Day 467…
The other day, as I was walking through Washington Square Park, I came upon a woman dancing in the rain.
The rain was really coming down, so nobody else was out in the park. I had nowhere much to be so I didn’t care if I got wet. I’d been out on a walk when it started, and I just decided to keep going.
I’d seen the woman in the park before. She was always in the same place by the fountain and always dancing. She had a box out for tips but the fact that nobody at all was out there with her didn’t seem to have stopped her resolve to keep at it. When I’d seen her before on other days, there was enough noise around her that I couldn’t really hear her music. That day, out there in the rain, though, I could hear it plainly and follow how she was interpreting it and reacting to it, through her body.
Yesterday afternoon, I saw a photography exhibition by an artist named Adrienne Raquel who photographed adult entertainment performers in a club called the Onyx. There was a quote from one of the performers on the wall that said, “Everything is not what it seems. Mind the business that pays you. Stay true to who you are, someone’s going to love it.”
Mind the business that pays you.
Vincent Van Gogh, famously, never sold a painting in his lifetime and yet is considered one of the greatest artists who ever lived.
Many months ago, when the discussions began about how commercial theatre would start up again, there was the thought that it would start slowly. A couple of shows would begin and then others would be added to them slowly as the market got used to being back. There would be a slow but incremental building back up to operating at full capacity. What happened, though, was the exact opposite. When Governor Cuomo announced last month that Broadway would be able to operate at full capacity, everyone announced their restart dates for about the same time all together. Suddenly, everything is back on sale.
And nobody is buying tickets.
My doctor still will not eat inside a restaurant. This is a medical man of science who has been fully vaccinated, and he won’t do it. I have eaten inside a couple of times when the restaurant in question has had high ceilings and tables that were spread far apart. As desperate as I am to experience live theatre again, am I ready to sit shoulder to shoulder with 1400 other strangers in a contained space for over two hours?
At some point I will be, but I don’t think that I am there yet, and I’ve been far more adventurous and willing to take risks than some. Venturing inside a restaurant with people I know is a far cry from sitting inside a theatre with people I don’t. If we aren’t fully ready to do the former, what makes anybody think that we are ready to do the latter?
There is an art to creating commercial theatre but is commercial theatre art? Over the years, I have enjoyed the challenge of having to make something the best that it can be given the financial restraints of any given situation. My job has always been less about what the product is, and more about the skill and efficiency of delivering it to an audience. My say in the creation, execution and selling of it might be limited, but my organization around the building of it, my assistance in how the process unfolds and my maintenance of the final piece can help make the difference between both artistic and financial success and both artistic and financial failure. I am a necessary component of a Broadway play that works, but just another name on a list of the people who worked on a show that doesn’t. I can’t necessarily make a show fail, but I am necessary for it to succeed.
We all make things. We make shows. We make deals. We make stories. We make agreements. We make paintings. We make decisions. We make friendships. We make money. We make dinners. We make photographs. We make children. We make art. We each, hopefully, decide to make the thing that fulfills us the most. As things begin to reopen, I find myself faced with the question, what do I want to make?
New York City is starting to feel normal to me. It’s become busy and loud again. People are out on the streets and gathering in clumps on the sidewalks. I have started to have to make actual plans to get together with friends who over this past year have been readily available to me but who are now busy back at their jobs. That seems normal or at least what used to be normal.
I met two friends for lunch the other day that I had never met in person before. I met them through Michael via zoom and they are part of a group that got together with us every week virtually over the course of the entire shut-down. One lives not too far away from us but the other lives in another state and this was the first time that she’d come into the city in well over the year.
“It’s changed,” she said.
I guess it has. Having been here through every single microscopic step of its transformation, I’m finding it more and more difficult to see those changes. When I go out for a walk to take pictures, what’s different is harder for me to discover. I sometimes return home without photographing much of anything. I know that there are almost no tourists here and still no throngs of office workers, but they’ve all been replaced by city-dwellers out for a good time who seem to take up the same amount of space.
Mind the business that pays you.
