Separate Lives
Henry isn’t the only one who has had to be flexible in the Hodges family. Although Henry’s father now lives in New York, Henry and his mother lived there alone for more than four years while his father and older sister stayed in Bethesda. “We have lived separate lives for the last four years,” James says, “but we’ve been fortunate that New York and Washington are close enough together for us to see each other.”
Unorthodox as their choice to live apart might appear, the Hodges feel it has been the right one for them.
Henry’s sister, Charlotte, 20, agrees. “You don’t have to have a regular picket-fence family to be really strong,” she says. “I don’t know how it would have changed things if Mom had been home, but I turned out OK.”
Now a sophomore at Boston’s Emmanuel College, “Charly” is sports oriented and loves books. “I don’t dance and sing,” she says, “but I do other things better than he does. We complement each other.” She adds, “I offered to move up to New York City when Mom and Henry did, but in the end we decided it was
in my best interest to stay in Bethesda with my friends and family.” Charly did travel with Henry for a summer during his Beauty and the Beast tour in 2003. “I sold merchandise up and down the aisles,” she recalls with some pride. “I sold the most of anyone on tour.”
For Jane and James, living apart from one of their children wasn’t easy. But they found ways to compensate. Charly would fax or e-mail her school essays to Jane, and James read all of the Harry Potter books to Henry over the phone. Henry’s performance schedules made it difficult to visit Bethesda during a show’s run, so James and Charly traveled to New York about once every other month. Last summer, things got easier. With Charly in college, James, who is a corporate headhunter, transferred to his firm’s New York office.
The Hodges rented out their four-bedroom home in the Edgemoor neighborhood of Bethesda and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s theater district. At 500 square feet, it’s about the same size as the studio Jane and Henry shared the previous four years.
Luckily, Henry’s a New Yorker now and his housing standards aren’t so high. After years of sleeping in the same room as his mother, he’s elated to have the living room sofa bed while his parents share the bedroom.
According to Jane—a native of Bethesda who graduated from the University of Maryland and used to work in the admissions department at Landon School—the plan is to eventually return to Bethesda. “I grew up [in Bethesda],” she says. “I love New York, but Bethesda is home.”
Bethesda Roots
New York may be home to Henry, but he still enjoys visiting Bethesda. “I love going back to see old friends,” he says. He spent the summer of 2006 (between Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins) in Bethesda seeing his grandparents and hanging out at the Edgemoor Club pool with old friends like Sarah Backenstoe, a pal since kindergarten. “I think Henry’s just a normal kid who’s an actor,” says Sarah, an eighth-grader at Thomas W. Pyle Middle School in Bethesda. “Maybe he’s a little more mature because of being in show business, but he’s still the same to me.”
Tim Simon, a freshman at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, has been Henry’s friend since 1997, when they were 4 years old. “I see Henry maybe two or three times a year,” Tim says. “I’ve gone to see him in his last two shows. “It’s a little strange. I can’t believe I’ve got a friend on Broadway, but he’s really just a normal kid. When he visits, we go to the pool, play video games, watch movies,” Tim says. In New York, Tim says, Henry’s life is so different he probably doesn’t know about the normal stuff he’s missing out on. “He’s made a lot of friends in other shows, [kids] who all have the same kind of life he has.”
Henry’s New York friends are the kids he sees on the audition circuit. “It doesn’t get too competitive,” Henry says, “because it ends up being about who’s right for the part.”
Many of Henry’s peers attend a performing arts school, but Jane decided to home-school her son, who is in eighth grade. That way, they can work around his complicated schedule of rehearsals, lessons, auditions and performances. “I love being home-schooled,” Henry says. “You can really concentrate on what interests you and what you need help with. And it only takes about four hours a day instead of six. You can’t beat that.”
Henry’s favorite thing about acting is meeting the “amazing” people he works with. According to the show’s associate director, Anthony Lyn, Henry is talented enough to do just about anything. Lyn describes him as “a combination of normal, regular teenage boy and someone with an extraordinary instinct and understanding for a kid—similar to an adult.”
“He’s always at a hundred percent; I always get a complete performance out of him,” Lyn says. “It’s my job to make sure the show stays great, and he makes it easy. I’ve worked with hundreds of kids, and he’s up there with the best of them. He’s born to do this. I believe he’ll be hugely successful as an adult.”
Other colleagues give Henry equally glowing reviews. Ashley Brown, the actress who plays Mary Poppins, calls Henry “professional, respectful. During rehearsals, he was the first one to know his lines and blocking. He always finds something fun in it all. Does he ever have a bad day? We’ll never know.”
Dan Jenkins, who plays Mr. Banks, calls Henry mature for his age, “but the great thing is that he hasn’t adopted any of the cynicism that so many kids in this business develop. He’s got perspective and he actually listens on stage, which is a difficult skill to master.”
What are Henry’s plans for the future? For updates on his career, check out his Web site, www.henryhodges.com, created when Henry began getting too much fan mail to handle individually. According to his parents, he may go to college when the time comes, but it will depend on how his career is going—they’re leaving it up to Henry. “I’d like to spread my wings and try a little of everything,” Henry says. “As an adult, I’d love to do movies and theater, but I picture myself as a theater actor.”
Stage Frights
In his short acting career, Henry Hodges has had some strange—and frightening—stage experiences.
During his second stint as Tiny Tim, Henry was in rehearsals for A Christmas Carol when the opera Idomeneo, starring Placido Domingo, opened at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The opera’s producers wanted Henry to play the role of “Neptune’s sacrifice”—a dead little boy. Rehearsal times at Ford’s Theatre conflicted, but since he didn’t have to appear onstage in Idomeneo until the second act, Henry took the role. As soon as nightly rehearsals were over at Ford’s Theatre, he would grab a cab to the Kennedy Center, quickly put on his costume, and do his part.
“It was easy,” Henry remembers. “I was dead, so I didn’t have to learn any lines.”
He was injured on the set of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang while playing the part of Jeremy Potts. During a Wednesday matinee, the Child Catcher drove a cart over him. “Somehow my shoelace … got tangled in a gear under the cart, then my foot got mangled in the spokes of the wheel. I screamed ‘Stop!’ But the problem was, it was a scene where we were supposed to be screaming,” Henry says.
“It was probably the worst thing I ever felt. My foot was almost twisted backwards. They rushed me to the hospital in my costume and there was a doctor waiting. I was really lucky there were no broken bones. He [the doctor] put an air cast on me and we pulled back up to the theater almost as the overture was starting for the evening show. Since I already had most of my costume on, it wasn’t hard to get ready. I did the whole show.”
Writer Julie Beaman lives in Chevy Chase.
