GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Joseph Medeiros of 'Yank!' and 'Anyone Can Whistle'

When Irving Berlin’s White Christmas made its second annual yuletide visit to Broadway last year, Joseph Medeiros received the Gypsy Robe on opening night. The robe, which is given to the ensemble member who’s been in the most Broadway shows, was presented to Medeiros by its previous recipient, Michael X. Martin of Ragtime (January’s Gypsy of the Month). Martin had been working on Broadway for nearly two decades before he received his first Gypsy Robe for Ragtime. Medeiros, on the other hand, earned the robe after a mere 16 months as a Broadway performer. White Christmas was his fourth Broadway show within a year, following West Side Story, Guys and Dolls and Grease.

Actually, there is one other Broadway credit—from 14 years ago. Medeiros made his Broadway debut at age 11, in the 1996 Maltby/Shire musical Big. In that adaptation of the Tom Hanks movie, Medeiros was the swing for all the male child roles. He joined the Big cast with just one credit at a professional theater: playing Winthrop in The Music Man at Sacramento Music Circus. Medeiros had Big on his mind when he accepted the Gypsy Robe for White Christmas. “I remember really clearly the Gypsy Robe ceremony when I was 11 years old,” he says. “Frank Mastrone got it, and I remember him coming around to the dressing rooms. Those little traditions that the general public really isn’t aware of, they feel special and celebratory. They’re for the actors, for the company.”

After White Christmas, Medeiros began rehearsals for Yank! A WWII Love Story, the gays-in-the-military musical that opened in mid-February at off-Broadway’s York Theatre. The well-received show was extended until April 4 and just announced plans for a Broadway transfer next season. This week, while Medeiros is doing the final performances of Yank!, he’s also in rehearsal for Anyone Can Whistle, which runs at City Center Encores! April 8-11. That will make seven shows in New York in a year and a half. In addition to 2009’s Broadway four-pack and the two limited runs in 2010, Medeiros was in Academy, a John Carrafa-directed entry in the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) last October.

Yank! originated at NYMF in 2005 and had subsequent productions at Brooklyn’s Gallery Players and Diversionary Theatre in San Diego, getting reworked each time. The current production features additional revisions, including Medeiros’ showcase number, the dream ballet. Yank! creators Joseph and David Zellnik modeled their 1940s-set show on the classic musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the ballet envisions secret lovers Stu and Mitch in a time when they can freely and openly be partners. (Medeiros is “Dream Stu,” Denis Lambert “Dream Mitch”; the regular Stu and Mitch are portrayed by Bobby Steggert and Ivan Hernandez.)

Medeiros also plays a soldier in the opening number, “Yank,” and Act 2’s “Credit to the Uniform,” and he’s the man dying in bed in the faux movie scene at the top of the second act. His other featured part is India, one in a clique of gay Army clerks who call each other by female character names from Gone With the Wind. Medeiros had never seen the movie, and his castmates who had didn’t remember the character of India (she’s Ashley Wilkes’ sister, eternally resentful of Scarlett O’Hara). “Everybody was like, ‘I know Scarlett and Melanie, but who’s India?’” says Medeiros, who watched Gone With the Wind and was impressed with India’s significance to the story.

Medeiros was not in any of the earlier productions of Yank! He got involved this time when Jeffry Denman, Yank!’s choreographer, asked him last spring to help work out the choreography of the dream ballet. Denman, who also plays a role in Yank!, knew Medeiros from the 2008 world premiere of The Gershwins’ An American in Paris at the Alley Theatre in Houston.

