A few weeks into the school year, the cast hits a plateau. It happens part of the way through every production. They know their lines (mostly) and the choreography (mostly), but opening night is still off in the distance and they’ve already been at it for a while.
The excitement of being chosen for the pilot, the newness of first coming together, has dissipated. Little things begin to bother them. One day the auditorium is not available and they have to move to the cafeteria, where the football team has gathered to consume a spread that’s been set out for them—sandwiches, chips, soft drinks, cookies. “We’re the ones who are the best in the country, and they’re the ones feeding their faces,” Lindsay Edmondson, Robby’s sister, says.
Even Volpe shows flashes of grumpiness. He sits in the auditorium and observes as a scene is rehearsed, one he’s had to tone down. “Sometimes I wish I could do this the real way,” he says. “It would be so much funnier.” It’s the only time I ever hear him complain about the limits of being a high school director or express a wish that he could work at a higher level of theater.
He tells the cast that the following week, two days of rehearsals will be lost because he and Krause are attending a conference of high school theater teachers in Chicago. The kids don’t like it. They may be getting a little weary, but they’d still rather rehearse than not. “Is this something you have to do, or you go because it’s fun?” Colin Lester asks.
He is launching into one of his bits, as Volpe knows. Colin is one of the school’s top students as well as a serious actor planning to pursue theater in college. He is distinctly a character actor type, a little guy with a tuft of blond hair and a face that reads irony and attitude.
“Oh, it’s fun,” Volpe says of the upcoming conference. “We know lots of the other teachers there.”
“So it’s like an ego thing, too? You like it when people say, ‘Oh my God, there’s the great Lou Volpe’?”
“Yes, that’s exactly how it is. We eat fancy hors d’oeuvres, and they buy me expensive champagne and praise me in elaborate toasts.”
The production itself could use some of the snap of this repartee. Part of the problem is that not everyone is fully off book—they have not yet memorized the whole of their parts.
“You will never have a character when you’re reading from a script,” Volpe has to tell them. “The play will never work.”
He segues into the rhetorical tic I’ve heard before, his own call and response. “Am I mad? No. Is the show awful? No. Is it good? No. Right now, we’re stuck in neutral. If you’re satisfied with that, fine. We can do a very neutral show and the audience will applaud politely and forget the whole thing one minute after they leave the theater. But if you want to do better than that, you’ve got to get rid of the damn books. Do you hear me?”
It is a sort of first warning. If anyone has imagined his patience is infinite, they now know it’s not.
• • •
Most of the challenge of Spring Awakening resides in the sheer difficulty of the show itself. Volpe’s young actors could do teen angst and anger once they learned the music and got the hang of the story’s punk-rock spirit. But sexual awakening, the other thread woven through the musical, is more challenging.
Melchior, Luke’s character, is a recognizable figure from any era: the righteous young man, seized with intellectual passion, whose ardor migrates from his brain to his loins. He defends the academically faltering Moritz against their authoritarian teacher, explains the concept of sex to the other boys, based not on experience but on his deep reading about the subject, and makes arguments against the evils of the onrushing Industrial Age.
Wendla (Georjenna) is fetching, socially concerned like Melchior, but painfully and tragically innocent. As the show opens, her sister has just had a baby. “I’m an aunt for the second time and I still have no idea how it happens,” she tells her mother, who replies, “I honestly don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this kind of talk!” Melchior and Wendla like to meet in the forest and talk. He tells her that he worries over the future of the peasantry and fears that “industry is fast determining itself” against them. “Against us all,” she replies.
It’s maybe not the most suggestive courting language, but one thing leads to the next. They make love in a hayloft. On Broadway, the scene, as played by Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff, is explicit. The script includes such directions as Melchior starts to unbutton Wendla’s dress. He gently reaches up her legs. Melchior reaches inside Wendla’s undergarments.
