BLOG: Episode 4 – Waiting for the theatre curtains to raise once again
There is almost an ethereal quality to the way velvet, wood and leather can transform stale acrid white wine, mephitic cedarwood colognes and saccharine floral perfumes into the warmest and most comforting of scents.
How that amalgamated aroma weaves through a dark arena crowded with society’s elites and ends up remotely pleasant, I will never know. As I once stood on flooring carpeted with 21st-century vintage fabric, I used to be one of those people. The people who Boisterously laughed with friends, took blurry photos and owned a smile that would make the Cheshire Cat jealous.
Maybe it’s the result of a childhood of brainwashed socialization, or it’s the instinctive response to utter darkness, but we all would grow stone silent with rapt attention focused on the platform in front of us. For the split second between the cacophony of men and the slight raise of stage lighting, the whole world would stop and I would feel a pause of childlike anticipation.
I cannot begin to fathom if there is another moment so pure and wonderful as the beginning of a live musical.
I’ve always loved musicals, even before I knew what they were. As a small child, I instinctively gravitated to movies and television shows with musical performances, in particular, anything with an Alan Menken score, but I was too young to quite understand composers and their impact. By the time I was ten, I already knew the names of great musical theatre actors like Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, but I called them Mrs. Potts, Angelique and Princess Jasmine.
When I was 10, I remember watching the Tony Awards and witnessing Idina Menzel’s “Wicked” performance on the stage and feeling everything within me reset. As I got older, I absorbed every aspect of musical theatre a pre-teen could without actually joining the theatre. I may have been dumb in love with the theatre, but I wasn’t deaf and I knew that was just not an option for me.
The first time I saw a live musical theatre performance, I was 15 and it was “Pippin.” I hated the music and the plot with a fiery passion (seriously, you don’t want me to get started on how much I loathe this story). But, I loved watching it. Being in the theatre alongside the actors is an indescribable rush and I thirsted for more.
Flash-forward to 2020 and I have attended more professional and local shows than I can count. I have a box of Playbills that sit in my room, taunting me to find a better permanent home for them. I listen to cast albums to the exclusion of almost every other performer. My daily routine included putting on a Broadway playlist and reading the daily news from Broadwayworld.com before searching for blogs and retrospectives of “Glee” and “Smash.” For someone who never stepped a foot on the stage, musical theatre somehow became my entire existence.
But now, it is 2021, and theatres across the world have gone dark for over a year now. The COVID-19 pandemic forced my beloved Tony Awards to delay repeatedly. In the grand scheme of things, live theatre is a minor loss, but it is still a loss.
When the pandemic first hit, I comforted myself with slime tutorials, movie musicals and musical theatre YouTubers. But now, I can’t bring myself to listen to the opening notes of “Wicked” or fancast the inevitable “Sweeney Todd” reprise. My “Glee” comfort episodes bring me nothing but unyielding waves of sadness.
Proshots, once a rare glimmer of joy, leave me numb and empty as if they are just the indents in the carpet of where furniture used to live. When the “Hamilton” proshot came out on Disney+, it felt like a lifeline to the world I used to know. However, two weeks after it premiered, I suffered a mental breakdown because I was afraid I would never be able to see the show live. I haven’t listened to any aspect of the show since. When “Hamilton” TikToks pop up on my “for you page,” I shut off my phone as soon as humanly possible. Pre-COVID, “Hamilton” was my favorite album of all time, now, I don’t know if I will ever listen to it again.
I have a “Come From Away” keychain that resides in my purse and consistently gives off a barely-there clink-clank that feels like the auditory equivalent of a painful tattoo that never healed properly. I can’t seem to bring myself to remove the keychain despite the imaginative burning of my skin where it touches me as I fish my keys out of the Kate Spade cavern. As much as it hurts, it is the last physical reminder I have of the live-theatre world. Nine days after I was transported to Gander, Newfoundland, theatres across the nation went dark.
When Broadway and other theatres reopen, it won’t be the same. The chandelier from “Phantom of the Opera” will never crash as majestically as it once did. When the “Come From Away” audience leaves the theatre, the tears staining their faces won’t belong to the show. Alex Brightman’s Beetlejuice will never terrorize and enthrall audiences again. The Broadway (and musical theatre in general) we once knew and loved died on March 12, 2020. What comes next will be something else; something new, but hopefully, just as magical.
