Just Stritch It

Early in 2009, I was working on the first musical I had been cast in with a singing role since I was 12 years old. It is probably just as well that I wasn't writing this blog at that point, because I may have been tempted to express certain frustrations I may have felt with the experience, but as is, least said, soonest mended, so I will just say that there were many travails in the process. One of the hardest, for me, was my solo, because this was a hard solo and I am not a good singer. I am a decent singer. I am one of the best singers in my family, and this is saying absolutely nothing, because when I was a baby I would actually put my hand up to my mother's mouth whenever she tried to sing me a lullaby, as though I knew even then that something was distinctly wrong. So imagine me, someone who had never sang outside of a shower, a car, or a burlesque show (where the singing takes third place after comedy and stripping, no matter what Christina Aguilera might have you believe), trying to nail a great big solo number with notes held for sixteen counts.
As if that weren't enough, I was surrounded by extremely talented singers, people who had been doing musicals for years, decades if you counted college. I was intimidated as hell. This was not what I had bargained for. I had auditioned for the company, not the show, and the company did experimental theatre. I love experimental theatre. I can do that. What I could not do was make this song work.
It took a really great director, music director, and the support of the cast to make me realize something: I didn't have to sing it. I was sitting in a coffee shop one night before the rehearsals when two of the immensely talented leads came in and sat with me. I told them that I was worried about my solo, that I felt like I couldn't do the song. One of them said, "Rudy, I couldn't do your song. It's long, it's complicated, and it's a list song." List songs, for those who don't know and can't guess from the name, are songs that, rather than telling a story, simply offer a list: think of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. List songs can go really wrong really fast. I needed to bring variation. I needed to bring out the camp and the comedy. In short, I didn't need to sing it; I needed to act the shit out of it.
Or, to put it yet another way, in the words of my music director, "Just Elaine Stritch it!" I knew just what he meant, and I thought I did.
Last night, I realized that I did not Elaine Stritch that song. I saw Elaine Stritch herself Elaine Stritch a song, and what I did couldn't hold a candle. If Elaine Stritch is tiramisu and espresso in a cafe in Rome, I was Chips Ahoy and Mountain Dew in a basement apartment in Jersey. When Elaine Stritch cracks her knuckles and Elaine Stritches a song, the world stops spinning and you are left alone in a room with Stritch, or maybe you're just inside her head, a person she imagined to tell her story to, a story so intimate that it couldn't possibly be told to a real human being.
The song that Elaine Stritch Elaine Stritched was "Liasons" from A Little Night Music, a musical that I performed in during college. Now, I know you're thinking that either I'm a dirty liar or have begun an early descent into senility, but while I was in this musical, I didn't have a singing role in it. I played Frid, Madame Armfeldt's personal valet who wheels her around in a wheelchair throughout the show and who, in the second act, gets to sleep with Petra, the shamelessly slutty maid. Lest you think I had only been cast in a small role that semester, it was a part I took on at the last minute. My roommate was directing the show, and I was wrapping up my own directorial project for the experimental company (See! I told you I could do that!). He needed a Frid, and I asked if I could take the role. After having me audition, he cast me, and we jokingly discussed how funny it would be that I, an out, loud and proud queer who was well-known around campus for being an LGBT activist, would be kissing a girl.
Ha ha ha.
On opening night, I went upstage before we had even officially opened the theater to find my mother waiting for me, a complete surprise. She said her conference at Princeton had let out early and so she had driven to Philadelphia to see me perform. I told her it was a very small role, but she said she didn't care: it had been a long time since she had seen me do anything on stage. After a first act of me doing nothing but stand and push, the director came up to my mother during intermission and assured me that I had lines in the second act. I didn't just have lines, though. I actually came onstage in hot pursuit of Petra, my collar undone and a bottle of champagne in my head, at which point the entire audience erupted into the hoots and hollers of a crowd ready to see just how convincing a heterosexual I could be. They were even louder in their approval when I kissed her passionately and then began slowly working my way down to her hoo-ha as the lights went down. They laughed, they cheered, they applauded, and as the noise died down and I was almost off-stage I heard, "Oh my goodness!" This started the riot again and was neither the first nor the last time that my mother upstaged me.
The next night, our crowd was dead, laughing at virtually nothing. Then I came out with the champagne and everyone woke up screaming. When we got offstage, the actress playing Petra whirled around and asked, not without a sense of frustration, "Rudy, does EVERYONE on this campus know you're gay?!" Another actor, a hetero male one, said, "Yes, everyone on this campus knows that Rudy's gay." To prove him right, I made out with him a few weeks later.
Because of this and so many other wonderful memories associated with the play, I decided that I wanted to see A Little Night Music before it closed. I had wanted to see it with the director and the actress who played Madame Armfeldt, two people that have remained good friends of mine to this day. Unfortunately, balls were dropped in terms of getting tickets, and so in the wee hours of New Year's Day I found out that the show was sold out. At this point, I had a decision to make: cut my losses and just spend some extra time with my friends, or try to get a ticket by hook or by crook.
I didn't have to think long. Had this just been A Little Night Music, I would have saved my money, but this was Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch.

