and Hair, which were both recorded. As a performer, he appeared on Broadway in The Ritz and on TV in "All My Children," "Law and Order C.I." and on MTV's "Made" and "Legally Blonde: The Search for the Next Elle Woods." He has written the books "The Q Guide to Broadway" and "Broadway Nights," which was recorded as an audio book on Audible.com. He is currently the afternoon Broadway host on Sirius/XM radio and tours the country doing his comedy show, "Deconstructing Broadway." He can be contacted at his website SethRudetsky.com, where he has posted many video deconstructions.)