Where The Stagestruck Get Started

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

If the young Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were making a movie about stagestruck kids today, they probably wouldn't mount a musical in the backyard and wait for lightning to strike. Nor would they necessarily look for a summer-stock barn or tent, like so many fledgling players of times past. Instead, the tyro tap dancers, crooners and thespians would probably hie themselves to the nearest theme park or cruise ship to audition for a job. Theme parks may be more conspicuous for flume rides and cotton candy, and cruise ships may be best known for bingo and buffets. But they have become the summer stock of the '90s, the place where growing numbers of young performers get their first experience in entertaining live audiences -- and where many audience members, particularly young ones, first see live theater.

Theme-park and cruise-ship shows keep alive the spangled Busby Berkeley dance traditions largely abandoned by Broadway and Hollywood. They honor theater-music classics that no longer make the pop charts. From Wild West rarees to Victorian parlor skits, from Tin Pan Alley to '50s nostalgia, the shows reacquaint the public with styles of entertainment that Broadway once thrived on, and thus conceivably make it possible for such works to prosper anew.

And they do so on a scale unjustly obscured by Tilt-a-Whirl and Cinderella's castle. The giant Disney parks in Florida and California consider everyone who greets the public to be a performer; the ranks of honest-to-Goofy singers, dancers and actors reach into the hundreds and arguably thousands, even if ) some sport Mickey Mouse heads. Nashville's much smaller Opryland, which relies more on entertainment to sell itself than any other park, employs 400-plus performers -- comparable with the combined casts of all the musicals currently on Broadway -- in a dozen shows with a cumulative annual audience of nearly 5 million. Most of these actors, and the bulk of their counterparts at other theme parks, appear in five or six daily performances of a half-hour or more, six days a week, often outdoors in 90 degrees heat, with no showers backstage. They develop discipline and stamina. Even harder, they learn to keep fresh a routine they are performing for the 300th time but that spectators are seeing as if brand new -- all for about $300 a week. (Cruise ships pay better but often impose double duty, asking performers to run shuffleboard games or even make beds.)

Yet the grind seems to inspirit young performers. Says Karl Wahl, 20, who is in his third summer at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Ill., and who has worked at the Busch Gardens park in Williamsburg, Va.: "This is the first taste of the performer's real world. College shows run two or three weekends. Where else, as a young person, can you do a long run like this?" Michael Myers, 22, a Texas Tech marketing graduate turned singer-songwriter, likes Opryland because "you're out there in the full light of day, playing to no tellin' who. They come from all over, and you have to relate right away."

Performers at theme parks learn things never taught in a classroom: how to dance without tripping over a microphone cord, how to improvise when a prop disappears or scenery just won't move, how to entice an audience distracted by weather or a crying child or a plateful of food. Says Steven Fox, 24, a singer and pianist at Pennsylvania's Hersheypark: "Our show takes place in a restaurant. We call it performing at McDonald's. For every person who came to see us, another wanted spare ribs."

One measure of the practical value of such lessons is that university drama professors, who used to scorn theme-park and cruise work, now often guide students toward it. Many performers at the Six Flags park in Gurnee, one of seven in the chain, are funneled there from Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., and what they learned in class helps them survive. "If you don't use proper vocal technique and warm your body up," says Diane Zandstra, 22, a Millikin graduate in her second summer at Gurnee, "you'll hurt yourself and be out of a job."

Theme-park actors do not, to be sure, make much use of training in Shakespeare or Method-style character analysis. But they say acting study helps nonetheless. Kevin Kraft, 22, is a University of Southern California junior in his second summer as a clown and juggler at Hersheypark; he has also toured with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Says Kraft: "If I pretend in slow motion to grab for a nonexistent ball, I'd better have a real intention to catch it, which is acting technique, or the comedy falls flat."

Despite their enthusiasm at getting paid to do what many would gladly do free, performers at theme parks and on cruise ships acknowledge three key frustrations. First, many of the shows are not very good, and once they are set, there is no opportunity to enhance them. Second, because admission is covered by a general entry fee, some spectators are just looking for a place to sit down, especially if the wait for a roller coaster is long, the day is hot and the theater is indoors and air-conditioned. As a result, their tastes may be unsophisticated. Says David Felty, 25, an Opryland singer who will appear on Star Search, a syndicated TV series featuring aspiring performers: "The audiences like songs they already know. Also, many of them don't appreciate how hard we work to please them because they are used to just turning on the TV, not seeing entertainment live." Third, it is almost impossible to get agents and casting directors to come, even to Opryland, nine miles from the country-music-industry center in Nashville. Admits Kelly Wilmoth, 26, a Hersheypark performer who has appeared on the Bermuda Star Line and in dinner theaters: "From the viewpoint of getting your next job, this work almost might not have happened."

Even so, dozens upon dozens of theme-park and cruise-ship alumni go on to Broadway and movies, among them Oscar nominee Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Color of Money) and Tony nominee Patti Cohenour (The Mystery of Edwin Drood). Countless others earn a steady if unspectacular living from touring shows, club dates, commercials or studio recording.

Whether this summer's crop includes future megastars is hard to judge. Many shows are humdrum and haphazard about sticking to a theme. Even at the best places, the opulent Opryland and the slick and imaginative Hersheypark, quality varies, although the top surpasses the average off-Broadway musical -- including Hershey's Victorian Sarsaparilla Review and Opryland's cleverly , scored, gymnastically choreographed Wild West show. Moreover, theme-park shows tend to be ensemble efforts, built around teamwork rather than stars. But it is hard not to notice a dancer like Todd Crank, 23, a Wild West high-kicker at Opryland, or a singer like Connye Florance, 29, Opryland's premier blues belter. And in Sarsaparilla, Lothair Eaton, 26, and Dedra Eastland, 25, perform an Ain't Misbehavin' sequence worthy of the Broadway cast. Or, for that matter, worthy of Mickey and Judy, barn or no barn.