It cannot go that way at Truman. The easy thing for Volpe would be to just let everyone off the hook and allow them to play it as chastely as possible, but that is not his style. Georjenna and Luke, friends since grade school, get together one Saturday to try to get this scene right. Each of them brings a friend. They spend a good half of the time joking and talking. The rest of the time, they practice wrapping themselves around each other in ways that might seem convincing. The following Monday, they do the scene at rehearsal. Volpe is unimpressed. “I know you’re trying, but I’m sorry, this looks like two friends in the park on a Sunday afternoon.”
He tells them it has to “sizzle” and reminds them they are acting. Yes, the Truman version of this scene will be PG—or PG-13 at most. Fully clothed. Hands in proper places. But it can still convey something of the real thing.
“If you haven’t done it, imagine it,” he says. “That’s acting. It’s what we do here.” He makes a reference to the previous year’s musical, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. “After all, Georjenna ran around like a Texas cowgirl firing a six-shooter, and she had never done that.”
It’s a funny line. But everyone understands the point. Their director will protect them by staging the show appropriately; he’s never done otherwise. But they can’t be afraid of it.
A reporter from the Bucks County Courier Times, the paper whose columnist went after Rent, is expected at a rehearsal. He wants to write a story about Truman landing another pilot. The school district’s public relations director suggested the story on a list of other feature ideas she hoped might put Truman in a positive light. Krause’s response to this impending visit: “You have to be fucking kidding me.”
She fears a disaster. The reporter will surely Wiki the show and learn about its elements of sex and rebellion, abortion, sexual abuse, a little homosexuality, a hint of S&M—maybe without understanding that the Broadway version is not what will be produced at Truman.
Every one of these aspects, however, does remain in the play, if muted in some cases—even a whipping scene that Volpe dislikes and believes has “no theatrical purpose.” (To understand what it must feel like for Martha to be beaten by her father, Wendla asks Melchior to bend her over and lash her with a switch he picks up in the woods, which he does, hesitantly at first, then with some enthusiasm. In the revisions that Volpe and Krause sent to New York, they cut this scene; it is one of the few edits that the authors rejected.)
Volpe expresses no worry over the reporter’s visit. On the day he is to arrive, the rehearsal schedule includes “Totally Fucked,” which Volpe proclaims “no problem at all” because it is, after all, one of the best songs in the show. Why shouldn’t he get to hear a great number? This is a Volpe I did not know when I was his student—and who maybe didn’t exist then: the person who really gets a kick out of stirring the pot.
The reporter walks into the auditorium halfway through rehearsal and watches the cast go through about the last thirty minutes of Act 2. He’s missed “Totally Fucked,” which Volpe later acknowledges was a good thing, saying, “I’ve already got too many challenges with this show.”
It may also be that the reporter’s computer does not access Wikipedia. “What’s the play about?” he asks after the snippet of rehearsal he watches. Volpe gives him a pretty PG version of Spring—a bit about the music, a riff on the lessons that this era’s youngsters might take from those who lived in the nineteenth century. It’s not quite Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm he describes, but it’s cleaned up. Volpe will stand one hundred percent behind what he puts onstage, but he is not eager, as was done with Rent, for elements of an upcoming show to be cherry-picked and criticized in advance.
After the reporter leaves, Ellen Kelleher, Bristol Township’s PR chief, has a much more pointed discussion with Volpe and Krause. “I’m afraid this will be known as the abortion play,” she says.
“The word abortion is never even used,” Krause responds.
In Act 2, Wendla gets pregnant—of course she does; the basic facts of life have been kept from her—then is taken by her mother to the oily family doctor, who leads her to a back-alley abortionist. He botches the operation and she dies. Her gravestone will say that she died of anemia. The point of all this is the dire consequences that ensue when information is withheld from children. The show is a comment on sex—it’s powerful, it can’t be bottled up—but not on the issue of abortion.
Krause says some people in the audience may not even realize what leads to Wendla’s death. Musicals, especially one as raucous as this one, are not the most linear forms of storytelling. A person could easily miss it. Kelleher does not seem mollified. She’s just very concerned, she says.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t run away from the content, Ellen,” Volpe says. “That’s not what this program has ever been about.”
