Richmond to Broadway

Hometown theaters serve as a springboard for performing artists

by

Mary Page Nance stops traffic.

On 46th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues amid New York City’s Theater District, she grabs the edge of an SUV-size trash dumpster parked indecorously by the historic Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, where she is appearing in the musical “Finding Neverland.” Nance vaults upward and her heels almost touch her tossed-back head. She just might launch toward the second star to the right.

A yellow New York City cab halts. The delighted driver calls out, “Can you do that again?”

Ever mindful of her audience, she repeats the stunt.

The versatile performer is larking around for a Richmond magazine photo shoot in the late afternoon light. Fellow cast member Josh Lamon admires her grace over garbage and cracks, “This is Broadway, and we’re never far from trash.”

Nance is part of a growing group of Richmonders who’ve found their footing in New York City theater, on and off Broadway, during the last few years, among them Drew Seigla, Emma Orelove, Duke Lafoon and Bud Weber. Each of them points to the teachers, mentors and training opportunities in Richmond that prepared them for their present careers. And just like any cast member who comes out for a handholding bow at curtain call, each has a story about the challenges they overcame and the chances they took to claim their place in the spotlight.

‘And Straight on ‘Til Morning’

Mary Page Nance wanted to know if it was OK for her to take off her shoes. She asked this of “Finding Neverland” choreographer and “So You Think You Can Dance?” judge Mia Michaels. Nance, after grueling years of eking out a living and hauling herself to often pointless auditions, had garnered agency representation that gave her a step up — but not yet a job. On that day in January 2014, she’d come to yet another in a series of auditions for this new show. Along the walls of the small room, about 20 people stood, many of them recognizable to Nance from renowned Broadway productions.

This time, she understood the production team wanted to hear her sing, and she’d come with her hair down, wearing jewelry, cute shoes and tight, non-stretch jeans. Michaels, however, asked Nance to improvise movement. “I want to capture that spirit of where we were a few months ago,” she said, referring to a previous audition. Nance, whose training is in modern dance, knows never to turn down a challenge. She responded, “Absolutely.” Michaels agreed to let her eschew her footwear.

Nance’s dancing partner, now a good friend, played well with her. “I was pushing off walls, climbing chairs and grabbing Tinkerbell,” she recalls. The accompanist also improvised. “The entire room was with me. It was beautiful. Then, they say: ‘That went well. Now that you’re out of breath, can you do scales?’ ” After this, no closer to knowing if she’d land a spot, she encountered a friend who insisted on praying with Nance for her success. Later, she received a call to appear for more dancing at 2 p.m. She ran home, grabbed clothes, bolted down some Chipotle and called the upscale clothing boutique where she worked, to find someone to cover her anticipated late arrival to her shift. Nance rubs her temples as she recalls the anxiety. “And finally I just said,” and she slaps her hands on the table, “I don’t effing care. You can sell pants to rich people another time.”

She found two other actresses in a cramped room full of Tony award-nominated and -winning observers. They danced together and apart, improvised more and sang. The music supervisor repeatedly stopped and started them. She says, “At the end you’re thinking: ‘What do you want? I’ve given you everything.’ ”

During a March production of “Finding Neverland,” which had opened on Broadway a year earlier, Nance is seen throughout the show, in seven different guises ranging from pirate to Indian to acting troupe member. She creeps and fights. She scurries up rigging. She dances as a stiff society matron and serves tea to the players within the play. And she sings. Man, does she.

She’s in love with her workplace, the more than century-old Lunt-Fontanne, named for Wisconsin-born Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who became renowned for their appearances in Noël Coward plays and for being the greatest husband-and-wife acting team in theater history. Renovations in the 1950s removed much of its original décor, but a sense of old Broadway remains. The 1918 Ziegfeld Follies and “No, No Nanette” ran there, as did “The Sunshine Boys,” “Sophisticated Ladies” and the musical “Titanic.” Broadway history is layered here, and Nance is adding some of her own.

