Signs, Maybes, and A Paddleboard…

One of my most favorite tours that I have been on was one of the least known shows to come out of Broadway in recent years. It was 2015, I was 37, and the show was If/Then. If you are a Broadway fan, you’ve probably heard of it because it was directed by Michael Greif and…Idina Menzel played the lead. Anthony Rapp, LaChanze, and James Snyder rounded out the principals.

Let me start with this, I wasn’t in the best work situation immediately before If/Then. I was the head at Finding Neverland and things at that particular Broadway theater were complicated for me. There were a bunch of reasons, but looking back, most of them were exacerbated by my stubbornness or arrogant responses to conflict. In any event, after eight months, it didn’t feel worth the emotional turmoil or lose of my integrity anymore, so I decided to look elsewhere. When I was offered If/Then the day after I started looking, I accepted it immediately. Of course, I didn’t leave immediately since I like to give six ample notice, but everything is relative, right? I had made it almost two years in one apartment and had worked on two Broadway musicals. I made it out of Neverland having kept my sobriety intact and I was sure that I could handle the road again. All of this felt like enough so I put my recently procured NYC apartment furnishings into a Manhattan storage unit, took what could seem like a pay cut, and headed back out on tour. I agreed to have an assistant that had never toured…and that I had never met. Plus, I didn’t know a single other person in the touring company when I started. This meant very few opportunities existed for “Remember when you were really drunk and (fill in your own example of my stupidity here)” stories….perfect, yeah? Pro tip – thankfully, no, I don’t remember,

Almost immediately, it felt like that show and that company were breathing a renewed love of theater into my soul and my heart. The company rehearsed in NYC with Jackie Burns, as a stand in for Idina. They had a complete rehearsal scenery package and the Broadway (now tour) prop package. Idina was contracted to do the first fourteen weeks of the tour and then Jackie was contracted for the remaining cities, but Idina was finishing up a personal concert tour. There was logic to the weirdness and all of the principals had done the Broadway version. It got weirder because then the whole acting company, SM team, Directors, Choreographers, my assistant and I traveled to Van Nuyes, CA and they rehearsed in a…well, let’s call it a “dance” studio with Idina.
While some rehearsal set pieces were shipped from NYC, Carlos (new assistant) and I outfitted the room with rehearsal props from the Goodwill, Party City, Target and The Dollar Store. The show prop package went immediately from NYC to Denver with all of the other gear that we always collect in the rehearsal studio…instruments, management stuff, cast trunks, and a gazillion cardboard boxes of costumes and various other things that we will need on tour… I only stayed in Van Nuyes for a day and a half…just enough time for Wells Fargo to fraud protect my debit card while out shopping with Los for the first time. Nice first impression of your new boss, right? I quickly headed onto Denver to start the load in and meet the rest of the team…

I became attached to If/Then for a few reasons…1. I needed everything about that tour and those people at exactly the moment all of them came into my life. 2. Situations magically worked out perfectly for the prop department…All. Of. The. Time. 3. If I ever got to see Broadway shows, I would totally be the bullseye to the target audience for this show…and not just because I have always had a crush on Anthony Rapp. We can talk about my propensity to pick the gay boys some other time. 🙂 Also, seeing the out of town try out in DC inadvertently got me Rocky The Musical, bringing me back to NYC and leading me to sobriety so it already felt that we had a history even in the very beginning.

Not many people loved If/Then the way that I did. The lead character (Elizabeth) is a 39 year old woman and throughout the course of 2 hours and 54 minutes (another reason people didn’t like it), you are shown two completely different paths, side by side, that her life might have taken. One Beth and One Liz. A lot of people literally just didn’t get it. They couldn’t follow both story lines at once. You had to pay attention and that isn’t something we ask of audiences too often or for extended periods of time. Mostly, people come to the theater to be entertained, not to look for clues in costume pieces or thematic lighting changes, but I digress…One plot line has her married to a military man and they have two children and he dies at war and one plot line has her advancing her career as a Rock Star City Planner in NYC. You didn’t know Rock Star City Planner was a thing, did you? It is. I enjoy the notion that you can be a Rock Star ANYTHING. As long as it burns your passion and allows you to achieve your dreams, I let Rock Star be an adjective as well as a noun… Anywho, the point of the musical isn’t that one way is right or one way is wrong. It’s that both can be either. Both options have love and second guessing and laughter and trust and friendship and joy and pain and doubt and heartbreak…both options can seem so amazingly right and both options can feel so mind-blowingly wrong. Also, everyone will forget their cell phone at some point, life is really meant for celebration, and all options will inevitably involve starting over at one point or another. I promise, she even sings a whole song about it.

