Broadway Tails (26 page)

Then the second miracle of the week happened. Our crew head from New York had refrained from asking the local crew for any favors because they were working so hard. But on the third day, he mentioned it, and to his surprise they said, “We know Bill. We like him and his dogs. Let him do whatever he wants.” Over the years I had been in San Francisco many times. We treat everyone we work with, including the crew, with respect. The crew has talents that the audience doesn’t see, but they are no less important than anyone else. That one act of kindness to me made the show happen for the dogs. Each dinner and supper break, Dorothy and I would sit with Chico onstage. It took him about a week to feel comfortable in the space.

Chloe, our second bulldog, had been caught in a Colorado snowstorm for three days on her trip west. No worse for wear, she was ready to go. When she saw Orfeh and her husband Andy, she went crazy. She, too, needed a week to get used to the space.

Soon, our first preview arrived. Chico sensed everyone was nervous backstage, and he was a little distracted. The first audience was so excited to see the world premiere of this musical. The overture started and the audience screamed. The curtain went up, and the audience screamed. The first set change happened, and the audience screamed. Then Chico hit the stage, and they roared. His ears were pinned back as he went to Annaleigh. He barked because he loved her, but he couldn’t wait to get
into her arms and offstage. He was nervous for the rest of the show, but Laura and Annaleigh protected him. At the curtain call, I told Laura to come and get him instead of sending him out into that thunderous applause. Jerry Mitchell saw how the audience affected Chico. Jerry made sure before each rehearsal that week that we got his set, Annaleigh, and the girls so we could run his scene and reassure him he was safe. With those rehearsals and a lot of love, it took Chico a week or so to completely ignore the audience and get into his show.

The following weeks there, we worked long and hard. We rehearsed every day with the cast and crew. We did interviews. The company slept, ate, and breathed that show. Changes were constantly being made, and new songs were going in and out. But it all came together. Reviews were positive. By the time we left San Francisco, the only thing left was to teach Chloe to bow.

When I drove up to the Palace Theater, there was a 50-foot-high billboard of Laura and Chico. His face became part of the logo—on the marquee, in the merchandising, in ads, taxicabs, commercials—anywhere you can imagine, there was Chico. Chloe had been so well accepted in San Francisco that they decided to add a second scene for her in the second act. She was so excited to be working with the two people she loved the most that on the second night, she threw up, which is what bulldogs do when they’re excited. I took it as a sign of love and affection. It got a huge laugh.

Opening night came. We loaded into a stretch limo to go to the opening-night party. I kissed Dorothy and Jenna as they got out with Chloe, who was wearing a pink sequined dress that Dorothy had made, to walk the red carpet. The door closed. The cue came for me to come out. I was in my tux, Chico in a sequined tux. Before I opened the door, I closed my eyes and saw all the animals I had owned, gathered together with Sandy in the middle, smiling, giving us their blessing.

As Chico and I stood on the red carpet, it was a special moment. It is what every entertainer dreams about. But I’m also an animal trainer. There are still a lot of animals to rescue and lots of opening nights to come.

It looked like 2008 was going to be a great year.
Legally Blonde
was a hit. With its positive messages about empowerment and being true to yourself, and the enormous energy of the cast, it had become one of my favorite shows. Our audiences loved it. So it looked like we would be settling in for a long run, but two things happened to slow us down. First, although we were nominated for seven Tony Awards, we didn’t win any. That hurt the marketing for the show. We were still getting enthusiastic audiences, but we weren’t selling out anymore. Then the recession hit Broadway, and ticket sales really fell.
Legally Blonde
closed in October of that year.

I started looking for new opportunities. During a recession, producers tend to do more revivals because the costs can be lower, and it’s easier to attract audiences to shows that are familiar. That didn’t worry me because there were three major revivals in the works that all featured animals, at least as originally written and performed. So I thought there would be lots of work.

First there was
Gypsy
. I had just done the Broadway revival starring Bernadette Peters a couple of years before, and I knew many people in the cast and crew. The fact that Gypsy Rose Lee and her sister June Havoc had pets all their lives was written into the musical for a reason, but the producers decided to use puppets instead of real animals.

The second show was
Miracle Worker
, the first Broadway revival since the original production many years before. I had done the play in regional theater a number of times over the years, and I had worked with the producer, Randall Wreghitt, on
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
. There is a pivotal scene where the audience realizes that Helen Keller is making progress when she tries to talk to her dog using sign language, but as costs increased, producers cut the dog.

Two down, one to go, and I thought this was a sure thing. The Roundabout Theatre Company was doing a revival of the 1987 Lincoln Center production of
Anything Goes
. I had supplied the dogs for that show, and I had worked with the director, Kathleen Marshall, on
Two Gentlemen of Verona
. Cole Porter, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse must have felt that the aristocracy and their pampered pooches were significant enough to write them into the show, but the Roundabout was in the same financial crunch as everyone else. No dog.

I understood that everyone on Broadway was hurting, but I still question the choice of cutting the animals. Why must the animals be the first to go? The savings weren’t great. An animal’s weekly cost is less than the weekly salary of one actor.

My ultimate concern is for the people seeing those revivals for the first time. They might think that real animals were never used in those shows. In each of these plays, the animals were important to the plot—that’s why the writers put them in. To me, that’s not a revival, but a re-write, and it should be credited that way so the audience knows.

