Right now on Broadway, audiences can glimpse the behind-the-scenes frenzy at an elite eatery in the comedy Fully Committed. And a ticket to the musical Waitress opens a window onto the lives of workers at a small-town diner, who find unlikely romance amid the pie-making and hash-slinging.
Entertaining? Hopefully. But for actors in these and other shows, what’s happening onstage may stir up bittersweet memories of earlier lean times when, as fresh-faced new arrivals in New York, their only chance to emote was reciting dinner specials for surly customers at the restaurants where they worked.
While waiting for their big break, many performers put in time as waiters and at other food-service jobs. They may not be on Broadway yet, but they often toil in tantalizing proximity, either at restaurants in or near the theater district or as servers at glitzy parties with boldface guests.
Photo: AFP/Mahmud TURKIA
The gap between where these young actors are and where they want to be can feel huge.
So it seemed to Keren Dukes, 27, who plays several roles in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the night she worked as cater-waiter at a party for the musical Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark at the Foxwoods (now the Lyric) Theater.
On the guest list: Bono and the Edge of U2, who wrote the score for the show.
“I was in the theater, and it was so exciting,” she recalled, “but not actually to be part of it was such heartbreak.” (It didn’t help that she dropped a tray of Champagne flutes just as the speeches ended.)
The benefits to a restaurant or food-service job are many: tips, camaraderie with fellow wannabe actors working alongside you, and flexible schedules that allow for auditioning and attending classes.
“It was a sense of community,” said the actress Faith Prince, 58, recalling the several months she spent toiling as a waitress in 1981 at McHale’s. The now-closed bar and hamburger joint in the theater district was a hangout for stagehands and other Broadway employees.
Prince, most recently in Disaster! on Broadway, recalled that it felt like a family reunion when she won the major role of Adelaide in a 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls and entered the theater for her first rehearsal on the set.
“A bunch of the stagehands were like: ‘Hey, Faith, Faith, you’re doing good! You got a Broadway show,’” she said. “And one goes: ‘Do you remember me? I used to order the cheeseburger.’ And I’m like: ‘Yeah, yeah, Joey, I remember. You’re a cheeseburger, medium-rare.’”
Another plus is free food, which has helped many a young performer stretch a budget. Just ask Leslie Kritzer, 38, and currently in The Robber Bridegroom. She worked as a barista and waitress in training in 2000 at a fancy restaurant called Atlas, which attracted a celebrity clientele.
“People would order these decadent desserts all the time and not finish,” Kritzer said. “We were a bunch of poor actors, and we’d bring them back to the kitchen and eat them. I especially remember a banana cake souffle. I probably ate a dozen or so famous people’s desserts in the half-year I worked there — I’m not ashamed to say.”
On the other hand, while catering a birthday party, Dukes learned the hard way that rules are rules.
“At the end of the night, we’re all ready to go home and exhausted, and I see there are entire platters of food, untouched,’’ she explained. “I went to the boss and asked if I could take the food to a shelter like the ones my church has. She said no and gave me every rule in the book why they couldn’t risk food poisoning. She took the platter of sliders or chicken dumplings, and she threw it in the trash.
“I knew they were wasting food and throwing it away, but, up until then, not quite how much. I quit. I just never went back.”
Mostly, though, the skills required for service work can be applied to stage careers. “You learn to keep a smile on your face, no matter what,” said Lauryn Ciardullo, 30, an understudy to Jasmine in Aladdin.
And of course there are the stories — about a huge tip, an impossible customer or a celebrity encounter — on which performers can dine out for years.
Take Marc Kudisch, 49, now playing Captain Hook in Finding Neverland. When he worked in 1989 as a waiter at Broadway Bay, a long-gone seafood restaurant on the Upper West Side, a customer he mistook for an elderly bag lady turned out to be Jo Van Fleet, who had won a best supporting actress Oscar in 1956 for East of Eden.
“I walked over and said, ‘So how’s everything, Jo?’” he said. She became a regular of his at lunch, always ordering the lobster special and a bottle of Champagne. “And she opened up like a book,” Kudisch said. “I was getting stories from her about ushering on Broadway, about the Actors Studio, about (the director Elia) Kazan. She would wander over to other tables and tell people to be nice to me because I was her friend.”
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