GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Cameron Adams of 'How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying'

Last year's Broadway revival directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford: Promises, Promises, a musical from the 1960s about the shenanigans in an office. This year's Broadway revival directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, a musical from the 1960s about the shenanigans in an office.

"I know they're going to be compared, but I think they're very different," says Cameron Adams, a cast member of both shows. "Promises, Promises doesn't take place that much in the office building, and it's about Chuck's relationship with his boss and with this woman he's in love with. The score is more pop music. With this, it [the score] feels much more like musical comedy. It takes place in the office building the entire time, and the whole thing is about him working his way up in the office. Even visually, compared to what Promises looked like, this show is like night and day."

Headlined by Daniel Radcliffe in his musical debut, the new How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying began previews last weekend and is scheduled to open March 27. This revival comes just 15 years after a revival that many still remember, which starred Matthew Broderick and a then unknown Megan Mullally and won Broderick the Best Actor in a Musical Tony. Some material that was cut from the original 1961 production for that revival has been restored for the new revival, including the Act 2 number "Cinderella, Darling," which is sung by Adams and the rest of the women's chorus.

How to Succeed is Adams' seventh Broadway show. All of them have been either revivals (Oklahoma and The Music Man along with Promises and How to Succeed) or stage adaptations of movies (Hairspray, Shrek, Cry-Baby). Adams has repeatedly found herself in musicals set in the 1950s and '60s: In addition to Hairspray, Cry-Baby and her last two Broadway shows, she was in a jukebox musical called The 60's Project at Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House. She's also been in a number of musicals that take place in the heartland, among them The Music Man and Oklahoma. Another recurring theme: shows populated by storybook characters—which was the case not only with Shrek but also Hans Christian Andersen, which she did at Maine State Music Theater in 2003.

While these motifs have emerged in her work, Adams does not chafe at possible typecasting the way some performers do. "I've totally accepted the fact that as much as I would love to be in Rent or shows like that, I'm probably never going to," she states. "You've gotta be okay with the fact that you look a certain way. I have a round face and freckles, and I look Midwestern, I look 'all American.' I watch Rock of Ages and think, 'Oh, God, how fun to wear the crimped, crazy wig and sing all that '80s pop music! It would be such a fun departure.' But this is what I do. I sort of stick with the classics. I think everybody's got their type, and I'm okay with it. Maybe when I'm older, I'll be able to branch out a little more."

Rock of Ages comes to mind quickly because Adams' boyfriend, Jeremy Woodard, is in it (and has been since it originated off-Broadway in 2008). They started dating during the five weeks both were on the Hairspray tour in mid-2006, though they'd met about a year earlier through mutual friends. They would have worked together again in 2008 had Cry-Baby lasted longer, as Woodard was slated to join the cast as a replacement when the show posted its closing notice. Both hail from the Carolinas—Woodard from North, Adams from South.

She was a high school junior—and junior-class vice president—in Myrtle Beach, S.C., when she was cast in her first Broadway show, the 2000-01 revival of The Music Man directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. "I was not trying to be a professional child actor," she says. "I grew up mostly dancing—singing and acting secondary." It was her participation in a dance scholarship program that led to the Music Man audition: Joe Lanteri, who runs the New York City Dance Alliance (in which Adams had been involved since she was 12), recommended her to Jay Binder Casting after they contacted Lanteri in their search for Middle American-looking youngsters for the play.

Adams had grown up around music and performing—for some family members, it was a hobby; for others, a profession. She says her father, a real estate agent, would teach her a song every time he drove her somewhere; she remembers in particular a lot of Temptations, Led Zeppelin and Allman Brothers playing in the car. Both her father and her older brother, Terry, have "amazing" voices, Adams says, and her brother does some freelance music reviewing as a sideline to his business career.

Her mother, Sandra, is the resident choreographer at Theatre of the Republic in Conway, S.C. When Adams was a child, her mother taught at a dance studio, though to avoid any nepotism issues, she sent her daughter to a different studio when she started training at age 4. Cameron eventually switched to the studio where her mom taught and even took some classes with her. "It was totally fine. She was really good about treating me the same as everybody else and not being extra hard on me," says Cameron. "I think I knew well enough to know that this was dance-teacher time, and I was still young enough where I wasn't working towards becoming a professional dancer; it was just fun."

