top five musical related moments in your life?
I’m going to count this as a fan rather than as a theatre person, or we’ll be here all night. So:
When I first saw Hair on Broadway and saw Jay Armstrong Johnson go on as Claude (he was the understudy). Before that I was really a theatre kid who cared about Broadway because it was theatre, but I probably couldn’t have named a single Broadway actor. After seeing Jay as Claude and being blown away by him, I went and searched for him on youtube and discovered the crazy amount of videos of musical theatre actors on youtube. That’s when I turned into a total Broadway fan girl who has favorite understudies and can give you an actor’s whole resume.
Seeing Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal play Mark and Roger in Rent on Broadway. It was the first time I’d voluntarily seen a Broadway show for a second time and I was sure that I was going to miss them, but I didn’t and I’ll never forget it.
The opening notes of Magic To Do the first time I saw Pippin on Broadway. I’d already seen it in the pre-Broadway run in Cambridge, but Pippin had been one of my favorite shows since I was too young to be allowed to watch Pippin. When the Broadway marquee went up, I posted a picture saying, “I’ve been waiting my whole life to see you.” Because I really had. When the opening notes played that first time, I started crying because I was so glad it was real.
Sitting with januarium in the front row of Hedwig the first time we saw Darren in the role. I didn’t really know anything about the show until I saw Neil play Hedwig last year, and I’d been in the process of falling in love with the show ever since. I wasn’t even supposed to go see Darren that trip, but I just couldn’t turn down the experience of seeing it front row. It was one of the most amazing, overwhelming hour and a half stretches of my life. Just being that close, falling in love with Darren and Rebecca’s portrayals, seeing this show that I’d been growing to appreciate more and more over time, and most importantly, getting to do it all one with one of my best friends in the world who I hadn’t gotten to see in meatspace before that day. Afterwards, I just felt like I got run over by a bus. It’s a hard experience to top.
Seeing Godspell on Broadway for the first (and second, and third) time. Godspell was the first show I ever saw on Broadway that I had been in before I saw it. And there’s something about being in Godspell that is a bit hard to explain. I’m sure not everyone experiences this, but I’ve talked to a lot of people who have felt this way. It’s not even necessarily religious, but Godspell itself is about the formation of a community of believers, and when you do the show, you feel that community. You feel the way that you as a cast are becoming a community in the way theatre people always do, but, for once, that’s also what you’re playing on stage. The story becomes a story about people that you love. And when the group goes around and says goodbye to Jesus at the end, you feel like you’re saying goodbye, especially on that last day. For me, I grew up in a community of theatre people that I loved very much and that were the center of my universe and that was where I did Godspell, with a selection of my favorite people in the world, during one of the hardest times in my life. And by the time I saw Godspell on Broadway, that community was long gone. Not only had I been a part of that show and felt what it was like to fall in love with it, but I’d also felt what it was like to say goodbye to my community.Godspell on Broadway had such absolutely brilliant direction and was such a joy to watch, and by the end of it, I was crying, even though my friends weren’t. I ended up trying to explain that when you’ve done Godspell and had an amazing experience, it just gets to you. When you watch the group say goodbye to Jesus, you remember that feeling.
