In The Beginning

In times of stress, it is quite common to seek out comfort. For me, comfort comes in the repetition of favorite TV series. I have nearly worn out the tape on The Great British Baking Show and Gilmore Girls – ‘tape’ is old school lingo for Netflix button. Typically, the comfort “food” is balanced with a healthy portion of new content – for me, primarily on stage. Alas, seeing live productions is, temporarily, not likely.

In seeking out new content during the ‘Rona, there are hits and misses. Have you tried to watch Floor is Lava? No? Don’t bother. Not even Jesus could help that trio of ministers win or make that “game show” worth watching. Athlete A is worth a watch. It seems Netflix programmers run the gamut from completely awful to quite commendable. All that to say, if anything good has come out of the global pandemic and subsequent shutdowns it is that theater companies, performers and producers have made the leap to streaming content, both original and previously filmed. Some of the group sings are incredibly fun – please watch the Hairspray “You Can’t Stop the Beat” video – but there is also a push to release or make available for free filmed stage performances of plays and musicals.

As much as I want to love Andrew Lloyd Webber’s canon and applaud him for streaming his content for the masses, I was much more excited to learn that Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Act One would be made available for streaming a couple of weeks ago. James Lapine wrote and directed the stage adaptation of Moss Hart’s Broadway memoir. While the production did not blow me away, I recognize that it is simply impossible to replicate the immediacy of live performance with a filmed version. In fact, reviewing a live production based on only a filmed version is really not fair. I  will say, I did not fall asleep, or even doze off, while it was on; that’s high praise coming from a person who nodded off and awoke at intermission of the big, lavish tour of Hello, Dolly! last spring. Watching Act One on screen made me wish I had seen Tony Shalhoub and Santino Fontana (both portraying Hart at different stages of life) live on stage. Hart’s desperate longing for a life in theater, his restlessness while striving to get there and the reality once he did was written all over their faces. One can only imagine the energy of their live performances.

Watching Act One made me long for the days of  joining the masses to shuffle into the theater, contorting your body when someone is seated inside the row but arrived late and experiencing a show collectively, a show that because it’s live and anything can happen will never happen just like that, for you, ever again. Every trip to the theater is unique and special. Watching the production spurred me to finally pick up the book, purchased in January in New York City just before the scales began to tip. Not even halfway through I have discovered the passage that, to me, explains perfectly the fact that theater almost literally captures an audience, be it the audience sitting in their seats waiting for the curtain to go up or an audience of its own makers and creators, and then refuses to let go. Hart writes,

“It is noticeable, I think, that anyone who has tasted the heady wine of the theatre, even on its merest fringes or in the most menial of jobs, is cut off from the outside world forever after. The world of the theatre is as closed a tribe and as removed from other civilian worlds as a Gypsy encampment, and those who enter it are spoiled for anything else and are tainted with its insidious lure for the rest of their lives.”