The summer after graduating from Brown University, I did stock in Maine. I met director Gary John LaRosa, who was opening his show, as I was beginning rehearsals for mine. That fall, I moved to New York. My first audition was for the New Jersey Theatre Alliance, a huge cattle call, where all the theatres in Jersey came together for combined auditions. From that, Michael Unger and Rob Ashford (before his Tony) cast me in McCarter's A Christmas Carol.
I was in the adult ensemble. I commuted from New York to Princeton every day. I made $75 a week, but I left with seven points toward my Equity card. I was agent-less, auditioning and dead set on accumulating the rest of those points, when LaRosa who remembered me from Maine, let me audition for a regional production of Camelot. I played Tom of Warwick. I had only one scene at the end of the three-hour show, five lines and I was playing a kid – but I got my card.
My friend from the show, Victor, and I were so proud to go pay our initiation and walk out of the Equity building with our temporary cards. The sky was the limit. Seven arduous years later, I accepted my Tony for Jersey Boys.
