2 days till #Hallowmeme!

Sunday night cinema

It's "whom"

There is a moment near the end of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?--Edward Albee's 2002 play exploring the outer limits of love, fidelity, morality and tolerance--where the emotional crisis at the center of the narrative boils over into such catastrophic levels of heartache and rage and such Greek-tragedy levels of destruction and retribution that the first time I saw it--and the second time and the third time and the fourth time--the audience collectively gasped to the point of almost screaming and then sat rigidly and almost palpably silent until well after the final stage light had extinguished and the last emotionally drained actor had silently moved into position for the company bow.

It's one of my two favorite--if there even exists a favorite-not favorite continuum of cataclysmic emotional destruction--moments in modern theater ... the other being the last three seconds of David Mamet's Oleanna before the stage becomes abruptly, dreadfully dark.

Though he's largely a genre unto himself, it's difficult to pigeonhole Edward Albee as a playwright. He wrote or adapted about 30 works that embodied movements like Theatre of the Absurd and brought popular works of fiction like The Ballad of the Sad Café and Breakfast at Tiffany's to the stage and screen.

My favorite Albee works--Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (embodied in this photo by the incomparable Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor playing the American-experiment patriarch and matriarch George and Martha [whom the script deliciously describes as "large, boisterous woman, 52, looking somewhat younger"]), The Play About the Baby and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?--all share the format of four characters on stage and one character who may or may not exist offstage. It's an intriguing conceit, and one that keeps bringing me back to these three plays for my own contemplation. In an odd double standard, though, I can't stand reading them; the characters for me seem to be clumsy and dry with no meaningful depth on the page but they grant a glorious latitude for actors to make fascinating choices as they flesh them out.

Today is the third anniversary of Edward Albee's death. I'm not one to be sad when famous people I've never met pass away--and having seen only six of his works (that I can remember) I'm certainly no slavish Albee devotee--but I'm profoundly thankful for the emotional roller coasters he's put me on over the years ... and for the body of work he's left that I can continue to explore in my own way in my own time. I have a couple favorite quotes I'd love to mention here in closing, but they're all potential spoilers. So I'll just lift a glass of bergen to his memory.

LITANY OF DEMANDS

1. Laundered socks will reunite on their own like Cary Grant and Debra Kerr in An Affair to Remember but sooner and with no off-screen auto accidents or racist music recitals.
2. Smoke alarms with dying batteries will not chirp so randomly that you can’t figure out which ones need rebatterying but will instead shout HEY! OVER HERE! THIS ONE! MARCO ... MARCO ... MARCO ... POLO! YOU FOUND ME! NOW REPLACE MY BATTERY!
3. I will finally master the “bowler brim” verse of “Put On Your Sunday Clothes.”

If you’re going to squander a perfectly good evening that you’d reserved for doing productive things, you might as well spend it making use of your long-neglected Netflix subscription

Great-read books that rose to the tops of the piles in tonight’s brief excavation of the storage unit:

Two are bipolar. Two are totally gay. One is a fascinating historical-fiction fantasia (Let the Great World Spin—read it!). One is the pre-McSteamy actual reference book that I received for Christmas 1981 back when I had dreams of being an ER doctor. But it qualifies as a great read only if you really REALLY want it to be.

#UnwantedIvanka

What’s more appalling:

That I’m having ice cream for dinner or that I just said Kitty Kitty Bang Bang out loud in public?

Really, Amazon Prime Video?

The entire batshit-crazypants Left Behind trilogy is free in your catalog but Can’t Stop the Music is $3.99?

Is it because I finally blocked all the fox “news” channels tonight?

I know it’s May The Fourth Be With You Day

but in space no one can tell the difference between franchises so this is still relevant.

I just laughed waaaaay too hard at this ...

I’m one bird-feathered fascinator and a barely attractive missing fiancé away from being Carrie Bradshaw!

David Yazbek wrote Full Monty. David Yazbek wrote Tootsie.