He tells her this in an even tone, but with a clear resolve. She smiles, looks resigned, gets up, and leaves. It puts me in mind of what Jim Moore, the principal, said: “He can do what he wants. He’s Lou Volpe.”
• • •
With four weeks left before opening night, the Mike McGrogan experiment ends. Volpe calls the cast to the front of the stage before an afternoon rehearsal. “I’m sure you already know this,” he begins, “but I’m going to tell you straight out. I talked to Michael this morning. I told him I was replacing him. He was very good about it. I’m replacing him with Steven, who will now play the male adult roles.”
Steven is Steven Dougherty, a junior who has been in past shows and was in the ensemble in this one. He is not the ladies’ man that Mike is and, though well-liked by the cast, is considered a little odd. Tall and thin, with short black hair and an angular face, he has a bit of a hunched posture and a lurching way of moving. Everyone considers him highly intelligent, but when a class doesn’t interest him, he won’t always bother doing the work. He’s not a kid who seems to care about chasing high school popularity.
When Volpe makes the announcement, Steven’s castmates applaud for him. He smiles and says, “Thanks for the birthday present. It’s my birthday today.”
Volpe told Mike that he hoped he would stay in the show, as part of the ensemble, but that he would understand and respect whatever decision he made. Like the rest of the cast, Mike has already given up part of his summer and devoted about 150 hours to rehearsals.
As the rehearsal gets under way, he is nowhere in sight, at least not from the seats in the auditorium. About an hour in, Volpe gets a text from one of the girls onstage: Mike is in the wings, watching. Volpe walks up onstage and around the curtain to talk to him. About ten minutes later, Volpe comes walking back to his seat and Mike takes a place in the ensemble—where he will stay right through closing night.
Everyone but Steven is off book. He has a script in his hand, but he barely needs it. He knows the blocking. Knows most of the lines. He had observed and listened closely from the ensemble. The characters he must play—Herr Sonnenstich, the malevolent Latin teacher; the fathers of all four of the boys; the family doctor who hands Wendla off to the abortionist—are out of another era, authority figures at a chilly remove. Steven’s otherness serves the roles well. “Steven, you did well. Thank you,” Volpe says as rehearsal ends. The cast gives him another ovation.
With opening night beginning to come into view, the production has already started to gain momentum. Fleming and Tucci have worked their magic. Adelbert, one of the boys in his first Truman role, has one solo song. He has to hit some high notes. He’s not amazing, but he’s tuneful enough. “Sort of hard to believe, right?” says Fleming, who has been working closely with him.
The casting change accelerated the progress. It wasn’t Mike’s fault. He was, quite literally, miscast. As soon as Steven took the role, it was clear he should have gotten the part—not that he was a finished product, any more than the rest of them were. Volpe had to spend some time editing his mannerisms. A few days after he starts, Volpe asks him to please stop standing onstage with his feet splayed. “It’s like you have clown feet,” he tells him.
Steven says he finds it easier to stand that way. “I’m not interested in easy or in your comfort,” Volpe says. “That’s part of being an actor. Discomfort.”
A few days later, he notices another issue. “Maybe you don’t realize it, but you look like you’re chewing sometimes when you’re onstage.”
It turns out Steven is aware of this. It’s just something he does when he’s bored or nervous.
“Well, stop,” Volpe says. “Number one, you’re driving me out of my mind. And number two, your character does not chew, so therefore, you don’t chew.”
Steven had the misfortune of being elevated to the main cast at just the point when little things were starting to be noticed and corrected. Everyone else was getting the same scrutiny.
Volpe stops a scene halfway through.
“Luke!”
“Yes?”
“Do you have a beach ball or something in your mouth?”
“Uh, no. Why?”
“Because every time you say bourgeois, I hear boardwalk.”
Volpe gives the word its proper French pronunciation. Luke repeats it, pretty close to correct. They do it one more time and the word sounds just like Volpe said it.
“From now on, that’s the only way you say it, right? No more boardwalk.”
