A Not-So-Secret Second Life

Bill Whitney is coaching a chorus of Lehigh students playing a chorus of adolescent, humorously awkward, disarmingly charming, singing spelling-bee contestants. Sitting by a piano in a Zoellner Arts Center rehearsal room, he doles out advice that’s concise, calm and colorful. Stretch those vowels. Cross those t’s. Paint those feelings. Don’t forget to have fun with “fecund.” Be sure to belt out “Weltanschauung.”

The practice is for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a merry, moving musical that features highly unusual spelling techniques (trance, “magic” foot), a cameo appearance by Jesus Christ and a few acts of uncommon kindness. Running from April 21 to 29 in Zoellner’s Diamond Theatre, it’s the third Lehigh show that Whitney has music-directed since 2013, when he officially became the resident expert on musicals in Lehigh’s department of theatre. Last fall he premiered Lehigh’s first course in the history and performance of musical theatre, teaching everything from Show Boat to Hamilton, Second Hand Rose to Look to the Rainbow.

Conducting singers and instrumentalists is one of Whitney’s two Lehigh jobs. During the day he’s the administrative director for the Office of the Vice Provost for Creative Inquiry and Director of the Mountaintop Initiative, a division launched in January. Before he began incubating creative projects all around and off campus, he spent nearly seven years as the executive assistant to three Lehigh presidents, booking their travels, arranging their meetings, generally serving as their “first line of defense.” Navigating a sea of personalities was a customized role for a rock-steady, gently funny, self-described “frustrated political scientist.”

Whitney took a zigzag path to becoming Lehigh’s piano-playing, musician-training, president-scheduling, creativity-fostering, time-keeping gatekeeper. He grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, the child of an Army National Guard officer and a piano teacher. Taught initially by his mother, he spent a dozen years as a classical pianist, winning a state-wide competition in high school and in college. He doubled as an actor and an instrumentalist in musicals, a passion triggered at age 12 during a family vacation on Broadway, where he took his “first deep hit” with Cats and Sunday in the Park with George.

As an adolescent Whitney endured three surgeries to adjust hip sockets wrenched by a dramatic growth spurt. He eventually decided his calling was in theatre instead of classical music, show tunes rather than sonatas. At Nebraska Wesleyan University he majored in theatre arts and English literature while leading the choir and the dramatics society. In 2000 he received a master’s in drama from Washington University in St. Louis and started a year-long stint developing musicals for the Manhattan Theatre Club. Before searching for a teaching job, he switched tracks, settling in Boston as the administrative assistant to MIT’s vice president for research. His boss, Alice Gast, a chemical engineer and first-time university administrator, says she enjoyed how Whitney kept her on schedule and on point, reminding her to say “no” when she forgot to. Impressed by his flexibility and reliability, she compared him to Cpl. Radar O’Reilly, the Mr. Fix-It and Mr. Bury-It of M*A*S*H.

A classical-music fan, Gast attended Whitney’s piano recital as part of MIT’s “Artist Behind the Desk” series. She saw him perform in a Mexican wrestling version of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. She supported his every-other-Sunday trips to Brooklyn to study with a 90-year-old piano teaching legend who helped improve his sense of structure and interpretation, emotion and character.

In 2003, Whitney enrolled in the doctoral program in theatre and drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For two straight years he won a top graduate-student award. He has fond memories of performing all sorts of jobs for Gypsy and diving deeper into theatrical academia. He has fonder memories of his wife, Joanna, an acting teacher, giving birth to their daughter, Olive. Now 8 years old, the youngest Whitney loves to sing tunes from her dad’s shows. She also shares the first name of a latch-key, key contestant in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

After graduating from UW in 2009, Whitney tried unsuccessfully to land a teaching position during an epic hiring freeze on college campuses. In 2010 he switched tracks and time zones, moving to Bethlehem to become executive assistant to his former MIT boss, Gast, who by now was Lehigh’s president. Far busier than at MIT, he scheduled her trips, booked her interviews, provided briefing materials, and promoted her projects on Twitter.

“Bill had to deal with the most delicate of circumstances, and he always did so with extraordinary wisdom,” Gast said in an email. “He anticipates needs, understands people and welcomes all from the youngest student to the most esteemed world leader. His acting skills keep him as the epitome of calm.”

Whitney moved easily between his day-and-night roles as presidential assistant and adjunct theatre professor. In 2013 he music directed Urinetown, a sleeper Broadway hit named for the hellhole where residents of a water-starved city are banished for refusing to pay a fee for peeing. One of his proudest accomplishments was convincing Cassandra Dutt ’13, who played Urinetown’s matron, Penelope Pennywise, that she could nail the song “It’s a Privilege to Pee,” which is exceedingly tricky and excruciatingly high. He managed to decrease Dutt’s anxiety by increasing her range and her confidence.