Ballet was integral to Medeiros’ last Broadway show, West Side Story, and though he’s been doing ballet since he was 9, West Side Story made it seem like a new experience for him. “I think it changed the way I dance,” he says. “It made me think about different things when I dance—about exactly where and how I was putting my body. It’s not just what steps you do on what counts; the quality of your movement conveys meaning. And then to be precise rhythmically.” Medeiros notes that while “everybody always talks about how brilliant the choreography is” in West Side Story (this revival uses Jerome Robbins’ original choreography), he didn’t fully appreciate it until he started learning it. He was taught by associate choreographer Lori Werner, who’d worked with Joey McKneely on previous productions that reproduced Robbins’ choreography. “She’s done the show for a long time with Joey in Europe,” explains Medeiros, “so the way she teaches it, she teaches the intention. She makes sure that you understand the movement and how it’s supposed to be done, because it’s really specific and complex and really built into the music and built into the situations...and she’ll make you do it again if it’s not right.” He recalls one epiphany in particular during a rehearsal where Werner had the dancers practice one small section of the “Prologue” over and over again. “One time we were doing it, and I heard the music while I was dancing: It wasn’t just something that I was aware of; it was something that made sense with the movement,” says Medeiros. “All of a sudden I felt that the movement was that closely tied to the music.”

As a vacation swing in West Side Story, Medeiros had to learn all the Jet roles. He’d last been a swing in Big, and had almost forgotten what a tough job it is. “You have to learn everything, and then when you go on the first time, you don’t get a rehearsal with all the costumes and lighting in time with the whole show. That first time you’re doing it, there’s a theater full of people.” With West Side Story, the challenge of swinging is compounded by having to do “that choreography you kind of put up on a pedestal,” Medeiros says. In his four months with the show, he went on most often for Big Deal, Action, Snowboy and 4H. “It was the first time in a long time,” Medeiros admits, “that I had real stage fright, that I was actually nervous about performing in front of people.”

He was cast in West Side Story just a couple of weeks after his previous Broadway show, the poorly received revival of Guys and Dolls, closed. Medeiros had auditioned for the original cast of West Side Story the year before, but his agent was told then that he was “too dark to be a Jet, too light to be a Shark.” Medeiros, whose last name comes from a Portuguese grandfather, says of his successful audition for a replacement slot: “I didn’t put a lot of product in my hair.”

Speaking of product in hair, Grease was the word—er, the musical—that brought Medeiros back to Broadway as an adult. In late 2008, he replaced Brian Sears as an ensemble member and understudy for Doody and Eugene during the last six months of the revival’s run. Medeiros had done the same track in a 2006 production of Grease—or, more precisely, Grease Das Musical—in Munich, Germany. The songs in that show were performed in English, but the dialogue was in German. (FYI: There is no German translation for “mooning.”)

Medeiros’ first stage role came when was only 6 years old and played Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol at Modesto Performing Arts, the community theater in his northern California hometown. His mother’s best friend had suggested he audition for the play after observing him entertaining at home, copying his three older sisters, who were all taking dance classes. Neither of his parents was familiar with the workings of musical theater (“My dad is a little tone-deaf, and my mom is uncoordinated”), and he recalls: “At the end of the audition, they read a list of names for people who had callbacks, and my mom was like, ‘Is that good?’”

He went on to do several shows at Modesto Performing Arts, including Babes in Toyland, The Music Man, Peter Pan, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and a nonmusical staging of The House on Pooh Corner. At age 8, he enrolled in a jazz class with his sister Maylin at Modesto’s Juline School of Dance; he started training in ballet at Juline the next year and became a part of Central West Ballet, the school’s preprofessional company.

In the summer of 1995, Medeiros performed in both Peter Pan at Modesto Performing Arts and The Music Man at Sacramento Music Circus. The following year, someone from the Peter Pan cast who had moved to Los Angeles contacted his parents after she heard about children’s auditions for the Broadway-bound new musical Big. Medeiros went down to L.A. to audition, and he moved to New York with his mother when the show started rehearsals prior to its April 1996 opening. Big ran only six months on Broadway, but Medeiros then played Young Josh on the tour for about six months. When he was 13 and his voice changed and he grew four inches, he had to leave the show.

