Theater

It's not always easy to find a topic to talk about in this blog.  I want there to be enough variety so that people can look one day and, if the subject doesn't interest them, come back the next day and go "Oh, that looks interesting."  However, while some things are easy to map out ahead of time (Ask Eriks and episode reviews, for instance), other things tend to be a spur of the moment deal.

This appears to be one of those days, so I'm just going to grab something from a huge stack of stuff I have to sort and ramble about it for a while let's see here.  A gift card to Ricetta's...I should use that.  A World Wildlife Fund sticker...need to find a home for that.  Okay, just grab something, let's see what we've got.

You know, I don't know if I still have anything that could play this.  I had a Walkman somewhere but I might have got rid of it.

All right, first things first, a confession: I didn't actually see Matthew Broderick do this show.  My family and I saw it about a week before he was scheduled to either start or return, but they had the posters and soundtrack for sale.

Now, if I remember correctly, Megan Mullally was in the performance at the time, and I remember being pretty impressed that the "squeaky woman from Will and Grace" was so versatile and was such a good singer.

I've always tried to make it a point, any time I'm in New York, to see a stage show.  To this date, from what I easily remember, I've seen magicians and performance groups, but also shows like How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (with Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella), The Lion King, The Play What I Wrote, and others.  I've enjoyed each one, and simply reaffirmed for me the magic of theater.

It's funny how, when you're just looking at a stage, you see all the work.  You can see some of the wires holding pieces up, a few nails might be showing, and you know there's wooden frames behind everything and you're about to see a bunch of people in costume come out and pretend to be other people.  Once the show starts, if the performance does it right, one of two things happens.

With some shows, you never forget that they're on a stage and performing for you, but they seem so into it that you easily believe they're acting like how they always act and simply are being given a storyline to perform.  These tend to have a bit more audience interaction.  The other, though, is probably the closest thing we, as people, can do that can still be described as something so far beyond basic understanding as to be described a s "magic."

The show simultaneously frees your mind while placing its own prison around it.  Chains holding your sight down and grounding it in facts and details are stripped away and you're able to "see" what the performers want you to see.  Wooden sets become cities, actors become characters, and music becomes the heartbeat of the world, pulsing as moments of action and drama rise and fall.  You forget about your seat, you forget about the audience around you, you forget about even being in a theater, as the edge of the stage just becomes the edge of where your vision of this new reality begins.

But while it does it, the show is setting up its own control over you.  You see what the performance wants you to see.  When the stampede scene happens in The Lion King, it doesn't fill the whole stage, just a section of it as puppets are used to bring a heart wrenching moment to life.  Your brain doesn't think to glance at the other side of the stage, your mind is viewing things like you're at one of those quarter-powered binoculars at tourist locations, and the show has aimed you and zoomed in to keep the spell from breaking.  It holds on to you and doesn't let you go until it feels ready to, barring a flub or mistake from an actor, but even then they use it to draw the audience in.

When I saw Forum, Nathan Lane has a moment where he interrupts a huge argument amongst the rest of the cast.  The audience was so drawn in that, when he had this moment for us, the whole room burst with applause.  It lasted so long the cast just stood there for a moment, unable to continue as they wouldn't be heard.  Once we all died down, Nathan Lane seized control of the scene, pulling us back under control and shaping our vision again.

Whenever I emerge from a well done stage performance, there's always a moment where I have to let my mind rebuild reality around me.  I'm no longer picturing a world shrunk to fit on a stage, it's now large enough where I'm a speck in it.  Music won't come to let me know what the general mood of the area around me.  Light won't always work perfectly over things.

If I had the choice of a movie or a play, I'd go for the play any time.  Granted, I'd want the cast of the play to be somewhat as high caliber as the movie, but even an amateur performance typically has more value than some of the cheaper films I've seen.