My theater bug: "Evita." I saw it in the fifth grade, and my life changed. I went to the North Tonawanda public library and borrowed the "Eva Peron" biography, and learned (a) prostitution is a thing, (b) Argentina is a country in South America, (c) there is a phenomenon, or at least a myth, called "sleeping your way to the top," (d) it's possible to be a movie star and later a major political figure, (e) if you're Latina and looking for a term of endearment, you can just stick "ita" on to a name, and (f) big-deal politicians from one country might travel to other countries, even other continents, simply as good-will ambassadors. All of this: news to me.
Andrew Rannells writes today, in the Times, about feeling that gender is tiresome. He had that feeling in childhood. I had that feeling, too, when I saw "Evita"; if you were going to pretend you were an Argentinian alive in the 1930s, why not go ahead and make an additional leap and pretend you were a woman? Who would want to be Che--standing around, getting angry, providing lumpy bits of exposition? Wouldn't you want to be Evita--declaring, "All I want is a whole lot of excess"--?! Cutting your husband down to size when he murmurs, "I could find job satisfaction in Paraguay"--? Battling your ovarian cancer, battling God Himself: "Oh, what I'd give for a hundred years, but the physical interferes--everyday more, O My Creator. What is the good of the strongest heart--in a body that's falling apart? A serious flaw. I hope you know that." Anyone in his (or her) right mind would want to be Eva.
Another character didn't grab me this way until Georges Seurat, in high school. Sondheim's Seurat. A hero for depressed, gay teenagers--everywhere. I loved that he had a vocation. I loved his spikiness and his tense, conflicted relationship with his senile mother. In high school, I was a robot who churned out good grades. It was increasingly frightening to me to contemplate adult life, because I didn't know what my motivation would be, once I wasn't receiving report cards. Seurat was a way forward, because he was loony, waspish Sondheim in disguise. (If you don't actually know any "out" gay men, if they do not exist in your world, then you lean on Sondheim.) I could see--not consciously, but on some level--how the effort to tell the truth, in an artistic way, could be a governing passion; it could get you through life. That's what "Sunday in the Park" is about.
Georges--and his great-grandson, George--want to "give us more to see." They want to "stretch one's vision in every direction." Tiny details become all-consuming: Georges basically sacrifices his romantic commitment because he wants to stay home and make a painting of a hat. Georges wants--intensely--to get people to see what they do not yet see. He resists the lazy, the inaccurate, and the banal: When his girlfriend accuses him of drawing monkey cages at the zoo, he snaps, "The monkeys, Dot. Not the cage." He notices colors other people don't notice, and he speaks directly to the figures in his painting, in a charming, deranged way: "And you, sir. Your hat so black. So black to you, perhaps. So red to me."
Musicals are stories about misfits. They are life-support lines for gay Midwestern teenagers. There's a reason Elphaba is so powerful (and this isn't news): A gay kid sees the outcast embrace her own outcast status, and actually derive power from that weirdness, and it's like a light goes on. Over and over. You hear Barbra Streisand, or LuPone, or Peters belting out the insistent, shrill, unpopular commands of Momma Rose--and you think, Someone gets me.
Now I'm obsessed with "Falsettos." I'm especially drawn to the big tearjerker at the end. The protagonist has lost his love to AIDS. He asks: "What would I do if I had not loved you? Who would I blame my life on?" His dead lover appears from beyond the grave--another favorite Broadway trope!--and asks if he, the protagonist, would have picked the road he's on, now, if, long ago, he had known where it would lead. (To early-widower status.) And the protagonist: "I left my kid. I left my wife. I'd do it again. I'd like to believe that I'd do it again and again and again." The protagonist is ennobled because he has allowed himself to love and to lose love; he has chosen to be alive. "There are no answers, but who would I be--if you had not been my friend?" I can't listen to all this without getting teary.
I have an encyclopedia of facts in my head. Stephen Schwartz is the king of the "I Want" song: You can draw a straight line from "Just Beyond the Riverbend" to "Meadowlark" to "Spark of Creation" to "The Wizard and I." "Defying Gravity" works because of the tension between the two witches, the internal conflicts within each witch, and the way the actual flight and the high-pitched ululating match the meaning of the final verses. (Form dictates content.) Christian Borle has two Tony Awards; Judy Kuhn has none, though many would rank her among the top five or ten Broadway stars of all time. Elphaba wasn't supposed to be Idina Menzel, for a long while; she was supposed to be Stephanie J. Block. All of this is useless trivia. But a passion is a feeling you have without really, ever, getting close to articulating the reason for that feeling.
