Courtesy of The Muny
Watch Lara and Kristen Teeter’s wedding video—the couple’s 15th anniversary is this summer—and at the reception, you’ll see Eartha Kitt, dancing with Munchkins.
“I was in a touring production of The Wizard of Oz,” Lara Teeter explains. “Kristen was not in the show, but spent a lot of time with me on the road; we married on tour. I proposed in Toronto, and our next stop was San Francisco. We had a lot of friends down in the Los Angeles area, because that’s where we’d met…”
They wed at a Sonoma Valley winery, which was booked a year out—but not on Mondays, a theater person’s Sunday. They bused in the cast of The Wizard (including Kitt, who played the Wicked Witch of the West) and invited all of their L.A. friends. After the show closed, the couple briefly settled in New York, then headed to Chicago when Lara was appointed artistic director of Light Opera Works. Soon, he was also invited to teach theater at Northwestern University. Those big cities also offered opportunities for Kristen, a modern dancer, but after the birth of their twins, Elizabeth and Charlie, “It was just too much,” Lara says. “So we made a break for it.” Their next child, Katherine, was born in Winchester, Va., where Lara headed the Shenandoah Conservatory. Then, in 2007, Webster University’s theater department came calling.
“It was like old home week,” Lara says, because he’d spent countless summers here performing at The Muny, often with Kristen in tow. “The minute we set foot in St. Louis, it felt like coming home.”
They settled on a peaceful, leafy street in Webster Groves, close enough to Bristol Elementary School that Charlie and Elizabeth, now 11, and Katherine, 7, could walk. When Maggie, 3, was born, Kristen dialed back teaching jazz and contemporary dance classes at COCA to keep the household on a more even keel. (Though once Maggie’s off to school, Kristen hopes to work with Nerinx Hall High School to establish a dance program.)
And there’s a lot going on in this house. In addition to his full teaching schedule, Lara performs (he spent nearly the first 10 years of his career on Broadway). Charlie is training in speed-skating—he’s been Missouri state champion in his age bracket for the past three years—and Elizabeth has been performing at The Muny since she was 7. In 2011, she and her father appeared onstage together at The Muny in The Little Mermaid. (She played Flounder, and he was Scuttle the seagull.) Elizabeth’s also performed at The New Jewish Theatre, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. And last summer, she received word that she’d been chosen for the role of Jane Banks in Mary Poppins—at the New Amsterdam Theater, on Broadway. In New York.
“People ask us, ‘That’s really hard, isn’t it?’” Lara says. “My response is always the same: ‘We didn’t sign up for easy.’”
Last July, the family packed up a moving van. Kristen and the kids leased a 900-square-foot apartment in the city, a subway stop or two away from the theater. The family decided to home-school, so Kristen bought the math books used at Bristol and gathered email addresses for her kids’ teachers so they could keep in touch. Lara remained in St. Louis to teach at Webster’s Conservatory of Theatre Arts—and spent a good part of the winter and spring in Texas, where he replaced Tommy Tune as Cap’n Andy in the Houston Grand Opera production of Show Boat.
“When people hear what we’re doing, their first response is always, ‘Oh my gosh—you must be crazy! How are you managing?’” Kristen says, laughing. But, she adds, she has great kids who handle themselves impeccably. “And I have admitted to many people that I find it easier to parent my kids here than back home,” she says. “And I’m a huge St. Louis fan! But here, there is so much to engage them.”
So far, the only crisis was the night Elizabeth lost her shoe onstage (she was wearing blue toenail polish—cast members are not allowed to paint their nails or wear jewelry, though pedicures are OK…at least on non-lost-shoe days). Lara says his wife is a superlative organizer, and it’s clear that’s true when she runs through the family’s New York schedule: On Sundays, she goes over the week’s schoolwork and makes assignments for the coming week. Elizabeth sleeps in Monday morning; she might get home from a previous night’s show at 10 or 11 p.m., which means after eating and winding down, bedtime isn’t until midnight, and Monday is her day off. She joins her siblings for schoolwork by 9:30 a.m., and they work until lunch.
Then they head out into the city for home-school classes, like the one she and Charlie took at the New-York Historical Society Museum on the Declaration of Independence. “It ties it to musicals,” Kristen says. “So they watched 1776 and went to the museum to see paintings and George Washington’s bed—it was very interactive.” In December, one of the home-school moms, who’s also a professor of religious history at Hunter College, lectured at the American Museum of Natural History about Mayan culture—and how the world would not end December 21.
