By Doug Chandler
The track, he says, is a symbol for the journey ahead, including the new people who might appear in your life and how you can veer off or keep moving along.
If the metaphor is extended to the 26 children from Queens who appear in “Wildflowers,” a musical production filmed by Rossetti so he could shop it around among Broadway producers and opera companies, it can easily be said that they had quite a journey.
The children, ranging in age from 4 to 16, are mostly past and present students at the American Dance and Drama School in Fresh Meadows, where auditions for “Wildflowers” took place in the fall of 2001. About 1,500 students attend the school, which is owned and run by Fred Siretta, a choreographer who worked with Rossetti on a host of TV commercials.
Once the auditions ended, the 26 children spent eight months playing orphans – the huge bulk of that time in rehearsals, three days a week at the Fresh Meadows school, and, finally, two days in front of the camera. The filming took place in May 2002 at Broadway Stages in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a facility owned by another close friend of the director.
Some children played earnest-looking, innocent kids, like 12-year-old Andrew Feller of Fresh Meadows. Others, like Andres and Felipe Dieppa, 11 and 13, of Richmond Hill, tackled the parts of street-gang members, boys with a bad streak.
And still others, like Georgia Linaris, 8, of Fresh Meadows, worked hard to be a bit of both – tough and virtuous.
“She thinks she's really brave,” Georgia said, referring to her character, Little Tough. “But, inside, she'd cry for her mother” and “she stands up for other people.”
In the process, the children learned about the Orphan Train movement, a controversial program started by the Children's Aid Society and considered a forerunner of today's foster-care system.
From 1854 to 1929, the movement sent more than 100,000 children from the streets and orphan asylums of the Northeast to the small towns and farming communities of the Midwest, where families gathered to adopt them. Many of the children found warm, loving homes, where they were nurtured and encouraged to pursue their dreams.
On a more worrisome note, their placement into new families proved “casual at best,” according to a Web site for “The Orphan Trains,” a documentary aired by the Public Broadcasting Service. “As the trains pulled into towns, the youngsters were cleaned up and paraded on makeshift stages before crowds of prospective parents.”
In many cases, the adoptive families saw the children as “nothing more than a source of cheap labor,” exploiting and even abusing them, the Web site read. The movement also separated many children from their siblings, and some youngsters ran away from their new homes.
Records show that many children placed on the Orphan Trains came from Queens, although the precise number is unknown.
What is certain is that interest in the Orphan Trains has flourished in recent years. Among the signs are the creation of Orphan Train societies in states that received the children, like Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska, and new plays, books and documentaries.
The subject has long fascinated Rossetti, whose late mother, Mary Jo, spent much of her childhood in an orphanage and whose relatives labored on the railroads. His own turn to work on the railroad came at 18 or 19, said Rossetti, who grew up in New Rochelle and still lives there.
Rossetti later attended the School of Visual Arts, worked as a messenger at a design studio and joined the creative side of Young & Rubicam, one of the country's most prestigious advertising agencies.
Now 62 and the owner of three companies, Rossetti Films, La Strada Theatrical Development and the Ad Factory, Rossetti still creates TV ads – a career that has won him more than 20 Clios, the industry's equivalent of Oscars. He has launched campaigns for such products as Dr. Pepper, Dunkin' Donuts and Microsoft Windows, and has worked with the likes of Jason Robards, Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry.
But his mother's experience is still close to his heart.
Rossetti, a genial, normally voluble man, grew quiet during a recent interview as he recalled two stories his mother passed along: her having to wear hand-me-down clothes and her being set afire, accidentally, by another child in the orphanage.
“She went through a lot as an orphan,” he said, “and I felt an affinity for the whole subject because of her.”
Such memories gave birth to “Wildflowers,” the first in a trilogy of musicals Rossetti hopes to create about children living poor or troubled lives. The other musicals, which already have titles, will be “Rails,” concerning teens who rode freight trains during the Depression, and “Pickles and the Junkman's Daughter,” exploring child labor on the Lower East Side.
The director arranged a private showing of “Wildflowers” last month at the TriBeCa Film Center, where about 20 of the children, many accompanied by parents and grandparents, saw the completed version for the first time.
Before the screening, Rossetti sat on the edge of the stage, his arms crossed, his legs dangling and his rapport with the youngsters easy to see, as he reminisced about their eight months of hard work and joy. He also emphasized that the film – a musical captured on celluloid – is aimed not for theatrical release but at piquing the interest of other writers and producers.
The film opens with a group of children, their faces and clothes smudged, singing about the bedlam of street life, which they share with “beggars, floozies, thugs and thieves.”
