February 20, 2024

I feel like I am trying to dig out of a hole created by several months of devotion to Into the Woods. I was sure I had stayed fairly caught up but now that I have resurfaced, I’m starting to notice all of the little things that I had put aside to deal with after the show and the piles are starting to teeter. There are legal cases requiring reviewing, music to learn, auditions to prepare, an enormous stack of laundry, church projects, book readings/signings to prepare and schedule, stuff to do to maintain board certification, a passport to renew, a car in need of a maintenance tune up, and some friends whom I have recently neglected and need to figure out a time for brunch or dinner or at least coffee. I’ll get it all done. I always do. But I’m going to have to make sure I don’t take on anything new for a month or so while I’m whittling away at the pile so everyone out there who was thinking about asking me to do this or that… don’t.

Most of my fellow cast mates have been decompressing after the show’s closure this past weekend and reflecting back on what this particular journey into the woods meant to them. It’s been interesting reading their reflections, some of which are similar to my own and some of which take completely different perspectives on the material and the experience. The Virginia Samford Theatre touted this show as an All-Star Birmingham cast since most of us have been around for a while and have played leading roles there and at other local theaters over the last few decades. I don’t consider myself a star, just a journeyman character actor who occasionally gets a lucky break with a really juicy role and who has lasted long enough to be a known quantity when it comes to casting. I have good theater work habits, usually do well if cast in the right part or opposite the right performers, and am perfectly willing to take a minor role in a production in which I believe in order to hang out with insanely talented folks and learn from them. Over the last twenty years, I’ve been in something like sixty stage productions in this town, some very good, some very not. This Into the Woods enters my top five. I can never have a single favorite. It’s always apples and oranges. How do you compare an edition of Politically Incorrect Cabaret that’s firing on cylinders with a classic musical with a modern drama with a 19th century opera?

I just have to say I’m deeply grateful to Chelsea Reynolds for casting me and allowing me to play with these dear friends, many of whom I have adored for decades (some of whom I have never had the chance to actually share a stage with in the past, despite knowing and admiring their talents from the audience for years) and letting me be a small piece of the ephemeral work of art which is theatrical performance. Theater has power because it is real and it is happening with the collaboration of the audience, mirroring their aspirations and fears and it will never exist again in that form after the final curtain is brought down.

My Christmas gift to Tommy’s family this year was tickets to the show for all eleven of them and they came en masse to our final matinee. He has five great nephews and nieces (ages five to fifteen) who loved it. The five year old, born while Tommy was in the hospital with his final illness, was riveted and on the edge of his seat the whole time. It’s a very long show for a five year old but he was so caught up with the twists and turns of the story and the magic of live performance that he barely fidgeted according to his mother. Perhaps we have a new member of the family who will want to follow his great uncle into the world of mutual cooperation and teamwork and creativity that I discovered for myself all those years ago.

I was taken to my first adult theatrical performance at age five. It was the very last American tour of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company’s original staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. I can still see it in my mind. The colors, the lights, the orchestra in the pit and remember the frisson I felt when the curtain rose and those real people enacted a story to music that I didn’t fully understand and still found mesmerizing. It has occurred to me, that if I live to 80 or so, that I will be one of the last people on the planet who saw an original staging of a Gilbert and Sullivan. Maybe that’s why I still enjoy them as much as I do. I’ve done Pinafore and an abbreviated Pirates. I’d like to do Yeoman of the Guard one of these days. I love the Mikado but the orientalism has become a bit problematic. It works fine, though, without the Japanese trappings if done by an imaginative director. If you don’t believe me, look up the English National Opera production of the late 80s with Eric Idle as Ko Ko.

I had a long talk with my editor/publisher this weekend about the new book. We have figured out a path forward in terms of how it should be put together. Now I just have to come up with the time to sit down and do some writing. Which is running into the issues mentioned in my first paragraph above. It will all work out in the end. I tend to do my best when under a bit of pressure. I don’t necessarily like how it makes me feel in general but I have figured out over the years just a little too much to do makes me more efficient in general and my work product tends to improve. Now if I could just figure out a way to get by on less sleep. Tommy and Steve both used to do just fine on five or six hours tops. I need about seven or eight. Perhaps I should induce a little hypomania. That’s probably not the best of ideas.