While university presidents rarely need their hands held, music-theatre students often do. “I tell them: I don’t care what your range is; you’re going to sing this song and hit all these notes, even if we have to transpose a lot,” says Whitney. “I tell them: ‘Calm down, you don’t have to be perfect; you just have to be authentic.’”

Whitney also comforted Urinetown director Pamela Pepper, a veteran of staging dramas and a relative newcomer to musicals. “Bill is a joy to work with; he has such a great attitude,” says Pepper, a longtime Lehigh theatre professor who worked for the Pennsylvania Stage Company, a defunct professional regional-theatre organization in Allentown. “He’s a wonderful teacher and coach. He can translate what I’m trying to say into musical-theatre terms; he can overcome my occasional incompetence, bless his heart. He pushes students in very positive ways. He’s exacting; he strives for the absolute best. That man can do anything; he’s such a multi-barreled guy.”

Whitney shifted gears in 2014 when Gast left Lehigh to become president of Imperial College London. After working with interim president Kevin Clayton ’84, a capital-management executive, he welcomed another full-time, first-time university president: John Simon, former executive vice president and provost at the University of Virginia. A chemist and an amateur pianist, Simon kept Whitney hopping as a travel planner by crisscrossing the country to get the lay of the Lehigh land. Whitney also had to adjust to significantly different presidential routines. Gast, he points out, liked to host meetings in the president’s office; Simon prefers meeting people in their offices. Gast liked her schedule crammed; Simon prefers a three-hour block in the afternoon to catch up on messages, run, and think in relative peace. It was Whitney’s job to cover for Simon while he drank coffee, read and chatted with Lehigh people in the morning at Saxby’s; it was Whitney’s job to remind Simon that he was running late by appearing at the president’s door and tapping his watch.

Interviewed last summer, Simon praised Whitney as an exceptional manager of time, place and mental space. “I can’t imagine it’s fun to plan my schedule, and it’s not infrequent that it has to change. Yet there are no signs of frustration from Bill. He’s very attentive to detail and style; we’ve never had to talk about how he arranges and structures my life. He comes from the theatre, so he’s used to large-scale productions.”

Whitney agrees with Simon’s assessment. “When you come from the theatre world you have seen a lot of aspects of behavior and misbehavior, so nothing really surprises or shocks me in the world of a university president,” says Whitney, who belonged to a five-person presidential office led by Chief of Staff Erik Walker. “University presidents have much more self-confidence than theatre people, who tend to be vulnerable. With Alice and John my job was to get my nose dirty in the details and stay the heck out of their way. Nobody needs their coffee fetched anymore.”

Whitney’s Lehigh lives entwined on November 19, 2015. During the day he chaperoned a health-sciences consultant around campus and powwowed with communications officers, sketching a social-media profile of new President Simon to be sent to other higher-education CEOs. At night he played piano and conducted the band in the musical Violet, directed by Pam Pepper and named for a disfigured character who travels from North Carolina to Oklahoma to seek healing from a televangelist. After the show he heard a familiar voice call his name. Turning around, he saw Simon with 10 Lehigh colleagues, plus the visiting health-sciences consultant. All had dined at the President’s House before coming to the Diamond Theatre to support Whitney, their favorite time-keeping gatekeeper.

Whitney was pleased by Simon’s secret salute. He was also a wee bit embarrassed by the surprise tribute. “It felt almost shameful,” he says with a smile, “like discussing my secret life.”

Last year Whitney decided that a nearly seven-year run as “the president’s scheduler” was enough. He wanted to run meetings as well as book them, create as well as facilitate, stretch his resume and strengthen his career. He found the right fit as the administrative director for Khanjan Mehta, Lehigh’s first Vice Provost for Creative Inquiry and a specialist in engineering design, international affairs and humanitarian entrepreneurship. Whitney’s role is to help Mehta create visionary partnerships between students, teachers, administrators and citizens through eight bucket-list items, or “buckets,” ranging from aiding K-12 teachers to low-income STEM students. His mission is to encourage “taking a new intellectual path, a deep dive into new or old fields,” whether it’s launching an app to assess student motivation or widening the audience of a documentary from YouTube to Netflix.

Whitney’s personal bucket list is similarly ambitious. He wants to teach his music-theatre course again; coach high schoolers with his wife, who has taught acting at Lehigh, and continue empowering young musical-theatre singers to hurdle their blocks. “My job is to make them more capable,” he says. “To tell them that singing is as much about acting as the actual purity of the notes. To help them find their voice as well as the character’s.

“To remind them that the human voice is a pretty wonderful instrument.”

Story by Geoff Gehman ’89 M.A.