Nance says she wasn’t primed as a guided missile of entertainment from childhood, though something theatrical seemed destined. While a youngster, she hated her bountiful mass of curly dark hair and wanted to look more like Caroline, her two-years-older, redheaded sister. Nance draped a red slip over her head and pretended. “There are pictures of me, in public, at the fair, standing with my family and a red slip on my head,” she says with a laugh. Page is technically her middle name, but connects her through her paternal side to the Virginia Pages, politicians and public figures. She doesn’t recall her lawyer father and marketing mother ever admonishing her about theatrical inclinations. Quite the opposite.

They encouraged her direction, at their home on Richmond’s West Avenue where she grew up performing impromptu after-dinner songs, and through classes at the School of the Performing Arts in the Richmond Community (SPARC), where she met mentors and friends who remain meaningful to her. She made the ensemble for a SPARC production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” and this led to a long relationship with choreographer Pam Turner. “She taught me everything I knew,” Nance says. She also went through the Richmond Ballet’s Minds in Motion program and Team XXL.

These programs connected her with mentors — Swift Creek Mill Theatre artistic director Tom Width, voice teacher Steven Rudlin and music instructor Blanton Bradley, and stage manager Joe Doran, now an accomplished New York lighting designer. In “The Music Man,” she met Richmond actor/writer Jason Marks, with “Footloose” she became friends with singer/actor Drew Seigla, and as a professional performer in “Children of Eden” at Swift Creek Mill, she worked with a big cast including Duke Lafoon, with whom she also acted in “A Wonderful Life.”

A graduate of Appomattox Regional Governor’s School in Petersburg, Nance considered auditioning for the State University of New York at Purchase’s Conservatory of Dance, but at first shied away from what she heard was a difficult program housed in low-slung contemporary buildings in a remote location. “I’m from Richmond, Virginia, with its beautiful architecture. I was in the middle of the city and I looked around and said, ‘I cannot go here.’ ”

Nance invented a required modern dance routine in a hotel room the night before the audition.

SUNY Purchase’s isolation ultimately helped with concentration for her studies in a rigorous program while also situating her close to New York’s musical theater. “I figured: You can’t quit dancing for four years and go back to it,” she says. “Physically, the time was now.”  

Nance felt that her technique didn’t measure up to that of her classmates, while her performance background strengthened her onstage presence. She returned to Richmond for summer productions of “Guys and Dolls” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” Friends who came from New York to see her in “Millie” understood Nance’s passion. A friend wrote a note: “This is the part of you that flourishes onstage.”

Two weeks after her barefoot improvisational dance audition, Nance received word of acceptance into the “Finding Neverland” workshop to build out the play, loosely based on the 2004 film that delved into the creative and personal life of “Peter Pan” playwright J.M. Barrie. That became a record-busting run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which made Nance part of the original cast of “Finding Neverland” on Broadway. She’s on the official recording and a bonus ensemble track, “Play.” Arranged by Nance and her friend Rory Donovan, the song emerged from a back porch jam session during a summer 2014 cast getaway to Lake St. Catherine in Vermont.

The physical demands of eight shows a week require additional effort. Nance maintains an athlete’s regimen of exercise, physical therapy and diet. Constant fine-tuning is required when you are your own instrument. “If you don’t take care of yourself, you cannot be on Broadway,” she says. People who don’t get this reality run the risk of jeopardizing all that they’ve strived for.

Nance recently moved into a one-bedroom Washington Heights apartment with her boyfriend after several years living with “two amazing sisters.” At the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, she moves in familiar fashion backstage showing off her costumes, the wigs and hats and props, the jokey signs placed to keep spirits up. After a Tuesday night performance, she stands next to the ghost light placed onstage once the audience is gone and the house lights are off.

“This is my home,” she says, arms akimbo and looking as comfortable as if she were in a tidy living room.

‘Love, Fantasy and Magic’

Drew Seigla, a J.R. Tucker High School grad who studied opera at Juilliard, in April celebrated his year anniversary in the musical “The Fantasticks” at the Jerry Orbach Theater, in which he plays a character who sings not a note, but serves as the show’s barometer: The Mute (and on occasion, The Boy, named Matt). At one point, portraying a wall separating feuding fathers, Seigla stands motionless for 19 minutes with one arm out and tries to not even blink.

