GREAT WHITE WEIGHT

I don't know why I didn't see this musical on Broadway, but I should have. When my sisters and brother-in-law went to see it during its initial run many years ago, he said he thought it was boring and lacked the usual Broadway flair.

Sometimes the best opinions on Broadway musicals do not come from brothers-in-law. For once I should have ignored him, even if right now I am getting ahead of my story.

I love musicals. Jellicle songs for jellicle cats and chicks raise me to a higher level of understanding the purest forms and functions of music onstage. I will hear a song from a musical for the first time and I could chime while wailing for the gap between their authoring and my listening, Where in the world have you been hiding?
A beautiful love song, sung live, can change my outlook completely, even for an instant, and say, Love, love changes everything, hands and faces, earth and sky.

My love affair with musicals started not by watching it onstage but by being part of what was going on backstage. It was a different world back there, none of the glamour, twice the fun, and I probably would not have been this attached to musicals if not for that first -an unforgettable first - experience.

I was a freshman in high school and during our foundation day the seniors presented Jesus Christ Superstar onstage. It was an annual thing, not just the foundation day but the JC musical, and every year the seniors play the parts.

Before the number was called, I went to take a peek backstage to find out what's going on, and what was then going on gave me a consummate thrill. There were cables and equipments everywhere and at the center of the makeshift wall were 10 switches installed side by side. Each switch was labelled as floodlights, or blacklights, or rotating lights, or dancing lights, or simply branded with a color, and so forth and so on. Taped next to the switches was a sheet of paper that turned out to be the lighting script - the method by which the lightsman was to turn on one switch and turn off the other in the progress of the musical - which was perfectly timed not just by an indication of the scene when a certain switch was to be turned on/off but by a specific line of a specific song in a specific scene. And so when Mary Magdalene was crooning "Try not to ge worried, try not to turn in to problems that upset you" as she and Jesus were warming up to each other in one scene, a switch labelled "yellow" was turned on and the stage was awash with a color of friendship, and when Jesus responded with his "Woman your fine ointment, brand new and expensive..." song, the stage shifted to a red hue to signify the sudden increase in tension, thanks to the guy at the back who timely turned on the switch labelled "red" and turned of the one for yellow, exactly as the lighting scripts asked for him to do.

My innocent exercise of curiosity paid dividends big time as I became the lightsman the following year, and the year after that, and so I was an accidental lightsman before I got to be an incidental lover of the musicals.

In my senior year, armed with stage skills and a little contempt for repetitions, I lobbied for a change of presentation. No more of the JC musical, on with something new. And as part of stage powers that be, whatever it was, I was called in to direct a musical of my choice. Oklahoma.

When it comes to musical presentation that I, somehow, become part of, I forget the word humble. Oklahoma, the musical, was touted as the best presentation in my school, ever, at that time.

Fast forward to decades after. I did not become part of the stage, in musicals. I simply watched them, and continue to do so, while they have something to present and I have the money to spend. Musicals on Broadway do not come in cheap, some $55.00 for upper level, middle row seats, and so it gets to be a little revolting when all you have to go through is a heap of trash disguised as songs.

My first Broadway experience was fantastic, front row seat at Gershwin theater for Showboat, and next to that was fanbloodytastic, last vertiginous row for Les Miserables. Both were great, great still, and I will never tire of listening to any one song in these musicals.

I have seen many after that: Man of La Mancha (featuring the song Impossible Dream); The Pajama Game (yuck!); Big River (great musical, great name); I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change (funny as hell); The Beauty and the Beast (there was a scene here where a character was transformed from pauper to prince, foom!, in all of five seconds of smoke); Contact (very revolutionary for a musical, not one song was sung by any actor and every music played was canned, as background); and, Wicked (a pretty wicked bore!)

And of course, the overrated Miss Saigon which was a horrible watching experience. Many years after Lea Salonga, my sister and I watched this show on Times Square one rainy December, seated at the top freaking level, all wet, and there was this couple in front of us who obviously did not know the ethics of watching a musical (which was about the same as watching a tennis match, you applaud only after a point was won). So these morons were clapping their stinking hands right in the middle of songs, and worse, one was interpreting to the other, in a loud voice, what was being sung on stage. In the Fall of Saigon scene where locals were being hauled out of the city, I so wanted to scream and asked if they could take into limbo the distracting, disrupting, discombobulating morons in front of us.

And of course the disappointing experience was made more disappointing by the lackluster performances by the actors onstage, all simply going through the motions, bored by the songs which were admittedly uninspired and uninspiring. And from which I learned, you do not conquer the hearts and minds of the viewers with something huge as a helicopter on stage. It's in the song, baby, it's in the song.

And that is why this video I had been watching for weeks, which I regret not seeing on stage, is the best thing to happen to me now since the discovery of (musical) fire.

Four things got me here: It is about Bohemia, it stands up for sufferers of AIDS (which include the friends of those afflicted), it is set in The Village, and the first scenes happen on Christmas Day.

Rent is this musical, and in one scene which I play over and over and over again, I still can't get to decide which of the two is more haunting, the scene or the song.

Inside the Ryder Community Center somewhere in the ghettoes of Lower East Side of Manhattan are 8 lonely souls sitting on chairs forming a circle, having a brainstorm. It is December 25th, and as one of the 8 was telling a friend in a previous scene, Some people have nowhere to go on Christmas Day.

All 8 of them have AIDS and the leader of the group asks one to begin. The young guy (early twenties maybe) says "Yesterday I found out my t-cells were low", and when asked of his reaction, he says "Scared". The leader asks him how he feels today, now, and he answers awkwardly, Okay, alright, pretty good, the best I felt in a long time, months.

The leader follows this up with another question, as to why he chose fear, and he answers, I am a New Yorker, fear is my life.

And then the kiddo sings -

I find some of what you teach suspect
Because I'm used to relying on intellect
But I try to understand what I don't know
Because reason says I should have died three years ago.

Then they all stand up, hold hands while still forming a circle, and altogether sing a poignant song about the philosophical significance of here and now -

There's only this
There's only us
Forget regret
Or life is yours to miss
No other road
No other way
No day but today

God I wished I were a part of this musical, even if only as an innocent peeker at the backstage, someone lost in the temple of light switches. And then I will turn on the blue switch. Blue for cool. Way blue for way, way cool.