Broadway stars make it look easy — hitting a high C, crying on demand, landing a complex turn with taps, doing all that as many as eight times a week. But behind the curtain, before a show, the groundwork is laid: the vocal cord steaming, the fight calls to ensure violent scenes can be staged safely, the visits and hugs and affirmations that put actors in the right frames of mind. We watched the preparations for four Tony-nominated shows — “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “John Proctor Is the Villain” and “Oh, Mary!” — as their performers got ready to go onstage.
‘Buena Vista Social Club’
Photographed by OK McCausland at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.
The Tonys are still a few weeks away, but already this is certain: Eleven ardent musicians in the onstage band of “Buena Vista Social Club” are winning a special Tony Award for their work as part of this year’s celebration.
Music and dance are the engine of this musical, which is based on a Cuban ensemble named for a midcentury Havana nightspot and immortalized in a Wim Wenders documentary.
Patricia Delgado, who choreographed the show with her husband, Justin Peck, is among numerous Cuban Americans involved with the project. “I grew up listening to this music at every family gathering,” she said.
But there was much to discover. Her parents had left Cuba as children, and never returned. “I grew up in Miami surrounded by Cubans, and at the same time, not understanding,” she said. “The experience of being first-generation Cuban American has a lot of complexity to it because you don’t fully know the home where your roots are from.”
Also: Delgado and Peck could find no footage of the dancing at the actual Buena Vista Social Club. They designed an homage to the island’s social dance, a sort of scripted improvisation that incorporates salsa, rumba, mambo, cha cha, as well as Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Cuban, contemporary and ballet influences. Now the show is nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including for best musical and for the couple’s choreography.
“I feel more Cuban than I’ve ever felt in my entire life,” Delgado said.
‘Sunset Boulevard’
Photographed by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet at the St. James Theater.
“Before I go onstage,” Nicole Scherzinger said, “I sometimes feel like I’m a boxer, about to go out in the ring.”
Scherzinger is relishing the test and the triumph of starring in a high-tech, minimal-scenery production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which requires vocal and choreographic athleticism, and ends each night with her barefoot and blood-soaked. The production is nominated for seven Tony Awards, including for best musical revival (this Andrew Lloyd Webber show first opened in London in 1993) and for Scherzinger’s performance.
Her preshow ritual is, to put it mildly, rigorous. “My body is my temple, and my instrument,” she said. That means that, before every performance, she undertakes a high-intensity interval training workout, warms up her voice, does yoga, stretches, splits, and then, if short on time, she uses a trampoline “to get my heart rate up really fast, which is always better for singing.”
And then comes getting into character, as Norma Desmond, a delusional faded film star. As the show begins, she rubs peppermint oil into her palms (“it opens up my ear, nose and throat, and awakens my senses”), and settles into a chair upstage, seen in silhouette as the ensemble begins to sing. “That’s where I do all my prayers and meditation — over the entire show, the entire cast, the entire company,” she said. “I have it down to a T, so by the time the intro and the orchestra are done, I’m getting in the zone.”
‘John Proctor Is the Villain’
Photographed by Caroline Tompkins at the Booth Theater.
The cast of “John Proctor Is the Villain” is mostly young, which makes sense because they’re playing high school juniors, connected by Taylor Swift and Lorde, splintered by boy trouble, wrestling with “The Crucible.” In Georgia.
The characters are unpredictable, and so are the show’s preshow moments, but before each performance, the actors find some way to huddle before facing the audience, which is skewing young and often quite amped up, especially now, when the show has seven Tony nominations, including for best play.
“We all meet down on the set, and it’s kind of something different every night, but it’s usually just a circle, whether it’s like putting our hands together, or running through the first definitions that we do” as classwork, said Sadie Sink, the show’s Tony-nominated star. “It’s just whatever, it’s a moment of togetherness. And focus. Getting into it.”
Sink’s character, raging for reasons that fuel the show’s plot, isn’t onstage for the first several scenes, so she has time to herself, warming up her voice and her body.
“I have a playlist that I listen to,” she said. “Maybe there’s a certain song that I’ll put on. It kind of changes. Right now it’s ‘Limp,’ by Fiona Apple. Anything off of ‘Melodrama,’ obviously.”
Later in the show, when she gets another break, she turns out the lights in her dressing room and meditates. And sometimes she opens up the Notes app on her phone, where throughout previews she had journaled in the voice of her character. “It’s nice to revisit it,” she said, “when I do feel like I need to connect with her more again.”
‘Oh, Mary!’
Photographed by Daniel Arnold at the Lyceum Theater.
Even before picking up five Tony nominations and being designated a Pulitzer finalist, the are-they-really-doing-that spoof “Oh, Mary!” had become the surprise hit of the Broadway season — the first to become profitable, and regularly outgrossing many musicals.
Cole Escola, the show’s talk-of-the-town creator and star, nurtured a divaesque performance style through the alt-cabaret scene, on YouTube, and with occasional television work. “Oh, Mary!,” an aggressively ahistorical romp that imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a deranged dipsomaniac, took years of development, including a twice-extended Off Broadway run in New York’s West Village.
And yet. “I still get stage fright every single night,” Escola said. “Every night, I think, ‘What if it’s not there tonight?’ Once I’m out there, it’s fine — it’s the moments before.”
So Escola, who led the cast from June to January and then returned last month, likes to arrive at the theater an hour and a half before showtime, with plenty of time to ease back in.
“I often will chat with the rest of the cast for about 20 minutes and put myself in a time crunch, so I do my stretches really quickly, I put on my makeup, and I listen to music that opens me up,” Escola said. “I need to feel vulnerable.”
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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