Volpe keeps asking, pushing, demanding. No detail is too small, no theme too big or too frightening. The work rate of the kids is impressive. They don’t take days off, don’t complain, don’t drift. If they give less than full effort or attention, they’re called on it, either by Volpe or one of their castmates. Excuses are not accepted. “Luke, your focus has been at best ordinary,” Volpe says one afternoon. “You like to have a good time. You’re a jovial, great guy. But you have to be Melchior every moment you are onstage, and Melchior is not a jovial guy.”
The dark soul of this play comes more easily to some than others. Perhaps the angriest words in the angriest song (“And Then There Were None”) are sung by Tyler, right after Melchior’s mother has declined his character’s request for money so he can flee to America. “Just fuck it, right? Enough, that’s it. You’ll still go on, well, for a bit. Another day of utter shit.”
Tyler could pretty much sell this from the beginning, not because he is a despairing person—he isn’t—but he has an aspect that allows him to reach down to that level. Each of the cast members took their own meaning from the material. Tyler didn’t see playing a character who kills himself as uplifting, but he believed it was a useful role. “Look at what happens afterward. All the sadness, the people who miss him—if somebody was thinking about doing that, he would see the devastation it causes.”
To Georjenna, the show is a rumination on the struggles of life, something Truman students already know well. Their difficult lives may, in fact, make them better onstage. Our best actors, after all, often do not come from backgrounds of privilege and tranquillity. Volpe’s students have taken some knocks. They have experienced life. Their soulfulness, combined with spending a few years in his program, is potent. Georjenna doubts that the richer schools nearby—“fantasy lands,” she calls them—could do Spring Awakening even if they were allowed. They’d be too afraid of it. “We have something inside of us for this kind of theater,” she says. “It’s indescribable, but Mr. Volpe can touch it and bring it out of us.”
It took some longer than others to find their characters, but that’s why Volpe builds in as much time as possible, especially when the material is demanding. As the performances approach, the show sounds good, it looks good, and the actors have wrapped their minds and hearts around their roles. This is the point in the process when he always ratchets things up: the stakes, the bonding of the cast, the emotion. When it’s finally good, he twists it all a little tighter, hoping to make it great.
The cast, all twenty-one of them, including the ensemble, gather on the edge of the stage. “In August, when we began, this play was a possibility,” he says. “That’s all it was. Now it’s real. I opened that door for you. But you walked through it. You made that choice. You didn’t have to rise to the challenge, but you did. You’ve become so good that every mistake you make has a spotlight on it. In a couple of weeks, it will be gone. It disappears, and it’s a memory.”
“No,” Georjenna calls out. (Just as Courtney did in Nebraska.)
Kids do not much like finality. They don’t like to consider the end of things. This is one reason that teenagers are such natural procrastinators—there’s always more time. But the concept does focus their attention.
The last time Georjenna and Luke rehearsed the hayloft scene, Volpe pronounced it vastly improved. He told them how proud he was that they had given it more layers, made it more emotional, more believable.
Georjenna says now, “But we can make it even better. It’s like he says, we’ve gotten it to a good place, but now it’s up to us to go farther. I think the whole show can get better if everybody just takes more risks.”
I ask how she would define a risk. “Trying something you haven’t done before. Saying a line a different way. Adding humor to it, maybe. Just anything to make it more complex.”
Dozens and dozens of small matters still need attention. The hayloft scene, for example, has a whole tableau built around it—a stage picture, with other couples singing in their own romantic poses. Volpe likes how Adelbert has his head nuzzled against Julia’s neck, but cautions him not to do it in such a way that all his microphone emits is static.
Moritz’s last solo before he shoots himself is performed in front of a stand-up microphone. Ryan Fleming wonders why he meticulously lowers the mic stand after the song, observing that it seems like an unusual piece of housekeeping in the instant before committing this act. Volpe disagrees. He mentions an incident he knows about—a young woman, the daughter of a friend, who spent hours in her garage, straightening up each shelf, before throwing a rope over a beam and hanging herself. “Sometimes people tend to seemingly mundane details before committing suicide,” he says.
