Last fall, Playbill listed Fordham among the colleges most represented on Broadway, so it’s no surprise to find three alumni and one Fordham Theatre faculty member among this year’s Tony Award nominees.

Fordham Theatre alumna Julie White, PCS ’09, is up for best featured actress in a play for her turn in Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus. Written by Taylor Mac, Gary is an imagined sequel to Shakespeare’s violent revenge drama. It’s set amid the decline of the Roman Empire and tells the story of the minor characters left with the macabre cleanup work following the gruesome events of Shakespeare’s original.

In her review for Vulture, Sara Holdren praised the “combined zaniness and pathos of [White’s] marvelously feverish performance” as Carol, a midwife who is merely mentioned in Shakespeare’s play, and added that it is “all but impossible to imagine Gary without [her] brilliantly kooky antics.”

White previously won the Tony for best actress in a play in 2007 for The Little Dog Laughed, and she was also nominated for best featured actress in a play in 2015 for Airline Highway.

Meanwhile, Ephraim Sykes, FCLC ’10, has been nominated for best featured actor in a musical for his role as David Ruffin in Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations. New York Times critic Ben Brantley noted Sykes’ “spectacular scissor splits” and “smoking hot” performance as the music legend who sang lead vocals on Temptations hits like “My Girl” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” but who was as personally troubled as he was talented.

“This is the most monstrous role I’ve ever had to take on,” Sykes told Broadway.com. “The award [for me] is when I walk out of the stage door, and I meet somebody that says, ‘What you did really connected to me.’”

A graduate of the Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. in dance program, Sykes has previously been nominated for three Astaire Awards for his roles in Broadway productions, including Hamilton. He has also toured with the Ailey II dance company, and in 2016, he played Seaweed J. Stubbs in NBC’s televised live production of Hairspray!

Tony Award winner Clint Ramos, who joined Fordham Theatre last fall as head of the design and production track, has been nominated for best costume design for his work on the play Torch Song. He won the Tony in that category in 2016 for his work on the play Eclipsed.

Rounding out this year’s list of Fordham nominees is producer John Johnson, FCLC ’02, who got his start on Broadway as an intern for Joey Parnes Productions during his junior year at Fordham Theatre. He has a total of seven Tonys to his credit (among Fordham alumni, that’s second only to his mentor, Elizabeth McCann, LAW ’66, a nine-time Tony Award-winning producer).

This year, Johnson has been nominated twice, as an executive producer of best play nominee Gary and of The Waverly Gallery, which is up for best play revival.

Six additional members of the Fordham family are part of productions that have been nominated for 2019 Tony Awards:

• Siena Zoë Allen, FCLC ’15, associate costume designer, What the Constitution Means to Me
• Kaleigh Bernier, FCLC ’16, assistant stage manager, Be More Chill
• Jessie Bonaventure, FCLC ’15, assistant scenic designer, What the Constitution Means to Me and Hadestown
• Drew King, FCLC ’09, ensemble, Tootsie
• Fordham Theatre student Wayne Mackins, ensemble, The Prom
• Michael Potts, former Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre at Fordham, Mr. Hawkins, The Prom

The 73rd Annual Tony Awards ceremony will be held on Sunday, June 9, at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

Dinner and a Show: Fordham’s alumni office hosts theater outings as part of its cultural events series. On May 9, a group of alumni and guests saw Tootsie and heard from Fordham grad and ensemble member Drew King, FCLC ’09, in a special talkback session after the show. Plans are underway for an October outing to see Ain’t Too Proud featuring Tony-nominee Ephraim Sykes, FCLC ’10. Tickets will be available soon via the alumni events calendar.

“I didn’t know, for example, that he had polio,” Levine says. She was also unaware that Alda’s mother exhibited symptoms of mental illness throughout his life and was hospitalized for it when he was about 18. “I spent months working closely with Alan and had no idea of the tragedies that surrounded him and the hardships he had to overcome to have the faith in himself to do this work.”

Similarly, Levine had bonded with the actress Molly Ringwald in a mommy-and-me class when the two were traversing the new frontier of first-time motherhood. But it wasn’t until interviewing her for Little Known Facts that she learned that Ringwald’s father is a blind jazz musician. They spoke about her catapult to stardom in the mid-1980s, with the blockbuster success of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, and about the perils of young fame.

“I found her story incredibly compelling,” Levine says. “How do you forge your own identity when the world has decided who you will be? She has had to prove herself over and over again, and she’s done it with incredible humor.”

From Acting to Podcasting, a Mid-Career Reinvention

It’s intimate conversations like these with stage and screen artists that are earning Levine’s podcast five-star reviews on iTunes and Podbay. Listeners call the show “hilarious,” “warm,” and “welcoming,” and say that Levine “has a gift for turning an interview into a conversation with an old friend over coffee.”

That’s precisely the vibe Levine was aiming to achieve with the project that materialized serendipitously in 2016. “A friend who had just taken on a podcast business told me that I might be great as a host,” she says. Having no experience in the space, her first inclination was to say no.

“But at the time, I had mindfully decided to say yes to more things,” Levine says. “I am an actor, but doing shows every night is hard on the family,” she adds. (She and her husband, the actor Dominic Fumusa, have two children.) “It was just a weird confluence of moments” that led to an opportunity that has since become a full-time job.

Given her long career in acting and theater—she starred as Lucy in the 1999 Broadway revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and appeared in television shows and films, including The Nanny Diaries, Law and Order, and the memorable Seinfeld episode “The Contest”—interviewing colleagues in the business made perfect sense. Levine points out that the same skill set needed for acting translates easily to hosting a podcast.

