MARCH 2010
The Business of Show Business
He’s filling in at the ticket booth, stamping hands and handing out playbills—playbills he reprinted this morning after one of the actors, a month into rehearsals, quit the show—“just flaked out after seeing his costume,” Andrew says.
So Andrew called in another actor—a guy who is right now standing in a backstage stairwell practicing his songs with a stagehand—and simply reprinted 6,000 playbills.
“It is what it is, I’m not going to get too stressed about it,” Andrew says, and sounds like he almost means it. “That’s live theater. Things go wrong.”
Sure, it’s not the biggest opening night for the 29-year-old Rochester theater star-turned New York City actor-turned-producer. That would be The Wild Party, his 2005 Fitzgerald Theater production that cost anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000 to stage (and, despite reviews like “Awe-inspiring!” from the Strib, lost money).
Still, though, his production of Rent costs $200,000, give or take, money raised through area business owners and Facebook friends and people who invest in these things like they’d bet on a football game. His parents put up a few thousand; Andrew put up $8,000 or so himself; anonymous people sent random checks with notes like “we believe in what you’re doing.”
And while the production is scaled down, it’s still 15 paid actors plus a band and stage crew, and, at almost $50 per ticket, a sold-out audience—at least some of whom will be hardcore Rent Heads—expecting a fresh take on a classic musical that just ended one of Broadway’s longest runs. It’s still 300-plus people expecting a show worth $50 per ticket.
And while Andrew has his share of solid stage and screen credits, tonight’s opening night has got to be a bigger deal than his biggest, or at least most recognizable, acting gig—as a dead guy on three versions of “Law & Order.” Bigger than his seven-month stint as Artistic Director for Norwegian Cruise Lines.
Rasmussen, though, isn’t doing the kinds of things you’d expect from a producer/director just a minute or so now before the first number of opening night. He’s not double-checking sound systems or giving a dressing-room pep talk to the cast or waiting in the wings to watch the audience reaction. He is, in fact, still standing in the ticket booth giving theater directions to lost stragglers and taking phone orders for the next night’s show.
But a spotlight could burn out! Wardrobes could malfunction! The last- minute replacement guy could forget his lines!
Hell, the musical itself is legendary for its pre-opening night disaster—writer and creator Jonathan Larson died the night before Rent’s premiere in 1996.
The A&E reviewers from at least a few Twin Cities newspapers and magazines are sitting in the audience, just waiting to write those reviews that could mean the difference between empty seats or a sold-out house. A 17-show run cut short or extended for that extra week. Profit or loss.
“I feel very confident in my team,” Rasmussen says. “The bulk of my job is to make sure everything is in its place, and it is. There is no sense in getting my stress level up to 10,000 for the things I can’t control now.”
Then you can hear the start of the opening number. And Andrew Rasmussen isn’t even leaving the ticket booth to go watch.
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These are the kind of moments that Andrew Rasmussen has been preparing for and dreaming about since he was 5 years old and his parents took him to see “Disney on Ice.”
“I knew right then I wanted to be in the theater,” he says. “And that’s what I’ve set my sights on ever since.”
“He started doing shows in our basement in kindergarten and first grade,” says his mom, Mary Jane Rasmussen, a Rochester resident who will be volunteering at the concession stand for the full run of Rent. “In second grade at Sunset Terrace he directed their Frosty the Snowman play. He was telling the other kids what to do and everything, and his teacher said ‘He’s really good at this.’”
While Andrew’s first real audition—at age 7, for The Adventures of Paddington Bear—didn’t land him a role, he quickly became a Rochester Civic Theatre regular.
He joined the Inside Out Players, an RCT offshoot that traveled to area schools to perform those plays-with-a-message pieces, landed a role as Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird, sang in John Marshall and Mayo musicals.
Even his hobbies and part-time jobs centered around entertainment.
Andrew and his older brother Spencer put together a two-man magic show and booked themselves for birthday parties at $25 per show. When Spencer, then 14, decided he was done with the act, Andrew bought him out. Bought the fog machine and the mirror ball and the sound system and all the props for $98. “I knew after just four shows it’d be all profit,” Andrew says. He was just 11 years old. “I was trying to be business savvy and creative at the same time. I kept it going. I’d do five shows a day in high school and bring home $125.”
