GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Eric Hatch, a Jet All the Way

We all know that West Side Story is demanding for dancers. It can also be an acting challenge, particularly if you have to portray a New York City street tough when you’re actually an Iowa boy who has a history in Disney shows and once wanted to be an elementary school teacher.

That’s Eric Hatch, previously seen on Broadway in such cheery shows as Legally Blonde and Mary Poppins and now playing the Jet named Big Deal in the Arthur Laurents-helmed revival of West Side Story at the Palace Theatre. Offstage, Hatch doesn’t talk or act anything like a bat out of hell who’s gonna beat every last buggin’ gang on the whole buggin’ street. He’s never even seen a gun besides the prop used to kill Tony. He balks at merely saying the word rape when discussing the scene in which the Jets assault Anita (Karen Olivo), opting instead for “the taunt.” And he cites one rehearsal of that scene as the hardest part of the all-around rigorous West Side Story rehearsals.

“We did it at the end of a week,” he recounts. “I was frustrated, I was tired, and we had to practice it over and over, to physically and verbally abuse Karen. I couldn’t handle it; I just broke down and started bawling. I don’t have any past of abuse, so nothing was boiling up. But it’s very gross, and something I would never think of myself doing.”

Like other performers playing Sharks and Jets, Hatch also had to make himself hate—on stage, at least—his friends. The cast members he knew best before the show are both Sharks: Manuel Herrera, who was in Legally Blonde with him, and Isaac Calpito, who was the first person he befriended after moving to New York (they were introduced by Hatch’s college pal Jennifer DiNoia, currently the Elphaba standby in Wicked). Hatch recalls one exercise they did in rehearsal to ramp up the animosity between the gangs: “The Sharks stood on one side and the Jets stood on one side. It was when we were practicing ‘Dance at the Gym,’ like when we have to say ‘Mambo! Mambo! Go!’ We had to get that fire behind us.

“First, we had to stand there and stare at them and just think hatred towards them. And then we had to shout at them—anything vulgar and mean, just yell it. Then it was their turn. A lot of them said it in Spanish, so we couldn’t understand, but it was still hard to hear because we knew the intent was awful and harsh.” The practice was so intense it affected them offstage. “We didn’t actually talk to each other much that day,” Hatch says.

He got the part of Big Deal just as Legally Blonde—in which he was a swing—was wrapping its Broadway run last fall. He’d already been offered an ensemble role on the Legally Blonde tour, but being cast in West Side Story allowed him to stay put at the Palace (where Blonde had also played). Of course, first there was the strenuous rehearsal process and a pre-Broadway run in Washington, D.C. Hatch thought he was well-prepared, having danced for a year in Mary Poppins, which has several long, athletic ensemble numbers: “There were some nights where I came home from Mary Poppins and I was like, ‘Oh, man, “Step in Time” really got me tonight.’” Then he started rehearsing West Side Story: “The movement’s really hard, but I think all the emotion on top of it just drains you. You have to really power through it, and sometimes it would get you more mentally than physically.”

Joey McKneely, who has reproduced Jerome Robbins’ original choreography for the revival, “pushes you to that limit,” says Hatch. “He wants to really get down deep and see what person you are. He doesn’t want to see just a facade.” A few times during rehearsals, they would dance “Prologue,” “Dance at the Gym” and “Cool” back to back to back. “That was demanding,” Hatch says. “They were getting our stamina up. When I got done, I was, like, seeing stars.”

All his sweat and tears have made him appreciate the groundbreaking classic more than ever. “This is the pinnacle of dancing to me,” Hatch says, marveling that “something that’s fifty-some years old can still hold up to the test of time and make us work as hard as anything.”

Hatch had only seen the movie, never a stage production of West Side Story, before the Broadway revival, but he had auditioned for it regionally. Hatch received his Equity card in regional theater, when he did the entire 2003 season (Miss Saigon, Annie, She Loves Me, My Fair Lady and Funny Girl) at Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera the summer before his senior year in college. In 2005, he appeared in Fame at Massachusetts’ North Shore Music Theatre; Footloose, Jesus Christ Superstar and Hello, Dolly! at Kansas City Starlight; and Beauty and the Beast at Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia.