Charlie’s taking a robotics class; Elizabeth takes ballet. And Katherine benefits from the fact that her mother has already coached her two older siblings through second-grade math. Charlie rollerblades to keep in form for speed-skating—trips to Flushing Meadows were too stressful, timewise and travelwise, so training is on hold till the family returns to St. Louis in June. His coaches say that may be a good thing, because it will possibly help him avoid the burnout they see in other kids. And he’s loving New York.
“I’ve joked that all the nannies in the city owe my son money, because he’s the one who gets all the games going and entertains all of the other children on the playground,” Kristen says.
Then, from 4 p.m. on, it all depends on whether Elizabeth has a show that night. “So for instance, tonight she has a show, she’s performing, so she has to be at the theater by 5:45. I have to always do the math and go backwards: So we need to leave by 5:20, so that means we need to eat by 4:45… A lot of math is involved on my part!”
Katherine is enjoying New York, too, watching her sister on the stage, knowing she can audition at The Muny for the first time this year. (When asked what she thinks of her sister’s performances, Katherine replies, “She’s aaaaammmmazing!”) Though Kristen jokes that once they’re home, “the crossing guards at school are going to loathe them. After crossing streets in New York for a year? Nobody waits for the signals!”
But being in New York has been “a gift,” Lara says, one that Elizabeth has given the family. “My kids get to experience New York—the sidewalks, the museums, the shows, the concerts… It’s very different from 35 years ago, when I was on the Upper West Side. Now it’s all about family, with all of these free things for kids to do. This experience they are having in New York is going to change the way we are as a family, both collectively and individually, for the rest of our lives.”
So what was Elizabeth’s first Muny audition like? Lara chuckles.
“I came home one day, and Kristen says, ‘Your daughter wants to sing her Muny song for you.’ She had chosen ‘A Spoonful of Sugar.’ She did the song, and I said, ‘That’s great, sweetheart!’ like any dad, proud of his girl. She walked out of the room, and I looked at Kristen, and I said, ‘Did you work with her at all?’ And she said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m just saying—that was pretty good.’ And for the next couple of years, she did all of her own auditions.” In fact, she would just close her door to her room and sing; when Kristen asked her whether she wanted her to look at her audition, Elizabeth would reply, “No, I’m fine.” Now, Lara is coaching both Elizabeth and Katherine in singing and tap-dancing and acting, but he emphasizes that the will to go onstage has come entirely from the girls. Still, Lara adds that Katherine doesn’t seem to be following the “straight line” to the stage that Elizabeth has.
“Katherine is a little bit of our Andy Warhol,” he says. “She’s always doing some interesting piece of art. All three of the kids take piano, but she is the one who will play the song and sing the words while she’s playing. She writes her own songs. She dresses her own way. She is really bright—she got moved after the first six weeks of kindergarten into first grade… Elizabeth is our heart center, Charlie keeps us active, Katherine stimulates us, and Maggie entertains us.”
Mary Poppins closed in early March, but the family will be in the city until May, so Elizabeth can do a staged reading of Lord Tom with a Broadway cast. She’s auditioning, too. Then they pack up the truck for the return trip. They’ll join Lara in D.C. for another run of Show Boat with the National Opera at Kennedy Center, drive down to Florida to visit family, then land back in St. Louis in June, just in time for the Muny season to start.
“It’s a good thing,” Kristen says, “because we will still be involved in the artistic, creative community. If we came back in August, just in time for school, that would be a shock to the system.”
The kids can’t wait to get back to their rooms, and the yard, and Bristol. “They’re consoling me!” Kristen says, laughing, noting that she will miss home-schooling. Though there’s a chance that Elizabeth may get another run on Broadway.
“She feels in her heart right now that she is ready to be done,” Kristen says. “At the same time, having been married to an actor for many years now, I know you think you are headed down one path, but when that door opens, you can’t help but walk through it.”
Lara says the family knows itself better than to say “Absolutely not” to that opportunity. “But the idea of another year in New York, separated, doesn’t feel right,” he says. “I might be able to take a leave of absence from the conservatory to make that a possibility. If you were to ask Elizabeth her preference right now, I think she’d say she wants to come home. So we’d have a family discussion about it. The family has benefited from this year in New York, but maybe it’s time to reverse that. Who’s up now? Getting Charlie back here to skate is important. Getting mom back into her house is important. So the plan is to be back in June and get back into the school system in the fall.
“But,” he says, pausing, “we are the living, breathing example of how there are no definites. That about the time you think you have it all figured out…things change.”
