Twosome with talent

It's their 40th wedding anniversary, and even though they're spending it together, they're also working - which has been their story from the beginning: Their Puerto Rico honeymoon was paid for by his employer, Philadelphia radio station WIFI 92.5, on the condition that he interview hotel guests for an on-air segment. For the last 12 years, they've seen each other only on weekends.

Rodney Robb is the founder/director of the Actors Center in Old City; Edie Robb manages talent in New York and Los Angeles at a boutique agency called Station 3. Theirs is a truly mutualistic relationship, rewarding for each of them on both personal and professional levels.

Says he, proudly: "For most of the years that we're in this business, I am known as Edie Robb's husband. But she has opened a lot of doors for the Actors Center. I can now talk to any agent or casting director in New York. I am like the farm team. People come to the Actors Center, and they stay here for many years. I train them, and then turn them over to Edie. She makes them into stars."

(As he raves on about her, she, behind his back, puts a jokey finger down her throat.)

Rodney Robb - who also runs the talent-management agency Baby Boomers - is a native New Yorker who loathes his hometown. He's lived in Philadelphia for more than 40 years, and calls it a great place for inexperienced talent to get started. Among the actors he's helped train are Tony Award-winner John Gallagher (American Idiot), Stephanie Gatschet (All My Children), and Seth Green (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Family Guy).

Edie Robb - who blames an early acting coach for her distinctive sandpaper voice - began managing when she inherited some clients from local agent Phyllis McArdle, who left the business to help launch the career of daughter Andrea, one of Annie's earliest Annies.

Mark Indelicato of Levittown, who played Justin Suarez on ABC's Ugly Betty, began taking classes at the Actors Center when he was 6. His grandmother had clipped an ad she saw in The Inquirer, and he thought it might be fun. By the time he was 8, he was being managed by Edie and was on stage at the Walnut Street Theatre.

"Everything that Edie wants or expects in an actor, Rodney teaches you," says Indelicato, now 16. "They're pushers. They have a really great eye for talent."

Expanding on that, Edie Robb says: "If there's someone who we think has promise, I will send him over to Rodney to get started - get him into the nonunion commercials and everything. We take care of each other that way."

On this December Saturday, their anniversary, the Actors Center is holding four classes designed for kids: voice-over, on-camera, improvisation, and acting. Also offered are classes in dance movement, stage combat, and musical theater, and classes on weekdays for adults. Given the exposure students get to various entertainment media, Rodney likes to think of the Actors Center as a kind of workshop.

In the voice-over room, a tiny redheaded boy is seated on a stool behind a sliding-glass door, his mouth millimeters from the mike, his feet dangling far above the floor. Snapple proves challenging for him to pronounce, but he pushes through the 30-second spot.

In the improv class in the black-box theater, students are anthropomorphizing objects found in a cafeteria. One gives life to a cash register, another to a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

"Turn up the volume on the character!" yells their instructor, Kristen Schier, in a space that seems like a cross between a playground at recess and a really productive classroom. Students wave their hands, hoping Schier will call on them next to jump on stage and pretend.

Downstairs, Rodney is in a director's chair, working with his senior group. Two at a time, they stand against a blue screen and record a commercial for General Electric. This time he asks one of his students to try a "valley girl" delivery. Giggling ensues.

Rodney, who worked as an account executive for 6ABC and brought the long-running Al Alberts Showcase for talented kids to the station, says his background in advertising has influenced his teaching strategy tremendously. He estimates that 80 percent of his students go on commercial auditions and that many book jobs in the Philadelphia market.

"He knows if they're good or not. He knows if they're ready," his wife says of Robb's assessments. They watch tapes of his students together, though Edie can't take many because Station 3 manages only 25 actors on each coast. "Our business is now at the level where we have fewer and they're of a higher caliber."

One of those few is Michael Rady, who most recently starred on the CW's Melrose Place. Rady, now 29, was at Saint Joseph's Prep when he started at the Actors Center. On the second day of on-camera class, he remembers Rodney leaning out from behind the camera to say, "You gotta meet my wife." And when he did meet her, he says, she began with, "So, you've met my husband."

"There's this really cool synergy between the two of them," says Rady, "and they're very productive with that synergy."

The Actors Center focuses on giving students constructive feedback and lots of support.

"I can't play God and say, 'You're not going to make it' because I could easily be wrong," says Rodney. "Maybe 3, 4 percent of the kids that we see will go on in this business. But by having come to the Actors Center, we have given them the self-esteem that, no matter what they do in life, they will succeed because they have been able to talk in front of people and have a lot of confidence in their ability."

As students advance, Edie is there to break the show-business-blues news to parents who may already be playing chauffeur and figure that auditions and soccer practice are interchangeable after-school activities.

"They think it's very easy. They think you go in on an audition and all of a sudden you're making money," she says. "They don't realize you have to go 50 times before you hit. And you do." (It was seven or eight years before Rady booked anything substantial.)

"So I sometimes tell the negative part, because, you know, I'm a mother. I love it, it's exciting, and I think I have the most interesting life there is - but it can be draining for a child."

This she knows. She shuttled her now-grown son, R.D., to New York and back even when he was an understudy and only had to stop by the Broadway theater to sign in. She ran her management business out of their Huntingdon Valley home until the early 1990s so she could be there when R.D. and his sister, Lori, needed her.

"That house was an insane asylum," her husband says, recalling late-night family dinners and three or four phones ringing at once.

Nevertheless, he characterizes the family as normal. R.D. - a child actor now active in the film industry - played on the baseball team, and Lori, despite her early touring-company work, attended her senior prom.

"It's so funny because R.D. would say to me, 'You're always on the phone.' And I said to him, 'But I'm here, aren't I?' " says Edie.

And that seems to be true, too, for their students and clients. The Robbs say they're interested in developing talent, more focused on the journey than on the outcome.

"Edie is in New York, my daughter is in Ohio, and my son is in L.A. I see my wife two days a week. But this is my love," says Rodney of the Actors Center. "I just feel as if I didn't waste my time on this Earth, that I helped people realize their dreams, and that's a good feeling."