A little more than a year after Justin Guarini had been chosen runner-up to Kelly Clarkson in the inaugural season of American Idol, he was in his Bel Air mansion watching Saturday Night Live, when he saw his own face on the screen, and heard Tina Fey say on Weekend Update: “This week, former American Idol, Justin Guarini, was dropped from his record label” – adding “And now he looks like this,” the photograph morphing from the frizzy-haired 23-year-old Guarini to one of frizzy-haired then-62-year-old Art Garfunkel.
This televised joke was how he heard that his label had dropped him. He probably should not have been surprised. His first movie, “From Justin to Kelly,” had bombed, and his first album was not doing well. But the news steeped him in “a brew of depression and paralysis” for months – until he turned his life around.
Two decades later, Guarini tells this story near the beginning of “Center Stage Confidence “(Entrepreneur Press, 288 pages), a self-help book about how to build confidence and reach one’s goals. But it is more interesting to me as a kind of sporadic incidental memoir.
This includes anecdotes from his Broadway career– how nervous he was at the first performance of his first Broadway musical, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” when he stepped onto the stage of the Belasco Theater playing the son of Patti LuPone and Brian Stokes Mitchell; how he had to build up his stamina to avoid passing out while both singing and dancing to the song “Circus” in “Once Upon A One More Time”; how as Fiyero in “Wicked” he demonstrated through body language the character’s evolution from aloof to passionate; he put his weight on his back foot at the outset, then eventually shifted forward into a battle-ready stance: “The physical shift told the audience everything they needed to know about his growth, even without dialogue.”
Guarini uses his experiences as a performer to illustrate or at least introduce his advice. The entire book suggests theater as a metaphor for life in general, with such chapter titles as Workshop. Previews. Dressing Room, Backstage, Earning Your Standing Ovation. In the Workshop chapter, for example, (subtitled “Always Preparing for Your Moment”), he explains how workshopping a show – and thus getting feedback from a live audience — is part of the long and laborious process of getting it on Broadway. His life lesson: “Get feedback from people who have done the thing you want to do.” (Emphasis on people who know what they’re doing, not your well-meaning ignorant Uncle Ralph ) In a later chapter, “Dressing Room – Feeling Uncertainty and Doing It Anyway,” he comes back to the topic, with a four-word mantra: “Reframe Failure as Feedback.” It took Thomas Edison 10,000 tries to invent the light bulb, he gives as illustration.
Guarini is now an entrepreneur, with several businesses that coach executives, entrepreneurs, and performers on public speaking, stage presence, and growing their brand. “Center Stage Confidence: How to Own Your Story and Command Any Room” largely reads like an outgrowth of his businesses, and a tool to promote them. Like many self-help books, much of his advice strikes me as too obvious or too general to be of much directly practical use. But the passages that are most straightforwardly connected to performance feel more grounded. He recommends specific gestures and vocal exercises in the section on public speaking. There are transcripts of several interviews he conducted with performers, including Broadway veterans Amber Ruffin, and Jordan Fisher, who tells Guarini how therapy “helped me see that my career is something I do, not who I am….Now, I approach my work as a craft, not a measure of my worth.”
What “Center Stage Confidence” most persuasively illustrates is something that Justin Guarini doesn’t even mention explicitly: The gift performers develop for reinvention. Of course, they reinvent themselves for every new character. This seems to be good training for life: Justin Guarini has certainly exhibited such resilience and flexibility. He turned himself from a TV celeb into a disciplined and effective stage actor and – like many stage actors – then used those skills for a new career. There are clues in the book that his reinventions are more numerous than we know. Its foreword is written by Eldrin Bell, who is identified as the first Black police chief of the City of Atlanta. This seems at first like a strange choice, and Bell even seems to undermine the promise that Guarini’s book can teach you to be confident, when he writes that “confidence is not a mask you wear, but an identity you grow into.” But the reason why he was asked to write the foreword becomes clearer when he continues: “It isn’t about applause or perfection (although my son enjoys both). It’s about presence. It’s about standing firm when everything around you wavers. About knowing who you are when no one’s watching.” Who Justin Guarini is, when no one’s watching, is Chief Bell’s son.
