And Now Some Thoughts from Jack Kerouac

"Accept loss forever
Be submissive to everything, open, listening
No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge
Be in love with your life."

--From Jack Kerouac's essentials for prose

My First Lesson from Stan Wojewodski

Student: “I can diagnose the problems but I don’t always know how to solve them.” 

Stan: “That’s the difference between a critic and director.”

On the State of Musical Theater Today

I was 10 years old the first time my mother took me to New York City.  I was your cliche musical theatre dweeb of a child; I watched My Fair Lady and Hello, Dolly! back to back when my mother somewhat absent-mindedly put them on as background noise when I was 5 years old and I have been a smitten kitten ever since.  My first Broadway show was Annie Get Your Gun with Bernadette Peters and Tom Wopat.  Despite the fact that Bernadette seemed equally disproportionate life size as she did in the windowcard (see here) I thought it was magical.   Bernadette fit my image of a Broadway star--charismatic, as radiant as all get out, and unique.  I had grown up listening to old school recordings of the Pajama Game, Oklahoma, The Music Man, The Sound of Music, Annie, Bye Bye Birdie, Guys and Dolls and the like.  These vocalists/performers weren’t always precisely on pitch and they all had a unique sound.  Through subsequent visits to NYC and a broadening knowledge of college musical theatre programs, I began to notice a rift between the old school sound of my favorite shows and what seems to be favored now.  The last few of trips I have taken to the City that I have taken over the past couple of years have been disheartening in a sense.  I feel like the majority of the leading ladies I have seen (aside from Patti in Gypsy, Bernadette/Elaine/Angela in Night Music, etc.--but I'm speaking more of the younger generation) have been practically interchangeable.  The ladies are generally very thin, beautiful, smooth-voiced or hardcore belters, and relatively uncharismatic.  (There are a couple of exceptions that come to mind immediately—Kate Baldwin in Finian’s Rainbow and Laura Benanti in…everything she does.)  The dancers generally have the same plastered smile and dead eyes.  They can kick their faces, but that doesn’t necessarily make me want to watch them.  Do I have an unrealistic image of what Broadway used to be, or is there really an unfortunate shift in what it has become?

Last week, I finally watched Broadway: The Golden Age.  While hearing all the old tales and anecdotes from Elaine Stritch, Adolph Green, Gwen Verdon and oodles of other musical theatre legends fed my soul, it also confirmed my worry and frustration.  Broadway is so much less about art than it is about commercialism right now, and I don’t even think it’s doing a good job at that.

Something that I believe has a lot to do with this is the institution of musical theater conservatory.  Do I think it’s fantastic that there are places you can go and train in musical theater all day long for four years?  Absolutely.  Sounds like fun to me.  Do I think it’s a double edged sword and it’s also caused us a loss in terms of uniqueness and art? Yes.  We’ve made the job more competitive but perhaps not in a good sense.  We’ve made it streamlined (and therefore, I feel, boring.)  There are hundreds of insanely talented triple threats on Broadway right now, but I can’t tell them apart.  I think that’s a problem.  Where did the Gwen Verdons, Ethel Mermans, and Gloria Grahames go?  They probably didn’t get into a good musical theater school.  Or, if they did, they had the same voice teacher and acting professor as the Julie Andrews of the class and their uniqueness got beaten out of them.

Furthermore, what happens when you don’t get into the musical theater program you want?  I haven’t auditioned for any, so I can’t really speak personally, but I know several insanely talented out-of-the-norm individuals who weren’t accepted to musical theater programs.  Thanks to musical theater audition “coaches,” there’s now a pageant mom-like mafia that you can overpay who have individual relationships with big-wigs at every musical theatre conservatory in the nation.  Then, you can overpay the conservatory to sound like everyone else and look like everyone else in hopes that you can become a big star on Broadway.

Sound like art and perhaps what Broadway should and used to be to you?  It doesn’t to me.