“I get quite engaged with all sorts of storytelling,” she says. “As an actor, you are also an investigative reporter,” she explains, noting that she devotes a lot of time to research before each interview. “I want these conversations to unearth new parts of these artists for my listeners as opposed to retreading the same things they’ve heard a hundred times.”

Her first interview subject was long-time friend John Slattery, the actor and director known best for his work in Mad Men. It went so well that Levine says the experience allowed her to give herself the “seal of approval” to move forward on the project. To date, more than 125 artists, including Jason Alexander, Cynthia Nixon, Uma Thurman, Octavia Spencer, Julianne Moore, and Edie Falco, have visited the studio for Levine’s up-close-and-personal-style interviews.

“Almost every one of my guests is a friend, and I still haven’t run out,” she jokes. “Most of my interviews are with friends I’ve collected job by job by job.”

Some guests, such as Tony Award-winning actors Julie White, PCS ’09, and John Benjamin Hickey, FCLC ’85, are friends she met at Fordham. Others are fellow performers she met as a founding member of the Naked Angels theater company, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, and Mary Stuart Masterson.

A Talent for Comedy

Levine’s conversations with her guests are often laced with humor, something that has served her well, she says, not only as a podcast host but throughout her life and acting career. It’s the reason she landed the role of Lucy in the Broadway musical, even though she insisted, when she was called to audition for the part, that she couldn’t sing.

“The director apparently had seen me perform before and felt that I had the essence of what they had in mind for Lucy,” Levine recalls. “They wanted a comedic actress.” The team worked with her on vocal exercises to give her confidence, and the project turned out to be one of the most memorable highlights of her acting career. “It was a stage-door experience that was the most glorious … so pure and beautiful,” Levine says.

Years later, the song Levine sang in the musical, “12 Little Known Facts,” inspired the name of her podcast. “It was the perfect name for what was happening in all of my conversations,” she says.

Fordham and theater weren’t in Levine’s thoughts until she spent a gap year between high school and college in Israel. Before that, her plan was to study advertising.

“Fordham was so enthusiastic and excited that I spent a year in Israel—not only did they give me credits for the courses I took, but they gave me a whole year,” says the New Jersey native. “They understood the life experience and community service were meaningful in my development as a human and my education at the college level.”

Levine adds that there is no better place to learn about theater than in New York City, and that in addition to giving her the chance to perform in and work on several productions as an undergraduate, her Fordham Theatre instructors frequently took her and her classmates to see shows on and off Broadway.

“It was such an exciting time, running around in the city with a group of warm and gifted students,” she says. “It was a tremendous beginning to my life in theater and I’m so grateful.”

—Claire Curry

Those were among the sticky questions that a panel debated on March 2 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

“Religion and Madness: Spirituality and Pathology,” a forum co-sponsored by the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture and Fordham Theatre, dwelled on the prominent role that madness plays in theatre and—to a much more controversial degree—in religion.

A packed Pope Auditorium was treated to scenes from the four plays in Fordham Theatre’s 2009/2010 season, dubbed a “Season of Madness” because of the thematic thread that ran though the pieces. They included: The Day Room, Mrs. Packard, Sarita and Hamlet, which will be performed in April.

Matthew Maguire, director of the theatre program, moderated the panel, which featured:

• George Drance, S.J., Fordham’s artist-in-residence and author of Working on the Inside: The Spiritual Life Through the Eyes of Actors (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003),

• James Jones, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and professor of religion at Rutgers University, and

• Broadway actress Julie White, who won a 2007 Tony for her performance in The Little Dog Laughed.

The scenes provided a jumping-off point to discuss madness as a social construct. The panelists also debated whether the same external forces that drive a person mad might also lead to a state of spiritual bliss in another person, provided the second person had a stronger psyche.

Father Drance noted that in contemporary culture, questions of madness and spirituality are viewed primarily through the lens of empiricism, which relies on observable evidence to frame reality.

“We tend to reject that which goes against what can be verified empirically,” he said. “In our culture, we find ourselves mistrusting unverifiable aspects of our lives. Imagination, emotion, intuition and revelation—these are precisely the places where religion and madness play.”

Jones said that symptoms of madness can be understood as cultural constructions.
“Is it madness to encounter the blessed Virgin Mary? Is it madness to be aware of the presence of, and converse with, a beloved spouse or parent who died recently? Is it madness to pray for a sick person with a profound expectation that they will recover?” he asked. “Forty years ago, the local family shrink was taught that such things were signs of illness and required medical intervention.”

He also wondered if theatre can be a container for a maddening impulse that otherwise might have been channeled exclusively toward religion. Regardless, he urged more compassion for those on the ends of the mental health continuum.
“Mental health and pathology, like physical health and pathology, exist on a continuum that we all move back and forth along,” he said.

“Under stress, trauma and shock, we may all slide toward the pathological end,” he said. “If we get enough social support, perhaps even a spiritual discipline, we might move toward the healthy end.”

It was Maguire, however, who made the most explicit connection between the religious fervor behind the ritual and sacraments of the Mass, and the madness inherent in drama, which is the driving factor of a theatre production.

“When I learned as an altar boy about transubstantiation, I realized that there was a mystic difference between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics believe that the bread and the wine literally become the flesh and blood of Christ,” he said.

“I think that’s what happens with the stage. There’s a transubstantiation—that what we put on the stage is just lumber and hardware and Fordham theatre students. But because we believe, it transforms, and it becomes the thing itself. We impart in a mystical action, and it’s so important that the audience is here, because it’s a communal event.”