Free Showstopper by Abigail Pogrebin Page B

Japan.  I was more partial to “Someone in a Tree” than to “The Music and the Mirror.”
     
    On a typical Friday night in ninth grade, Daisy would say, “Should we grab dinner, see a movie, or go to Evita ?” It was exactly that casual for her—going to a hit Broadway show. She had a perpetual backstage pass, which, for me, opened the proverbial candy store. I felt like the luckiest friend in the world to be able to breeze through the stage door of the Broadway Theater and be escorted to sit on the balcony steps.  We were decidedly theater geeks, gaga over Mandy Patinkin and jazzed to watch—for the umpteenth time—his outraged Che hiss at LuPone’s steely Eva Peron.
     
    Daisy was—still is—one of those boundless centers of bonhomie.  I can’t count the number of sleepovers we had at her family townhouse. After an after-school snack in the street-level kitchen, we’d dispense with our homework in Daisy’s fourth-floor sanctum with its eaves and catty-corner twin beds, listening to records (musicals, of course) and singing along—at Ethel Merman volume. Daisy’s acerbic, hilarious Mom, Judy, would order in deli food for dinner and, over potato salad and sandwiches on rye, we’d deconstruct every show that was running on Broadway and I’d devour every gossipy crumb about the celebrities in the Prince firmament. To hear Sondheim referred to as “Steve” was enough to make my head spin. (There were photos of him all over the house.) Hal would usually arrive home from some meeting or rehearsal, (“Hi, honey!”) and I couldn’t believe I was actually in his home. Every show that Hal (I learned to call him “Hal”) had produced or directed was a landmark: The Pajama Game , Damn Yankees , West Side Story , A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum , She Loves Me , Cabaret , Candide .
        The Princes invited me to their legendary annual Christmas parties, where an enormous, twinkling tree dwarfed the furniture, and I’d catch glimpses of Adolph Green, Betty Comden, Phyllis Newman, Lauren Bacall, and Sondheim himself, milling around with cocktails, laughing breezily.  
    When carols were sung, Daisy’s voice was like a clear bell above the din of mangled “Joy To the World”s. She wasn’t just Broadway royalty; she could sing like one of its leading ladies. Her liquid soprano made me realize what a second-rate set of pipes I possessed. Despite all my leading roles in grade-school shows and camp musicals (resume still available upon request), I didn’t have an effortless voice or a trained one. I could “belt” (translation: “push”), sell a song and hit the right notes but, as I got older, the line between gumption and gift became more pronounced. Daisy, on the other hand, had real talent. And she was relatively shy about it—never grabbing the opportunity to dazzle people, sometimes even refusing to sing. When I choreographed Dalton’s production of Oliver! in my senior year of high school—after Merrily was fast becoming a memory—I had to cajole Daisy to get out of the dressing room and go onstage as Nancy; her stage fright could be paralyzing.
        Daisy and I both felt we had something to prove in the original reading of Merrily . Both of us could potentially be dismissed as nepotistic shoo-ins, simply because the director was Daisy’s dad, I was Daisy’s friend, and both Daisy and I were close to the casting director’s daughter, Rachel Dretzin (also a classmate.) There is no question that I got in the door because of my personal ties. But once the game was on and a show was being assembled, Daisy and I were evaluated and tested—exhaustively—along with everyone else.

“Where is the Moment?”

    The staged reading on the Evita stage felt like the birth of something seismic.  We held our scripts in a semicircle, felt the theater lights on our faces, waited carefully for cues. Sondheim played the few dazzling songs that were finished, and the producers and