After Meth, Acting in Annie Almost Drove Me Out of Show Business

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 13 Part 1

It was winter of 2014 in New York City. I’d been clean from meth for over eight years.

I stood outside the audition room hugging my music binder. I took deep breaths as my heart tried to pound out of my chest.

It was final callbacks for a big budget multi-year national tour of Annie, and I was in the running to play Rooster, the character played by Tim Curry in the 1982 movie. Over the previous two months, I’d gone through rounds of auditions. I’d sung, I’d danced, I’d read for Rooster, each multiple times. Now, I was about to walk into the room one last time.

I was feeling myself. Not only had I nailed every part of this audition process, earlier that week I’d booked a production of 1776, a musical about the Second Continental Congress and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence — a bucket list show for me. Major confidence booster. You can’t tell me nothin’ after I’ve booked a show.

The door opened. The actor who went in before me emerged.

As instructed, I entered immediately. I greeted the room. “Well, hi!”

There had to be at least 20 people sitting in a line behind a row of long folding tables. The casting office. The choreographer and her assistants who had led all the dance calls over the last few weeks. The producers, all men, whose suits alone were in a vastly different tax bracket than my own.

In the center of them all sat Martin Charnin, original Tony Award winning Broadway director and lyricist. At 80 years old, he was a bear of a man with a mane of silver-white, shoulder length hair. This was the guy who wrote “Little Girls,” “Hard Knock Life,” and “Tomorrow.” They’ve been so ubiquitous in the American zeitgeist for the last 40 years that he’s made millions of dollars a year without lifting a finger.

Since the success of Annie’s original Broadway run in 1977, Martin had lifted a finger many, many times to mount his original version of the show. He’d even sent out a few smaller budget national tours in recent years.

During the previous season on Broadway, there had been a revival of Annie — without Martin. It had been darker, grittier… and unsuccessful.

When the producers of that revival decided to pass on a first national tour, Martin joined with one of the largest producers of national tours to mount his original version. He believed his version of Annie worked. Even the movie starring Carol Burnett, Albert Finney, and Ann Reinking missed the mark for him. With the 40th anniversary approaching, Martin saw this as perhaps his last chance to prove his was the only version of Annie that worked.

“What do you have a for us?” Martin asked, his baritone booming into the room.

“I have a pre-50s,” — we’d all been asked to prepare a song from early 20th century Broadway, the style Annie was written, but, again, I was feeling myself — “But I’m going to do ‘Use What You Got’ from The Life.” I knew I was up for Rooster so, instead of showing them I could do pre-50s style — something I’d already done several times over multiple rounds of auditions — I wanted to take a song from a musical about the hustlers and prostitutes of 1980s Times Square and show them I was the Rooster they were looking for.

It could not have gone better. I played to the entire 20 plus person jury sitting behind the table. The room was mine!

When I’d finished, Martin had a warm smile on his face. He thanked me and asked me to wait out in the hall.

It hadn’t been a couple minutes when the casting director came out.

“John, thank you, you’re done for the day.” Then, right there in the hallway — which was filled with others still waiting to get in the room to be seen — she said, “Don’t accept any other offers till you hear from me.”

Holy shit! What?!

It wasn’t an official offer, but I had basically been “put on hold” pending an offer, a common practice though a definite first for me.

A couple days later, my agent called.

“They’re offering Harold Ickes and Rooster understudy.”

I was disappointed.

I was pretty “meh” about Annie to begin with. If I’d gone my entire career without doing Annie, I would have been just fine. In my opinion, it was one of those shows, like Grease, that theaters do when they have nothing to say and just want to put butts in the seats and make a little money.

I had all of three lines in 1776, but at least that show had some dramatic meat on its bones: the Second Continental Congress and their struggle to pass the Declaration of Independence, including a debate over the inclusion or exclusion of a passage condemning the slave trade.

What was Annie about? How wonderful life could be being adopted by the 1%? In my research, I learned the wealthy in New York City did in fact take in orphans during the holidays, showing them the splendid life of the rich for a single day before sending them back to the squalor of their orphanages. This gave many orphans a false idea of what life was like outside the orphanage, which fucked a lot of them up when they grew up and found out what life was actually like.

Still, as lukewarm as I was about Annie, it was a significant step on the show business ladder. A professional step forward.

It was a yearlong contract, the longest I had ever worked.

That meant job security for a year.

Financial security for a year.

Plus, because of the length of the contract, I was certain to go on for Rooster.

So I accepted.