Rannells ends his piece, today, by imagining a kid in Omaha watching Sunday's Tony Awards and beginning to draft--for himself--a future. In the words of Howard Ashman, it's "a tale as old as time." (NYTimes review for the animated film, "Disney's Beauty and the Beast": "This is the best Broadway musical of the season, and it's not a Broadway musical.")
But, anyway: Let's save Howard Ashman for another day.
Andrew Rannells writes today, in the Times, about feeling that gender is tiresome. He had that feeling in childhood. I had that feeling, too, when I saw "Evita"; if you were going to pretend you were an Argentinian alive in the 1930s, why not go ahead and make an additional leap and pretend you were a woman? Who would want to be Che--standing around, getting angry, providing lumpy bits of exposition? Wouldn't you want to be Evita--declaring, "All I want is a whole lot of excess"--?! Cutting your husband down to size when he murmurs, "I could find job satisfaction in Paraguay"--? Battling your ovarian cancer, battling God Himself: "Oh, what I'd give for a hundred years, but the physical interferes--everyday more, O My Creator. What is the good of the strongest heart--in a body that's falling apart? A serious flaw. I hope you know that." Anyone in his (or her) right mind would want to be Eva.
Another character didn't grab me this way until Georges Seurat, in high school. Sondheim's Seurat. A hero for depressed, gay teenagers--everywhere. I loved that he had a vocation. I loved his spikiness and his tense, conflicted relationship with his senile mother. In high school, I was a robot who churned out good grades. It was increasingly frightening to me to contemplate adult life, because I didn't know what my motivation would be, once I wasn't receiving report cards. Seurat was a way forward, because he was loony, waspish Sondheim in disguise. (If you don't actually know any "out" gay men, if they do not exist in your world, then you lean on Sondheim.) I could see--not consciously, but on some level--how the effort to tell the truth, in an artistic way, could be a governing passion; it could get you through life. That's what "Sunday in the Park" is about.
Georges--and his great-grandson, George--want to "give us more to see." They want to "stretch one's vision in every direction." Tiny details become all-consuming: Georges basically sacrifices his romantic commitment because he wants to stay home and make a painting of a hat. Georges wants--intensely--to get people to see what they do not yet see. He resists the lazy, the inaccurate, and the banal: When his girlfriend accuses him of drawing monkey cages at the zoo, he snaps, "The monkeys, Dot. Not the cage." He notices colors other people don't notice, and he speaks directly to the figures in his painting, in a charming, deranged way: "And you, sir. Your hat so black. So black to you, perhaps. So red to me."
Musicals are stories about misfits. They are life-support lines for gay Midwestern teenagers. There's a reason Elphaba is so powerful (and this isn't news): A gay kid sees the outcast embrace her own outcast status, and actually derive power from that weirdness, and it's like a light goes on. Over and over. You hear Barbra Streisand, or LuPone, or Peters belting out the insistent, shrill, unpopular commands of Momma Rose--and you think, Someone gets me.
Now I'm obsessed with "Falsettos." I'm especially drawn to the big tearjerker at the end. The protagonist has lost his love to AIDS. He asks: "What would I do if I had not loved you? Who would I blame my life on?" His dead lover appears from beyond the grave--another favorite Broadway trope!--and asks if he, the protagonist, would have picked the road he's on, now, if, long ago, he had known where it would lead. (To early-widower status.) And the protagonist: "I left my kid. I left my wife. I'd do it again. I'd like to believe that I'd do it again and again and again." The protagonist is ennobled because he has allowed himself to love and to lose love; he has chosen to be alive. "There are no answers, but who would I be--if you had not been my friend?" I can't listen to all this without getting teary.
I have an encyclopedia of facts in my head. Stephen Schwartz is the king of the "I Want" song: You can draw a straight line from "Just Beyond the Riverbend" to "Meadowlark" to "Spark of Creation" to "The Wizard and I." "Defying Gravity" works because of the tension between the two witches, the internal conflicts within each witch, and the way the actual flight and the high-pitched ululating match the meaning of the final verses. (Form dictates content.) Christian Borle has two Tony Awards; Judy Kuhn has none, though many would rank her among the top five or ten Broadway stars of all time. Elphaba wasn't supposed to be Idina Menzel, for a long while; she was supposed to be Stephanie J. Block. All of this is useless trivia. But a passion is a feeling you have without really, ever, getting close to articulating the reason for that feeling.
Rannells ends his piece, today, by imagining a kid in Omaha watching Sunday's Tony Awards and beginning to draft--for himself--a future. In the words of Howard Ashman, it's "a tale as old as time." (NYTimes review for the animated film, "Disney's Beauty and the Beast": "This is the best Broadway musical of the season, and it's not a Broadway musical.")
But, anyway: Let's save Howard Ashman for another day.
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