She would go on to compete regularly in nationwide programs like Showstoppers and Star Systems and spend summers getting special training. During her teen summers, Adams studied ballet at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and modern dance at North Carolina School of the Arts and attended the Broadway Theatre Project in Tampa, Fla., where she took classes with Gwen Verdon, Gregory Hines and Ann Reinking. She cites jazz and theater dance as her forte but notes, "I consider myself a technical dancer," explaining: "I'm so thankful for when I was 12, this ballet teacher came into my studio. He was British and he was tough and he whipped my butt into shape." Adams says that thanks to that training, she's "able to do shows that Rob Ashford choreographs, because they're very athletic and there's a lot of partnering and technique involved."

A lifelong love of sports also helped prime her for such athletic choreography. Adams says she used to play football in the yard with her father and brother "all the time," and she's an avid basketballer as well. She's even able to play basketball at home these days, as there's a hoop on the patio of the Hell's Kitchen apartment she shares with Woodard.

Adams had almost declined to come to NYC when she was invited to audition for The Music Man, since it occurred during her school's homecoming week. "My mom said to me, 'We can make it a fun girls' weekend. We'll come up here and take dance classes and go see shows and shop, and then you can go to college and know what it was like to audition for a Broadway show,'" she recalls. Soon after, Adams made another trip to New York for the callbacks. She had returned home to Myrtle Beach when she was called with the job offer. "My parents were so beyond excited, but at the same time, it was not the goal—college was the goal."

She never did make it to college. She stayed in Music Man for its entire 21-month run, then headed to Seattle to perform in The Most Happy Fella at 5th Avenue Theatre, a 2002 production that featured a local talent named Cheyenne Jackson as Joey. Adams was back in The Music Man—in the featured role of Zaneeta (which she'd taken over on Broadway)—when it was filmed for ABC Television in 2002, and by the end of that year, she was back on Broadway in another Stroman-choreographed revival, Oklahoma, directed by Trevor Nunn.

Adams has no regrets about bypassing higher education. "I don't feel like I missed out on anything," she says. "I would have gone to college to study musical theater, and instead I got the best education possible with Music Man." She was also unfazed by plunging into professional work while still a teenager. "I was really lucky," she says of the Music Man Broadway company, "because that was like a family. I had people left and right that were there for me. It was a bunch of aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters. It was a good first experience, if you're going to move up here that young. I don't think that situation is normal, and I don't think it's the easiest thing for everybody. But I have such grounded parents, and then having a family at the theater like that was nice."

While Adams completed the last two years of high school through correspondence and homeschooling, she eventually got to relive high school playing a student in both Hairspray and Cry-Baby. She also managed to have, or at least simulate, some college-like experiences. After she turned 18 six months into Music Man's run and her mother moved back to South Carolina, Adams shared a tiny one-bedroom apartment with another dancer. They slept in a trundle bed, but Adams figured her living quarters wouldn't have been much better if she were in college. "We would have been in dorm rooms, so we just treated it like that," she remarks, adding: "I also took a ton of extra voice lessons, dance classes and acting classes and treated that as my 'college.'" 

Moving to New York in the middle of high school, she did have to leave behind a school and community she was devoted to. To this day, Adams roots for the University of South Carolina ("Go, Gamecocks!"). She had always been active in student government, serving as president her freshman year and treasurer as a sophomore, and she belonged to the service organization Beta Club. Adams did take time off from The Music Man to attend her H.S. prom and go on the senior trip to Cancun.

A few years later, she took a longer break, of about a month and a half, to spend time back in Myrtle Beach. It was after she'd done Hairspray for a year on tour and then a year on Broadway, and she just wanted "to relax and be on the beach and be with my family," she says. "Because I hadn't gone to college, because I had jumped in head first, I went through a small period of 'I want to reevaluate and make sure this is really what I want to do for the rest of my life.' So I took a step back." She stayed connected to dance during that time by occasionally teaching or judging competitions, and she came to the realization that "this is absolutely, 110% my dream and what I want to be a part of for my life."

