Young Broadway and TV Actor Stars at a Synagogue’s Annual Dinner

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – At age 17, Noah Baird was decades younger than almost everyone else in Tifereth Israel Synagogue’s social hall, but all eyes were on him for nearly an hour Sunday evening, July 23, as he lectured about stage- and TV-craft.

Although he just will be entering his senior year of high school this fall, Noah has a long list of acting credits—on Broadway in Matilda; at local theatres such as the Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse, and the Escondido Performing Arts Center; in a live television performance of A Christmas Story; and on the Disney Plus channel in The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers.

 

Noah spoke at the annual dinner of the Tifereth Israel Synagogue Men’s Club, in which his grandfather, Dr. Ed Cherlin, is a member.  In their introduction of their grandson, Cherlin and his wife, Sue, kvelled over Noah, as well as over Becky Cherlin Baird, Noah’s mother, who clearly provided the impetus for his acting career.

Herself a childhood actress who became the founding artistic director of the J*Company, the youth theatre at the Lawrence Family JCC,  Becky more recently has served as the executive director of Kids on Stage.  She has been developing the Jewish play Hereville and also conducts week-long theatre camps for children, including one this week at Congregation Beth Israel focusing on the stage version of Frozen.

 

Becky Baird said when Noah was 4, he accepted her invitation to play one of the orphans in a singing and dancing production of Annie; at 5, he took a role in Cinderella, and at 6, he had his first agent, who helped him secure a role in the traveling Broadway production of  A Christmas Story, during which he toured in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York.

Then at the age of 8, Noah was picked for a part at Broadway’s Shubert Theatre in Matilda, a play about a girl with telekinetic powers outsmarting the cruel headmistress, Agatha Trunchbull, at Crunchem Hall Elementary School.  For the last two years of Matilda’s 5-year-run, Noah Baird on an alternating basis portrayed two of Matilda’s classmates.

To secure the parts, Noah said, he believes he did four auditions “They were grueling. They were hard. They tested us and pushed us as far as we could go to see if we would have the ability to act in such a hard Broadway show.  It was one of the hardest Broadway shows for kids at that time and that has ever been produced.”

With the aid of slides and short videos as prompts – with his father, Dan, operating the projector – Noah recounted some of the memorable moments of his Broadway career.  He recalled that “one of the numbers was very physical – a physical education class with the headmistress Miss Trunchbull — and we had to do vaults. There was a trampoline and there was a mat and a vault, and we had to run through that before every show.  We wanted to make sure that no one got hurt and nothing went wrong.”

In the play, he alternated between playing two characters—Eric and Nigel. For “one of them, they had to put hairspray in my hair and completely mess it up, which was a nightmare getting it out in the shower at 2 a.m. when I would get home from the show,” he said. “I had to wear a wig for the other character … It was crazy in my mind switching between the two characters; I learned a complete Broadway show in two months, twice in a row.”

As a “swing” actor, “I did two shows a week guaranteed; the other times, I would be backstage, waiting for something to happen,” Noah said. “One time someone broke their nose and I had to go on for two weeks straight because he couldn’t perform.”

On another occasion, one kid “got a stomach bug or something happened, and he had to leave in the final number of the show called ‘Revolting Children,’ Noah said. “We’re running around, doing a haka, and he had to leave. I had to go on stage. I was running down the stairs, getting my pants on, getting my mike belt on, and I had to do the rest of the show with my mike pack in my pocket.  I had to keep my hand in my pocket when we were jumping, so it wouldn’t fall out.”

In Matilda, he said, “the beginning of Act 2 starts with two kids sitting on swings.  The swings started going all the way up with the kids still on them, so they cut the power, and on the mike, there was an announcement ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there was a technical error. The show will resume eventually.’  We waited for 30 minutes and tried again. It went wrong again. We waited another 30 minutes and the show resumed like nothing had ever happened.”

Noah and the other child actors had to fit schooling into their acting schedules. Some cast members went to New York public schools, others to performing arts schools, and “I was one of the kids who was home schooled.  My parents bought books, a reading book, language book, math book, history book and a science book, and I had to go along with a curriculum that went along with the requirements of California,” he commented.  “I would go to the theatre and sit backstage and do my long division.  Usually the shows were at night, so before the show I would do my whole day of school, and then I would go to the theatre without having to worry about school. But sometimes I would wake up at 2 p.m. and then I would have to do school at the theatre.  It was something that I had to learn to manage and really figure out.”

