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Music had Mozart; medicine — TV medicine, at least — had Doogie Howser. If the world of pompoms had a prodigy, her name would be Danielle Carlacci.
The blond, blue-eyed Long Islander is one of 13 real-life competitive cheerleaders putting the rah-rahs between the raps in Broadway’s “Bring It On: The Musical.” The show opens Aug. 1, but Carlacci, who turns 21 Thursday, has been training for it all her life: since age 2, actually, when the Port Jefferson native started tumbling.
Add dance lessons at 6 and varsity cheerleading at 13 — plus a stint as a Knicks City Kid — and she was a slam dunk for “Bring It On,” based on the 2000 Kirsten Dunst film.
Leap-frog pyramids? Check. Plus flyaways, arabesques and basket tosses, in which someone gets tossed some 20 feet in the air, only to be caught in a brace of interlaced hands.
And because Carlacci’s a swing — someone who subs for any ensemble member — she gets to do it all, sometimes at a moment’s notice. At 4-foot-9 ½ inches, she’s usually the one at the top of the pyramid.
So what’s it like being thrown 20 or 25 feet into the air?
“The first time, your whole stomach rises up into your chest,” she says. “Once you get comfortable in it, it happens so quickly . . . it’s like 3-D emotional theater!”
Between rehearsals the other day at the St. James Theatre, where the show’s in previews, the cherubic Carlacci exuded such wholesome, all-American cheer — “Oh my gosh!” she cries, often — that you could almost smell the apple pie. She might not have been Port Jeff High’s homecoming queen, but she was captain of the squad her senior year, when she dated the boy next door, the captain of Port Jeff’s football and basketball teams.
She was cheering for Boston College when she was picked for “Bring It On,” which she says is “like the movie — the first PG-13 I ever saw! — but different.” To this tale of rival cheerleading squads, “Avenue Q” veteran Jeff Whitty sprinkled in redistricting and some good old “All About Eve”-style subterfuge. There’s even a Tracy Turnblad-size cheerleader-wannabe who learns to accept herself for who she is.
And no, Carlacci says, judging from her Port Jeff days (“Go, Royals!”), cheerleaders aren’t the clique-ish, smug bunch of girls you think they are.
“I was the baby on the team, and everybody was really, really nice to me,” she says. “On a cheerleading team, you really have to get along, because you’re relying on each other physically. If you do have issues, you have to get over them quickly, because you need to support each other.”
Judging from the whoops at a recent matinee, the mostly young audience is eating it up. Then again, this isn’t your typical theater crowd: It takes more than “Death of a Salesman” to lure all the members of the Burlington, NJ, national cheerleading champs to Broadway. Some girls even come in uniform.
“See you at halftime!” one chirped before the Act 1 curtain.
Even so, Carlacci insists, the show appeals
to all ages. Standing in line for an hour the other day for $35 “rush” tickets was 55-year-old Debra Buchanan, a dance teacher and “cheer adviser” from San Diego who figured she might learn some moves.
“We’ve heard about 65-year-old men who said the show touched them more than anything else,” Carlacci says. “It’s really reaching everyone!”
Alas, the reach extends only to Oct. 7, when the show ends its limited run. By then, Carlacci will be at Columbia, where she’s transferred, to study theater. If she has time, she says, she’ll join the cheerleading squad and help the university’s benighted Lions roar to life.
And Port Jeff? Her younger sister’s now on the cheerleading squad, carrying the torch. Make that pompoms. Go, Royals!