A few minutes into the film, one character, Kathryn, steps forward to deliver a monologue about her mother, a prostitute, and the home in which she used to live. Played by Sophie Tsouraonakis, Kathryn calls her former home a “bad memory” as her younger brother Pip, played by Andrew Feller, perches himself nearby.
The production's songs, monologues and dialogues, many of them delivered with the emotional power you might expect from veteran actors, also describe life in an orphanage, the journey west and the whistle-stops along the way. Other aspects of the Orphan Train movement addressed by “Wildflowers” are the placement into new homes, the love or abuse experienced by the children, and the separation of siblings.
In one scene, a young boy runs away from his adoptive family, where an older step-brother tormented him, to search for his two sisters, Meghan and Little Faith. Looking at the characters, Irish girls with long red hair and a real presence, a viewer wouldn't be wrong if he guessed that two real-life sisters are behind them – Leona and Danielle Togher, 14 and 11, of Sunnyside. (The film also features their 12-year-old sister, Bernice, who, at one point, sings an Irish lullaby with her two siblings.)
Appearing with the children are two veteran performers – Irving Metzman as Mr. O'Malley, the train conductor, and Helen Hanft as the owner of the orphanage – and a third adult, Lois Simon, a real find, according to Rossetti. Simon, the office manager and a tap instructor at American Dance and Drama, plays Mabro, a black hobo who shares a powerful scene with Meghan.
Leona and Danielle, described by Rossetti as the “stars” of the film, took no acting classes before they auditioned for their roles. But both sing with choirs – training that comes across in the film – and both have appeared in school productions.
Once they were cast – almost by accident, Rossetti said – he wrote and rewrote parts of his script for the sisters. It was a favor returned by the two girls, whose unique vocal power lifted the film's lyrics, written by Rossetti, and its music and orchestration, written by John Deutsch.
In separate phone interviews, Leona and Danielle both said they felt comfortable on stage and that acting with each other was natural.
“The whole thing about me looking out for my younger sister – that happens in real life, too,” said Leona. She described her character as someone who tried to be “very independent” and “very motherly. She tried to fix everything.”
Just as he did for the two sisters and others in “Wildflowers,” the director returned to his script for Joseph DiColandrea, now 16, a resident of Ridgewood who so impressed Rossetti that he created a new character for him.
The character, Joseph, has killed his abusive father – an act that viewers hear about, but don't see, and that lands the child in an orphanage and, later, a train to the Midwest.
“He went through a lot of hurt,” the actor said of his character, “but he didn't know how to handle it,” so he exploded. “He allowed the orphanage and the deed he committed to define him instead of finding his own identity.”
The real Joseph, who has directed and appeared in plays at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, said he drew inspiration from stories of the Orphan Train movement and from the particular role he was handed. He also relied, somewhat, on the “ghosts” in his own life.
Like actors two or three times their age, other children in the production said that they, too, drew on experiences from their own lives to drive the emotions called for in the script.
“Fred really helps me with my drama,” Georgia Linares said, referring to Siretta, one of her teachers at American Dance and Drama. “He helps me to think what would make me cry, if my grandmother passed away, or what would make me angry, if my sister went into my room and read my diary.”
Discussing her scenes with Andrew Feller, a handsome, endearing child who bears a slight resemblance to the young James Cagney, Sophie said she “pretended that Pip was my own brother, because I have a younger brother, and it kind of helped. And my own character is really feisty, and I'm kind of feisty, too.”
Unlike many of the children in “Wildflowers,” Sophie, a 15-year-old from Richmond Hill, had years of acting experience to back her up. She has appeared in plays at the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan, a public school she entered as a sixth-grader, and has also acted in community theater.
Whether or not “Wildflowers” becomes a launching pad for future jobs, one parent suggested, the children benefited from the experience in ways large and small.
“This was a serious undertaking (for the children),” said David Feller, Andrew's father. “They had to really learn the script, be responsible and work as a team. Even if nothing else comes of it, it was a great experience for the kids,” Feller added. “All the parents felt that way.”
The children impressed one of the veteran actors who worked with them.
“When you're just starting out, you don't know enough to be fancy, so you're simple and true,” said Metzman, a Manhattan resident whose credits include more than a dozen films, including several by Woody Allen. “I was acting with many people who, in many ways, were better than the best in the business.”
Rossetti, who made the production at his own expense, spoke of the determination, tenacity and talent he saw in the young actors. But perhaps most important, he said, is that the experience helped them grow as people.
“The children grew into a family,” supporting each other's best efforts and applauding each other during rehearsals, Rossetti continued. He also recalled one event in which the children raised money among themselves for the Children's Aid Society, the organization that created the Orphan Train movement.