Seigla’s parents met in a community theater production of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” in which his father, an insurance man, played Charlie Brown, and his mother, a teacher, was Lucy. Church choir introduced him to music, and at the age of 5, he sang his first solo while in the Greater Richmond Children’s Choir. This led him to SPARC and teachers Debra Clinton, Ted Boelt and Steve Rudlin. He became good friends with actor Zak Resnick, who also went on to New York. Seigla enrolled in the summer classes of dance, acting and singing. His first SPARC summer musical, “Once Upon a Mattress” ran at what is now Virginia Repertory Theatre’s Sara Belle and Neil November Theater. Seigla, who was 14 at the time, says, “Being a kid and seeing that beautiful space filled with people was amazing.”

Seigla performed in ComedySportz improvisational shows and took improv class with actor Scott Wichmann. Upon the suggestion of a high school choir friend, Seigla auditioned for an intensive, five-week overseas opera training program through Operafestival di Roma. He went on to Elon College in North Carolina, where vocal teacher Kenneth Lee’s encouragement led to his successful application to Juilliard. After graduation, he alternated between the Lyric Opera Virginia and musical theater in New York.

Meanwhile, he needed to make a living. He earned his Actors Equity Association card in Virginia Rep’s “The Producers,” donning a blonde wig in the number “Springtime for Hitler.” He shakes his head. “I’m not the most Aryan looking, but I guess it worked.”

A Juilliard background didn’t assure Seigla of anything. “I naively thought, ‘Oh, I’ll walk into a room and it’ll be like fairy dust.’ Well, it’s not. Nobody cares that you went to Juilliard.” When auditioning or performing, what matters is consistent accomplishment at a high level. Seigla recalls how, during a visit home in October 2014, his brother point-blank asked him about his progress in New York. “He was saying, ‘Man, it’s the fourth quarter. You need to make this happen. What’s your feeling?’ ”

Before landing his “Fantasticks” gig, Seigla thought he might need to start doing temp work. He’d been in a small production of “La Traviata” at the Berkshire Theatre with a Lyric Opera Virginia alum, who wanted Seigla to join him in the traveling production. “But I thought, ‘I need a job and I need to be singing more.’” Through the American Choral Directors Association’s website (choralnet.org), he found a position as a soloist at the First Congregational Church of Greenwich, Connecticut, where he remains involved. During 2013, he also worked with Juilliard classmates in creating an anti-bullying musical for kids set in a comic book character motif called “Operation Superpower.” He directed the show at the Opera Saratoga, in Saratoga Springs, New York, in February.

“The Fantasticks” audition came along in late 2014, and Seigla’s voice impressed associate director Kim Moerer. Nothing happened until early 2015, when a call went out for Equity Principal Auditions (EPA). He says, “I was in a room with 15 other guys, all young, good-looking dudes, and I did it — and I couldn’t believe I got the call.”

“The Fantasticks” is one of Broadway’s — and the world’s — most durable shows. A minimalist eight-member, two-musician play with roots in 19th-century playwright Edmond (“Cyrano de Bergerac”) Rostand’s “Les Romanesques,” commedia dell’arte, and 1950s New York experimental theater, it opened May 3, 1960, at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, with Jerry Orbach as the cavalier/cad/narrator El Gallo (Orbach became known to another generation as the wise-cracking detective Lennie Briscoe on “Law & Order”). The show ran for 17,162 performances until closing in 2002 and reopened at the then-Snapple Theater Center in 2006. On the occasion of its 2002 closing, attending actor F. Murray Abraham enthused that the show’s longevity connected to the essence of musicals and theater: “love, fantasy and magic.”

As the saying goes, everything that happens in life can happen in a show — and for the longest-running show on Broadway, most everything has and will. On the night of Seigla’s debut, producer Catherine Russell gathered the cast backstage after the performance and gave them the news that she couldn’t keep the show going. “And then MacIntyre Dixon, a really good Old Actor [his role in the show], turned to me and said, ‘Oh, Drew, you’re the kiss of death.’ ” Seigla laughs. Out of a job on the evening he started, he rebounded and thought he’d sign on as Lt. Cable in Virginia Rep’s “South Pacific.”

