It was no less a triumph. Composer and lyricist Jonathan Larson, Rent’s creator, had died just months before Rent’s 1996 Broadway debut, from a tear in his aorta. The show’s immense success would forever be linked to the sadness and shock of his sudden death. At Truman’s opening night, Larson’s father, Allan, sat in the fourth row of the theater, and when the curtain came down, Volpe invited him up onstage, just as he had Mackintosh five years before. Allan Larson accepted a handheld microphone and said that his son was with them in spirit, and that he would have loved the performance and been thrilled that Rent had reached a high school stage. He turned to the cast, which was gathered behind him, and said, “Thank you for honoring Jonathan’s memory.”
“It wasn’t maudlin; it was celebratory,” Volpe says. “But it was emotional—the most emotional moment we’ve ever had. People were weeping.”
The process of how Spring Awakening came to Truman was different from either Rent or Les Mis. Volpe lobbied for it. Just about begged. He told John Prignano, “When you’re ready for a pilot, I want it. Just let me know and we’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen.” His ardent pursuit was not necessary. Spring Awakening was going to be difficult to revise for a high school production, and the show’s creators were not convinced it was even possible. MTI executives had already decided that if permission was granted for a pilot, they would ask Volpe to direct it at Truman.
Volpe and Tracey Krause had seen Spring Awakening on Broadway not long after it opened in 2006 and fell in love with it. It was experimental, alive, subversive, and right in Volpe’s sweet spot—a coming-of-age story with characters the same age as his high school actors. The music was composed by Duncan Sheik, who had a separate career and a following as a singer-songwriter. Lea Michele, who a few years later would become a big star in Glee, played the role of Wendla, the most prominent female part.
One of the features of the Broadway production was that about twenty audience members were seated onstage. They didn’t do anything, and in fact were instructed to be still and quiet, but they were integrated into the set. A couple of months after they saw it for the first time, Volpe and Krause took students to New York for the show and, through connections, scored the seats onstage. It was an exhilarating experience. The Truman kids and their teachers were on a Broadway stage—if not exactly in a cast. (It was also a huge bargain; the seats, which technically were “obstructed view,” cost only $30 each.)
Volpe’s advanced theater students studied the show and performed parts of it in class. The 2011 class of seniors who made up the Good Boys cast knew it would ultimately be piloted at Truman and were disappointed to miss it by just one year. “Maybe I could, like, screw up in a couple of classes and have to repeat twelfth grade,” Bobby Ryan joked when he found out the show had been scheduled.
• • •
On the morning of auditions, Krause arrives a few minutes after Volpe, takes a seat next to him, and sets her coffee cup down on his desk. They are joined by Ryan Fleming, Truman Drama’s vocal director. Fleming doesn’t teach at the school; he is the choir director at a local church and an accomplished vocalist who sings with the Opera Company of Philadelphia and in a highly regarded choral group called the Crossing, which performs in Philadelphia, New York, and Europe. His role is to help select the cast and then to try to elevate nontrained voices to as high a level as possible in the time he has to work with them. “There’s no longer a full-time vocal teacher at Truman,” he says. “It’s terrible, it really is. All we have here is what I can shove down their faces in a short period of time.”
Communities and schools get poorer in all kinds of ways, beyond what can be measured by income levels. Levittown has gotten musically poorer, which is related to other parts of the community that have frayed. Fleming only rarely encounters Truman students who attend church, traditionally one of the great incubators of vocal music in America. The mainline Protestant churches in town, built on land Levitt set aside, have hollowed out, and many are left with graying, older congregations. Some Levittown residents have migrated to megachurches elsewhere in the county, where Fleming considers the musical opportunities to be inferior. In 2012, even Levittown’s Catholic grammar school, Saint Michael the Archangel, once so bursting at the seams that class sizes were in the fifties, was scheduled to be shuttered before winning a reprieve.
Truman students sometimes seek private lessons from Fleming, often in the weeks before an audition to give them a leg up to make the show. But most can afford only a handful of sessions, even though he doesn’t charge them much.
Fleming’s other role with Truman Drama is to be nervous. While Volpe and Krause certainly care deeply about the quality of voices in their shows, it is fair to say Fleming listens differently and cares more. Volpe assumes they will have the voices to go forward with a show; Fleming worries and doesn’t assume anything.
“How many kids are out there in the hall?” Volpe asks before the nine A.M. start of auditions.
There are about seventy, far fewer than for Rent, but Spring Awakening has not been made into a movie and does not carry the same cachet. Beyond that, Volpe’s program has become like an elite high school sports team, and therefore a little intimidating—if you’re a student in the school, you don’t just show up and try out unless you feel you have some game.
“I want to know how many boys,” Fleming says.
The show has eleven lead parts—six of them boys—and a small ensemble. Fleming is confident about the girls, but concerned about having enough male voices that meet his standard.
“If we’re not happy with the boys, then we just won’t do it,” Volpe says. “We’ll do a different show.” He may mean that at the moment he says it, but it’s hard for me to imagine him telling MTI that he has changed his mind.
