Wake me for the miracle...

I attended a benefit concert tonight for the incredible Transport Group, the theatre company here that recently did See Rock City And Other Destinations (see below, AMAZING music and pretty great show all around, my brilliant voice teacher Sally Wilfert is the actress singing the song with her grandfather in the wheelchair).
They are also reviving Michael John LaChiusa's Hello Again this Spring.

The benefit was a tribute to LaChiusa and spanned much of his best-known work, though one point that the hilarious hostess Mary Testa kept making was that he is incredibly prolific. Entitled a "Boys' Night Out," performers included some of the best voices I've heard on one stage in the same night--Marc Kudisch, Malcolm Gets, Max Von Essen, Stephen Pasquale, Alexander Gemignani...and the list goes on. Their performances, though, weren't even the point of this blog. YES, the concert was incredible. YES, the performances were breathtaking (especially, I must add, from Marc Kudisch. LaChiusa pointed out that he wrote several characters forthe man, and it showed. His voice is ridiculous--range, musicality, power, you name it, and it seems LaChiusa is really the perfect man for writing something [many things] to showcase it.), but it was the material itself that left me brokenhearted at the end of the concert.

Rich and I were walking out and we saw a friend of mine from Cincinnati who's directing up here now. He had directed LaChiusa's See What I Wanna See a few years back, and I said "you know, I think I would kill a child to do that show."*

*not really.

**no, I might.

I won't go into a book report on See What..., but suffice to say it's a piece that simply rips you in half, I would imagine as a performer, and certainly as an audience member or listener/reader. In not so many words, it's what I wish I was doing more than anything. Now, of course, pieces like this one don't come along that often, and I'm nobody in the grand scheme of my business, so it's totally ridiculous for me to act like I could even come close to picking and choosing what I was doing, but this play is everything that I love about theatre, and it's the kind of theatre that charges, recharges, changes minds, changes hearts. Maybe someday. I know I have to focus on the positive aspects in everything I'm doing, no matter what it is, and not get lost in the 16-bar cuts, the running between one studio (where I throw on my gray dress and boots and give 'em red-headed earthy belter) to the other, several blocks away (to put on the bright blue dress and pink shoes to give 'em soprano ingenue), and the closest thing to a full production on my horizon that happens to end in "A Mousical!"

I talked with my grad school classmates who are THANKFULLY in the city now just last night on how in the world we can stay positive and motivated. I think we know that sticking together is going to be key, and discussion has started of something of a theatrical "book club" of sorts where we meet up, have a potluck, read monologues, read through a play, sing through songs in a specific show, discuss it, whatever it takes to get back into feeling like ARTISTS in some small way.

LaChiusa said it himself in the aforementioned See What I Wanna See, through the character of an Atheist grandmother, when she sings:

There will be a miracle
Stick around and see
You need patience for a miracle
Timing is the key

Somewhere in the middle of the Mousicals and the ECCs there will be some truly inspiring and artistically fulfilling work, I know it. I'm doubtlessly one of the "hungry souls" the song mentions. In the meantime I'd better get my food for tomorrow packed, along with my black shorts and tall black open-toed heels. Ragtime/Rocky Horror EPA in the morning...wake up ETA, 5AM.