Erin outside stagedoor

Brandon Espinoza, Erin, and Crysta Macalush

Erin and Crysta Macalush...and Erin's brother, Matthew

Erin sang with the group called SugarBeats. Here they are appearing on the Rosie O'Donnell Show:

Erin is the one in bright green

The SugarBeats appearing on The View:

Erin is second in from the left

'Les Miz' on Broadway, But a Child at Heart
By CYNTHIA MAGRIEL WETZLER

ERIN RAKOW'S sixth-grade teachers at H. C. Crittenden Middle School in Armonk are used to seeing her a little sleepy in the morning. For nine months she played Cosette in "Les Miserables" on Broadway where she sang her solo, "Castle on a Cloud," six performances a week and was an understudy for two other performances.

"I loved doing it so much," said Erin a day before her 12th birthday earlier this month at her home here where she lives with her parents, Susan Rakow, a physical therapist, and Rick Rakow, a commercial real estate agent, and her brother, Matthew, 8. "I did my homework in the car, backstage, and now sometimes waiting at auditions," she said, a system that must work for her. Erin is a straight-A student. Hugging a life-size Young Cosette doll in her bedroom, which is covered floor to ceiling with theater paraphernalia from "Les Miserables" and other productions in which she has played, she pointed out the figure on a "Les Miserables" poster. "It's a drawing of my character Cosette," she said.

She pulled a pair of her dirt-splattered, brown stockings from the show and leftover makeup from a small trunk filled with "Les Miserables" memorabilia.

Mrs. Rakow said that Cosette "was supposed to look poor and tattered so her makeup was different eye shadows made to look like dirt." Erin applied her own "dirt," and the makeup people added a black eye. Among her keepsakes is a journal she wrote in at the theater, "whenever there were parties or the kids had fights backstage," Erin said. There were five children in the show. A chaperone, Jim Cleveland, "brought us gum, helped with homework and watched over us," Erin recalled.

Parents were not allowed to stay for performances. Erin left the Imperial Theater at 9:45 P.M. after her part was over and was excused from the 11:15 curtain call.

"We signed a 'two-inch contract,' " Mrs. Rakow said. Erin's heart stopped beating, she said, when she sat her down on her bed last spring to tell her that April 29 was her last performance because she had gotten too tall. "But then I realized these things happen," Erin said. "I just grew."

Erin now does television commercial voice-overs and jingles, performs in benefits with the singing group "The Broadway Kids" and sings with "The Sugar Beets," a group that makes children's recordings. In February she will sing with "The Broadway Kids" in Washington at the 25th anniversary of Unicef. She is managed by Fox Albert Management Enterprises in Manhattan and is an Equity member.

While there may be stars in Erin's animated, gray-green eyes, her feet are planted solidly on the ground. "I'm just a regular kid," she said. She is a regular child with perfect pitch and a beautiful voice. "I don't talk about this stuff at school," she said.

"Sometimes certain kids, not my friends, say snotty things like, 'Broadway brat,' or other pretty mean things like, 'Oh, you think you're so cool,' or they'd be too extra nice and I would feel kind of weird." The hurt look of any youngster teased by peers crossed her face and for a moment eclipsed her natural poise.

Is she anything like her character, Cosette? "I was an orphan in 'Les Miz,' " she said. "Cosette lives with innkeepers who make her work hard. She is shy and timid, and I'm completely the opposite. I love my mother very much, and Cosette loved her mother, who died. I would think of this when I was singing, and it would get me into the part."

Her brother, mother and father say she sings at home all the time, even when she does her homework. In a poem she wrote with her mother about her time on Broadway, she said:

For three years every day and night
I practiced "Castle on a Cloud"
And my parents who it once drove nuts
Now said it was allowed.

Erin got her start at the Westchester Broadway Theater and the Yorktown Theater Company. Her parents say they are careful to avoid the pushy stage-parent syndrome, but they see benefits in her professional experiences "far beyond what we could provide," Mrs. Rakow said. "These are life lessons, not just acting lessons," she said. "I'm as proud of how she manages her time as I am of her on stage. This juggling is great training to be a working mother. During the show there was not a lot of down time, and she pulled it off."

Mr. Rakow added, "She proved she could handle disappointments and rejections at auditions."

Doing benefits with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS has sensitized Erin beyond her years, her parents said. "She understands that some of the people who are dying could be her music teacher or write the play she might be in," Mrs. Rakow said. "She has learned about charity. It has made her a very open-minded child."

But Erin and her family are not willing to disrupt their lives too much for her career. "I would never want to move away to do movies or anything," Erin said. "All the cliques in the middle school are formed now. I have to be at birthday parties and hear who said what. I just have to be there."

Sometimes when she was performing at night she would arrive at a sleep-over party at 10:30. "We never let her regular life droop," Mrs. Rakow said.

And when she grows up? A lead on Broadway?

Erin doesn't envision a star on her dressing-room door. "I like it as a hobby, but I don't want to devote my life to it," she said. "I might want to be a doctor." Her eyes brightened and, she added: "Or be someone, ummmm, you know, who writes commercials. I don't know which yet."

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