Here we are. Opening night. The last opening night I will be sure of for a long time. My last opening night in the beautiful Vinik Theatre. You can bet your ass I made it count.
Opening night is a beautiful yet terrible thing. Beautiful because you can watch, see, and feel something magical coming together for the first time. Terrible because as soon as the first strains of the overture begin, you realize that this beast is out of your hands.
I suppose that's me thinking like a director. This big, snarling beast of a musical is no longer in the place where you can yell "STOP!" and run a number five more times. You've got 200 pairs of eyes, and one shot to make an impression.
A new friend summed it up quite nicely: "Compared to rehearsal, performing is easy."
I'd agree with that for the most part. Rehearsal is the learning. The teaching. The envisioning. Performance is the doing. The culmination. The end game.
But performing adds something entirely different to an equation that we've tinkered with for weeks. Performance adds the audience. Those other humans for whom we make our art.
They bring this indescribable energy to the room. I believe that the theatre is the most human place in the world. You bring hundreds of different people into the room for one thing: an experience. You know going into it that this experience will be different for everyone; we celebrate that difference.
Theatre is art made for, by, and with people. As a director, I proudly call myself an artist. My medium is humans. We strive to find emotion, drama, movement, narrative--all while asking our audience to open their eyes and see themselves on the stage. Everyone's a bit of a Man in Chair. People dream of spontaneous tangoes and Show(ing) Off. We all put monkeys onto pedestals. We all just want to be taken away sometimes.
This night poured some serious lighter fluid on my passion for theatre. Those lights you see in that picture caused the fire to catch.
Life is uncertain. The future can be scary. Friendships don't last forever; people come and people go. You'll wake up one day and wonder how you got there. I can't promise that there will always be advice that is coherent and relevant to the situation. But I'll give it a shot...
Follow your passions. Do what lights you up. Live while you can.
I can promise that as long as we can hear our own little bluebirds, there will be a fucking song.
As we plumble along.
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