Back home in Modesto, Medeiros ramped up his dance training. He had another professional gig, portraying a developmentally challenged boy in Over the Tavern, a comedy about growing up Catholic in the 1950s, at San Jose Rep in 1999. He also maintained straight A’s in his public high school. “I took AP classes and five or six AP tests—passed them all,” Medeiros says. “I liked studying and I liked school. I thought about other things [to major in] now and then, but when it came down to it, I didn’t actually want to do anything else at that point.”

After high school, Medeiros attended the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, where he became good friends with his classmate Savannah Wise (late of Ragtime and Rock of Ages). In summer during college, he worked at Sacramento Music Circus and St. Louis Muny, in such shows as Beauty and the Beast, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, 42nd Street, Crazy for You and Cats. He also appeared in a revue called Don’t Look Down at the 2005 Cincinnati Fringe Festival, for which he was nominated for a Cincinnati Entertainment Award as Best Supporting Actor in a Musical.

After graduating from CCM, Medeiros went to Germany for Grease, performed in White Christmas at the Fox Theatre in Detroit and then joined the Chicago company of Wicked for over a year. In 2008, he had a chorus part in An American in Paris at the Alley and played baby bro Gideon in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma (a role he’d done earlier at the Muny) before arriving on Broadway in Grease—the kickoff to his recent nonstop run of productions in NYC.

In Anyone Can Whistle, Medeiros’ first Encores! gig, he will play a Cookie—that is, an inmate of the insane asylum known as the Cookie Jar. The 1964 show, an absurdist allegory on the nature of madness, is one of Broadway’s most beloved disasters; it was Angela Lansbury’s Broadway musical debut and features a book by Arthur Laurents and score by Stephen Sondheim, but closed in a week. A few days into rehearsal, Medeiros says, “You can see why people had mixed feelings about the show when it originally opened. I mean, there is a rock that squirts water and everyone thinks it’s a religious-type miracle.” But he adds, “It’s fun to do something where you don’t have to always be perfectly logical in finding and making the best choices.”

Later this year, Medeiros may have a go at another show that was a talent-laden flop in its original incarnation. He has been cast in It’s a Bird...It’s a Plane...It’s Superman at Dallas Theater Center, scheduled for June 18-July 25. That Charles Strouse/Lee Adams musical lasted less than four months on Broadway in 1966, a production that was directed by Harold Prince.

All of Medeiros’ Broadway shows, and most of his regional work, have been revivals, so he’s happy to be originating a part on the Manhattan stage in Yank! “It’s exciting to have material that has been done by only a handful of people,” he says. “I would really like to keep working on new stuff.” He also enjoys having featured bits—“the opportunity to feel like an individual”—in Yank!, as he did in the roles he covered in West Side Story.

Yank!, as well as several of Medeiros’ other credits like White Christmas, Guys and Dolls, Grease and Wicked, has a choreographer who started as a gypsy (Denman, Sergio Trujillo, Kathleen Marshall and Wayne Cilento, respectively). But that’s not really the direction in which Medeiros is looking. “I would like, in the future, to direct or teach,” he says. “I don’t have as much interest in choreographing. I feel like I’m not good at coming up with steps.”

He has long thought about being a teacher, even of something other than dance. “My other love is languages,” says Medeiros, “so part of me wanted to major in Spanish or French. I have this dream of being a college professor, wearing a tweed jacket with the leather elbows.” His interest in directing, however, is fairly newfound. “As I keep working and see what the job actually is,” he shares, “I’ve started saying to myself, ‘That’s something that my brain would like.’”

Photos of Joseph, from top: in the theater where Yank! A WWII Love Story is playing; at left, with David Perlman, Nancy Anderson and Christopher Ruth in Yank!; in the Guys and Dolls ensemble, with castmate Graham Rowat behind him; as a 13-year-old in the title role of Oliver at Sacramento Music Circus; starring as Bobby in Crazy for You at CCM, with classmate and fellow future Broadway performer Savannah Wise; with Jamie McMahon in Grease Das Musical when it was televised live in Germany. [Photo credits: Yank!, Carol Rosegg; Crazy for You, Mark Lyons]