Another Openin’, Another Show: And Into the Woods has launched itself on its three week twelve performance run. Per usual, everything gelled over the last few days with the addition of costumes, a completed set, lighting, sound effects, and all of the other myriad details that make up the live stage performance of a musical. One of my favorite things about performing in a large and complicated show such as this one is watching and learning the back stage patterns as everyone goes through their individual track. Life is made of moments, as the show says, and there are certainly plenty of them that performers revel in that the audience is blissfully unaware of. The complicated choreography of a quick costume or wig change. The moments that are cast favorites so that we all peek a bit from the wings. The need for everyone to either bunch up or race to clear the fly rail stage left as there simply is no wing space on that side. Meeting the same people at the prop shelf at the same time as you grab your prop as they return theirs. Things hum along in their little routine. The only significant issues I had tonight was a fake pearl popping off of a button of my second act vest but I caught it before it could get lost or trip anyone up.
This is my 20th show on the mainstage of the Virginia Samford Theatre and I’m just about six months shy of the 20th anniversary of my debut on that stage in a production of Jekyll and Hyde (as the butler). Leah Luker,, who also made her VST debut in that show, is playing my stepdaughter this time around. She’s one of my favorite people with whom to get into the sandbox. Over the years we’ve played fizzled romantic interests, father and daughter, bailiff and juror, and a bunch of other things. And there’s another half dozen of the Into the Woods cast that are part of the old guard and we’ve all been friends and playmates for so many years and in so many different shows. I came offstage into the stage left wing, doing my usual abrupt stop to keep from running into the fly rail and all of a sudden my brain opened up a kaleidoscope of memories of dozens of other exits through other sets – sometimes after simple crosses, sometimes after complicated musical numbers with the sound of a contented audience following. Most people do not realize how vital the audience is to the success of a theater piece, especially a musical. Those of us on stage enter into a symbiotic relationship and feed off of the energy of audience response and it informs the pacing, the performance, and the whole purpose of the evening. I generally don’t ‘see’ the audience. I feel them and I can tell when they are following and engaged or when their attention is waning. Tonight, being opening night and full of family and friends, it was definitely a friendly audience and I felt the piece moving forward in new and better ways.
I can never gauge my own performance and I never really believe that I’m more than mediocre in anything I do. I think it’s because I’m not really trained. I learned to perform and hold an audience from a decade or so of public speaking and lecturing, not from a bachelors or masters degree in any sort of fine arts performance. I did not appear on stage and sing for an audience until the age of 42. (Perhaps it was my answer to the ultimate question). I always feel inferior when around cast mates who have that kind of training so I try to make up for it with a good work ethic and a commitment to the project and the character. I’ve been told by trustworthy sources that I usually end up holding my own but there’s always a nagging doubt that I’m really not good enough. But then there’s the fact that I keep getting cast and that probably wouldn’t be happening if I didn’t have something going for me. It may just be the dearth of male stage actors locally of my type and age. I did put myself back in voice lessons a year or so ago and they have been paying off. I’ve given up on the dance piece of musicals. The joints have gotten too danged old. It’s going to be character roles that can fake it behind the ensemble dancers moving forward.
Now that I can come up for air a bit as I’ve just got to make room in my schedule for performances, and not for daily rehearsals, I need to take stock of some of the other pieces of life. Fortunately the work life has not been too pressured the last few weeks. Some additional clinical help has been procured and that has let some of the steam out of the boiler. I don’t feel quite as buried under the pile of everyone wanting a piece of me as I was a few weeks ago. The health care system continues to slowly collapse. The retirement of my generation of primary care physicians continues apace and there are no new ones to be had. New patient appointments for the few in town that are taking new patients are booking out about a year from now. Not particularly helpful if you’re middle aged, and have some chronic issues and need medications refilled in the interim. It takes me about four to six months to get my patients into needed specialty appointments these days. And don’t get me started on the appalling mess that short staffing has created in senior living facilities and community service agencies. There are no white knights riding in to help. This is the new normal – a health care system that cannot provide timely health care. It’s due to a myriad of issues. The pandemic pushing the older generation into retirement and creating a new chronically ill population of millions of long Covid sufferers with complex health needs. The emphasis on short term profit over the actual health needs of the population. The dismissal if not downright denigration of primary care and cognitive specialties by the health education system pushing people who might go into those fields into other career paths. The reimbursements that favor technical skills and mastery and machines and highly sophisticated procedures over cognitive skills and empathy. These are issues that have been compiling themselves for fifty years or so and there are no easy or quick solutions. It will give me plenty to write about in the next book which I can actually start thinking about now that I am coming out of the woods.
Covid and flu and RSV numbers appear to be dropping somewhat but all three are still out there and circulating. None of them seems to have gotten into the Into the Woods cast and crew (knock wood multiple times) but there have been a few cases of the general viral cruds. I’ve managed to avoid those so far this winter. I’m putting it down to three things. First, I keep my hands washed. Second, I’m up to date in all my immunizations. Third, I was never really able to isolate throughout the pandemic years due to the nature of my job and I probably ran into the cruds during that period and kept my immune system on its toes. Those that were more successful in isolating didn’t challenge their immune system as much over the last few years and now that they’re running into things again as social patterns return, they’re more likely to become symptomatic. If nothing else, I hope the whole pandemic experience has allowed us to retool the culture in such a way that when we get sick, we’re more likely to take a few days off and isolate and not power through and infect others and let ourselves get even more run down. But vulture capitalism isn’t likely to stand for that attitude for long.
My news feed has been full of stories on illegal immigration and how it’s supposedly destroying the country. I know a few people who live near the Southern border. Their lives are just fine, thank you, they haven’t noticed anything in particular being destroyed. Congress is, of course, playing politics over the whole issue as the Republicans think that if they don’t work to solve it, they can use the unsolved problems as bludgeons against the Democrats in the upcoming elections. Crass politics at their basest which anyone with a modicum of critical thinking should be able to see through. Of course, if we really wanted to stop illegal immigration, the easiest way to do it would be to start charging and jailing the executives of the companies that depend upon and hire the undocumented to do the jobs that make them money and which are necessary for our society to function. But that’s never going to happen. So we basically want and need to have a large undocumented class. Their status prevents them from having significant claim on the rights and privileges of the citizenry. The club of ICE and deportation can be used to keep them in line. Our society has just moved the underclass from slaves to Jim Crow combined with the mass immigration of the late 19th and early 20th century from which many of us descend and which manned the sweatshops and factories of the robber barons of the Gilded Age to undocumented immigrants from Latin America and beyond. We’re all complicit in a system that traffics in human misery in order for us to have what we want when we want it at a cheap price. Labor Unions, the New Deal and the Great Society tried to change all of that but capital will have its way and flow upwards so we’ve spent the first quarter of the 21st century being distracted with various scandals while those who really run things continue to quietly undo all of those policies. I don’t know why I went off on that tear. Probably because after a show my mind races for a couple of hours and things just come out. Time for bed now. I have a meeting at 7:30 tomorrow morning and that’ not too many hours from now.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 