Maybe this sounds macabre. Why is a teacher sharing this in the middle of a rehearsal, or at all? But the interesting thing to me, watching the cast, is how intently they are listening. Volpe spins out these kinds of digressions as they occur to him. They always connect to something. They’re quick, and he moves on. I’ve yet to look into the faces of any of these kids, who spend hundreds of hours with him, and think a single one of them wants him to shut up. Their teacher is more compelling to them than their friends are, which is no small feat.
He turns back to the show. The big thing he wants the cast to think about is pace. Everything about Spring is quick, almost violent. The music, the dancing, the story. It’s a cascade. He says they have to start thinking about the transitions between scenes. Whatever they think of as fast, they have to make it faster. There are no big set pieces to move around, no excuse for dawdling. “You lose the mood, you lose the play,” he says. “Am I worried about that happening? No. Is it something we have to pay attention to? Yes.”
• • •
Even in Truman’s no-drama drama troupe, stuff happens. It’s a high school. No week goes by that Volpe doesn’t have to deal with something on the periphery of the show.
This cast, in general, is more academic than the Good Boys group. It doesn’t have the same alpha figures among the boys or the girls. Colin is one of the school’s top students, but he is not a natural leader in the same way as some of the previous year’s seniors. Leading up to one of the Saturday rehearsals—which are crucial, because the cast gets all day to practice—he calls another student in a class an “asshole.” He is sent to the discipline office, where the punishment meted out is “Saturday school.” While the cast rehearses, he will do time in the library.
“I want you to know I did this for the show, not you,” Volpe tells Colin when he informs him that he was able to bargain the sentence down to lunch detention.
The cast and their parents have been selling ads for the program. It’s not easy to get merchants to write checks, even for just $50 or $100. They get requests constantly—from school clubs, sports teams, volunteer fire companies, fund drives for kids sick with cancer. It’s endless. And there’s not much money in Levittown’s flattened economy. Volpe has even had to lower ticket prices. He used to charge $15 for shows like Rent, Les Mis, and Beauty and the Beast (the “power shows”) and $12 for other musicals. Since 2008 the top ticket price has been $10.
A father of one of the cast members comes walking in with a big sheaf of ads. He hands the papers over to Volpe, who leafs through them, then separates two from the pile. He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t get upset, but just says calmly, “You have to know that I can’t take these, right?”
The ads are from local strip clubs.
The father is a former Volpe student and cast member who was a munchkin in a long-ago production of The Wizard of Oz. “C’mon, Lou,” he says, “you’ve got people in this show having sex, killing themselves, and you can’t take an ad from a tittie bar?”
• • •
Truman’s Spring Awakening has a couple of crises still to overcome. The first is Homecoming Weekend and its associated revelry—a bonfire, a competition between the different grades to build the best floats, sixty minutes of screaming in support of a perpetually losing football squad, and late-night parties following the officially sanctioned school events, all on a couple of cold, damp nights. Rarely have I seen Volpe truly angry, and never this angry.
Some of the kids are already battling colds and upper respiratory infections. A Saturday rehearsal follows the Homecoming blowout, with a pit orchestra accompanying them for the first time rather than just Ryan Fleming on keyboard. It’s an important moment. But the cast is exhausted and bedraggled. Hacking coughs rise above the harmonies.
They are to run through the whole show, both acts, twice—once in the morning and again after lunch. The musicians are on the clock, with their pay coming from the theater department budget. After they start out a little too soft, Volpe stops everything for a moment to remind them that the show must be powered by a hard-driving beat. He seethes through the morning session, then starts in on the cast. “In the beginning maybe it was partly the band’s fault. I wanted them to sound like Led Zeppelin and they sounded like Bread. But they fixed that. You didn’t fix anything.” (The kids don’t get the last part of that reference, but this is not the moment for anyone to say, “Who the hell is Bread?”)
Poor Luke. He has the most important male role and has grown into it beautifully. When he is at his best, the promise of his stunning audition looks like it will be fulfilled. But he can be inconsistent and not always laser-focused. An earnest, enthusiastic kid, he wore his voice down to sandpaper by screaming at all the Homecoming events, and he was already sick.