Spring Awakening is a big, risky proposition—a pilot and a show very much on the knife’s edge—and he is undertaking it with young kids, some of them totally new to Truman Drama and one another. “There’s a lot of talent out there,” Volpe says the morning of auditions. “I have confidence in them or I’d never do this. But Ryan has a point. They’re very much untested.”
In a perfect world, one in which he controlled the timing of everything, Volpe would have liked Spring Awakening to come his way a year or two earlier, when he still had the core that performed Good Boys and True. They were an almost foolproof group—capable, mature, deeply committed to him and one another. They had voices, both the girls and the boys. “That group, you didn’t have to wait for them to come together,” he says. “But that’s a luxury. Will I miss the leadership of Bobby and Wayne? Yes. But that’s the way it is. You have to create new Bobbys and Waynes.”
• • •
Volpe, Krause, and Fleming sit in a row of three chairs at the front of the audition room. It reminds me of American Idol or one of its many spin-offs, except that those shows are modeled after these scenes. High school auditions are cauldrons of tension broken up by moments of unintentional comedy. The stakes are high for the kids, but also for the directors—one wrong choice and they have set the show off course, perhaps irrevocably.
The first to audition is an incoming ninth-grader, one of several that morning who would not begin classes at Truman for another two months but is hoping to start high school with a place already secured in a Volpe show. She is a lovely girl, long black hair, a shy smile. Her hands tremble as she hands over her name and contact numbers on an index card. “Relax,” Volpe says. “Take a nice deep breath.”
She sings “Mama Who Bore Me,” the opening song in the show, with a degree of competence but little presence—she seems just to want to reach the end without dissolving. “Thank you, that was beautiful,” Volpe tells her. When she leaves, he says to Krause and Fleming, “I want to make sure not to lose some of these younger ones,” meaning he wants to be encouraging enough for them to want to audition in the future.
Next comes ano
ther freshman girl, who sings the same song but in a faint whisper. “She was in tune,” Fleming says. “I’ll give her that.”
Luke Robinson, the recycling maven who worked on the stage crew in Nebraska, steps forward with a big, goofy grin on his face. He is a charming kid who gives the impression of being entirely comfortable with himself, as if he knows that he fits the stereotype of a high school geek—braces, involvement in drama and debate—and just doesn’t care. Luke had a lead part in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the previous year’s musical, but is still considered an emerging talent. He auditions with a number called “Don’t Do Sadness,” which starts out like a moody indie-rock tune and then builds into hard-driving rock. He hits the notes. Makes the turn from soft to pulsating. Sells the whole thing.
“I have to tell you, I am in shock at what I just saw from you,” Volpe says. “Are you the same Luke we had here last year?”
Krause offers her own version of praise: “I could just punch you right in the face. Where has that been?”
Robby Edmondson is less surprised. He graduated earlier in the month, but is in the room because Volpe is paying him to help out on the technical side of Spring Awakening. (Robby is also starting college and continuing his gig working the lights for the pro hockey and basketball teams in North Jersey.) “Truman Drama’s a cycle,” he says. “Wayne and Britney and Mariela and all of them, they defined it for a couple of years, just like Antonio [Addeo] and some other kids did before them. Now Luke feels like it’s his time. You can see it. He’s ready.”
A few minutes later, one of Truman’s out gay students (there are several) auditions. He is funny and popular with classmates, theatrically and often hilariously effeminate—he plays it that way—but cannot hold a tune. Volpe admires his audacity, but says, “I feel bad. I’d love to give him a part because I know he doesn’t have that much else in his life and it would mean so much to him. He’s such a nice kid and he’d give four thousand percent. But he only has one role—swishy gay boy—and there’s not a part for that in this play.”
It’s a long morning—a mix of familiar faces and new blood, a range of voices from good to god-awful, a couple more revelations. Volpe and Krause keep up a constant patter, if for no other reason than to amuse themselves.
Britney Harron’s little sister, Shannon, another incoming ninth-grader, gives a polished audition and clearly is in line for a role. “Let’s give her a really big part, just to annoy Britney,” Volpe says.
A hippie-looking girl with torn jeans, short blond hair, and multiple piercings hands in her card and says she will be in ninth grade, “but I should be in tenth. I have to do ninth over.” She’s pretty good, but Krause says, “Do you think she’s too drama-y?”
The girl who follows her gives a promising audition and seems like a possibility. “She’s one of my criminals,” says Krause, who had her in class the previous year. Everyone laughs. “No, really. She’s on probation for stealing a car.”
Georjenna Gatto presents a different kind of problem. She is a stellar student from a solid-as-a-rock family, ranked fifth in the incoming senior class, beautiful and poised, a proven performer in past Truman productions—and also the captain of the field hockey team, an honor she had been accorded even as an eleventh-grader. Sometimes students can mix their sport and a show, but field hockey is a fall sport, and this is a fall musical and a pilot. Volpe has made it clear to her that if she wants to do both—be in the show and play field hockey—he can put her in the ensemble, but will not cast her as one of the five female leads.