In the basement of the theatre building was a classroom. Teachers certified by the State of New York were available to help the child actors understand their assignments. It was like a one-room schoolhouse with “a range of kids. There were people like me who were learning their times tables and other people starting to learn trigonometry.”

Following the end of Matilda’s run on January 1, 2017, Noah flew home to San Diego, where a part in Freaky Friday was awaiting him at the La Jolla Playhouse.  After that he rehearsed at the Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank for a live telecast of A Christmas Story.

“The craziest thing about all of this: we ended up running around a ton because we had one sound stage that was one set and then all the cameramen and all the cast had to sprint during a two-minute commercial break to another sound stage,” Noah said. “We had to sprint two blocks away to film an intense dance scene after running from a dance scene, and being out of breath!”

He shared that “just to make sure there were no slip ups, they actually recorded us tap dancing before and they only did a few people, and I was one of the lucky few. They miked all of our tap shoes; they put microphones on them and recorded all those noises, and overlayed it live.  So, there were trucks and trailers just dedicated to making sure everything was perfectly aligned.  There were people running all over Warner Brothers trying to make sure that everything was good.  We didn’t know what it looked like until they played a recording for us at an after-party.  It was amazing to see months of work go together that smoothly and be over within a few hours.”

He did some voice-over work as a robot duck in Disney’s Duck Tales;  performed in Newsies: The Musical at the Moonlight Amphitheatre in Vista and in Who’s Tommy at the La Jolla Playhouse; and then, he was cast as “Fries” in the second and last season of The Mighty Ducks: Gamechangers.

“During the audition process, they had asked us to send in a scene, send in a head shot and send in a video of you ice skating … We drove to the only hockey rink that was open on a Tuesday and allowed video.  My mom stood at the outside of the rink and zoomed in as far as she could with her camera and took a video of me ice skating.” After he was accepted into the cast, “they gave us a two-week hockey boot camp and brought in NHL coaches and players to train us how to play hockey.”

The story supposedly took place at a summer hockey camp.  It actually was filmed inside a giant soundstage.  “Walking on the set for the first time, it was like being transported to a different world. You are outside with all these trailers and you walk inside and it looks like you are at summer camp.  It looks like you are outside.  There are all these lights that look like the sun. … It does look like you are at a campfire on a lake at a summer camp.”

Filming was at the Disney studios in Santa Clarita. “I was a sophomore in high school, taking courses that were not easy,” Noah said. “I had to teach myself how to speak Spanish and study geometry while driving back from Santa Clarita and doing world history, Spanish, chemistry, in the passenger seat.  I had to learn surface area, volume, and all that stuff while playing hockey, while filming, while being employed and having a job.”

As pictures of himself skating flashed on the screen behind him, he marveled: “They brought those cameras on the ice. They had trained ice skaters who were also camera operators. They put these giant $10,000-plus cameras and $10,000-plus lenses on sleds that they could ice skate with.  That was incredible watching because they could go as fast as some of the professional hockey players along with a camera that was not light.”

Filming, he said, rarely was in chronological order; “They film by what they can do conveniently.  Somedays they will film the first scene and the last scene, and later fill it in, and on other days (in different episodes), just the last scene.  It all depends on the cameras they can get access to and the people they can get access to.”

Noah had a stunt double named Shawn who could be seen from the back in certain skating scenes, such as when Fry crashed into the boards, whereas front-facing shots would be of Noah. Shawn and Noah had similar looking hair styles.

“Of course,” explained Noah, “we are still kids and there are child labor laws.” Time had to be accorded for various breaks, including for study. “Sometimes I would be in school, and I would take a test for five minutes and they would bring me onto the set for an hour and then I would have to go back for three minutes to take that test, and I would be back on set for 30 minutes, and then I would come back and finish that test in the 10 minutes that I had before I needed to be back on set for another hour playing hockey…. It definitely wasn’t easy, it was very stressful.”

For the moment with writers and actors on strike, Noah as a member of SAG/AFTRA is on hiatus. “The strike applies to commercials, television jobs, movies, so there are a lot less auditions right now.  Lots of times I will get a few tapes a week, learn this scene, put it on tape, send it in, and the casting director will look at it and let you know.  But nowadays there aren’t a lot of those because people aren’t writing things.”

Asked about his career plans, he commented: “Acting is a finicky business. I would love to see where it goes.  It might not be the main career. I am very interested in science, biochemical research, molecular biology.  That is a huge focus for me right now, but acting is also something that I heavily enjoy and I would love to do it if it comes my way, but it is something that I am not Tom Hanks yet, so we will see what comes of that.”

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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com