Every branch of show business has its own special pains, but to outsiders the strains of working in a long-run musical seem particularly burdensome. How can a person remain sane (and perky) while playing and singing and dancing and going through exactly the same routines night after week after month after year? Wouldn’t you go bananas?
Some have. Al Jolson once stopped an aging show in the middle of the second act, asked the audience how many wanted to continue and got a huge ovation for a second option-him singing solo. He carried on until 1 a.m.
Another Broadway star, Zero Mostel, used to liven up “Fiddler on the Roof” by improvising long pantomimes, which relieved his boredom but terrified his producer, who had to pay overtime if the show ran past midnight.
“It’s tough,” admits a modern star, sitting on a beach in Wilmette, letting his daytime thoughts wander onto a laptop computer, composing a song as he seeks tranquility by looking far out to sea (well, actually, Lake Michigan). This is a person who, six days a week, puts on a coat of many colors and, like millions of other Americans, goes to work.
The difference, as Donny Osmond is the first to admit, is that in his case, hundreds of onlookers judge his every move. Unlike normal folk, he cannot profess boredom with his job and kill hours by going for coffee, making lunch dates, checking magazines out of the company library, reading the morning paper, going to the bathroom or griping about middle management.
On some 900 recent nights-including most of the past year at the Chicago Theatre-Osmond has had to whirl his delicately colored features and tiny tawny torso for 2 hours and 5 minutes through an intricate retelling-in song, dance, tumbling, clowning and haute Vegas splendor-of an Old Testament story that has become “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
“You’ve gotta keep it fresh, and it’s not easy,” Osmond said during an interview that began at Walker Brothers Original Pancake House in Wilmette and shifted to the town’s Gilson Park Beach where, on a windy afternoon, waves crashed against the shore and, in the distance, kids playing around sand castles shouted, “Donn-eee!!!”
That, of course, is one problem of the long-run star. Everybody says hi.
It’s easy to retreat, “but you can’t close the doors and withdraw,” Osmond said. “Look what happened to Michael (Jackson) when he isolated himself.”
Osmond has tried to build a normal life, not so much for himself, he said, but so he can have a normal wife and normal kids. “I was getting on a plane by myself when I was 5,” he said, “but that’s not how most people are raised. Most people wake up in the same bedroom every morning. They see other family members every day. Not many kids have their own TV show or do concert tours.”
Osmond did, with his sister, Marie, and with other Osmond family members who hit so many airports in travels across the country in the ’60s and ’70s, that Osmond recalled waking up one morning in a hotel room and having no memory of where he was, or even of having checked in the previous night.
It scared him. “I lay in bed and tried to think back. Finally, I had to open the curtains and look down at the marquee to remember coming into the hotel. I had to look at a phone book to find out what city I was in.”
For Osmond, long runs are in a sense better than the frenzy of one-nighters because they have given him a chance to savor family life.
“At times, it has been tough. I got married at 20. I was a father at 21. Normal life began, but I didn’t know how to deal with it. I never went to school. In fact, I graduated from a school in Chicago,” referring to his alma mater, Hyde Park’s American School of Correspondence. He had no idea how to relate to a wife, to kids or, indeed, to other males of his age.
“I don’t want to make it sound weird,” he said, “but I never had buddies when I was a teenager. My whole career had been nothing but appealing to, you know, young girls.” When he switched to rock ‘n’ roll, and later to “Joseph,” it took a lot of personal fine-tuning to build relationships on more than his ability to stir up mating frenzy in like-aged females.
He took up auto racing. He hung out at gyms. In Chicago, he flailed his way through three rounds of boxing with WLUP-FM’s Danny Bonaduce and has spent a lot of time with another “real buddy,” Jonathon Brandmeier. But much of his off time he spends at home, in a two-story brick house with black and white shutters on a quiet North Shore street about 40 minutes north of the Loop. Because he leaves for work about 5:45 p.m., he gets up early in the morning, or he wouldn’t see his children before they go to school.
