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From No Home to Back Home on Broadway
Midway through “Finian’s Rainbow,” which opens Thursday on Broadway, the stage veteran Terri White delivers a bluesy, rasping version of the song “Necessity.”
The character wants to play, to rest her “head in the shade,” but, Ms.
White belts out, turning to the face the audience directly, “the rent
ain’t paid!”
It is one of those crucial moments in musical
theater, a flash of heartbreak that tethers the fanciful, carefree
world of the show to the familiar, harsh realities of the everyday.
If
Ms. White’s delivery feels particularly authentic, it is because she
has lived those lyrics more personally than even the most diehard
method actress would want. In the summer of 2008, Ms. White, 61, could
not make rent. She was evicted from her apartment of 14 years, after a
breakup with a longtime girlfriend. She could not work. She also could
not find a way to ask for help. For three months, when she was not
crashing on a friend’s couch, she slept in Washington Square Park.
The
daughter of traveling performers, Ms. White has been performing in
musicals since she was 8, and the language of the medium infects her
life narrative. She started out as a “hoofer,” a tap-dancer. She has a
theme song: “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” And as of July 2008, she felt she was “all washed up.”
Between gigs on Broadway and singing with Liza Minnelli, Ms. White had always worked for tips in piano bars around the West Village. She
was a regular at 88’s until it closed, then found a new home at Rose’s Turn on Grove Street — until it, too, closed. She struggled to get a perch
at the few surviving piano bars around town. Heartfelt if campy
renditions of American songbook classics were out. Spoofy if campy
versions of ’80s pop were in. “They want to bring in the younger
crowd,” Ms. White said. “And I’m old.”
She still played one night a week at the Duplex,
on Christopher Street, earning enough to keep her phone on and get by
on Ramen noodles, and kept some clothing there after losing her
apartment. In the park, Ms. White slept on a bench near the bathroom
because it made her feel more civilized. She knew some of the
longstanding homeless there from her years in the neighborhood (they
often tried to bum cigarettes as she smoked on the sidewalk). And she
got to know the temporarily homeless like herself.
“Their clothes did not look like they were from Goodwill,” she said. “They looked like they’d had jobs.”
Ms. White never mentioned to the others who slept in the park that she had been nominated for a Tony award when she performed, alongside Glenn Close, in “Barnum,”
in 1980; nor did she ask about their pasts. Severely depressed, she was
too proud to reach out to social services, and kept the extent of her
problems from friends. “Most of them are barely getting by in their
tiny apartments as it is,” she said. “People in New York, they need
their patterns. You can’t interrupt them.”
To avoid the police,
Ms. White usually alternated sleeping for an hour with walking for an
hour, which is what she was doing when she ran into Officer David
Taylor on Grove Street at 4 a.m. one day last fall. Officer Taylor had
come to know Ms. White when he was patrolling the West Village. He
admired her energy, and, off-duty, came to see her perform. He had
never seen her looking like she did on Grove Street. “She is usually
someone who lifts your energy if you’re feeling down,” he said. “That
night she looked soulless. I was concerned for her — scared.”
Officer
Taylor made a few phone calls. A friend in Jersey City had a place with
a basement apartment no one was using. Ms. White moved in the next day,
rent-free. She got herself back into the mental shape to take advantage
of opportunities that came her way. An old friend in the Florida Keys
invited her to perform at her nightclub, and another friend bought her
a plane ticket.
In Florida, she met Donna Barnett, a stately
62-year-old jewelry designer — and, like Ms. White, a cigarette fiend,
a fan of road trips and musicals and Maker’s Mark. The two fell in
love, and moved in together. When the call came for an audition for an Encores! concert performance of “Finian’s Rainbow” (a predecessor to the Broadway production), Ms.
Barnett paid her airfare back to New York. After months of coming
close, but ultimately hearing “No thank you” — she auditioned nine
times for “Chicago” — Ms. White landed the part of “Finian’s” Dottie.
So, now, almost a year to the day after she last slept on a bench, Ms. White is back on Broadway, in a play she first performed in as a child, at the St. James Theater — the very place she earned her Tony nomination for “Barnum.” On
Sunday, she and Ms. Barnett are having a commitment ceremony at the St.
James.
Most of her fellow cast members in “Finian’s Rainbow” know
enough about Ms. White’s trials that when she sings, “There ought to be
a law against necessity,” they sing back, with particular feeling,
“Sister, you’re so right.”
And then it’s on to the rest of the
play, with its pot of gold and its world of song and, of course, its
impossibly happy ending.