By the transitive power of awesomeness, I’m going to love this show more than my smudgeproof lip liner.

Notes on my first night in NYC

1. Hadestown is insane.
2. IN.
3. SANE.
4. I’ve never seen or heard or experienced anything like it.
5. Everything about it—the music, the staging, the acting, the on-stage orchestra, the singing, the choreography, the sets, the costumes, the PASSION—is just off the charts.
6. I have no idea how anyone could learn all the incredible intricacies of the music and the choreography and the staging around the well-utilized turntables.
7. Especially the poor swings and understudies.
8. You could tell the whole audience didn’t want to leave and break the magic when it was over.
9. Did I mention we were in the third row center?
10. Because we totally were.
11. I got two slices of pizza, a Gatorade and a piece of cake for dinner on my way back to the hotel.
12. $28.68.
13. I don’t want to talk about it.
14. I swear I just heard two girls in our hotel hallway call me Danny and invite me to play with them.

We gays have the best stuff hidden away in our storage units

My Fair Lady > Elf > Full Monty > 9 to 5 > Follies

Yesterday marked the end of an eight-month marathon of rehearsals and performances for five overlapping shows. It’s been fun and exciting and challenging and exhausting, but now I’m more than ready to put my dance bag in the back of my closet and delete all the screen grabs of still-need-to-memorize lyrics from my phone and contemplate the joys of maybe actually watching a television show. Or seeing a movie. Or having more than 30 minutes to work out after work. Or maybe finally Swiffering my long-neglected bedroom floor.

Speaking of unmentionable bedroom filth, what the hell do you suppose was the creative spark behind this disconcerting advertisement ... or how the agency convinced Joan Crawford that fanning her skirt around would make a compelling sales pitch for Lysol?

Subtext, Joan. Subtext.

GREAT MOMENTS IN OSCARS HISTORY:

Allan Carr—the producer who brought us the mega-hit movie Grease in 1978, struggled mightily to keep disco relevant long enough to prevent his 1979 not-at-all-gay-porn-so-stop-giggling movie musical Can’t Stop the Music (featuring the Village People, Bruce Jenner in a wardrobe of distractingly cropped T-shirts, and a “Y.M.C.A.” musical sequence that drove a million ‘70s boys into the filthy homosexual lifestyle) from tanking, and then depleted Broadway’s entire reserves of sequins and taffeta when he made La Cage aux Folles the toast of the town in 1983—sabotaged his entire storied career and everything he’d achieved in life 30 years ago when the “antithesis of tacky” Academy Awards ceremony he produced opened with a now-and-forever-infamous-laughingstock parody of “Proud Mary” sung (extremely poorly) by (I am not making this up) Rob Lowe and (stay with me here) Snow White to celebrate (I said stay with me) “the youth of Hollywood” and (of course) get sued into oblivion by Disney.

Fun fact: He *did* that year change the convention of “And the winner is ...” to “And the Oscar goes to ...”. So there’s that.

#neverforget

#samedif

Lighthearted watching on a polar-grade winter’s night

Dear LORD this man is grotesque. And punchable.

It takes an awful lot of clothing to be a singing stripper

Also: There are grown, functioning adults in our dressing room who just asked each other in a fog of cultural bewilderment if the song “Footloose” was written for the movie Footloose or afterward in some kind of ride-the-post-Footloose-movie-pop-culture-wave frenzy. And I am apparently THE ONLY PERSON IN THE ENTIRE DRESSING ROOM WHO’D LIVED THROUGH THE ‘80s AND FOUGHT IN ITS HARDSCRABBLE BEMOMJEANED TRENCHES AND ACTUALLY SAW FOOTLOOSE IN THE THEATERS WHO COULD UNLOCK THE MYSTERIES OF THE MEDIEVAL PAST AND ANSWER THEIR QUESTION.

(Answer: The song was written for the movie. DUH.)

Also: Kevin Bacon as Ren McCormack. Or just guys named Ren in general. Sigh.