In the spring of 2007, Hatch made his Broadway debut in The Pirate Queen, the flop musical about a 16th-century seafaring Irish clan. Though the show ran only three months, including previews, it looms larger in Hatch’s memory. “It’s so funny, ’cause it didn’t last long on Broadway but it’s been my longest run with a show next to Mary Poppins. It was a long process—we spent a lot of time with that show, and a long time together. We started rehearsals, we went out of town to Chicago and rehearsed and had a long preview in Chicago, then we came here and rehearsed even more. That was almost a year of employment.” Hatch had no Irish dancing experience prior to Pirate Queen but got some extra tutoring in it because one of the step-dancing specialists in the ensemble, Kyle O’Connor, was his roommate at the time (and is still his best friend).

A couple of months after Pirate Queen closed, Hatch joined Mary Poppins, where his roles included a goat statue in “Jolly Holiday” and a chimney sweep. He also understudied Neleus and went on frequently as the Greek-god statue. Mary Poppins had almost been Hatch’s Broadway debut: He got all the way through the final callbacks for the original cast but then didn’t hear from them.

The final day of West Side Story auditions went quite differently. “It was one of the coolest experiences,” Hatch says. After a few earlier auditions and then another half-day of callbacks, “they cut it down to 10 or 12 all-American-looking boys and 10 or 12 Sharks,” he says. “They brought us all in at the end of the day and they kind of huddled us all up—like, in positions for the Quintet. We were all in this picture-perfect frame, on both sides of the stage, standing there in front of Arthur and the entire production staff. I forget who it was, but somebody said ‘Welcome.’

“We were like, ‘Welcome’?” he continues. “And they were like, ‘All right, well, thank you. This is it.’ We were so confused; we just kept looking at each other. Here we are, in this tableau, just like in the show. And we’re: ‘Is this the show? Is this what we’re going to look at every night? Oh, my gosh. Wow!’ You don’t usually walk away from an audition like that. We still didn’t know if we were going to get the call, but it felt right.” Virtually everybody who was on stage at the end of that day is now in the show, and they’re in virtually the same spots during the Quintet. “It pretty much landed right where they positioned us,” says Hatch.

In rehearsals, “we had a dialect coach to work on our New Yorker accent,” says Hatch, who grew up in Knoxville, an Iowa town of fewer than 10,000 people about 30 miles southeast of Des Moines. He and his fellow Jets also had to modify their comportment. “We had to do exercises with our walks, where we grabbed our crotches and jumped forward or kicked and said the lines at the same time,” he explains. “Stuff that was very awkward but really got us to a point where we were tougher.”

One of the most valuable experiences during their transformation into juvenile delinquents took place outside the theater or rehearsal studio. “In D.C., we took it upon ourselves one night,” Hatch says. “We went to one of our apartments, just the Jets, and ordered pizza and sat around as our characters and talked about our background. I didn’t talk about me as Eric Hatch, I talked about myself as Big Deal. I told them what age I was, where I felt I was from, how I got into the group, why I’m in the group, what I mean to the group—like how I fit in as a puzzle piece. The next day, it clicked for us on stage. We looked at each other like ‘That’s why you’re here’...‘You’re the one who initiated me’...‘You’re here because you’re that guy...’”

The backstory Hatch conceived for Big Deal entails an abusive dad and an older brother who also left home to escape the father. “I had to separate from my brother—he went off to do his own thing—and the Jets found me,” says Hatch, noting that during the session they decided it was Snowboy who recruited most of the gang: “He’s like, ‘You want protection? We’ll give you protection. We have a gang called the Jets.’”

Hatch’s character got his nickname “because I make a big deal out of everything,” he says. “I’m kind of the sensible one of the group. All my lines are like—they say we’re going to meet the Sharks at the gym, and I say ‘But the gym is neutral territory.’” Hatch says: “I’m a bit of a ham—the one that says ‘It hoits! It hoits!’ [at the dance] and falls in the middle of the stage. I try to make the guys crack up a little.”

Hatch also understudies Curtis Holbrook as Action, Riff’s right-hand man, and he played the role at a performance last weekend. As curtain time neared, “I started to get nervous, but I felt as ready as I could be,” relates Hatch. “I knew that I had great support from Curtis and my cast behind me, so I was excited to do it.” After performing the role, Hatch says Holbrook “deserves all the recognition because he plays Action with such conviction that he makes it look easy—and trust me, it was not easy.” He quickly adds: “I am glad my first-time jitters are out of the way and can’t wait to tackle the role again.”

