‘Catch Me If You Can’ lands its man

“A show?” said senior Henry Vote, playing Frank Abagnale Jr. in the theater production of “Catch Me if You Can.” From there launched a spectacle of ambition brought to life in all the little details.

It started with an idea from drama director Mary Dickson.

“Sometimes directors will choose one aspect to focus on, like: ‘We’re really gonna focus on costumes.’ ‘We’re really gonna focus on the set.’ Whereas this show, it was like every aspect of theater I focused on,” Dickson said. “There was choreography in every single number. So it was just you take one aspect of the show and times it by like, a million, that’s what this show was. So I think it was just that idea of needing to make every number a spectacle, and how I was gonna go about doing that.”

The musical follows the character Frank Jr. and his life as a con man. Frank Jr. is being pursued by Carl Hanratty, a dedicated FBI agent who has a penchant for tap dancing. Frank Jr. doesn’t have a good relationship with his parents, Frank Sr. and Paula Abagnale, and he runs away when they split up. Frank poses as a pilot, doctor, and lawyer, and he eventually falls for a girl named Brenda Strong, allowing Carl Hanratty to catch him.

It took the collaboration of cast, crew and tech to pull it all off.

“I think all of the individual parts were just ramped up,” said senior Jude Glaser, who played Hanratty.  “With this we just took it to another level, and decided to do new, groundbreaking things. We lit the stage from the inside … instead of from the overhead. So all of these new ideas that we had, they were just untested, which made it very ambitious because everything was uncertain, but it turned out a great product.”

The set was designed based on the original Broadway set, however on Broadway, the set wasn’t lit from behind. Senior Reece McAdams was put in charge of designing the set and the lighting.

“A very, very difficult part was figuring out how to adequately support everything and make sure that it’s structurally sound,” McAdams said. “But also being able to have no visible supports on the front side of it so that we could light it and not have any shadows be seen.”

With all of that going on behind the scenes, Vote used his knowledge of Frank’s life to help bring his character to live on stage.”

“He’s grown up really detached from his family because his parents don’t really love him that much, and don’t care about him, and so he realizes that he kind of just dissociates and decides to be a whole bunch of other people,” Vote explained, “and then he realizes the consequences of that, and it all crashes and burns. So I really wanted to grasp that emotional side of him, while also playing into the funny and charismatic aspect.”

Frank Jr. imagines he has his own show, titled the “Frank Abagnale Jr. Show,” featuring its own orchestra, which materializes as the pit musicians performing from the top of the set throughout the show. The pit was led in dazzling style by choir co-director Brian Johnson, who also had a few cameo moments interacting with characters.

Along with the music came a lot of dancing. Glaser, as Hanratty, led a particularly spectacular tap number involving the entire ensemble titled “Don’t Break the Rules.” Glaser had been tap dancing since a young age, which allowed him to be able to do more difficult tricks during the performance.

“That whole song is all about Hanratty’s obsession, and how he won’t stop at anything until he catches the bad guy,” Glaser said. “And it’s the way that I portray him, that he’s an obsessed person, so he gets very excited. The whole song is just him being as big as possible to show how much … he’ll do, so I jump off the stage and I just tried to keep the energy high for that entire song.”

The same motivations that drove that dance also drove Hanratty’s character overall.

“His whole purpose is to do the right thing, and he learned that from a young age,” Glaser said. “He didn’t have a good childhood and everything like that, so it just created a man that is driven, probably to too much of an extent, and it harms his other life endeavors. But he knows what he wants.”

On each side of the stage, there was a screen to project videos to coincide with some key moments on the stage, including a noir-style exploration of Glaser’s character as he wrestles with the mystery of Frank Jr.’s cons.

The videos were all filmed in a single day about a month before show week, with one of Dickson’s former students doing the editing.

Ava Albracht, who played Carol Strong, Brenda Strong’s wildly welcoming mother, was featured in a Brady Bunch-style video during the song “Family Tree.” Albracht described her experience of seeing the video for the first time.

“I would not let myself watch myself on the video, because I hate seeing myself in videos, I think it’s so embarrassing,” Albracht said. “And I accidentally saw myself on the screen while I was performing, and my voice was cracking, and I was like, dying, and I was having an out-of-body experience. I really should have just watched it before…. It wasn’t that bad once I actually saw it in the middle of my scene.”

The show was jam-packed with different dance numbers, all requiring quick costume changes for the ensemble and involving complex moves. Junior Caeli Karasek was one of the few trained dancers in the ensemble.

“I feel like, as I’m one who was a trained dancer, it was helping out other people sometimes. You know, like: ‘This is how you turn.’ ‘This is a good stretch to do to try to get your kicks like this.’ But also, I mean, it was like amazing these people who had never really taken dance classes before were able to do such good dancing.”

The wide variety of costumes added to the dazzle but also the difficulty.

“It was really fun to get to have so many different costumes, and the costumes were so cool, but it was definitely stressful, took a lot of time management of knowing when your changes were and how much time you had,” Karasek said. “I had like, one time, 30 seconds to get off stage, take it off, put it back on, and you have different shoes, you have fishnets, like all these different things. So that was stressful, but also was really fun. I think it was impressive for the audience when we were able to come off and on so fast.”

The dance ensemble also featured soloists throughout their songs, including “Jet Set” and “Doctor’s Orders.” Libby Petersen, a member of the dance ensemble, was part of a trio of soloists  in “Doctors Orders.”

“I was just really nervous about it,” Petersen said. “Because I never really sing in front of people ever, and I hate singing in front of other people, or like having people hear me sing, so having that part and having to sing in front of the auditorium was really spooky, I suppose. It was stressful, but it ended up being super cool, and I was really proud of myself after every performance because it usually went well.”