of her own, one in which she embraces her sexuality, and the love she’s felt, and that finally “she embraces the new life within her, just before it’s taken away from her.”
They pushed other elements to be even edgier, adding two masturbation scenes and rousing songs like “The Bitch of Living” and the gleefully bittersweet showstopper “Totally Fucked.” Melchior opens the song:
There’s a moment you know
You’re fucked.
Not an inch more room
To self destruct.
But then he embraces his fucked-up fate and the full cast belts out the chorus:
Yeah, you’re fucked all right and all for spite
You can kiss your sorry ass goodbye.
Despite sweeping the 2007 awards season with eight Tonys and all the major “best musical” awards, including the Olivier in London three years later, the show is too risqué for most high schools. When Barclay asked her kids what shows they wanted to do, they begged for Heathers, Rent, Avenue Q, and Spring Awakening. “Edgy shows about conversations people avoid having,” she said. “We’re all thinking we’re so progressive, but these kids are still desperate to do these shows. Why? Because they’re not being allowed to do them at their schools. I’m not at the school, I don’t have a principal, I don’t have a school board breathing down my neck,” she said. “I’ll be the place that does those edgy things. Someone has to be the place to go out on a ledge and let the kids be dark and be upset and be angsty and sexual. Or there’s no outlet for it. We’re perpetuating exactly what’s happening in the show.”
The cast was having a ball. “These kids have been waiting for an opportunity to sing ‘I’m totally fucked!’ at the top of their lungs. I didn’t choreograph that number, I said, ‘Now jump off that stage,’ and that’s all I had to say. They were ready for it. They took off their own clothes. Cameron does that froggie jump, he shakes his butt and slaps his ass all on his own. I didn’t tell them to do any of that.”
Casting Cameron had been dicey. Sawyer Garrity, another Douglas student, had an angelic voice and had landed the female lead of Wendla. Cameron’s voice was passable, but he would never get to Broadway on a song. But the rebel, the magnet, the pied piper—Cameron was Melchior. And he exuded the frenetic sense of the show. “Cameron’s always been like a champagne bottle that’s been corked too long,” Barclay said. “He would interrupt himself in conversations with me, before even getting to the end of the sentence, and then we’re on a different conversation. He was a live wire, ready for something in life.”
They had a frank talk about his voice. He got it. Cam agreed to an hour of voice lessons a week—intense and one-on-one. Barclay couldn’t make him a songbird, but he was born to play this role.
Cameron threw himself into the part. When he cared about something, he had only one speed. He was bitten by the drama bug, and was eager for more, more, more. Had she found enough boys for Legally Blonde? he asked.
She cast him as the Ivy-Leagued Warner Huntington III, the male lead. Then he brought Holden and schmoozed her for a part for him. Then he offered his Chihuahua, Brutus, for the production. He also landed a role in MSD’s spring musical, Yo, Vikings!, and assisted on its direction, and was directing the school’s one-act performance of Coney Island Christmas for the statewide drama competition. He was hoping to win districts for that in February, and go on to the state competition in Tampa in March. Cameron liked a full plate.
But it was Melchior that consumed him. And he couldn’t get enough coaching from Barclay. “He kind of immediately became an adopted teen son of mine,” she said.
“It’s like magic between the two of them,” Cameron’s mom, Natalie Weiss, said. “They just understood each other right from the start, as so many relationships are like in the theater.”
Barclay was ambitious too. She had moved down from Manhattan and begun the program two years earlier, and it was suddenly gaining traction. She cast her spring slate eight months into her first pregnancy, and scheduled herself straight up to her due date, which was Valentine’s Day. She would leave the staff and the kids on their own for a month of maternity leave—deliciously ironic, given the show—and then six frantic weeks till opening night on May 3. Four months of hoofing for two shows,