Supporting cast
If Cunningham is fierce and Morris is the good cop, Greg Thomas, director of the show’s pit orchestra, brings the levity. To ensure that only musicians can hear his direction during the show, Thomas speaks to the orchestra through a system of green garden hoses that they press to their ears. During rehearsals, he will occasionally instruct a trumpet player to aim a hose so he can blow a piece of candy through it at an unsuspecting actor. (Cunningham, who’s worked with Thomas for many years, shoots him the stink-eye whenever she sees a flying object.)
Late one evening on a brief break in the band room, Thomas informed his small orchestra that it needed to practice its theme song—something nobody knew existed. Back in the pit, he cued the musicians and they broke into a surprisingly well-harmonized a cappella version of “Build Me Up Buttercup,” causing the actors—and Cunningham—to stop what they were doing and bust a move. As light-hearted as he can be, Thomas never forgets that there is a job to be done, that the show must go on, and a couple weeks before opening night he was displeased with a malaise that seemed to have settled in.
Shortly before their 6pm dinner break, he gathered the cast around the orchestra pit, and reminded everyone that “you chose to do this and you’re not allowed to complain about how tired you are. When you complain, it affects you onstage, and that’s coming across. A combination of music and drama is only fun if it’s good. It’s not fun if it’s cruddy. Don’t choose this next year if you’re too tired. Right now, you need to be intense about getting this thing right, and that attitude will carry us. Every remaining rehearsal will be empowered by that vibe.”
“I didn’t pay him to say that,” Cunningham shouted, as the actors returned to their places for one more run-through, with an obvious infusion of new energy.
On a Saturday afternoon when most of his student crew was primping for the prom, Carl Schwaner, 51, was in a lift 40′ in the air, changing and then aiming 575-watt light bulbs. Schwaner has spent the past couple months observing rehearsals and taking notes about who should be lit and how, where, and when. He and his team of 10 are also responsible for Dolly’s sound.
“We’ll have 22 cast members miked, which is a lot,” explained Shira Goldeen, a senior who runs the soundboard with Sam Khurgel. “The first day we mic the actors we gather them all in a circle and tell them the ground rules. No food or water while wearing the mics,” which cost more than $600 apiece. “Nothing touches your mic except us. One year, someone broke her wrist when she fell because as she landed she was trying to protect her mic. Who says theater isn’t a contact sport?”
When all is said and done, Hello, Dolly! will cost about $30,000. How much of that comes from the school, I asked Cunningham after Melissa Brown, an AHS biology teacher in charge of set painting, had shown me around the tiny, graffiti-riddled backstage area. The two women guffawed, and Cunningham told me her entire budget has been $500 a year for the past 16 years. The money for the shows comes from ticket receipts, fundraisers, and donations. It’s always a struggle and a worry.
Yet she said she’s “been teaching for 36 years, and I’ve never worked anywhere where there is this much community support for theater. They embrace us. Last week a lady came to the front office with a beautiful dress that she wanted to donate to the drama department. She didn’t leave her name…people do that kind of thing all the time. They drop stuff off and tell us to have a great year, a great show.”
Over the past several months I’ve realized that the difference between a good show and a great show is the details. And no detail is too small for Cunningham. Like the evening she told “wardrobe maven” Donna Matkovich that “Cornelius is wearing the wrong kind of shirt. It looks all crumple-dumple, It doesn’t make sense that Barnaby’s so well pressed. If anything, it should be the other way around. And we have all kinds of spats we need to put on these guys. I counted 40-some pairs of spats. These shoes with tassles would not have been worn in the 1890s. And I’m not digging the black ties. There’s so much black in the restaurant that I’m trying to get rid of all the dark clothing colors.”
Some of the best advice I ever received came from a high school teacher. He told me that to succeed in life I needed to do two things: Show up and be prepared. By the time Hello, Dolly! premieres at the beginning of May, many of the kids involved in it will have put in at least 25 hours per week for three months—on top of full school days. Late one night I spy Keller in a sparkly, floor-length red dress with a feather boa wrapped around her neck. She’s tapping away on a laptop computer, furiously attempting to finish her statistics homework before she’s called back onstage to fine-tune a waltz sequence with Ben Merrel and Aaron Hoffman.
Obviously, they have shown up. But are they prepared?
“I see light at the end of the tunnel, although I’m not sure if it’s high beams,” Cunningham joked while polishing off a salad on the Thursday of “tech week” when all hands—actors, musicians, techies, painters, builders, costumers, make-up artists, hairdressers, parent volunteers—were on deck from 4pm to 11pm every day as this high school production takes on the appearance of something I’d pay to see off-Broadway.
Earlier in her teaching career, Cunningham briefly gave up theater because she thought it “was consuming my life—and I wanted a life for myself. But I had to go back to it because it’s who I am. The people I work with are my family, and why would I want to leave that.”
Speaking of family, set foreman Larry Johnson sits down with an anxious look on his face.
“We’ve got very little left to do, which gives me an uneasy feeling,” he said. “It’s weird to be this close to opening night and not have some major issues going on.” A few minutes go by and Johnson stands up, relieved. “Door handles. We need door handles. And I have to buy a couple of hinges, which is why I have this hinge in my pocket, to remind me. I’m gonna go write myself some notes.”
Issi Marsh, a 10th grader who plays a cook, tells me she will battle a couple of emotions when the curtain goes up for the May 2 preview: excitement and nausea. “That’s when you know it’s for real, that all the hours and the lack of sleep and the worrying about finishing your homework are worth it because there are actually people out there. You also realize that you’re a part of something, something really fun and worthwhile that makes so many people happy.”
“When we’re up there on opening night, there’s nothing like it,” added Brady Storer, transformed into a middle-aged Horace Vandergelder by a three-piece suit, a gray, handlebar mustache, and mutton chop sideburns. “I’m excited, but I also feel calm because the only thing left to do is to put on a good show.”
Sitting near the back of the theater during last Friday’s opening night, I hear a familiar squeal of delight, followed by a bark-like “ha!” I turn around and there’s Cunningham in an enormous cherry-red hat and a black sequined top. She’s seen every scene of the show dozens of times, but she’s still delighted when Storer’s Vandergelder seductively hugs his cash register.
Several scenes later, Keller as Dolly appears at the top of a large staircase lined with restaurant waiters. I feel a hand on my shoulder. I grab it, but I don’t turn around because I can’t take my eyes off Keller, stunning and sparkling in the gold ball gown a stranger dropped off in the school office several weeks ago. “It’s so nice to be back home where I belong,” she sings, and I glance at the seat behind me. Tears are running down Cunningham’s cheeks. Her leading lady is hitting it out of the park. And the fiercest woman in the room couldn’t be happier.
Hello, Dolly! has closed, but you can still catch In the Heights at Monticello High School Friday, May 17 through Sunday, May 19. Nominated for 13 Tony Awards, the musical features a multi-cultural cast and follows the goings-on over three days in the tight-knight Dominican-American New York neighborhood of Washington Heights, where “the coffee from the corner bodega is light and sweet, the windows are always open, and the breeze carries the rhythm of three generations of music.”