Sleepless
Posted July 21st, 2004 by Sean WilliamsSo I have a response to http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1263641,00.html”>this goddam article. Yeah, surprise, I have something to say.
Last night was dress rehearsal for my show “The Lady and the Ladle” a children’s musical about a town that becomes hopelessly obsessed with commercialism. I’ve been on edge lately for several reasons, but one of them has been our inability to fit in enough rehearsal for this show. The cast are about as lovely as people get, but it isn’t the strongest group I’ve ever worked with.
As an aside, these are perhaps the loveliest group of people I’ve ever done a show with, taken as a whole. Everyone is just so damn nice. Even the musical theater people are more or less kind people, and musical theater people are the dregs of humanity usually.
Anyway, we had our final dress last night, and it was really ragged. Some people in the cast are not going to get any better on their lines or their parts, but three or four more rehearsals would have been great for all of us. It’s not even character development kind of stuff, it just would have been great.
It’s hard to sleep any night between dress and opening, but particularly hard if dress ends at ten and call time is the following morning at 8. In fact, if this blog is a mess, I hope you’ll understand that I am operating under Jimmy Stewart in Spirit of St. Louis levels of sleep. I woke up every twenty minutes or so, afraid that I had overslept, and I finally just got up at about 6:15 and left for the show.
Make-up, hair, costumes, pre-show conversation, some girl talking about peacock feathers being bad luck, some guy talking about how touring isn’t for him. I don’t romanticize these things, but I think I might look back on them fondly if I were ever unable to move from my bed or something. It’s lovely, people doing what they can to show off for one another. I dressed by myself but eventually found my way over to the rest of the cast.
The director came in and gave us our five minute call and we got ourselves together and went to the wings.
I called Jordana after the show and I tried to tell her what happened, but I couldn’t really, and hours later now, I still can’t really describe it. I just know that I don’t usually feel okay, I don’t usually feel like I’m making the grade or matching up to the people around me. Everyone’s got more money than me, everyone’s smarter than me, everyone’s thinner and more successful and whatever, and I walk around like a coked up clown at a children’s party, making balloons and funny faces, desperate to make sure that the people I see either think I’m awesome or, failing that, at least make them understand that I know I’m as much an ass as they think I am.
But waiting in the wings, I feel okay, in the right place. I don’t feel like that, I feel like this other thing, that I can’t explain. For many people in the audience, this is the first time they have ever seen a live show, people singing and dancing and making them laugh. I remember my first show, I bet you do too. And these kids will remember what I did today for the rest of their lives. They won’t remember Paris Hilton.
You know what? I’ve got something to say about that piece I linked to, but it’s gonna have to wait. I just can’t do it today.
I’ll say this much today. You are a snotty little fuck. I know it’s a sin to covet, it’s bad to kick dogs, and we should all get more exercise, but, for the record, every time someone celebrates anti-intellectualism, every time someone celebrates the easy answer, every time someone opts for celebrity and kitsch over innovation and work, the steady march of human progress trips a step and, to me, that is the greatest sin of all. You’re definitely cool, I’ll give you that, but mocking live theater is like laughing at Sally Struthers. It’s easy, it’s ignorant, it’s destructive and it’s cruel.