But then, two anonymous benefactors heard of the interruption to “The Fantasticks” and underwrote the show to keep it going. Thinking it was the end, Daniel Berryman, the show’s Boy/Matt, went onstage elsewhere, temporarily, this past summer. For seven weeks, Seigla then used his highly trained and expressive voice as The Boy. (You can hear him on YouTube, performing duets in concert with his opera singer girlfriend, Gianna Barone).

“When I first got here, I couldn’t believe where I was,” Seigla says. “I walked out through Times Square and right there is the Theater District. This is crazy. Am I working here? This is awesome.”

The small, scruffy Orbach Theater is appropriate for the show, which is in part about making the ordinary, well, fantastic. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in high school and community theaters the world over can say they’ve acted in “The Fantasticks.” Seigla recalls how one night, the entire cast of a Puerto Rican “Fantasticks” production attended and afterward sang in Spanish “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” to the Orbach cast.

Playing The Mute has taught Seigla about listening on stage. “You can’t just check out and think about the grocery list,” he says. He confesses that as a younger actor, he would sometimes admire the manner in which he may have delivered a certain line, rather than giving his attention to the scene. “So stupid,” he says, shaking his head. “If you’re thinking that way, you’re not really giving a reaction to your scene partner.” At Elon, he studied the teaching of Sanford Meisner, whose philosophy stemmed from reacting rather than manufacturing emotions.

In the second act, when The Lovers are realizing the tough work of happiness, The Mute, by clicking his fingers, directs the pace of verbal arias. This seems pat from the audience, but, Seigla acknowledges, “They’re watching me: If I’m too fast or too slow, it can go wrong.”

Seigla remembers that when he was 17, his J.R. Tucker theater director, Brianne Powell Hayes, who’s since moved to New York, placed a note for him in a book of Broadway songs. “Only 3 percent of actors make a living off acting,” she’d written. “If you focus, you’ll be in that 3 percent.” Hayes bolstered Seigla’s confidence. “And here I am, making my living just through this show,” he adds. “I’m hoping I can ride this wave and it’ll open more doors. I’m in the business now.”

‘Welcome to Show Business, Folks!’

Emma Orelove’s love affair with New York began at age 7 when, during a vacation to the city, her mother allowed her to hail a cab. And it was important that she ride an elevator by herself. “I got a taste of independent, crazy New York, and there was no turning back for me,” she says. She’s lived there six years, and despite the daily frustrations and the challenges of finding work, she cannot imagine being anywhere else. She’s grateful for the network of Richmond theater alumni. She emphasizes, “Having a friend base is absolutely crucial here.”

She, too, came through SPARC’s classes and spent a decade in the program with teachers including actor Bridget Gethins and musician Paul Deiss. She enjoyed the big summer musicals at the Empire Theatre (now November Theatre). From that balcony at age 7, she watched, transfixed, as a friend performed in “Annie.” The next year brought “Camelot,” packed by a cast of 60 kids, each given a chance to shine. She played five parts, including a wood nymph, a sea urchin and a role made for her, Squire Abigail. In the title song, she added the little punctuation note at the end of “Cam-e-lot!” She grins. “That was the beginning of the end,” of any aspirations other than performance.

Orelove graduated from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, a small school, and returned to Richmond, where she tended to book the parts she sought. In New York, she’d get up before sunrise to rush to get in line to sit on cold sidewalks waiting for the theater to open. She’d not yet earned her Equity membership, which gives priority. Orelove realized she needed to go on numerous auditions, including many where she wouldn’t even be seen by the casting director and others that didn’t result in a job. This works on the actor’s psyche. Orelove explains, “You have to believe in yourself, but be humble enough to accept whatever they throw at you. If they read you’re cocky, ‘I got this,’ then they’re less likely to want you. Over-confidence won’t work, but without confidence you’ll drown. This is just the beast.”

