An exclusive look at the dressing room before “Lend Me a Tenor”

By Steve Russolillo

One hour till showtime.

Junior Scott Pendergrass and senior Mike Husni are practicing their duet. Sophomore Mark Brainard and Jenny Saperstone are dying each other’s hair gray to fit their roles. Everyone else is in their own world, preparing for the performance.

The Bacchus Theatre dressing room, no more than 20 feet by 20 feet, holds the eight student actors of “Lend Me a Tenor” preparing for their Thursday show.

The room is cluttered with hair straighteners, curling irons, makeup and costumes, just to name a few items.

’90s pop music blares in the background. Everyone is loose, joking around and keeping the mood easygoing and relaxed. It seems like a typical dressing room, nothing out of the ordinary, yet.

Thirty minutes till showtime — the music stops. The rehearsing is done, the makeup and curling irons are put down and the jokes come to a temporary halt.

“Ritual, everyone,” director Lauren Winiker yells to the cast.

As everything comes to a halt, the cast gets in a circle and performs several warm-up exercises. The first one involves everyone getting loose by shaking their hands and legs and counting from one to 10 repeatedly.

After this exercise, they sing a warm-up exercise where everyone chants in a round. Following that, Winiker gives the cast a short, inspirational speech.

At the conclusion of her speech, the group grabs hands and has a moment of silence. During the silence, a “pulse” goes through everybody’s hands as someone squeezes the hand of the person standing next to them, and it is then passed on. This goes around the circle throughout the moment of silence.

“We do the hand thing because it makes everyone take a deep breath, focus and stop being crazy,” junior Natasha Horowitz says. “We all have this image of a ball of energy going around the circle.

“It’s really cool because you have your eyes closed and you’re waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to squeeze your hand and you don’t know which way it is coming from.”

The girls and guys separate for the last aspect of “the ritual.” The guys stand in the stairwell and Husni gives a second speech. It ends with them huddling up and putting their hands in the middle, like a football team. They chant “Merelli’s Men,” in reference to the character in the play Tito Merelli.

Husni says this is a tradition that was started a few years ago. The men find something that pertains to the show and begins with the letter “m.” Then they put men at the end of it and keep chanting it louder and louder each time.

“That’s what gets me pumped for each show,” he says. “We love the adrenaline rush.”

Horowitz says the girls “don’t really do anything” when the genders separate. However, she says Winiker got the girls to start doing a “vagina chant.”

“It’s more of a joke than anything else,” she says. “It’s basically making fun of the guys because they take their thing very seriously.”

This ritual lasts no more than 10 minutes, but it always occurs 30 minutes before every show the Harrington Theatre Arts Company puts on.

Pendergrass says the unique aspect of “the ritual” is it is never talked about or explained to the incoming freshmen. They just watch and as they learn it, they start partaking in it.

“Whoever knows it just goes,” he says. “And whoever doesn’t know it just fumbles there way along until they do get it.”

“It’s a unity thing, we get to function together as a cast,” Husni says. “It gets us in the mode to get ready and go onto the stage.”

Ultimately, junior Natasha Horowitz says the goal is to get everyone focused for the upcoming show.

“It doesn’t really get me super pumped up, it’s more about focusing,” she says. “We get hyper beforehand, but this is more about focusing, trying to censor energy and get everyone on the same page. It’s kind of a clean slate before we get on stage.”

As the ritual comes to an end, the cast has 20 minutes remaining before the play begins. Thursday marked the fourth time the cast has performed “Lend Me a Tenor” this year, with two more scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

“Every night the ritual gets sadder because that means its one less performance we have left,” she says.