“Luke, really, I don’t want to bring you down, but you were so bad this morning I hope you got it out of your system,” Volpe says. “All I saw was a boy trying to act. There was no character going on anywhere in your body today. I wish I could say I feel sorry for you, but I don’t.”
Luke coughs. Pulls a wad of tissues from his pocket. “And go to the doctor. Please go to the doctor.”
The girls had arranged themselves in straight lines in some of their scenes, one of Volpe’s big peeves. “If you’re behind somebody, you’re behind somebody! I love it that you all want to be in the spotlight but you’re ruining the scenes. Are you getting that?”
Volpe liked one number the whole morning, “Touch Me.” It’s a mellow song, so it fit the mood, “but unfortunately, this show isn’t called Mellow Awakening.”
The cast couldn’t even execute proper stage slaps. Late in Act 1, Steven has a scene in which he slaps Tyler, but it looked like a love tap. Krause says, “If you can’t do any better, just slap him for real.”
Volpe had recommended that the cast leave the Homecoming festivities just before the game started, so they would get enough rest—guidance that many of them disregarded. “I feel great,” he says. “I was in bed at nine-fifteen. But you don’t feel great, do you?”
One thing about working with kids: They do stupid things, but also recover quickly. Some of them use the lunch break to take naps on the couches in B8, the theater classroom. The sick and weary are revived. Miraculously healed.
The afternoon rehearsal is the opposite of the morning run-through—it’s tight and energized. Steven takes Krause’s advice and slaps the hell out of Tyler. Looking on from row eight of the auditorium, I feel like it snaps my head back a bit. Tyler is unfazed. It’s Truman theater—not for wimps.
• • •
The final hitch, the last hiccup before opening night, is Volpe’s concept for the set—his idea to project images onto big screens at the back of the stage. Julia Steele (“assistant director in charge of God”) and some of the girls had questioned him when he first brought it up, fearing the pictures might divert attention from the actors (i.e., them) and the show itself.
Two months later, when the idea is translated into reality, it seems they had a point. The rented equipment arrives eight days before the show, in time for the last Saturday rehearsal. Robby Edmondson and Tony Bucci mount three big screens behind the existing set, which is minimal—the school desks and chairs in the class scenes and very little else. The setting is to be represented on the screens by a changing gallery of images, which Robby has been assembling since Volpe gave him the task in the summer.
He programmed the images into the digital projection unit, and they start rolling as the morning rehearsal begins. A pregnant abdomen for the opening number, “Mama Who Bore Me.” Pages from an antique Bible. Two hands clasped. Pictures of forests you imagine to be in Bavaria. An ancient stone wall. An old church. Stained glass. A field of wildflowers. Lovers, embracing.
The pictures evoke the action on the stage—some directly, others more abstractly. Volpe leans in my direction and says, “What do you think?”
I tell him what he already knows: It’s bad.
“I know,” he says. “We’re not watching the show, right?”
Images are flashing on and off the screens with great rapidity. Krause says, “Do you think we’ll have to put something in the program to warn the epileptics?”
Just a few of the individual images bother Volpe—a woman with heaving cleavage that looks like it belongs in Maxim; a kiss with too much tongue in the frame; a rainbow projected onto the screens timed to a gay interlude between two of the male characters, which he deems much too obvious. “Why don’t we just spell out G-A-Y?” he says.
But overall, the pictures have been thoughtfully curated. Several of them are quite beautiful. There are just so many that the musical feels secondary to the slide show.
As a student, Robby ascended to the highest level in Truman Drama: artistic collaborator with Volpe. He is adept with all the technology, but what animates him is thinking about how to use it to tell stories onstage. He likes his job running the lights at the pro hockey games, but it’s just that: a job, a way to earn his tuition money. He is at community college, soon to transfer to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. “I don’t belong here,” he says of Levittown. “I want to do theater for the rest of my life, in New York.”