Adams was in Hairspray for more than four years all told, including a couple of years in and out of the Broadway company as a vacation swing. She covered the role of Amber both on tour and in New York, and went on in the part multiple times. "I don't usually get to play the mean girl, so it was really fun," she says. Goodspeed's The 60's Project, directed by Richard Maltby Jr., followed in the summer of 2006, and Adams subsequently appeared in the much-lauded City Center Encores! production of Follies.

Then she was cast in the new musical Cry-Baby, adapted (like Hairspray) from a John Waters film. It was her first time working with choreographer Rob Ashford, and he's "single-handedly employed me" since then, she says. She was in Cry-Baby for both its well-received tryout at La Jolla Playhouse in late 2007 and its poorly received Broadway bow in the spring of '08. When Cry-Baby closed after just two months on Broadway, she'd already been cast in Ashford's next project, a "revisal" of Brigadoon. She was to have a featured role, Bonnie Jean, but the Broadway-bound production was canceled before its out-of-town tryout in Boston. Ashford then referred Adams to the people casting Shrek, which would become her next Broadway show. Following Shrek, she was reunited with Ashford for his directorial debut, Promises, Promises—which also reunited her with Kristin Chenoweth, who'd starred in the TV Music Man (and later with Molly Shannon, who'd played her mother in that Music Man and replaced Katie Finneran in Promises). Adams' roles in Promises, Promises included the waitress in the Chinese restaurant and one of the "Turkey Lurkey Time" girls in the Consolidated Life office.

Now she's a secretary once more, this time at the World Wide Wicket Company. And this time she's performing alongside the star of one of the biggest film franchises of all time. "I love all the movies," she says of Harry Potter, whose portrayer, 21-year-old Daniel Radcliffe, is How to Succeed's corporate striver J. Pierrepont Finch. Radcliffe impressed her from the start. "We walked in the first day of rehearsal, he knew everyone's name. He came up and was so on it. There's no ego involved at all," she relates, adding, "He's super-nice, and works harder than anyone else in the building. He was there almost an hour every day before everyone else. He's been working on his voice and his dancing for basically a year. He sounds so good, and his dancing is unbelievable."

With How to Succeed, Adams has the rare honor of performing in a musical that won the Pulitzer Prize. "It's the whole package...such a great show," she says. It also allows her to continue her "special relationship" with Rob Ashford. "I could honestly say I would love to work with him all the time if it were possible," she remarks. "He treats all of his performers as if they are principals, and in return he gets nothing but respect from everyone who works with him."

Having begun her career dancing for Ashford's mentor Susan Stroman, Adams sees similarities "in the way they run things: so amazingly organized and always have the best associate choreographers with them. Also, they both always stay unbelievably calm and cool—which is pretty amazing considering how crazy it is to put up a Broadway show." Yet Adams doesn't expect to follow Stroman and Ashford, both onetime gypsies, into choreography. "I would love to assist a choreographer some day, but I don't think choreographing is the right direction for me," she says.

Photos of Cameron, from top: outside the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, where How to Succeed is now in previews; with her boyfriend, Jeremy Woodard, also a Broadway performer; in a dance costume at 4 years old; with Victor Garber, who played her father in the TV version of The Music Man; on the left, backstage at Hairspray with (from left) Donna Vivino, Jackie Seiden and Lauren King; performing "Turkey Lurkey Time" in Promises, Promises with Megan Sikora (center) and Mayumi Miguel (right).

Previous Gypsies of the Month are all over Broadway this season:
Barrett Martin is in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying with Cameron.
Asmeret Ghebremichael is in The Book of Mormon.
James Brown III is in Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
Lisa Gajda, Michael X. Martin and Rachelle Rak are in Catch Me If You Can.
Brad Bradley and Megan Reinking are in The People in the Picture.
Nikki Renee Daniels is in Anything Goes.
And that's just the new productions!