I start back to work properly next week and will be out of town for about six weeks. It will be fantastic being back in a room with a group of people making something together. After this, there are some future job prospects that excite me and some that don’t. I’m not sure that there are enough of the former to keep me from having to do some of the latter to pay the bills. As much as I love doing what I am doing at this very minute in time, writing is not going to pay the rent. I’m not sure that I would ever want it to. There’s no pressure on it to be anything other than what it is.
I worked on a musical called Sweet Smell of Success that might be one of the best shows I have ever done. It was dark and challenging and nobody much liked it. We closed after a very few performances and the entire investment was lost. I can see why people out for fun might not have wanted to spend an evening being dragged through the dark underbelly of human existence, but there were moments over the course of it that were as thrilling as anything I have ever seen or been a part of. The cast and creative team were as good as it gets but it just didn’t work as a piece of commercial theatre. It was considered a failure not because of the art but because of the commerce. Honestly, as much as we all loved doing the show, I am not sure that anyone involved was truly surprised when our closing notice went up.
Jersey Boys was equally as thrilling a project to work on, but this time around everybody wanted to see it. I am writing in an apartment that we were able to buy largely from the money I earned working on it over the years. In that regard, it is as different from Sweet Smell of Success as you can get. On an artistic level, however, the level that really drives me, the experiences were the same.
As tempting as it is to think about just throwing everything aside that doesn’t feed our souls, we all still need to put food on the table. As much as people are calling for theatrical producing offices to close and unions to shut down because they have been slow and resistant to making changes to expand inclusiveness, where would that leave us? Isn’t it better to try and fix a flawed system than to have no system at all?
The woman dancing out in the rain in Washington Square Park did not look homeless. I would venture to guess that she either has money from somewhere or she must make it somehow. The three dollars that I gave her which was what I had in my wallet at the time is not going to get her very far.
I couldn’t write without also working at my job in the theatre. That I mostly love what I do in the theatre is a boon that I am beyond grateful for. The success of Jersey Boys and all the other commercial theatre shows I have worked on has, because of my union, provided me with the prospect of a comfortable retirement pension, but I’m not there yet. I’ve still got some time ahead of me where I need to work to pay the bills. Artistically, I may have found something new and satisfying to do this past year and a bit, but practically, I still need to mind the business that pays me.
The woman who danced in the strip club understood that clearly. We don’t always get to do exactly what we want to do whenever we want to do it in the way that we want to do it.
Vincent Van Gogh’s brother bankrolled him throughout most of his life. He sent him money and supplies when he could. He gave him work in his galleries. Vincent never made a sou off his work, but because of the support he was getting, meagre though it might have been, he didn’t need to. He just painted. I would love to think that the woman in the park was a tech millionaire, who dances for herself because she can.
The project that I am about to be working on won’t have a live audience; it will eventually be streamed. I don’t know how I would feel about opening something for live performances right now. Maybe I’d be fine. I fear that this rush to reopen Broadway is going to mean that a lot of these shows - both new and old - are going to fail. So many BIPOC writers and directors are being given their shot this coming season but unless something changes in terms of how these shows are being produced, this could all backfire and be used as an excuse in the future. “See, nobody wants to see plays like that.”
We all want to see plays that challenge us and make us look at our lives from a different perspective than the one we are used to, but I’m just not sure we want to do it together in a crowded theatre, YET. The new movie of the musical In the Heights has a lot of my friends talking about going to a movie theatre to see it. I don’t know. I understand why, but I just might want to stay home and stream it here.
Greed is not going to get us all back into theatres. This isn’t a strip club; we are going to need a bit of sweet talking and maybe a dinner first. Maybe even a second date.
The pandemic isn’t over yet, but it’s starting to be. Here. There are places in other parts of the country and other parts of the globe who are still very much in the thick of it. We aren’t out of the woods by a long shot, but maybe we are starting to be able to see light coming in through the trees.
I do want to be back inside a crowded theatre eventually but for now, I am happy to watch the performers who are all over the city making music and dancing out in the open.
“Stay true to who you are, someone’s going to love it.”
I think that the dancer in the park understood how much I loved what she was doing when I dropped the money into her collection box. Our eyes met for a moment, she smiled, and then she kept on dancing.
I love the image of this woman dancing in the rain. It’s truth in buckets! Beautiful post♥️♥️
❤️yes, I too believe that dancer knew how much you loved what she loved doing. You are true to who you are