The plague of jukebox and movie-turned musicals doesn’t really help matters, either.  Unless there’s a large amount of awareness raised and a real urgency (raised from producers and casting directors, I suppose) for something different in performers and in shows produced, the Golden Age of Broadway really was a grand yet temporary and singular time in history.  Besides jazz, Musical Theater is really the only truly American music form.  It seems a shame for us to maintain this overinflated over competitive under talented/charismatic uninventive state we are currently in.

So what do we do?

It's my Last First Day of School

After some unfortunate tossing and turning and utterly failed attempts at going to bed early, I’ve resigned to finally blog away the insomnia.  I’m back.  At lot has happened since I’ve written last and I’ve thought about posting on many occasions.  However, given the reaction over the ever infamous “Spring Cleaning and Such” post half chronicling my late grandmother’s then declining health and the debacle over classes vs. outside shows at SMU, I have feared posting anything.  It’s a really delicate and fine balance between being honest and saying what you want to say, and overstepping boundaries/offending people unnecessarily.  Another quandary I’ve had is that so much of the time since I last wrote has been spent with a person who has completely altered my life and I haven’t quite decided how much I want to share of our life.  (Our, as in a “we.”  Yeah, we’re already to that point.)  I have full permission from manfriend (coined name of said person) to discuss whatever I want of our life together on here, but we’ll see where this goes.  I guess we’ll work backwards—starting with today (tomorrow) and moving back.

Tomorrow is my last first day of school.  I am petrified.  You would think that after many (20 or so?) first days of school the jitters would go away.

They don’t.

I also feel as though I’m in a particularly wonky position.  For reasons partially due to the fact that I had no earthly clue what I wanted to do (or maybe I did and I just didn’t have the guts to pursue it) when I graduated from high school, due to my aversion to Elvis Presley, and due to Wendy Welch and a rather eventful catchup conversation at White Rock Coffee, I’ve had an especially unconventional college experience.  This is the first year I have not been the new kid in college.  I was a freshman at Rhodes, the new kid at Richland/within Dallas theater, then the transfer sophomore/junior (shmunior?) at SMU.  Now I’m the junior/senior (jenior? Sunior?) at SMU and I actually think it’s going to be more difficult.  Maybe.

For those who have followed the blog over the past year, you know that this past year royally sucked for me.  It was undoubtedly the hardest year I’ve ever had in my life.  When you go through hard times, you aren’t always going to be quite yourself.

Side anecdote that relates. I promise.

I distinctly remember a couple of girls in around 8^th-10^th grade who suddenly became exceptionally catty and evil and unhappy for periods of time at Hockaday.  They alienated themselves by pushing away their friends.  In adolescence (and without any other experience), I assumed that they just decided to become bad people.  Not the case.  6 months or so later, these girls would inevitably subtly inform someone (who would kindly inform the other 100 of us) that their parents had just gone through a divorce.  When life throws you for a loop, you can become a monster.

I guess that’s what happened to me last year.  Or something like that.

Because I was somewhat “over” being the new kid last year (3^rd time in a row) and because I was in the purgatory of not really belonging to a specific class and because I already had friends in the Dallas theater community and because I was hellbent on getting my degree in 4 years, I decided to treat fall classes like a job.  And so I did.  I went to class, didn’t really bother to socialize much (but was by no means catty or anything other than amiable with classmates/professors), and went to rehearsal/went home.  Sure, there were things that bothered me about the system.  (The overpriced overadministrative confused bureaucratic establishment that is the American university is severely out-of-touch and out-of-date universally.  I’m currently reading “Higher Education?” because I heard an interview with the authors on NPR a week ago and just the fact that there’s a book on the subject makes me feel eons less insane for beings so frustrated with the system in general.)  Winter break happened.  I came back 2 weeks early to finish a practicum.  Was I happy about it? No. Did I do it? Yes.  No problem.  As Grandmama’s health declined, so did my sanity, state of soul, and overall disposition. (For those just checking in—Grandmama was like the ultimate hybrid of parental figure, saint, grandmother, best friend, confidante, role model, and beacon of all things right in the world.  We were beyond abnormally close for grandmother/granddaughter and her death taught me more than I ever wanted to know about grief and depression.)  So I entered second semester at SMU not knowing my peers or professors particularly well and then turned into a zombie (who regularly missed class to be with grandmama/the family) and then wrote this extremely frank and frustrated post about the way a school/show conflict was handled.  I was bound to make enemies (and garner an unfortunate reputation with students and professors I didn’t even know or with whom I’d never held a conversation.)