Don’t get me wrong, Broadway has provided me with a career and the opportunity to work with some of the most brilliant and talented people in the world. But it was clear that the New York theater in 2009 was not interested in trained animals, at least not until the recession ended. So to pay the bills I hit the road. We had two years of a successful Equity tour of
Legally Blonde
and then a year of a non-Equity tour. For the tours we trained a new Bruiser, a little Chihuahua named Frankie rescued from the Meriden Humane Society in Meriden, Connecticut. He was a stray that the rescue group brought to my vet. When my vet heard Frankie was up for adoption, he recommended me, and a star was born. His understudy, Roxie, was saved by a woman named Rocky
Gates who runs CHIPPS (Chihuahua and Pounds Pups Rescue) in Louisiana. Roxie was a tough little survivor. She was so confident and unafraid of the world she must have been a stray for a long time. To play Rufus the bulldog, we rescued China and Nellie. China also came from Rocky Gates. She had been turned in because she was too much to handle. Her understudy, Nellie, was a puppy surrendered to the Humane Society of New York because she was out of control. With a job and a purpose they calmed right down.

Of course, there were lots of productions of
Annie
and
The Wizard of Oz
. We also did regional theater, summer stock, community theater, and even school plays, which we do just because we love it. In fact, a production of
Annie
at my daughter’s school gave us all a chance to work together. Jenna played one of the orphans, Dorothy came out of “acting retirement” to play Miss Hannigan, and I provided the dog.

We also started dreaming of something big all our own. Dorothy had managed to get the stage rights to
Because of Winn-Dixie
, the wonderful children’s book by Kate DiCamillo that had been made into a movie starring AnnaSophie Robb and Jeff Daniels. Then, in 2009, she found two deerhound/borzoi puppies, Izzy and Phoebe, who looked exactly like the illustration on the front of the book. When she asked me if we could adopt them, I thought she was crazy. We had no script, no songs, and we were years away from production. Why would we get the dogs?

“Research,” she answered. She wanted to see if we could train these huge dogs for the stage. I figured that the fact that these dogs had become available at the same time and resembled each other so closely was a kind of omen, so we adopted Izzy from St. Louis and Phoebe from San Diego.

Deerhounds and borzois are sight hounds, like greyhounds. They are difficult to train for obedience because they are easily stimulated—every little sight or sound distracts them. After a year of training, I was ready to give up, when we were asked to provide dogs for a Manhattan Theater Club revival of Edna Ferber’s
The Royal Family
. Izzy and Phoebe had the right look and the part was easy. All they had to do was walk on with the leading man, stand center stage, then exit.

I had one of my longtime handlers, Brian Hoffman, work with me on running the show. Unfortunately, Izzy and Phoebe weren’t in love with the stage. The dogs loved the quiet apartment, Central Park at night, and the dressing room. Everywhere else, they were anxious and concerned. We got them through the eight-week run and then retired them to our farm. We’d have to look elsewhere for a dog to play Winn-Dixie.

Around that time, our longtime friend and New York general manager Wendy Orshan called saying that she was representing a new producer, Arielle Tepper Madover. Arielle had become a successful producer at a very young age and is still much younger than most Broadway producers. She’s also a wonderful human being. Arielle and Wendy were working on the thirty-fifth
anniversary revival of
Annie
. Wendy set up a meeting, and two days after Arielle accepted the best play Tony Award for
Red
, I was in her office.

Arielle told me that her lifelong love of musical theater had started with seeing the original Broadway production of
Annie
, with my Sandy and the actress Allison Smith, when she was eight years old. She was planning a first-class revival that would be directed by the legendary writer/director James Lapine. It would mark the first time I would be working on a Broadway production of
Annie
without Martin Charnin, the director who gave me my start. The show would open in the fall of 2012. Arielle and Wendy explained that they wanted to create a marketing campaign focused on the search for Sandy instead of the search for Annie.

I thought I was dreaming. On top of everything else, Arielle proposed doing a documentary called
Searching for Sandy
that would cover the entire process, from the shelter through training to the stage. I couldn’t believe it. This could create great publicity for Broadway and for animal welfare. My message of animal rescue would be front and center. For shelter dogs, this could mean a much brighter tomorrow.

Of course, that tomorrow was more than two years away. In the meantime, there were more tours, small theatrical productions, and a Disney television movie called
Frenemies
that starred one of our agency dogs, Winston, owned by Theresa Carroll.

But the months following the meeting were very tough for me. My father had been fighting Parkinson’s disease for more than a decade. In the fall of 2010 he required full-time care, and for the first time I had to take over my parents’ affairs. It’s a task I took on without question. We enjoyed our last Christmas together in 2010, and in March of 2011 my father passed away.

As an only child, husband, and father myself, I had to take care of everybody over those last months. My father was buried on a Saturday and the next day I had to leave for a production of
Annie
in New Jersey. Fewer than twenty-four hours after my father’s burial, I found myself alone in a hotel room at the Jersey Shore. That first Monday at rehearsal was tough. I got through it, but Tuesday morning I woke up very low, lonely and exhausted, missing my dad terribly. What could possibly help?

Just then my cell phone rang. It was Allen Wasser, who had been the general manager of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
on Broadway. He said he was honored to tell me that I was going to be the recipient of the 2011 Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater. For a moment, I didn’t believe him. I never expected to win a Tony Honor. For one thing, I wasn’t eligible. You must belong to one of the theater unions to be eligible to win a Tony Award and there’s no union for animal trainers. But the Tony committee has special categories for people like me who play major roles but are ineligible in all the other categories.

I remember babbling my thanks. My hands were shaking as I called my wife, who cried, and then my mother. Next I felt moved to call Martin Charnin, the original director of
Annie
, and Michael Price, the original producer, and pass on the good news and thank them for believing in this young kid and giving him a chance. Moments before I had been in the depths of despair, but the one impossible dream for a theater person had come true. I accepted the award in May 2011.