“The secret to a good show is casting; it’s the same thing with finding the right pet,” says legendary Broadway dog trainer Bill Berloni. “If you can find the right dog, it’s going to be a hit.”
Berloni should know. He’s not only trained dogs and matched them to 20 Broadway shows, he’s matched numerous families and individuals with strays at the Humane Society of New York, where he volunteers one day a week.
“A shelter dog changed my life, and I made a promise to always adopt animals and help out,” he says.
If you ask him what he did before he started training dogs for Broadway shows, he’ll say, “I was in puberty,” which isn’t far from the truth. He was a 19-year-old aspiring actor working at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House, when a producer approached him with an unusual offer.
“He offered me a part in one of the shows in exchange for me training a dog for no money,” Berloni says. “Being a first-year college acting student, I accepted.”
Berloni adopted a stray from a local shelter and quickly realized he didn’t know anything about training dogs. “My dogs never had leashes or anything, they just followed me around because they loved me,” he says. “I figured if I could make the dog love the little girl [in the show], think the theater was his home and the cast was his family, that maybe he would do the things we asked him.”
Berloni was right. The dog fell in love with the little girl, followed her around and came when she called. “That was the original production of Annie,” he says. “That’s how it all started.”
Thirty years later, Berloni’s reputation as a “Star Animal Trainer” has grown to include television and movie credits as well as Broadway shows and revivals. And his work has allowed him to save thousands of abandoned animals.
Prior to the advent of the Internet, Berloni conducted his searches for pets at shelters with which he’d built relationships. Today, he searches adoption Web sites, such as petfinder.com, for potential canine actors.
What he looks for in a show dog is the same thing he counsels families adopting pets to look for: a dog that handles stress well. “At a shelter … there’s a lot of things to really upset them, and as you walk down the aisle, you’ll see one of three things: Dogs not doing very well, sitting in the back, shaking, just overwhelmed by it; dogs barking at the cage: ‘Let me out, let me out’; and the dogs who are just sort of hanging out, not overreacting, not under-reacting, just dealing with it,” Berloni says. “Those are the dogs I gravitate to, because if they can deal with the stress of the animal shelter and be calm and cool, I know they can go on stage.”
In this month’s Legally Blonde, audiences will have a chance to enjoy performances by Frankie the Chihuahua (“Bruiser”) and Nelly the bulldog (“Rufus”) or their understudies Roxie and Lewis. During the tour, each set of dogs has its own dressing room, hotel room and human handler to care for them. When they’re not onstage, they travel, play and exercise together. When the tour ends, they will go to live with Berloni, his wife and daughter on his 90 acre farm in Connecticut, in a house that’s been modified to include a comfortable, cage-free canine habitat.
“When I adopt a dog, I make a commitment to that dog for life; I don’t just adopt that dog to exploit it and get rid of it,” Berloni says. That is why when cast and crew members offer to adopt the dogs, he usually turns them down. “We have a genuine fondness for these animals and I owe them a debt of gratitude. In 30 years, there have been less than five instances when Berloni decided a dog would be better off with another owner. “Which is why we have 23 dogs,” he laughs.
Legally Blonde: The Musical plays the Fabulous Fox Theatre July 14-19.