When reading character breakdowns, Orelove says, actors sometimes wonder what the producers really have in mind. She gives a theatrical interpretation: “They call for a girl-next-door who’s beautiful — but not a model, a little quirky — but not weird, and maybe a physical ailment — but not ugly.” She rolls her eyes, laughs big, and throws out her arms: “Welcome to show business, folks!”

The first role she secured after moving to New York brought her back to Richmond. A Skype audition with Carol and Morrie Piersol led to her appearance in the Firehouse Theatre Project’s “Love Kills.” After that, a Philadelphia acquaintance who became the artistic director for Teatro delle Due sent her to Italy for “Romeo and Juliet.” She played Juliet and also appeared in “Macbeth” (or “The Scottish Play,” as actors often call it, due to a longstanding superstition) as a witch and Lady Macduff. One of her first actual New York shows was a staging of “Our Town” by The Transport Group, a company founded by Richmonder Jack Cummings III. She went on the road for a regional touring parody, “The Hungry Hungry Games,” playing Kat Evans, a Katniss variant, and learning to heft a crossbow.

Orelove lived for five years with two college friends in the Washington Heights neighborhood, and just recently moved 10 minutes away with her boyfriend, leaving her cat, Jack Spoons, at her former residence. “I pay cat support,” she says, and laughs. For more than two years, she worked as a nanny for an Upper West Side family and loved their two girls, but the hours proved too restrictive. One morning she looked in the mirror and said: “I’m not gonna pay this rent and I’m not gonna stay here if I’m not doing what I moved here for.” She left to work at opening the New York branch of an upscale Mexican restaurant she’d known from Philadelphia and made more money than she did as a nanny, with greater flexibility.

Her heart is in the theater, but she’s like many young actors who, in the quest for a livable wage, follow a cord that powers screens of various sizes. “Unless you are making a Broadway salary — and even then, with agency fees, it’s difficult to make a living — which is why you audition for commercials that you hope you book and it pays rent for a year.”

She just landed a part in an indie film called “Lemons,” portraying a character named Maggie. “She’s a really cool chick,” Orelove says — a young bartender and folk singer who becomes pregnant by a bandmate, but faces complications from “an ex-boyfriend situation.”

Orelove signed with an agent in January and thought this would lessen her workload. Instead, she works more than ever, but knows someone is there keeping an eye out on her behalf. “You are working for yourself and promote yourself. And the bulk of the work is in the hustle,” she says.

Her ideal life would be to book work in Los Angeles and then return to her family and dogs in New York. Meanwhile, she’s embraced yoga for her physical and psychological well-being. “For me, the work of yoga is not even on the mat,” she says. “It’s about taking it into the city, finding my breath and patience.”

Two Gentlemen from Mechanicsville

Duke Lafoon and Bud Weber are each one of five siblings, Duke the youngest in his family, Bud the oldest in his. Lafoon moved to New York 14 years ago and Weber, six years ago.

They credit the extraordinary support of their parents in deciding to pursue theater careers. Lafoon’s introduction came when playing a ballplayer in “Damn Yankees” at Stonewall Jackson Middle School — “One of my favorite shows,” says Weber, who, as a kid, arranged versions of “The Nutcracker” for his family. He came up through SPARC, but credits his introduction in the early 2000s to musical theater at the former Ashland Stage Co. And then there was “Bad Night in Bunny Town,” which sounds as though it would be a weird Off-Broadway absurdist comedy; instead, it’s about a rabbit detective. Weber acted in it at the Fort Lee Playhouse, and his family came to see.

Lafoon’s playing of Fléance in “The Scottish Play” at what was then the Virginia Museum Theater hooked him on stagework at age 14. To create tears to mourn his murdered father, Banquo, Lafoon squished makeup into his eyes. His real father told him to pursue what made him happiest and he built a theater-based life in Richmond.

Lafoon did both musical and nonmusical shows, and got into a few films and commercials. He and his wife bought a house in Forest Hill near O’Toole’s Restaurant and Pub. Then something happened: Lafoon was cast, to his surprise, as George Bailey in “A Wonderful Life,” a stage adaptation of the perennial Christmas season film at the Westchester Broadway Theatre. Lafoon lassoed an agent and spent a year between Richmond and New York.