He listened to the Spring Awakening sound track over and over to discern the “internal meanings” of the songs and culled the pictures (all in the public domain) from the Internet. He knows Volpe’s methods and has heard his maxims: “Go out there as far as you want, and I’ll pull you back in if it’s too much.” “Less is more.” Both axioms apply here, but the unfortunate thing is that Volpe has had to impose them so late. They talked all through the process, but there was no way until now to see how it would look.
“It just kind of sucks,” Robby says. “I’ve been at this since August. I went through, like, five thousand pictures. I don’t know if he understands that. But whether I like it or not, I have to do what he thinks is right for the show.”
Volpe asks him to edit the pictures way down, so that the images don’t change more than once a scene. He says he appreciates all the work that went into it, still likes the concept, “but it’s too much right now.”
Robby will spend a couple of days going back through all the images, removing about 60 percent of them. It makes a massive difference. Only the best and most telling images remain. At the dress rehearsal, the projections match Volpe’s initial concept—they are a stand-in for the set, not a slide show. “Gorgeous,” he tells Robby, invoking one of his favorite words. “I absolutely love it.”
The whole dress rehearsal gives everyone a huge confidence jolt. The cast is healthy. The show rocks forward at an urgent pace, one of Volpe’s primary goals. “It has all fallen into place,” he says to them. “It was a difficult show to do, a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. But you’re there. You should be looking forward to having a lot of fun this weekend. You’ve worked so hard, and now it’s time to reap the rewards.”
• • •
On opening night of Truman High’s Spring Awakening, the sign in the parking lot at Cesare’s Ristorante says WELCOME MUSIC THEATRE INTERNATIONAL. I smile when I see it—it’s so small-town—but it also fills me with pride for my old English teacher, Mr. Volpe. Levittown is far removed from any notion of success. Its moment in the vanguard was a half century ago; its last good times were in the 1980s. And yet Volpe and his kids perform at such a level of excellence that the world takes notice.
Drew Cohen, president of the company and second-in-command to Freddie Gershon, has made the trip from Manhattan, along with John Prignano, MTI’s senior operations officer. They are seated at a big round table that includes two agents who work overseas for MTI—one who licenses shows in Australia and another in the United Kingdom. They figure that Spring Awakening will be attractive to high schools in their sales territories and want to see its debut at Truman.
It is Prignano’s second time at Cesare’s. (No more cold cuts in the front office; Krause now arranges proper pre-theater dining for visiting dignitaries.) A former dancer who grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, he refers to the restaurant’s tomato sauce as “gravy,” as it is called in many Italian neighborhoods and families. “It always makes me so happy to see a Lou Volpe show,” he says. “It’s one of the best parts of my job.”
We drive over to the high school and arrive about thirty minutes before curtain. The parking lot is filling up. You can feel a buzz, a sense of nervous anticipation. I’m nervous.
The atmosphere around Volpe and Truman Drama is always a mix of the sacred and profane. (The work is sacred; everything else, not.) On show nights, he and Krause traditionally have dinner together in B8 late in the afternoon while the cast is getting in costume and doing makeup. It’s just takeout, nothing special, but it’s their moment together. Volpe shows me the texts he received when he let the kids know he was eating and where he could be found if anyone needed him. One says, “OK,” the second, “Whatever,” and the last, “Fuck you.”
“Isn’t it wonderful how they express their love for me?” he says.
The throng waiting to enter the theater is a mix of Truman students and parents as well as people from the community whose children are long past school age. People I have not seen in decades are among them: a local pastor and his wife who are the parents of childhood friends of mine and rarely miss a Volpe production; an old neighbor from my section of Levittown; a friend from my graduating class, now teaching at a high school up-county, and another regular on show nights.
Some of the students here are from neighboring high schools. The cast did “cuts” from the show at a school assembly during the week—a preview, essentially—and it created a buzz and an explosion of Facebook posts. Word went out beyond Truman.
Backstage, a few minutes before curtain, Volpe tells the cast, “People out there are excited. I’m excited, because I can’t wait for them to see this play. We have people who have come to see this from New York, and that makes it special and exciting. But the main thing is that you have created this together, and that’s what you will remember forever.”
He takes a look at Tyler, whose hair has been frizzed out and tinged with purple. “Perfect,” he says. “You look like Beethoven on acid.”