“You can do both,” Georjenna says. “Nobody at Truman thinks if you’re an athlete, why would you have that theater side of yourself. But the timing has to work out, and it doesn’t in this case.”
She was racked for weeks with indecision and anxiety. “We won’t hate you,” her field hockey teammates assured her, but she knows they want her to play. Some have been her teammates since the seventh grade. Georjenna’s parents keep saying it is her decision to make, a phrase she hears so much from everyone in her life that she thinks she might slap the next person who says it. She thinks her dad—a football coach and assistant principal at a high school in the neighboring town of Bristol Borough—wants her to stay with her sport, but he doesn’t press it. She feels like screaming: Somebody just tell me what to do!
Field hockey is like most of the teams at Truman. It wins a few games, though not many. Georjenna knows that sports are yet another way outsiders judge her school. She remembers taking a drive with her mother when she was a little younger. They got about twenty minutes out of Levittown, into some posh-looking community, and her mother said, “Isn’t it strange? It’s like two different worlds.”
When she competes in sports against those schools, Georjenna sometimes feels girls from the other teams don’t respect Truman. “I’m sorry, but you can tell. They have their noses up, like they’re so much better than us. It’s frustrating. We’re the same people. We want the same things. They don’t know us, but you can feel that they’re looking down on us.”
No one looks down on Truman Drama, but Georjenna wants to make sure she doesn’t make a decision based on the relative status of field hockey and theater. She has a specific part she wants, the role of Wendla, which Lea Michele played. Every time she thinks about maybe playing field hockey, her mind shifts to another thought: I really want this part.
She thinks Spring Awakening has a chance to be the biggest thing she’ll ever do in high school. As much as she loves her sport, it cannot rise to that. And she definitely does not want to compromise and take a part in the ensemble. She tells herself, It’s my last year of high school. I want to do one thing and go all out.
Casting decisions are made quickly, often the very day of auditions, or after callbacks if they are required. Georjenna auditions with “Mama Who Bore Me,” a performance Volpe will later attach one of his favorite words to: stunning. When she is finished singing, he says, “Georjenna, you know what I’m about to ask you. I know it’s a very difficult decision for you.”
She stops him. “I’m going to do the show if I get a lead,” she says. “I’ll call up my coach right away and tell her.”
“You’re okay with that?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m totally okay with it. I’m sure of it.”
• • •
The big revelation is Carol Ann Vaserberg, a short, delicately built junior with a speaking voice so soft, sometimes you have to strain to hear her. Before her audition, she says to the panel of three who will be judging her, “If any of you know my family, please don’t hold it against me.”
I do know her family, which is populated by smart if somewhat eccentric people. I graduated high school with her uncle Ralph, who had been a baseball teammate of mine starting from about age ten. I know another of her uncles, Roger, who was a year behind me in high school and played the lead in Volpe’s first musical, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. A gifted visual artist (Volpe considers him “an artistic genius”), he also designed and painted much of the set. I even know Carol Ann’s grandmother, who was locally renowned as a former professional softball player. I do not know her father, Robby, the youngest of the three Vaserberg boys, but he is apparently considered something of a character around town.
As soon as Carol Ann begins to sing, Fleming leans forward, wide-eyed. The song is “The Dark I Know Well,” a chilling number from near the end of Act 1. Her voice does not match her tiny frame; it is massive, rich, and laced with feeling. When she hits the last note, Fleming says, “Can I ask you a question, Carol Ann? How is it possible you’ve been in this school two years and this is the first time we’re seeing you?”
She replies that she is academically oriented and had not participated in many extracurricular activities. She spends much of her time studying and reading for pleasure. “But I know Spring Awakening and I wanted to be in it,” she says. “I love it. I think it’s reall
y cool.” (She will later tell me she had decided to get involved as an “homage” to a friend who introduced her to the music in the show.)
“Well, I’m a little bit pissed at you,” Fleming says. “Do you know the experiences you missed? The productions you could have been in and the fun you could have had?” She nods. “Well, I’m glad you’re here now.”
When Carol Ann leaves the room, Volpe, Krause, and Fleming just sort of look at one another in amazement. When I ask Fleming later to sum her up, he says, “A true alto belter. Her voice had a very raw yet warm and vulnerable quality.” He adds, “I’m just always shocked when a person like that shows up without even realizing what they have.”
As much as they like new and unknown talent, Volpe and Krause are always concerned about the issue of dependability. A Truman show requires a huge commitment: rehearsals every day after school with all-day Saturday sessions added in as productions grow near. This one comes with the additional burden of summer rehearsals; once the cast is picked, they will reconvene in August to get started. And a production is a team effort. They can’t have flakes, loose cannons, over-emoters—any of that.
Carol Ann is talented, composed, clearly smart and, in the little you can tell in a brief audition, seems very nice. But still, she raises a concern. How could someone with all that raw talent just now be showing up, two years after entering a high school known for its theater program?
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