Years before Bill Rauch won a Tony, he was a Jersey teenager playing Malvolio and braving a monologue through an allergic reaction
The "Cats: The Jellicle Ball" codirector said his high school drama teacher at Haddonfield Memorial High School, Jack Shaw, inspired him. Shaw "choked up" seeing his beloved student win.
When Bucks County-raised pop star Pink began the Tony Awards on Sunday evening, she started somewhere she would be comfortable on stage — in the air.
Suspended from the rafters, she joked about feeling underqualified to host the awards ceremony because she’s never appeared on Broadway. But actor Neil Patrick Harris assured her that she would excel as her entertaining, acrobatic self: “Listen you’re Pink, you’re singular, you’re the best.”
Then she went on to belt “Lady Marmalade” with some of Broadway’s best performers, and fit right in.
The night of revelry at Radio City Music Hall celebrated the biggest theater shows with major winners including Death of a Salesman, Schmigadoon!, Ragtime, The Lost Boys, and Liberation. The latter won for best play, recognizing playwright Bess Wohl, who became the fourth woman in Tony history to win that award. (Philly audiences will get a chance to see the show locally this fall when Liberation runs at Philadelphia Theatre Company in October)
The biggest local highlight was director Bill Rauch, who calls New York home now but spent part of his childhood in Haddonfield, N.J., where he first participated in productions at Haddonfield Memorial High School. Rauch and his codirector Zhailon Levingston won the Tony Award for best direction of a musical for Cats: The Jellicle Ball, a revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1982 feline musical, set in New York’s queer ballroom scene.
“Ballroom is about audacity and disruption, in the words of Junior LaBeija, it do take nerve,” said Levingston when the pair accepted the award.
“Finally, ballroom is about chosen family,” said Rauch, getting emotional. “We chose each other, my husband, Christopher Liam Moore, 42 years ago, and you and our kids Liam and Xava are at the heart of anything I do that has any value in this world.”
Rauch, who leads New York’s Perelman Performing Arts Center, previously directed the Tony Award-winning production All the Way, about Lyndon B. Johnson during the civil rights era. That production received Tony Awards for best play and best lead actor in a play (spotlighting Bryan Cranston), in 2014.
Rauch credits his teacher and mentor Jack Shaw with inspiring him to pursue theater.
“I did six shows directed by Jack Shaw, and they really changed my life,” Rauch told 6abc. “I learned by example what a great director could be, and it made me want to become a director.”
On Sunday night, Shaw hosted a Tony Awards watch party at his home in Voorhees Township, where he and a group of about 15 of Rauch’s old theater classmates jumped and screamed as they saw him accept the award. The revered drama teacher is still close with dozens of his former students, who reunite often to celebrate Shaw’s milestone birthdays and have created a scholarship at Haddonfield Memorial High School to fund drama students in Shaw’s honor.
One of Shaw’s favorite memories of Rauch was during a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, when the teenager powered through his Malvolio monologue while in the middle of an allergic reaction.
“The poor guy literally ended up on the floor of the stage, going through a long speech [as] his neck and back cramped up,” said Shaw. “Unbelievably, he kept going — the ultimate ‘show must go on’ spirit. He delivered the speech from his knees, still in character, and the audience had no idea …[then] we took him offstage and put him in an ambulance.”
A proud teacher, Shaw was “choked up” seeing Rauch receive the Tony recognition and praised his former student’s “remarkable need to bring theater to lots of people.”
“Theater and the drama club was a place where anybody could come and be accepted. To my way of thinking, that’s my most happy part, and Bill, as a director, has had the same kind of philosophy,” Shaw said.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball was nominated for nine awards and took home three, including best choreography and best costume design of a musical, which went to Qween Jean (who also designed costumes for Liberation). Qween Jean made history becoming the first transgender person to win a Tony Award.
