Quiet on the set
James Oh moved to Charlottesville from Washington State at the beginning of this, his senior year. First up during the singing audition on a Monday afternoon, Oh had never been in a musical and was obviously nervous. He talked with the piano accompanist for a few minutes, and then began. A couple measures in, he stopped and then started, and then stopped again. “Hey James,” shouted Cunningham from a small table below the stage. “Take your gloves off. I’m getting a Michael Jackson feel.” Then she turned around and said, “All you girls, remember to pull your hair back so we can see your face.”
Oh, a hurdler on the track team, would have a tricky balancing act to pull off when track practice and play rehearsals overlapped in the coming months. Several weeks later, I asked him why he was stretching himself so thin during the spring of his final year of high school.
Still sweaty after two hours on the track, Oh pondered the question, and finally said, “My sophomore year, when I lived in Washington, I ran away from my audition because I was really scared. When I moved here, I decided I had to go for it. Before my audition, my track coach told me to ‘focus on the audition, not the outcome,’ which is what I did.”
Although it’s been more than three decades since I was in high school, one thing hasn’t changed: When you want something bad enough, you swallow your fears and your insecurities, and, as Oh said, you go for it. Which takes courage. Especially when you’re a teenager.
Three days and 20-some after-school and late-night hours of singing, acting and dancing later, Cunningham and Morris posted their callback list. Oh made the cut, as did Christina Ramsey, Hello, Dolly!’s co-choreographer and the star of last summer’s Live Arts’ production of Hairspray. Also on the list were Anna Goodrich, the reigning homecoming queen who’d never before made it out of the ensemble; Annie Keller, a Barbra Streisand aficionado since age 12; and Hannah Williams, a dancer for 14 of her 16 years, and the show’s other choreographer.
In the running for lead male parts were Ben Merrel, who will study aeronautical engineering at Purdue University in the fall; Aaron Hoffman, a 10th-grader who’s performed at Four County Players and with the Ash Lawn Opera; Tyler Missig, a quiet transplant from Las Vegas; and Brady Storer, the thespian honor society’s treasurer who’s been honing his singing voice since he first discovered it during a middle school production of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
“All of you are very, very talented,” Cunningham told them just before 10pm at the end of a very long day. “If we were running this show for a year, we’d have understudies and everyone would have the chance to play Dolly Levi and Horace Vandergelder. No matter how we cast it, I expect you, my call-back people, to be my leaders; my strong core of diehards.” Exhausted and hopeful and lined up onstage like something out of A Chorus Line, the group has convinced me over the course of several days that they’re a widowed 1890s matchmaker and a hat shop owner and a feed store clerk and a half-a-millionaire, among others. I’ve watched them struggle to hit the high notes and dance for hours. Cunningham is right: They’re all very talented. And as a mom, I don’t want a single one of them to be disappointed.
When I asked Cunningham and Morris how they deal with this year after year, Cunningham jokingly told me that she wished she could post the cast list “and then run away to Canada for a week.” Instead, she becomes “Margaret Thatcher, iron woman,” and gets down to work.
Morris said she “empathizes with them when they come in and they’re in tears because they didn’t get the role they wanted. I try to help them work through the process, and to accept it. I remind them that it’s not that they did anything wrong, it’s that somebody else did something a little bit better. Very rarely does anyone quit, and when they do, it’s usually for the best.”
“Thank you ladies and gentlemen,” Cunningham finally said, and promised that the cast list would be posted on the drama bulletin board the following afternoon.
Josh Davis, however, has other ideas.
On Friday morning, Davis, chief operating officer for Albemarle County Public Schools, called a snow day. No school, no cast list. And Cunningham had the weekend to mull over her decisions. When I saw her in the AHS hallway on Monday, she told me that the cast list that went up that morning was not the list she would have posted the previous Friday afternoon. After going back-and-forth for 48 hours, she called Morris Sunday night, and told her she’d changed her mind.
Annie Keller received a Hello, Dolly! DVD for Christmas last year, and by her estimate has watched it about once a week ever since. Whippet-thin and 5’10” tall with a singing voice that would put an “American Idol” winner to shame, Keller made her AHS stage debut as the wardrobe in Beauty and the Beast when she was a freshman. Now a senior, she sat next to me in the seventh row of the school auditorium where she’d spend more time in the coming months than in her own bed. She smiled when I congratulated her on scoring the lead role. Then I asked how she would have felt if she’d been cast in another part. Her face fell, and I expected her to tell me she’d have made the best of it. But she surprised me when she told me, “I would have been really sad. I practiced for Dolly over the summer, and I learned all the songs. It’s been my dream to be Dolly ever since Ms. Cunningham told me that we’d be doing the show this year.”
“In real life, I’m not that funny,” said Keller, who has three younger, non-acting, non-singing siblings who all run lines with her. “For me, the best thing about being onstage is making the audience laugh. And I love making them smile when I sing.”
Cunningham and her leading lady have a complicated relationship. Dolly is the pair’s fifth musical together, and though they have obvious respect and affection for one another, their styles don’t always mesh: Cunningham has been known to raise her voice when an actor isn’t living up to her expectations; for Keller, the worst punishment her parents can mete out is to raise their voice at her. That’s all anyone has to do, she told me, and she wants to cry.
Three weeks before opening night, Keller trips over one of her long Dolly dresses and breaks her elbow. I suspect that Cunningham was not pleased when she saw Keller the next afternoon in a blue sling (she refused a cast in the emergency room, so her arm was immobilized by a mechanical brace) that temporarily made it difficult for her, especially with Dolly’s enormous bag looped through her good arm, to freely move and dance.
“People do their best work when they’re under pressure, when there’s an edge and a risk, an obstacle or problem to solve,” Cunningham told me several days later in the choir room following one of Morris’ bi-weekly singing rehearsals. “We never tell the kids that they’re doing the impossible, even though they are. What joy of achievement do you have if you tackle something easy? The students need to realize that they can overcome the impossible. That’s a life lesson. You can’t always give in when something is difficult. Are you gonna walk away when something gets tough? I certainly hope not!”