“And I felt like I had a foot in one place and a foot in another until my wife said, ‘Let’s go.’ ” They rented out their house, went through a time of living in spare rooms and out of luggage, and moved. Since then, the personas of George Bailey and Bill Clinton have followed him around; he’s played Bailey six times and Clinton in two cabaret farces, “Monica! The Musical,” and “Clinton: The Musical.”

Even with an agency, the name of the game is hitting the pavement. Auditioning isn’t Lafoon’s favorite part of the business. “Intellectually, I understand how it works. You get yourself together and you do ‘The Duke Lafoon Show.’ But enjoy it? ‘Hi there, I’m meat on a hook! Judge me! I need to be judged!’ Are you crazy?” His preference is for the rehearsal room and figuring out the characters and the nuances of the text.

Weber went through the Boston Conservatory for music, dance and theater, and a senior showcase secured him an agent. He moved to New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, where he waited tables and lived with three other people in an apartment with missing windowpanes through which pigeons had flown and made room deposits of their own.

“We lit candles because we didn’t know we had to call ConEd to turn the power on,” Weber says, laughing. But he spent little time there. He first toured with “Wicked” and then “The Book of Mormon,” the latter co-directed and choreographed by Tony award-winning Casey Nicholaw, who then created the Broadway/Shakespeare mashup of “Something Rotten!” now playing at the St. James Theatre. This is where “Oklahoma!” premiered, and where “Hello, Dolly!” and “The Secret Garden” opened. In 2013, Alejandro Iñárritu filmed “Birdman” almost entirely in and around the St. James.

Weber went into the workshop that developed “Something Rotten!” and the production tests for potential financial backers. That show passed its year anniversary in April. The day prior to our interview, he was in Boston with the cast promoting the show, and afterward he dashed to a class of young people to discuss the Shakespeare and Broadway references.

Weber grants the complete unpredictability of the business. He says, “Some shows you figure are sure-fire hits are not and the ones that you don’t ever expect hearing anything about become huge.”

Lafoon gives the recent painful example of the greatly expected musical “Nerds” about the rise of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that underwent preparation and trial runs from 2005 on. “Amazing people were involved,” he says, “They started loading into the Longacre Theater in March and then one day in rehearsal, they get the announcement that a major funder pulled out and the show won’t go on. You’re an actor, you finally get into a show, and there’s no guarantee about how long it’ll run or even if it will. It just crumbles in front of you. Heartbreaking.”

From a veteran’s perspective, he sees the new crop of conservatory-trained performers hitting the New York pavements as if they’re hitting enemy beaches. People get discouraged. They drop out. There’s attrition, but always fresh hopefuls. Still, he loves the theater because the people are, frankly, unlike any other. “My favorite thing of all is in a new show when you walk into a room and know that in a week, we’re a family,” Lafoon says. Theater also brings an inherent contradiction. “The actor opens his or her heart, to become [as] vulnerable as possible, so you can get crushed.” For now, Weber thrives on this uncertainty. He enjoys auditioning — going into a room, giving all and seeing what happens.

Lafoon says he would’ve been psychologically unprepared to make such a major move like Weber, at age 21 or 22. “I came up late,” he says. His first real New York show was The Transport Group’s “The Audience,” a piece that turned the focus to those watching, with varied characters each created by different writers.

Today, he enjoys his Dominican neighborhood, knows the guy in the bodega at his subway entrance, the fellow who runs the nearby dry cleaners, even the postal carrier. What interests him in theater are shows he knows nothing about, the material into which actors, musicians and technicians breathe life. He recently participated in a private industry reading of a musical based on the satirical film “Citizen Ruth,” about a sad sack woman caught in the middle of the national abortion debate. The play may go into Off-Broadway production during the summer.

Lafoon’s agent is telling him that for future auditions, he should learn King George III’s song from the current mega-hit “Hamilton” — which received 16 nominations for the Tony Awards to be handed out on June 12. And he chuckles. “I play the [Broadway ticket] lottery every day online just to see that show.”