I should explain, before I continue, that theater luck to me is probably theater bonanza to most people. I see so many shows that my co-workers often treat me as a one-stop Broadway information booth. I even have a catalogue of sorts, in the form of the Playbills that wallpaper my cube, which makes everything very convenient. (“Oh, don’t see that one with your relatives,” I say, pointing to the Urinetown Playbill. “See Oklahoma – see it there, on the top left? – instead. Great family fare.”)
So when I say theater luck, I don’t simply mean I’ve seen a good show, or have done well at the cheap ticket game recently. I mean that over the past few months I have seen a handful of shows and performances that I will be telling my grandchildren about when I’m 80.
First there was the Sondheim Celebration at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. – which in all fairness I knew would be a seminal experience. A 22-year-old Sondheim fanatic is in a bit of a pickle if he or she wants to truly appreciate the songwriter/composer/wunderkind in his glory. I was too pubescent for Passion, too adolescent for Sunday in the Park with George and too embryonic for Sweeney Todd. In short, I missed the boat, and since discovering the man’s mad musical genius through a DVD of Sunday, I’ve been scrambling around trying to find good productions of his work. It’s not easy, as Sondheim’s work is infamously noncommercial, and boasts some famous turkeys. Frank Rich once said that “to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals” — well, to be 22 and a Stephen Sondheim fan is not to have your heart broken at all.
And when it comes to theater, I know which I prefer.
So I traveled to the Washington, DC, celebration on two separate weekends just to see six shows. I spent two and a half paychecks, in all. But after having my heart ripped open by the desperate love in Judy Kuhn’s Passion performance, and my mind ripped apart by Merrily We Roll Along’s subversion of innocence and optimism, I can safely say if I had the chance to do it all, spend it all, again, I would. Tomorrow.
My theater experience has been chugging along like this for some time; in early September my friend Anthony took me to see Hairspray, the musical that kicks The Producers’ gauche white butt all the way down the Great White Way (and back). I saw one of my favorite actors, Raul Esparza, perform as the emcee in Cabaret, fully expecting another rethinking of the Alan Cumming incarnation – instead, I got a rounded, slightly awkward, vulgar-with-a-smile character I’ve never seen before, and it changed my perception of one of my favorite shows.
I’ve visited Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, Virginia, Delaware and London expressly for theater (hey, I may be a geek, but at least I’m a well-traveled one). But when I decided to go to Toronto, I made the best decision of my theatergoing career. I have friends living outside Toronto who I’d been meaning to visit anyway, so when my chance to see Christopher Plummer as Lear in King Lear (in a town called Stratford, for Pete’s sake) came up, I snatched it. It was my first Lear and my first Plummer experience.
It’s a fair assumption at this point in the entry that you know I’ve seen a lot of theater, right? Perhaps I can best sum up the performance this way: I felt like I was watching an actor act for the first time.
I’ve read the text of Lear, I’ve written papers on it, I’ve watched taped performances. Plummer - this man, this master - so fully became the character that I forgot he was anyone else. There were shards of insanity in his kingliness and pathetic drabs of royalty in his madness; he raged and wheezed, coughed, spat, hobbled, whispered, even died with every ounce of him divvied up proportionally between king and lunatic. Lear the Madman thought love should be professed – Lear the King demanded his daughers profess it. Lear the Madman tried to take his shirt off – Lear the King, having never operated a button, failed.
I’ve never seen acting simply disappear that way. Plummer had Lear’s heart in a bottle, and let bits of it leak out of his grip each word he spoke. A drip here, a drip there, and all of a sudden there’s a brokenspirited pool of insanity in the middle of the theater. I’ve just never seen it happen, at least, not that way. Maybe it’s because acting quality just isn’t like that anymore; maybe it’s because I’ve been desensitized by endless streams of pseudointellectual, standoffish, scientific dismemberments people call plays, and have forgotten that real emotion does, occasionally, show up. Maybe it’s because I try so very hard to seek out these experiences.
Or, maybe it’s just luck.
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