I had loved Bernadette Peters for so long that I can't even remember when I first fell in love with her; it took some time with the IMDB to figure out that it was probably Annie, of all things, where I first saw her. I loved her in pretty much everything, especially Into the Woods, of course, but it was only this year that I fell for her performance in Sunday in the Park with George, only at the age of 30 that i really began to understand both her character and Mandy Patinkin's. Last year I was briefly in a relationship; for those who don't know me, this falls somewhere between "full moon lunar eclipses" and "Halley's Comet" on the astronomical scale of rare events. For reasons that I vow never to go into on this blog, I ended the relationship. Bernadette Peters singing "We Do Not Belong Together" is one of the things that got me through that break-up. Her performance perfectly captures the rage you feel at the world when you realize that the only way forward is to step away from the person that you love and the rage you feel at your lover when you know that they won't follow you when you walk away. She feels the despair of that moment but she also finds the hope, and pulls herself out of despair hand over hand via that hope. I needed that.

I needed Elaine Stritch a few years ago. She famously says, in her one-woman show, that it's rather ridiculous for women in their 40s and 50s to sing "I'm Still Here:" "Where have they been?" she asks. She, in her 70s, then knocks the song out of the ballpark. If It is ridiculous for a woman in her 40s to sing that song, then it is ludicrous to the point of pathetic for a boy in his mid-to-late 20s to sing it, but that's what I was doing when I was 26 going on 27. It was one of many songs that I was singing along to in my car when I came back from Berkeley, where I had spent two-and-a-half years in graduate school and where I had slowly felt the life-force drain out of me. You're not supposed to talk about a job or a time in school as a low point in your life--these things are supposed to be an inherent good, while addictions and bouts with disease are inherent evils that make perfect memoir fodder--but I hope that this blog does just that. I want to develop a VERY carefully written show about how we stay on career paths because we feel we have to, leaving our dreams on the side of the road and then arriving at our destination only to remember that this wasn't where we wanted to go in the first place. We can step off of that path, and go backwards, and find those dreams right where we left them, and even as the world screams at us that we're making a huge mistake we can shove a middle finger in the air and prove them wrong. When I put on Elaine Stritch back then, I didn't know that all this was true, but damn it, I hoped it was, and singing along to her line, "I got through all of last year" made me look back at a year of depression and choices made out of fear and let go of it.

So it was no contest. I went online and, although the tickets were expensive as hell, there were premium seats available, and I had Christmas money I had intended for just such an occasion. The next day I was on a train to New York, hoping to god there were no major delays. Sure enough, I arrived and walked then ten or so blocks to the theater. I got my tickets and held onto them like they were my life savings. I went to a bar across the street, not wanting to risk being even a minute late, and had a lovely conversation with the woman next to me, who was, like me, seeing the show alone. Funnily enough, when we took our seats at the theater, there was just one chair separating us. Did I mention we were 4th row center? We were 4th row center. I was so excited that all worry about the money was out the window: this was my first Broadway show since Avenue Q in 2004, and I was doing it in style.

Then came the show. If I am going to be totally honest, I will say two things. The first is that I have seen a couple of shows with famous leads where you get the sense that the director spent too much time on the leads and not enough with the supporting cast. There were some weak and annoying performances in this play. One performance that was strong and enchanting, however, was Leigh Ann Larkin's as Petra. As someone who feigned sleep onstage when a Petra performed her solo, "The Miller's Son," which is about unrepentant sluttiness (something I stand behind totally), it was nice to finally get to see it from the audience, and Larkin made it the liveliest number in the show. Holding your own against two living legends is no small feat.

The other thing I will say is that neither Stritch nor Peters are in their vocal primes. I expected this from Elaine Stritch, but it was a bit disappointing not to have a Bernadette Peters delivering her full belt. These women are, however, in their acting primes, and have been for decades. Both of these women have Judy Garland's capacity to let their eyes well up with approximately 26 gallons-worth of tears and yet keep them there, making their eyes sparkle with barely contained heartbreak. Both of these women bring intelligence and strength to the women that they play. Nevertheless, between the two of them, it was Elaine Stritch saying, "He could have been the love of my life" that hit me square in the chest and got my own tears flowing, and if I could have one song from that show to live again, it would be "Liasons." As with her classic, "The Ladies Who Lunch,' she turned that song into a three-act play. It's about a courtesan recalling her former lovers, the luxury of her life and the way she played them all for money. Yet she is never venal. What made Elaine Stritch the perfect Madame Armfeldt is the same thing that made her the perfect Joanne in Company: her warmth. Underneath all the cynicism is a profound warmth that she feels for the men she's been paid by, as well as a deep love for her daughter and granddaughter. She is revealed as a woman who has carefully avoided heartbreak over the years by never letting herself love, and it is only now, at the close of her life, that the pride she feels is tinged with regret. And as if all that weren't enough, she throws in a moment of absolute hilarity, punctuating the line about the King of Belgians deeding her a duchy with a "Woooooo!" of triumph worthy of a Super Bowl winning touchdown. That, my friend, is a performance to remember.

It's also a performance to learn from. There is nothing like seeing Elaine Stritch Elaine Stritch the shit out of a song to remind you that there is no room for weak sauce onstage. This is a woman who is still getting up there every night well into her 80s and showing everyone else in the cast how it's done. We should all be so lucky. We should all work so hard. And for those of us, like me, who are not the best singers in the world, we should all figure out how to turn every song into a three-act play, and brace ourselves. and Stritch.