Jeffrey Epstein memoir recounts childhood theater experiences and Broadway roles

From: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]] Sent: 3/24/2014 7:06:50 AM When I was 8 years old, I watched my trial-lawyer father play Horace Vandergelder in the Livingston, N.J., community-theater production of “Hello, Dolly!” He entered wearing an enormous marching-band bass drum (the character is in a parade), and he roared to his sobbing niece, “Dammit! How am I supposed to play “Yonkers My Yonkers’ with all that bellowing in my ears!” It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen. I was a melancholic child. Worried, anxious. I never felt as if I belonged anywhere, as if I were a foreign exchange student living among the other kids, who seemed predestined to love sports. Add to that alienation the fact that my parents were going through a divorce, and I was truly treading water. But in that junior high school auditorium, I felt like ’'d discovered a secret I didn’t even know was being whispered. There was a place where I might belong: It was the Theater, and I was sold. A few years later, at Stagedoor Manor in Loch Sheldrake, N.Y., I joined an intensive theater boot camp for kids just like me. The second I stepped off the bus, I felt like baby Simba when he’s lifted into the air in “The Lion King” and all the animals sing. Everyone was affectionate; everyone hugged; no was called “gay” for doing anything that wasn’t masculine. (My insecurity about this had shamefully kept me from doing theater in school.) It was utopia, and I never wanted to leave. From left, Helene Yorke, Zach Braff and Lenny Wolpe in the musical “Bullets Over Broadway.” Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times It was there I met Michael Larsen, the musical director of the camp. He told me that I wasn’t just a camper having fun, but that I also had talent. And he was tough — sometimes he’d scream at me — but I knew it was because he thought I had a shot. (Michael was the first of many gay men instrumental in guiding me to where I am now, which is why I try to speak on behalf of gay rights whenever I can. But I suppose that’s a different essay.) At 18, I was cast as Woody Allen and Diane Keaton’s son in the film “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” my first movie role. And now, after studying film and theater at Northwestern University, playing J. D. on “Scrubs” on TV for nine years and directing two films, I’m working with Woody Allen again. I’m typing these words in my dressing room at the St. James Theater, where on April 10 Pll open in “Bullets Over Broadway,” a musical adaptation of his hit film. I play David Shayne, a struggling writer in 1929 New York who agrees to cast a mobster’s ditsy girlfriend in one of his plays in order to get it produced. The St. James is where Yul Brynner opened in “The King and I” in 1951; where hits like “Oklahoma!,” “The Pajama Game,” “Gypsy,” “The Who’s Tommy,” and “The Producers” played, and where, in 1964, by the most surreal of coincidences, Carol Channing first descended an endless staircase in “Hello, Dolly!” I sit in Dressing Room 201, where many of the great luminaries of the Broadway stage — Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Mandy Patinkin — have paced waiting for the intercom to chime, “Places for Act I, please.” This is the sanctuary that a little invisible boy in New Jersey dreamed he’d one day find. Zach Braff in a 1988 production of "Godspell" at Stagedoor Manor. Credit Stagedoor Manor It’s my first time on Broadway, but not my first time onstage. My first job straight out of college was in George C. Wolfe’s production of “Macbeth” at the Public Theater, starring Alec Baldwin, Liev Schreiber, Angela Bassett and Michael C. Hall, and I’ve since appeared Off Broadway in shows at the Delacorte and Second Stage Theater. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028524