So, entering my last year feeling like Cady Heron at the gym in Mean Girls when she says the line (to the effect of) “You know how it feels when you walk into a conversation and you know someone has just said something bad about you?..Have you ever had that happen 100 times?” is not particularly appealing or inviting.  Is it my fault?  To an extent.  Is it anyone else’s?  Nope.  Fate and awful circumstances’?  Absolutely.  I guess I’m back to the mindset of treating school like my job (which it is, really) and trying to jump through the hoops as unscathed as possible.

Backtracking a bit?  I had a fantastic and obscenely busy summer.  In June, I dance captained Bye Bye Birdie at Lyric Stage (and played a teen/the sad girl in “Happy Face”) and taught/choreographed  Lyric’s kids production of Bye Bye Birdie.  Was doing Bye Bye Birdie 3 times in 6 months the smartest idea? I mean, not really.  I could definitely use a bit of a break from the show.  Was it worth it? Absolutely.  It was worth it for a multitude of reasons.  (I got to meet Charles Strouse—composer of the show!) Lyric Stage is—without a doubt—one of the best places to work in Dallas.  For my interests and passions, it fits like a glove.  Their goal is to preserve the great American musical in the manner it was first performed.  I think that’s the most glorious mission I’ve ever heard in my life.  I’m one of the few 21 year olds (oh yeah! I turned 21!) I know who would take a Rodgers and Hammerstein show over RENT any day of the week.  (And I just watched Broadway: The Golden Age and cursed the world for not being born 60 years ago.)  I lament the loss of charisma and storytelling dancing (it’s not all lost—Andy Blakenbeuhler’s (sp?) choreograph in In the Heights functions as contemporary Agnes de Mille-style ballets) and variations and color in voices. –For instance, manfriend and I were watching My Fair Lady tonight. Nobody sounds like Marni Nixon nowadays.  In fact, I don’t think Marni Nixon could get a job today.  But back in the day she dubbed over oodles of movie-musical stars. Being slightly off pitch and having a different sound a la Bernadette, Elaine, Ethel, Carol Channing, or any of the greats is shunned—unless you already developed a strong reputation when that was okay and honored.  I digress.  At any rate, it was a great experience.  Our glorious choreographer toured with 42^nd Street (the original tour) and taught me the original B’way choreography on breaks and our rehearsal pianist gave me mini-lessons on accompanying and reading scores.  Dance Captaining was a new and exciting challenge; it was an overall education.

July was frustrating in many ways, but it was also an education in its own right.  I moved out of my glorious apartment and moved home, turned 21, taught 8 year olds all month at the Dallas Children’s Theater, and played Anytime Annie in 42^nd Street at GSM.  Most of these events were insanely trying, but I’m glad to have survived them.

August has been blissful.  I had two weeks—one in Destin, one in NYC/Boston—of beautiful vacation with family and manfriend (respectively) and then returned to the sweltering heat in Big D.  I taught one more week at the children’s theater, and started My Fair Lady at Lyric Stage.  Again, working at Lyric is bliss and serving as dance captain is fantastic.  I’m not in too much of the show (for women, it’s basically Eliza…and Eliza…and…well, Eliza..) but I’m having a great time.  I also strangely started a shoe business (by total happenstance) but I am absolutely loving it.  Check out my website at www.kcustomkicks.com and shoot me a message on there under “contact” if you want more info/want some shoes.  (Shameless plug.)  I also (magically enough) got a new apartment that I absolutely love in a location very close to my old one.  I have certainly learned the value and importance of having one’s own space to function/think.

Now, I’m just focusing on maintaining sanity, goals, and happiness.  I’m gonna be like the little engine that could—I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.  Wish me luck.

I think those are really the highlights of what you’ve missed.  Questions? Comments? Concerns?  Wanna show some love or good wishes?  Comment, my friends!

Until next time—K.