While Hatch and castmates were developing their characters in rehearsals, the creative team “gave us a lot of freedom to invest and find out who we would be as our character,” he says. “To really research him and maybe bring a little of my own life in, if I had this frustration in my life.” It was a stretch becoming depraved on account he’s deprived, given Hatch’s real background. “From the first time they saw me in my first dance class, my parents have always stood by my choices and helped guide me but always showed me so much love and support,” he says, “and that made me strong enough to get through all of the hard times.”

The youngest of three brothers, Hatch started dancing when he was 10 after sitting in on his friend Amy’s dance class. He’d always been active and drawn to music—watching movies like Dirty Dancing and Footloose and listening to his mother’s pop records (“I would just be dancing in the kitchen; so would she, while she was mopping”)—but he didn’t realize it was something he could actually pursue. He still didn’t realize it when he was finishing high school and had been taking multiple dance classes—mainly tap and jazz—every week for several years. “I didn’t have any connection to the outside world from Iowa,” he says. “I’d never been to New York, nor Chicago even, so I hadn’t seen much musical theater. I didn’t know I could do this, or that this world really existed for job opportunities. I was going to go into elementary education at the University of Northern Iowa.”

At a dance competition in Kansas City when Hatch was 17, a judge recommended he apply for a performing job at Hershey Park. Their conversation went something like this, according to Hatch: “‘Why don’t you get a resume?’ I was like, ‘What’s a resume?’ He’s like, ‘Well, send a headshot.’ And I go, ‘What’s a headshot?’ He says, ‘Oh, wow...just get a video of you dancing.’” Hatch’s father took the video camera to the dance studio and filmed him, and the tape got him a job at the Pennsylvania theme park, where he danced in revues for two summers. “That’s how I got out to the East Coast,” says Hatch, who learned about Pittsburgh’s Point Park College from another Hershey performer. “It’s a conservatory for dance...you can go to school for dance?” he remembers thinking. “I sent in a late application, and I bought my first pair of ballet shoes for my audition.”

By Hatch’s senior year at Point Park, he had completed all his performance requirements, so he left school to work at Tokyo Disneyland for the year, playing Peter Pan in a show. When he returned home, he enrolled in a community college to take the remaining nonmajor courses needed to earn his degree from Point Park. At the end of that summer, he moved to New York City. In December of 2004, Hatch’s first Christmas season in NYC, he had his first role in the city—as a roller-skating reindeer in a show at the Beacon Theater uptown called Santa Meets the Ice Dragon. For the next couple of years, as he was pursuing theater roles, he temped in all kinds of non-showbiz positions. “Any desk job in New York, I did,” says Hatch, who worked at sample sales as well as offices.

This spring, Hatch’s first movie was released: State of Play, the political thriller now in theaters starring Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck. In a scene at the Kennedy Center where Crowe, as a journalist, meets with a senator played by Jeff Daniels, Hatch is on stage dancing as Peter in a performance of Peter and the Wolf. Hatch has also danced in a commercial for the Mohegan Sun casino resort. And he’s gained some choreography experience, assisting Josh Rhodes on Broadway Bares and last summer’s All Singin’, All Dancin’ concert at Town Hall, where he also performed in “a Stomp-like number” set to Dreamgirls’ “Steppin’ to the Bad Side.” “I would definitely like to do choreography later in my career, but I feel I have more to accomplish as an actor and so much more to learn as a choreographer,” says Hatch. “For now I am trying to watch how the other side works.”

Plus, he still has plenty of hard work to get through on this side. Instead of the usual half-hour, the West Side Story gangs have to report 45 minutes before showtime every day for a “fight call” where, for safety’s sake, they run through the “Prologue,” the rumble and the taunt.

Photos of Eric, from top: inside the Palace, where he’s performed in two Broadway musicals; second from right, during “Cool,” with fellow Jets (from left) Cody Green, Mike Cannon, Joshua Buscher and Curtis Armstrong; backstage at The Pirate Queen with ensemble member and close friend Jennifer Waiser; as a goat statue for a Mary Poppins scene; at far left, dancing the West Side Story “Prologue” with Ryan Steele, Cody Green, Kyle Coffman and Curtis Holbrook; on West Side Story’s opening night with Isaac Calpito, who plays an enemy Shark; wearing Elle Woods’ signature color on closing night of Legally Blonde, with the show’s other swings, (from left) Jody Reynard, Lindsay Nicole Chambers and Tiffany Engen. [West Side Story production photos by Joan Marcus]