Wanna know the fucked up part of MY “right now” and why I even bring this up? I have been home for five and a half weeks. Maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s not knowing how long this will go on, OR maybe it’s that I actually do miss having people around, but I really can’t decide what the right answer is when it comes to my path forward. I feel like I’m stuck though maybe I’m just loitering. I’m not sure how to weigh my options on the same scale because when you are happily typing away on your balcony with no set schedule and no grumpy faces staring at you, it’s much easier to see the positive to both sides. Like, I can almost miss touring when I am home because I don’t have to pack tonight. When you’re sitting at an airport at 6AM after a 19 hour day on no sleep, it’s really easiest to focus on wanting to be at the beach.
One reason, that I am just now fully willing to admit, is that on tour I can focus on other people…their needs, their struggles, their complaints, and their problems…all day long… and sometimes, through the night. I get to hide behind distractions because there are so many other things to do, so many other people to take care of, and so many other things to worry about. Now, I find myself wondering, am I really so drawn to it because it lets me hide from myself? Ugh…wouldn’t that be annoyingly convenient? A great salary and no difficult questions about personal growth?! Who can be against coasting on that easy street at first glance? Of course, touring is not easy, but on some shows, like If/Then and Dear Evan Hansen, it’s not really hard especially when you compare it to what other people have to do to make a living. Sure, you have to give up most of your personal life, but hey, you get to travel the country, right?
In recent years, I’ve become more and more of an enigma to the local stagehands. I eat vegetables, work out, smile…things that most of them just don’t see as possible. Often, I hear their thoughts about my general state throughout the course of a load in or load out and it sounds something like this…”You work too hard.”, “You’re having too much fun.”, or “God, how do you have so much energy?”. The comments have really started to wear on me in recent months, but I think I am beginning to learn that all those seemingly negative “too much” comments might actually have acted as fuel for me. As much as I hate them, they drive me to be better because I want to prove that, in that environment and context, they are non-sensical statements. I am happy to have the oppressive nature of them out of my life for a few weeks, yeah, but here, alone-ish at home, I have to figure out how to become my own best audience, my own best client, my own best cheerleader…and my own best self. I’m really so much better at being there for other people, not me. Maybe it’s that I’m still unsure about how to think big about what’s possible in my future because it feels like so many big things have already happened… Or maybe, I just can’t decide what I want to do if I don’t tour because it is what I have known for so long.

It seems like I might be here through the summer though, so I bought a paddleboard the other day!! (cue the call back to work here) When the shipment notice hit my email, I saw that it is headed to me from Salt Lake City, UT. SLC is the last place that Dear Evan Hansen had a performance six weeks ago. It sounds so silly, right, but might this be the universe reminding me to hold space for both options!?! That maybe if I work at it, I can figure out the best way to hold both lives as one true me? That I can combine my life on the road with my life at the beach?…. As I try to decipher what my next steps are going to be, today I am sitting with the realization that maybe touring provides me a community that I still need and, right or wrong, a life raft that I keep clinging to. I am reminded that most situations aren’t just good or bad and that I can’t just label one path past and one path future. I have to be open to the notion that both paths can converge in the present otherwise they never will. My life at home is so different from my life on tour and I think the drastic opposition leaves me not knowing where to start in my dreaming. I thought I might try connecting the two a little bit more. Maybe instead of an exit strategy, I need a bridge and a new perspective. Now, back to my original thought…Do you believe in signs?…

Speaking of perspective, and with a serious heart, I would like to take a moment to ask for positive vibrations to the people out there actually suffering in this shitty pandemic, one of whom is LaChanze’s (the woman who is signing in the YouTube link at the top of this post) father. Thankfully, he has entered into the recovering portion of his nightmare through COVID-19, but he still needs us to send out strength and healing spirit!! On that note, thanks for stopping by and until next time, Spread Love, Seek Joy and Stay Intentionally Unrefined!