It’s pushing midnight and I should really be pulling the covers up over my head and trying to get some sleep. Especially as I have to be up in the morning for choir rehearsal, church service, and to teach Sunday school, all before reporting to the theater for tomorrow’s matinee. But, per usual, it’s taking me some time to wind down from tonight’s performance. Into the Woods has found its groove and settled into its run nicely. Tonight was performance 7 out of 12 (or 9 out of 14 if you count our dress previews) and the cast have all found their timing, their comic bits, and their moments of playing off each other which come at this stage and gives the production a certain level of buoyancy it was just beginning to achieve when we opened last week. The word of mouth around town has been terrific and so audiences are coming in expecting something special. Tonight’s audience had obviously been at the bar before the show started as they were raucous and responsive to everything. That’s exactly what you want when you’re performing musical comedy. They were even laughing heartily at the black humor moments in the second act.
I love being in an ensemble show that just works all the way around without any weak links. You know you’re a part of something far greater than you could ever achieve on your own and that if any piece were to misfire, the whole edifice could come collapsing down. But, instead, you make it all the way to curtain call having held the audience for the whole two and a half hours. I’ve been in other shows where there were major issues. A poor performance, design misfires, low energy, and you can tell that it just isn’t landing with the audience so those of us on stage try harder and harder, but it’s ultimately a lead balloon. I’ve been on a roll in recent years. Most of the projects I’ve been part of have gone well. I hope I can keep it up. I just got a call back notice for another musical for early summer and I have a play in April and direct in July and August. Fingers crossed that I finish out the season on a continued high note.
This cast is full of very accomplished singers. I do not count myself among that group. I dislike the sound of my own voice intensely and I remain incredibly intimidated when onstage with those who have performance degrees and Broadway/National Tour credits. But the current round of voice lessons are helping a good deal. My teacher is trying to break a lot of bad habits and rebuild it. One of my fellow castmates, a woman whose talent and voice I have admired greatly for many years was listening to my mic check tonight and said she thought my voice was beautiful. It made my night. My biggest regret with this show is that there’s so little ensemble singing – only in the prologue and the two act finales. When we’re all onstage and singing together we really do sound good.
The message of Into the Woods (or one of the many messages) is that it requires community to solve big problems and that those who try to live only for self interest are ultimately doomed. I can’t help but think that’s a good theme for today as the unpleasant political news continues to pour in from all sides. It’s getting to the point where I’m dreaming of locking myself in my condo and turning off all media for the next nine months until after the election, especially as self interest seems to be the name of the game on every side. The attitude of I and mine are fine and screw everyone else is no way to order a functional society long term and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better, only worse as the tendrils of late stage vulture capitalism continue to infest every sector along with the attendant willful ignorance that’s needed to keep people from thinking critically about problems from multiple points of view and understanding that the answers to big societal questions require input from more types of people than are likely to live in gated communities with over zealous homeowners associations. The current attempts to ban, if not destroy books describing life from alternate viewpoints, defund programs that give voice to marginalized communities, and demonize religious principles antithetical to ones own are all about trying to preserve a very narrow reading of the gospel of America which doesn’t serve a globalized world of mutual interdependence.
If a certain class of people come to power and are given the means to execute their ideas of a fortress America, I wonder if they understand the consequences? The Stephen Millers want to rapidly deport millions. That would require a paramilitary of tens if not hundreds of thousands being asked to dehumanize their friends and neighbors. We would have no agricultural workers to speak of (and no ability to import produce with an impermeable wall at the Southern border). The hospitality industry would likely collapse. There will be no workers in child care or senior care requiring millions of adults (mainly women) to leave well paying jobs for domestic duties. We would have to have a system of internment camps that would dwarf what the Germans created in the 1940s with the attendant problems of sanitation, predation and other issues of overcrowding. And the legal issues that would be created between cities (mainly blue), states (divided) and federal (divided) would choke the court system for decades.
Ask yourself, if my friends and neighbors become immediately endangered by a rapidly hostile federal government, what are you going to do to protect them? I know what I’m planning.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 