The play begins with Georjenna alone in a spotlight, singing the difficult “Mama Who Bore Me.” It’s a pure solo. Not much orchestration. She would never, like Zach, say, “I brought the heat, Volp!” but she accomplishes the same thing—she nails a difficult opening and sets everyone else at ease.
Volpe momentarily puts his head in his hands during a number halfway through Act 1, as Carol Ann and Julia sing the unsettling “The Dark I Know Well.” He is overwhelmed by it. Later, he says, “It actually gave me chills to think how far they had taken that song. It is one of the most difficult songs, emotionally, that I have ever asked high school students to do.”
At intermission, he walks into the room where the cast gathers backstage and says, “Could it be any better?” He describes their pacing and transitions as “liquid.”
As if the cast needs any more of a lift, Christy Altomare, the actress who played Wendla in the touring version of Spring Awakening, walks in right behind Volpe. “You guys are amazing!” she says. “You’re doing everything right. Every choice you’ve made is the right choice.”
Volpe always tells the kids “it’s theater,” meaning something will always happen you don’t expect. Lines missed, props missing, a costume change not made. It’s part of being an actor. You don’t panic; you just find your way back.
Part of the way through Act 2, you can hear a noise, almost a growl, that seems to come through one of the microphones. It is brief, not that loud, and not obvious what it is. Later, we learn it was Carol Ann. Her challenge was beyond the relatively simple matter, say, of a dropped line. She has a fever and flu symptoms. She vomited into a trash barrel, then ran back onstage. Perfectly timed. Didn’t miss a line, a scene, or a song.
She was not among those who wore themselves out at Homecoming, and as she said later, “I don’t go to parties, I don’t drink, I don’t do any of that, and I’m the one who got sick.”
Carol Ann put any initial doubts about her dependability (based only on her being an unknown) to rest. She is, if anything, sicker for the next show, but performs. Her voice elevates the show, in solo and harmony. “If she doesn’t go on, I have no idea what we would do,” Fleming says. “For her to be that sick and carry on—amazing. I could maybe tell a little difference in her voice, but no one else would notice.”
As the curtain comes down on opening night after “The Song of Purple Summer,” that very first number they learned in the beginning of August, the crowd rises to its feet. The cast takes its bows to a loud and long standing ovation. When it subsides, Volpe asks the MTI executives to come up onstage and thanks them for “entrusting” the show to him and Truman High.
Drama people are, of course, dramatic by nature. But John Prignano is genuinely overwhelmed. “I am so moved,” he says, his voice trembling. “This is beyond anything I thought I would ever see.”
Drew Cohen, the MTI president, says that Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik were reluctant at first to make their show available to high schools. They wanted it in front of young audiences, but feared it could not be done with its integrity intact. When they asked MTI who could direct it, “we immediately told them that Lou Volpe would be the only one we could ask to take this on.”
He thanks the Truman cast and Volpe on behalf of the high school directors and the young actors who will now get to do Spring Awakening. “We must also commend this community for being so open-minded,” he says—the only time I had ever heard those words applied to Levittown.
Jesse North, the national editor of the website Broadway.com, watches from a seat in the second row. The following day, he posts an online video about what he calls the “boundary-pushing theater” he witnessed at Truman. It was, he says, “so much better than any high school production I have ever seen.”
• • •
To this cast—to any Truman cast—the words that matter most are Volpe’s. The ovations subside. The theater empties. He gathers them backstage.
He tells them how proud he is that the performance pleased the people from Music Theatre International. That they would come to Truman from New York, he says, “is like icing on the cake, but what matters most of all is this production, this piece of art that we made. Spring Awakening, all of us being together for these last three months, changed my life, and it changed your life. We can say that. It always does. You are not the same person as when we began.”
The show was a challenge, he says—maybe the most difficult material ever attempted by Truman Drama. But they got there. The audience saw the show, not the struggle. He tells them that their performance could not have been better. It far exceeded any expectations he had when he took on the show.
“It was,” he says, “totally Truman.”