Just an Osmond on the street
Osmond’s four sons, ranging in age from 3 to 15, have “done all the normal things: soccer, football, scouting, children’s theater,” he said. “We spent a weekend in Galena, and on the way back we stopped in Belvidere for a tour of the Chrysler plant. At the Brookfield Zoo, we had our own cart with a guide to show us around, though every time the Zebra Train went by, the driver said, `. . . and here we have Donny Osmond.’ “
“Right now, we’re facing a difficult challenge, what to do next year after ‘Joseph’ closes in Chicago,” Osmond said. “We had planned to stay on here, to have the kids continue at New Trier. But it’s been difficult for them because of who I am. Every time one of them stands up in class, somebody goes, `Go, go, go, Joseph,”‘ parroting a song in his show.
Reversing directions, the family feeling now is for a base in Utah while Osmond, whose “Joseph” contract has been extended until 1997, does a run in Minneapolis. “I want my children to have a normal life, and to see an Osmond on the street in Utah is no big thing,” he said, though it still is in Wilmette, where he answers all inquiries engagingly-and honestly.
“What are your plans for the weekend?” a teller at his local bank recently inquired when he stopped off to make a deposit. “What plans?” Osmond replied, “I’m doing five shows.”
When it comes to long-run shows, most actors, singers, dancers and musicians can tell tales of dancers falling into the orchestra pit, horses forgetting themselves onstage, the nights the scenery caught fire, or the time at “Miss Saigon” when a pit prankster at the Auditorium kept dropping spare parts on the floor during clarinet solos, driving the clarinetist to frenzy because he thought his instrument was falling apart in his hands.
“How do you keep fresh in a long run? You don’t,” noted violist Marty Abrams, a Chicago pit veteran whose recent credits include “Phantom of the Opera,” “Miss Saigon” and “Les Miserables.” Also, “you redo your whole life around Mondays,” he said, referring to the traditional show biz day off.
In addition, he said, “every other day you have dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon, and you hang out after work with other musicians because everybody else is going to bed.”
On the up side, he said, “My daughter once asked me,`Dad, how much do you work a week?’ And I had to admit, 20 hours.”
Off off off-schedule
Long-run veterans often find it easier to hang out with each other.
Rose Mary Dalesandro, who has played Tina in “Tony and Tina’s Wedding” for the last year at a theater in Piper’s Alley, said: “This show has totally turned my life around. I don’t have a life anymore. I’ve given up everything.”
A month into the show, she lost her boyfriend. He was working 9 to 5. She was getting off around midnight, famished and needing quiet.
“It didn’t work out,” she said. “I can’t really make plans during the day either,” she added, noting that many of her off hours are taken up with other cast members, appearing at promotions or talking with reporters, like this one, who woke her up at 10:30 a.m. with questions about the strain of long-run shows.
“It takes me hours to wind down,” Dalesandro said. After jabbering onstage for three hours, she retreats to her dressing room, “then I have to go to eat because I’m starving. I also need a lot of sleep, 8 to 10 hours, but I don’t get to bed until about 2.” Her current boyfriend, a bartender with the show, understands her hours because he’s on the same schedule.
Tougher for him, she said, is that every night he has to watch Dalesandro engage in some rather severe necking with the actor who plays Tony. “He got used to it,” she said. “It became just a natural thing,” nothing personal.
At the country’s longest run, “The Fantasticks,” with 14,100 performances in New York’s 150-seat Sullivan Street Playhouse, “one problem we’ve had is how to keep the physical plant from falling in,” said Tony Noto, press agent and son of a star, the late Lore Noto, who did the show for 17 years.
“We’ve gone through 10 sets of seats. Our sign has fallen down. We have to renovate constantly,” Noto said in an interview, recalling his childhood days when his father was onstage every night and he “got to go to movies a lot.” Also, he said, “for me, Christmas always started sometime after midnight.”
“We had one actor who did 7,000 shows. Another did 5,000,” Noto said. “The way we keep fresh is by bringing in new people for the younger roles. And we keep tinkering. We rewrote one song. We changed some lighting. We did some reblocking.”
But like all show business, a long run depends on week-to-week receipts. “A show, even a long run, can end any time,” Noto said. “We’ve had winters when snowstorms almost destroyed us. Some nights we’ve had three people in the house. But we just kept going, week after week.”
Pranks help.
One Halloween during an earlier “Joseph” run in Minneapolis, when Osmond was onstage with his back to the audience, he slipped a set of Dracula teeth into his mouth and vamped the cast with a blood-drenched smile. After enjoying looks of shock and horror from the cast, he had to figure out where to hide the choppers. Most working stiffs would slide them into a desk drawer. Osmond slipped them down the front of his loincloth.
