Tannenbaum as Caesar Rodney in 1776.
July 24, 2008
Westfield resident Michael Tannenbaum was bitten by the acting bug at a very young age. While the other first-graders were learning their parts for The Little Gingerbread Man, he was questioning his teacher’s practice of assigning parts by pulling names out of a hat; he wanted her to hold auditions instead. “So at seven years old,” Tannenbaum said, “I knew I was born to compete.”
Today, Tannenbaum, 18, can appreciate that one-time auditioning reprieve as he rehearses for his role in the musical 1776, a part he earned first by competing against other young aspiring actors statewide at open auditions for the New Jersey Youth Theatre, based in his hometown, and then making it through final callbacks. Tannenbaum said the auditions “were scary. You hand someone your info sheet, photo, and resume, and then it’s the classic anticipation game that you go through with all the auditions…. You have one chance to show if you’ve got it or not.”
Preparing for the 1776 role of Caesar Rodney this summer kept Tannenbaum busy researching the historical figure. Rodney is remembered for his famous horse ride to Philadelphia to cast Delaware’s deciding vote for the Declaration of Independence, an event depicted in the Tony Award-winning musical that opened on Broadway in 1969. Tannenbaum pointed out that Rodney also is distinctly remembered because he had a painful and disfiguring cancer on his face.
Tannenbaum, a 2008 graduate of Westfield High School, also kept busy rehearsing. He said the troupe rehearsed “eight hours a day, six days a week. And a week before the production, we rehearsed 12 hours a day.” What has made his schedule even more grueling are rehearsals for his appearance later in the summer in NJYT’s musical Midnight Madness.
In that production, an original play based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tannenbaum plays Peter Quince, the director of the amateur theatricals within the play, set in this version in modern-day Manhattan. “It’s fun doing a part never done before,” he said. “The only resources are the people in front and the scripts, and the rest has to come from me.”
Performance withdrawal
Michael Tannenbaum said if he does not perform for a while, “I feel like I’m going through withdrawal.”
Tannenbaum trained at the intensive summer arts program of the Governor’s School of New Jersey, based at The College of New Jersey, and at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. He also works with an acting coach and appeared in high school productions, including as John Proctor in a production last fall of The Crucible. And, he credits his speaking skills to his parents, Jackie and Doug Tannenbaum (who he said are both excellent speakers), noting that “rhetoric skills are very important in this business.”
And while his first love is performing in front of an audience, “there’s always those late-night hours to write.” For his senior high school project, he wrote the play Next with his friend Elizabeth Harbaugh and also cast, staged, and directed the production. Tannenbaum’s work on Next earned him a Best Production Award and a Critic’s Award for writing at the Bucks County Playhouse’s annual competition.
NJYT board member Richard Eisenberg of Westfield said, “I’ve truly been impressed to watch Mike develop as an actor over the years, from his work in the Westfield High School production of Ghetto — a moving play about the Holocaust — to his leading-man performance in The Crucible. I look forward to seeing him in 1776 and Midnight Madness.”
While Tannenbaum looks back at his accomplishments and works in the present for two musical productions, he also looks forward to his future life as a student at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He will start in September and will take “core classes in acting, movement, theater history, voice and speech, lighting, and many electives.”
Tannenbaum — who said, “I like any actor who’s mastered theater and film because those worlds are polar opposites” — has high hopes for his future. If he had a crystal ball and a magic wand, he said, “in 10 years I’ll be a king in Hollywood and New York. I’ll dominate it all” — films and theater.
But fame and stardom aren’t everything for Tannenbaum. “A performer just needs to be on stage. If I’m not performing for a while, I feel like I’m going through withdrawal and I need to get back on the stage.” He said a more realistic future is: “I’ll be living in a dark apartment, writing the next American novel and have five auditions the next day.” And, Tannenbaum made sure to add, “it will be a very small and very dark apartment.”
Tannenbaum doesn’t perform any unusual rituals before the curtain goes up; he simply does a few vocal and physical warm-ups and some deep breaths and reminds himself that he knows what has to be done. Mostly, he remembers, he said, that “it always feels good to be on stage.”
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