Tabitha Lawing isn’t old enough to drink alcohol. In fact, she won’t be for 11 more years.
She is, however, taking part in the first Broadway production of a story that highlights alcoholism and how it takes its toll on a relationship after “Days of Wine and Roses: the Musical” opened for previews in New York City on Jan. 6.
Last summer, Tabitha performed in the Cape Fear Regional Theatre summer camp production of “The Adventure of Our Lives, So Far!” While that was Fayetteville’s introduction to Tabitha on stage, it was far from the first time she’s been in the spotlight. And over 16 weeks in early 2024, she will be in the biggest spotlight of her young life portraying Lila, the daughter of the couple who’s the focus of the story in “Days of Wine and Roses.”
“I probably need more time,” Tabitha said, speaking over Zoom from the Upper West Side on a Sunday morning in December, sitting next to her mother Sarah. “But I feel pretty ready.”
How she got ready to play a pivotal role on a Broadway show is a story in and of itself.
Always been a performer
The Lawings live in Watkinsville, Georgia, but the family originated in North Carolina — Sarah from Fayetteville and her husband Matthew from Gaston County. Born in Georgia, Tabitha loved to perform growing up.
“We’ve always thought she had the potential to be on Broadway,” Sarah says. “We always thought this could be her future, we just never thought it would be this soon.”
Tabitha says she called herself “Hollywood T” when she was younger, playing out various characters in her home, as many children do. One of her favorites was a school teacher named “Ms. Tooty.”
“I would make them sit down and [I would] play teacher for them,” Tabitha says of her performances for her parents.
That interest in performing grew as she got older, and by age 6, Tabitha says, she’d already set her sights on Broadway. Her first audition was for a touring performance of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” While she didn’t get the part, she says, “I just fell in love with it and wanted to do more.”
Her most recent role was in an opera version of Stephen King’s “The Shining” this past fall at The Atlanta Opera. She played one of the Grady girls — the iconic young girls that appear to be twins in baby blue dresses, who Danny Torrance sees while riding his tricycle in the Overlook Hotel. While she didn’t sing an opera part, she says, she got to sing a lullaby and enjoyed the experience.
“It was weird,” Tabitha says. “I loved being creepy though. I really loved hearing the other big opera singers.”
It was during productions of “The Shining” that Tabitha and her parents first got connected to Broadway. She had done auditions and even had callbacks for roles in some touring shows, but the first taste of Broadway she got was through an agent showcase this fall. Because of her role in “The Shining,” Sarah says, Tabitha had to send in a solo and monologue on tape, and it drew the attention of several agents. They eventually signed with CESD Talent Agency a day after “The Shining” closed.
The next day, Tabitha’s agent sent an audition request for “Days.”
“The very first audition was for ‘Days of Wine and Roses,’” Tabitha says, “and I booked it.’
‘Out of a misty dream’
The second stanza of the poem the story’s title originates from states: “They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream/Our path emerges for a while, then closes within a dream.”
You could say that Tabitha’s casting story came out of a dream.
Sarah and Tabitha flew back to Georgia after the callback audition for “Days of Wine and Roses,” left the airport and were about 10 minutes from home when Tabitha’s agent gave them a call and shared the news: Tabitha landed the role.
“I could see her in the rearview mirror and she was stunned,” Sarah said. “I immediately burst out in tears because the emotions are so overwhelming.”
First produced as an episode of an anthology TV series in 1958, “Days of Wine and Roses” gained critical recognition as a film in 1962, when actors Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick brought the story of a couple (Joe Clay and Kirsten Arnesen) who fall in love, get married, have a baby, and along the way fall deeper and deeper into alcohol addiction. The movie received five Oscar nominations, with the title theme winning the 1963 Academy Award for Best Song. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
The story is a dramatic one, with several scenes showcasing the toll alcoholism takes on both the people who suffer from addiction and those around them. Characters are strapped down in hospital beds, leave their families to drink the night away in a shoddy motel, and tear apart a greenhouse looking for a hidden bottle of booze. It doesn’t end on a happy note, with one of the leads recovering and sober while the other still yearns for a daily dose of drink.
Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara play the lead roles in this production, which first debuted off-Broadway last year. James has four Tony Award nominations (Broadway’s version of the Oscars) and appeared in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight” in 2015, while O’Hara is a seven-time Tony nominee and winner for her performance as Anna Leonowens in a 2015 production of “The King and I.”
The musical differs from the film in some ways, with one of those being the role of the couple’s child. Called Debbie in the movie, the daughter’s role, now called “Lila,” expands from a bit part in the film to a more substantial role in the play. Sarah said it’s one of three singing roles, along with those of the parents, and has a pivotal “heart-wrenching” scene where Lila writes letters back and forth with her mother. Tabitha says that Lila is a “smart girl” who is “more mature than her parents.”
While Tabitha is funny in real life, Sarah said, she has a knack for booking dramatic roles. Both “The Shining” and “Days of Wine and Roses” deal with heavy subject matter, something Sarah and her husband have approached by keeping channels of communication open with Tabitha. She cited a quote by TV icon Fred Rogers of “Mr. Rogers” fame — “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.’
“I’ve really held onto that, that we really tried to be open with our kids about the hard things in life,” Sarah said. “Both [roles] deal with some pretty heavy psychological kind of stuff. We’ve always tried to keep the communication channels open, like if there’s anything you see that bothers you, please ask.”
Sarah also cited the reputations of James and O’Hara as comforting.
“Trust is a big part of it, trust in the process and trust in the professionalism of this world class team,” Sarah said. “Knowing the reputations of Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James and their reputations for being kind and gracious and having kids of their own has put me at ease.”
Getting ready to go
Sarah and Tabitha are living on the Upper West Side, but they’ll move closer to the Studio 54 theater between Broadway and 8th Avenue before the show goes live. The venue itself has a storied history, as both the home of “The Johnny Carson Show” and later the iconic nightclub for disco fever. Now it’s a theater and will serve as Tabitha’s office, so to speak, for 16 weeks starting on Jan. 6.
During the show’s run, she will be taking online classes through Laurel Springs School, an all-online private school, and meeting with a tutor. Sarah will be living with her and supporting her throughout. For four months not only will Tabitha be working a full-time job performing in America’s Mecca of theater, but she’ll be in school like other kids her age.
It will just look a little different because she’s regularly in the presence of show business stardom. Rehearsals haven’t been at the theater yet, but instead at a space named after Latvian dance legend Mikhail Baryshnikov, who has made a few appearances.
“He just keeps walking by,” Tabitha says.
Sarah has been working remotely while Tabitha has been in rehearsals, and will occasionally see show biz stars over her shoulder in the background of Zoom calls. Recently, “Gray’s Anatomy” star Sandra Oh was in the building.
Many of Tabitha’s family, including her maternal grandmother and Fayetteville resident Carol Lloyd, will be in attendance on opening night and the days afterward, but a special guest and one of Tabitha’s key teachers will meet her in person for the first time. Alex Kidder, Tabitha’s voice teacher, is based in London and once gave Sarah some key guidance.
“She laid it all out very plainly,” Sarah said. “She said, ‘With Tabitha, it’s not about the talent. It’s [about] does she want to take this next big step.’ If [she does] take this next step, she thought it was very likely that she would book a show. I really think back to what she said a lot because she laid it all out a lot.”
And on that first night, Jan. 6, Kidder was there to meet her student for the first time in person and see her perform alongside Tony winners and nominees, in a production based on a culturally-significant film, mere months after starring on the Cape Fear Regional Theater stage.
Talk about a misty dream.
This story was first published in the January edition of CityView Magazine.