Starting with the first rehearsal, the entire experience was an act of holding up a mask of hope and optimism, all the while the truth behind the mask was anything but.

The dichotomy between what was happening onstage versus the reality backstage was best shown in the casting of Annie and Daddy Warbucks.

The little girl cast as Annie was the daughter of a pair of wealthy, high powered lawyers out of Florida. Perfectly lovely people, mind you, who wanted the best for their daughter and had the means to help her young dreams come true. They took their daughter on multiple trips to NYC to audition for Annie. A financial privilege far out of reach for most parents with little Annie hopefuls of their own.

The guy cast as Warbucks, on the other hand, was far from wealthy. He was a blue collar son of the American Rust Belt. Having worked extensively in the Ohio theater scene, he drove out to NYC for the chance to audition for his dream role. Unable to afford a hotel, he slept in his car the night before the audition. The day of the audition, he shaved his head in the rehearsal studio bathroom.

These were our Annie and Daddy Warbucks, playing characters that were in many ways negatives of their real selves.

Neither of these situations makes either of them good or bad people. But that contrast between reality and the story we were telling onstage seemed to inform the entire experience, or at least mine.

Once rehearsals started, we quickly learned that we had not been hired to collaborate. We had not been hired to breathe new life into a classic tale. We had not been hired to contribute in any way.

We had been hired to stand where Martin told us to stand, move where he told us to move, and say the lines exactly as he told us to say them.

And Martin had no interest in being nice about it.

If the line was “Nah” and the actor said “No.”

“Stop!” Martin would bark. Pointing at the stage manager who was on book, “What is it.” It wasn’t a question.

“Nah.”

“Nah. Ok, Go back. Do it again.”

Short scenes would end up taking hours as he would force all of us into the cookie cutter positions of his original vision.

He was just as hard on the orphans as he was on the adults. The moms weren’t allowed in the rehearsal room, and it was clear why. I often flinched at how he barked at them just as much as he barked at us. But these kids, they were troopers, never blinking an eye.

Warbuck struggled as he’d done the show before but either had used a slightly different script or originally memorized the lines wrong, so he was working against muscle memory.

And Annie simply didn’t understand emphasis.

Martin gave her the line reading in his booming baritone. “Because I knew they loved me.”

Annie, “Because I knew they loved me.”

Martin, “Because I knew they loved me.”

Annie, “Because I knew they LOVED me.”

Martin, “Because I KNEW they loved me.”

Annie, “Because I knew they loved ME.”

I swear to you, hand to my heart, this went on for a solid 15 minutes.

After two weeks of experiencing the old school Broadway director style of yelling at you till you do it “right,” Martin saw the wear it was having on all of us. After one of our final note sessions before we were to head out of town for tech, he tried to give us words of encouragement, at least in his own way.

“I know I’ve been hard on you guys. I know you’re exhausted. But after 40 years of directing this show, I can tell you, for a fact, the way I’m telling you to do it is the only way the show works. I promise you, if you do it exactly the way I am telling you to do it, the audience will jump to their feet every single time at curtain call. Every. Single. Time.”

We left NYC to a middle sized town to tech the show for two weeks. We previewed there before traveling to Detroit to officially open the tour.

We did the show exactly as Martin told, yelled, and barked at us to do, moment to moment, from start to finish.

When we took our bows, the audience did in fact jump to their feet.

Every. Single. Time.

At first, it was exciting, receiving a joyous standing ovation every single night.

But it wasn’t long before it lost its excitement.

Because, as I saw it, they weren’t jumping to their feet because of us, because of what we, the actors, had brought to the story.

There was nothing of ourselves invested into this show.

No, their standing ovations were for something that had been created 40 years prior.

We weren’t hired to be actors or even performers.

We were hired to be cogs in a machine.

This wasn’t our Annie.

This was Martin’s Annie.

Most of our houses were sold out; Martin and the producers made a lot of money.

Which was the point after all.

This was never going to be high art.

This was business. Annie was the product, and we were hired to sell it.

Not to reimagine, reinvent, or contribute.

We were hired to do a job.

And we did that job.

We did it well.

As the weeks turned into months, the job, Annie, became easy. Too easy. It cost me nothing. It took nothing out of me. In turn, it offered no catharsis, no release of pressure.

So that pressure would build

And it would explode.

Annie would turn out to be the worst year I experienced since my years of meth use eight years earlier.

Bad enough that I would end up leaving the business and nearly giving up on my dreams entirely.

Next Chapter

Chapter Guide

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