Broadway musicians rarely have the opportunity to chat up Broadway stars.
“There’s a reason they call it the pit,” Adam Krauthamer said. He was jokingly referring to the lower level of the theater where the orchestra is sequestered. Mr. Krauthamer, a French horn player, has played for stage shows for over a decade.
There’s an exception to this segregation: At the first run-through (an event called the sitzprobe), the orchestra and the actors unite in a rehearsal room.
In 2014 at the sitzprobe for “Bullets Over Broadway,” Mr. Krauthamer was taken aback by one of the female leads, an expressive and funny blonde.
“I could feel her personality in her voice, it was so clear and beautiful,” said Mr. Krauthamer, 36, a veteran of such shows as “Cinderella,” “Shrek the Musical” and “The King and I.” In February, he will be in the pit at the St. James Theater for the Broadway musical “Frozen.”
The lead who had Mr. Krauthamer’s attention was Betsy Wolfe, who is currently starring in “Waitress” at the Brooks Atkinson Theater in New York. At the time, she was cast as an ingénue in Woody Allen’s stage adaptation of “Bullets Over Broadway” and at the sitzprobe she was so deep into her work that she had scarcely noticed the musicians. During a break, a cast mate alerted her to a handsome guy in the brass section.
“French horn, salmon shirt, no wedding ring,” the friend whispered in her ear. “That’s who you should be with.”
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Ms. Wolfe laughed off her pal’s suggestion because she was in a relationship, albeit a rocky one, and not long out of a long marriage to her high school sweetheart, which had ended in 2012.
After the rehearsal, with the infamously sluggish (and small) elevator at Carroll Studios moving even slower than usual, Ms. Wolfe took to the stairwell, when she heard a voice behind her.
“Even Broadway stars take the stairs?”
Turning, she saw the salmon shirt guy. Ms. Wolfe chuckled and flashed a smile before continuing her descent.
“It was a gutsy move, and I like being made fun of,” said Ms. Wolfe, 35. “Plus I really didn’t think of myself as a Broadway star.”
Yet she had been charging Broadway since her childhood in Visalia, Calif., an inland agriculture town known for its citrus, olives and cotton. From an early age, she sought the spotlight. For a preschool concert, she was relegated to the back row but parted the children à la Moses to take center stage when the singing started.
Around the house she mounted musicals starring the family cats and broke into song willy-nilly with her hairbrush microphone. While still in grade school, she arrived at the first rehearsal of a junior college production to star in “Annie” having already memorized her lines. And before the ripe age of 17 she had played the lead in “Hello, Dolly” not once but twice.