As the chorus and ensemble spots progressed to speaking parts and lead roles, Andrew became more and more removed from the high school scene. “I’m not ashamed to say I was a loser in high school,” he says. “For everyone else it was football and parties, and for me it was auditions and plays. I think it was better, anyway.”
“My parents were really cool about it all since the start,” he says. “My dad [Tom Rasmussen] and my mom have really helped me every step of the way.”
“I was never into theater before, but I’ve been a theater person since Andrew’s been five years old,” says Mary Jane, who, along with husband Tom, has spent her share of time helping build sets or paint scenery at every stage of Andrew’s career. “We never thought anything about it. Whatever your kids’ interests are, you just get involved with them.”
Andrew transferred from John Marshall to Mayo and then, while still completing high school, to the drama program at St. Mary’s University in Winona. He signed with an agent before he graduated high school.
At 19, he moved to New York City to attend NYU’s prestigious Tisch School for the Arts—the school of Martin Scorcese and Oliver Stone, Woody Allen and Neil Simon.
He took an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, the Manhattan neighborhood once populated by Irish mobsters and then popularized in West Side Story and now gentrified by aspiring actors who like the cheap rent and quick walk to the theater district.
“It was a bit of a culture shock,” Andrew says. “Six people got shot outside my first apartment in one night. Because they shoot ‘Law & Order’ there, we thought they were just filming the show. Turns out it was real.”
Rasmussen, meanwhile, spent his summers collecting acting credits at the Ordway in St. Paul and the Chanhassen Dinner Theater. Auditioned for “anything and everything.” Did commercials for Sun Country Airlines and Oreo cookies. Took a part-time job at a company that did licensing for Broadway shows, including Rent.
“Once you get to New York they’re like ‘What have you done?’ Uhhh... not much. At least people knew the Ordway,” Rasmussen told us in a previous story.
In 2001, he took the role as Periwinkle the Cat in the touring version of Nickelodeon’s Blues Clues. “It was a big spectacle show, a musical/gigantic foam people show,” he says. “We toured Radio City, a lot of big theaters.”
He kept sending resumes, kept auditioning, kept getting close for Broadway plays and with callbacks for movies like About Schmidt and Dumb and Dumberer 2. Worked as a dancer on Mona Lisa Smiles, where Julia Roberts touched his shoulder.
He played a dead guy on three versions of “Law and Order.”
“I call it the triple trifecta,” he told us. “The first one was horrible. I won’t let my mom watch it. I was shot in the back of the head, raped, and left naked. I’m telling you, it’s awful. That was ‘Law and Order: SVU.’ The next one, I fell from a ten-story building and crashed through the windshield of a car. That day they didn’t have a stunt man so I had to actually put my head through the windshield of a car, and had glass shards in my chin all day. That was the regular ‘Law and Order.’ But it paid my rent for a month. In the last one I was just a toe tag. That was ‘Criminal Intent.’”
In 2005, Rasmussen returned to St. Paul for a big gamble. He wanted to produce The Wild Party, a full-blown, 40-person, $300,000 to $500,000 production at the Fitzgerald Theater.
“[The Wild Party] is a flashy, Broadway-style show,” reported Minnesota Public Radio in its preview. “[It has] generated a lot of interest, partly because its producer/director is only 24 years old, and because of the obstacles on its path to success.”
Here’s the end of that MPR piece: “[Rasmussen] says he’ll consider The Wild Party a financial success if, after the run is through, he can go buy a $6 sandwich.”
Turns out, though, he couldn’t.
Despite reviews like “awe-inspiring” (from the Strib) and “a refreshingly original evening of modern musical storytelling” (from Minneapolis Scene), The Wild Party failed to produce the kinds of ticket sales that get that next set of investors excited.
“We did lose some money,” Rasmussen says. “Maybe not as much as people thought, but we did lose on that one. It ran its full course, though. Everyone got paid. But that show was part of my education. What I learned from that I have incorporated into Rent.”
So, after 2005’s The Wild Party it was back to sending out resumes and headshots, and back to producing, though at a smaller scale. He followed up The Wild Party with an 11-person show called Tradition at the New York Fringe Festival and a pair of shows at the Minneapolis Fringe Festival, including a Best of Fringe winner (The Great American Horror Movie Musical) in 2008.
