By Seth Rudetsky
16 Nov 2010
Last Tuesday, I did a show at the Westbury Music Fair. I got hired to put together a "Best of Broadway"-type show and I used James, Darius deHaas, Gay Willis, Julia Murney and Capathia Jenkins. The show was amazing. And, it was sold out…all 2,800 seats! I've never been to the Westbury Music Fair, but I'm from Long Island, so I grew up hearing about it. Well, what I didn't know was that it's in the round. Tony Rende, who hired me to do the gig, got us an enormous limo that picked us up early in the morning. On the way out, I told the actors that they had to make sure they walk around the stage so the whole audience sees them. Well, turns out, there was no need to do that, because the whole stage rotates! Seriously. It takes something like 11 minutes to do a complete rotation, so every time one of my singers ended a song, they had no idea where the exit from the stage was. It would still be turning, and the audience members that were sitting in the exit row would raise their hands and the singer would make a run for it. The crazy part was you had to make sure you made it from the opening of the stage to the opening of the exit aisle before the stage turned too far. I said it was like a game of "Frogger." Remember -- you had to cross the stream at the perfect moment a log went by? The audience was all made up of people who could understudy Madame Armfeldt age-wise, so I think my 1980's video game reference went over their shawls.
Darius de Haas photo by Steve Vaccariello
Tyler Maynard and I drive to the George Street Playhouse a lot with Lauren Kennedy, and we were discussing onstage mishaps (my fave). We were saying that the gun at the end of West Side Story often fires by accident or doesn't fire at all. Apparently, Lauren knows of one performance where Chino went to shoot Tony at the end of the show and the gun didn't go off. Tony had to die, so he feigned that the sight of the gun….gave him a heart attack. What? Then when Maria brandished the gun to the Sharks and the Jets, instead of saying, "How many bullets are left in this gun? Enough for you? And you?" She made it more specific and said, "Enough to give a heart attack to you? And you?"
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| Tyler Maynard and Seth Rudetsky |
| photo by T. Charles Erickson |
The last story sounds like folklore, but Tyler was actually at a performance of Sweeney Todd where the guy playing Sweeney shooed the Beggar Woman out of his shop with his signature "Off with you! Off with you." Unfortunately, it was the scene where he was supposed to kill her! The whole end of the show rides on the fact that the Beggar Woman is dead, so Mrs. Lovett came out and decided to save the day by killing her with an ax. But, it was a real ax and too dangerous to use close to someone's body. So, as she yelled, "Die! Die!" and swung the ax downward, she was forced to stop a good two feet above the Beggar Woman. I guess it allowed the audience to use their imagination. And ask for their money back.
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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.)
