A couple weeks ago I took the Peter Pan bus to New York. I love the bus because it either gets you to your destination an hour early or four hours late. That Thursday night I arrived in Chinatown thirty minutes early, which felt like a good omen.
I travelled to the city to watch my friends perform at 54 Below, the famous cabaret club in Manhattan’s Theater District. Specifically, I went for Broadway’s Future Sings Its Past, a tribute to the Golden Age of Broadway put on by Harvard’s Charles Kirsch (‘29). Among the star-studded cast of young people were Gabrielle Greene (class of 2027), Carolyn Hao (‘26), Milena Manocchia (‘28), Jacob Prager (‘29), and Kaylor Toronto (‘27).
Kirsch hosts a podcast called Backstage Babble, an excuse for him to interview prominent theater professionals like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Raul Esparza, Julie Taymor, and Jonathan Groff. If these names mean anything to you, you would have loved last Friday’s performance. If not, you still would have enjoyed yourself, although you might have rolled your eyes at the Broadway superfan at the back table mouthing along to West Side Story (me).
Before I was born, my parents were actors in New York. I grew up on showtunes—my introduction to college radio, actually, was Emerson College’s Standing Room Only program on 88.9 WERS (“the best of Broadway, and Beyond!”). While I spent some of my teenage years pretending I had never heard of musical theater, the 54 Below show encouraged me to return to my roots. The cabaret starred twelve spectacularly talented young adults (high schoolers through recent grads) singing a lot of Sondheim and Rogers and Hammerstein. There were some obscurer numbers, too: a personal highlight was when Greene belted “You’ve Got Possibilities,” one of my favorite showtunes from the 1966 huge flop It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman.
But you didn’t have to be a theater nerd to delight in Manocchia’s effortless vibrato, or laugh at Prager’s convincingly humble performance of Lancelot’s “C’est Moi” from Camelot. Hao performed a clear and haunting “I Remember” from the (very weird) made-for-television musical Evening Primrose; and Toronto sang an emotional “Multitudes of Amys,” a cut song from Sondheim’s Company.
I’ve talked to Kaylor and Carolyn about acting before. I wish I could be an actor but I don’t know how to perform the magic trick that is folding into yourself but at the same time extending yourself like an elastic net towards the audience, simultaneously catching their feelings and projecting yours back. Talented performers can find a frequency where they become a department store mannequin or a lonely thirty-five-year-old on his birthday in an apartment in New York City, and while it is performance it is also completely real.
You have to be incredibly adept to locate that frequency. It's like standing on a beach with a metal detector, waving it around looking foolish until it beeps and you find a silver watch under piles of sand. Last Friday, Kirsch directed his group of young people with metal detectors, and throughout the night I could almost hear their steady beeping, faster and faster as my classmates and contemporaries took the mic and bared their souls, preparing for a career of auditioning and vulnerability and piles of sand.
My parents have taught me about how hard it is to be an actor, how it’s a career of failure and judgement and uncertainty. Which is why, if you choose to be a performer, you have to want it incredibly badly. This performance was so exciting because “Broadway’s Future” was singing songs with legacies and histories, tentatively and then confidently practicing their folding inwards and outwards with the audience sitting in rapt attention. I could feel the wanting and I could hear the frequencies.
The cabaret was dedicated to the late Sondra Lee, a celebrated Broadway actress who starred in the original casts of Peter Pan and Hello, Dolly!. Kirsch told his audience that one of Lee’s most influential pieces of advice was to “find and create a community of young artists who thought the same way you did and who were inspired by the same things you were.” The cast of performers—some of whom Kirsch met at Harvard, some of whom were childhood friends—created a community onstage; their camaraderie shone in lighthearted group numbers like “Elegance” from Hello, Dolly! which featured Hao and Prager joined by Harrison McNeill and Skye Papa; and the darker “Johanna (Quartet)” from Sweeney Todd, performed by Prager and Manocchia as well as Kaydence Arora and Michael Kitt—a number Kirsch himself admitted was a “crazy choice for a cabaret show.”
I didn’t act out a solo or sing backing harmonies for my peers onstage. But there is room in that “community of young artists” for an additional role: that of the audience. Being a performer requires having someone, or a room of someones, to fold vulnerability onto. I was jubilant to be one of the multitudes of Amys watching my friends sing their hearts out. And, in general, I highly recommend watching young people perform. On the Peter Pan bus back to Boston, all I could think about was the hunger I saw behind the microphone, an image of my friend Carolyn and her metal detector stuck in my head.
TLDR: Friday night’s singers performed with unique poise, consistency, and dexterity. In the next decade or so, leafing through my Broadway Playbills at intermission, I won’t be surprised when I see some familiar names.
Charlotte Stokes ‘27 is a staff writer and Artist Relations Director for WHRB. More information on Broadway's Future Sings Its Past, including the full cast of performers, can be found here. To learn more about the venue and its upcoming performances, visit 54below.org/visit/.