Later that year, he signed on as the Artistic Director for Norwegian Cruise Lines’ European Division, where he launched new theatrical projects for the on-board entertainment.
“A lot of times the shows on cruise ships have been what we like to call boobs and feathers—all lip synching with fake microphones and feather boas,” Rasmussen says. “I was there to help with an experimental entertainment project with live performers and a live band. I was on the ship for seven months straight. It was a great experience, and they’re still using the template I set up.”
Then it was back to Minnesota—first St. Cloud for eight shows, then Minneapolis—for his production of Rent. “It was costly to get the licensing, I’ll tell you that much,” he says. “And, yes, we know the touring production was just here in March [of ‘09]. But we had staged it in St. Cloud and it did well. There is so much local talent here that we knew it could work.”
After sitting through 400-plus in-person auditions, Rasmussen put together a cast with some non-traditional talent—local musicians without a lot of experience in musicals—in the lead roles.
Maria Isa (a well-known name in the Twin Cities’ hip hop and spoken word scenes) and Harley Wood (the singer from popular prog rock band Far From Falling) got two of the top roles (Mimi and Roger). The cast was rounded out with locals like Paris Bennett (also known as Princess P, a top five finisher on the fifth season of “American Idol”) and her mom, Jamecia Bennett.
“We wanted to give it a little more of an independent edge,” says Rasmussen, who had seen plenty of big-time Broadway stagings of Rent—he worked for eight years, on and off, as an intern for the production. “I had seen it staged so many times in big productions, I just wanted to stay true to the spirit of the show and the material. It’s about independent artists coming together, and that’s what we’re doing here.”
So he incorporated Bohemian seating (first-come, first-serve for the couches and chairs) in a Bohemian setting (the Lab Theater, a 6,000- square-foot warehouse in, well, the Warehouse District in Minneapolis).
He still, though, brought at least some of the tradition from his previous work with Rent. “I brought Rent’s official dog,” Rasmussen says, pointing to Casey, a golden retriever mix sleeping on the ticket booth floor. “Casey worked with me at Rent for eight years. She worked in the theater, slept in the merchandise office, and lent moral support to the stagehands.”
That Rent, the Broadway production, ran for 12 years, staged 5,124 performances, and grossed $280 million.
Here’s the business reality of Rasmussen’s Rent: He needs to fill 70 percent of the seats over the 17 shows. That’s 210 seats per night at $50 per seat for 17 nights. $178,500. Just to break even.
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It’s song three of the opening night of his production of Rent, and Andrew Rasmussen can’t stand it any longer. Or maybe he’s just sensing that I can’t stand it any longer, and we finally walk through the side doors and past the dressing rooms and down to the main floor.
The performances seem solid—lead Maria Isa, one critic will later write “looks and sounds like a star and ... wears her thigh-high black boots like she invented them.”
Andrew’s dad, Tom, puts his arm around his youngest son and whispers “You did it. It’s going to be a hit!”
The crowd, though, is not quite reacting like Rasmussen would like. “They should really be getting into it here,” he says, after one song. “This is when you’d like them to go nuts,” he says after another.
It’s a Wednesday night in Minnesota, after all, and it’s an audience stocked with friends and family—people who might not normally be Rent Heads—and, let’s be honest, people who haven’t hit the bars like a weekend crowd would have.
But the new guy has remembered his lines. The crowd sticks around after the intermission. The upcoming Saturday night show has sold out.
Tomorrow morning the reviews will start trickling in.
Here’s a clip from the Pi Press: “Rasmussen has clearly staged a work with which he finds resonance and heart.”
And the TC Daily Planet: “Rent sure seems fresh in director Andrew Rasmussen’s vigorous production at The Lab ... Don’t miss it.”
And the Strib: “Rasmussen’s intimate production draws us close. ... Full of gumption, moxie and deep emotion, this Rent rocks.”
Rasmussen, though, remains cautiously optimistic, even after four days of shows. Even after selling out the remaining weekends. Even after extending the show’s run for another five performances.
“It’s not the gangbusters I’d like,” he says, “but we’ve got great reviews and the show has been really well received. I think we’re on track. But there’s really not a whole lot I can do about this show. I’m already looking ahead. I’ve got five things on the burner,” he says, “and I’m already working on four of them.”