There. I think that’s all of them. If I’m missing any that you can name, you can email me through my website to let me know, and also, we can make arrangements for you to return the empty lipstick tubes and used tampon applicators you stole out of my trash as “souvenirs.”
I know this wasn’t nice, and subsequently, I took a lot of shit — or should I say, McPheces — from the McPhans, a loosely organized McPhederation of deeply devoted McPhollowers, who use a variety of quasi-McPhacist tactics to intimidate all those who dare to write something less than McPhlattering about their McPhantasy woman. (And I wasn’t the only one. As my colleague Kate Aurthur, a reporter at BuzzFeed who has covered the Smash beat, tweeted after one of her stories ran: “I’m trying to think if there’s a funnier thing that happened to me in 2013 than being called a bitch by members of KatharineMcPhee.org.” Dot. Org.)
The messages I received from the McPhans — and even some not-so-Phans — seemed mainly to come to the consensus that my primary motivation for harping on various McPhlaws was (and, I suppose, is) jealousy. Reader, they aren’t totally wrong. I’m jealous of Katherine McPhee in the way I’m jealous of anyone who has more money than me, which is to say, almost everyone (unless they live in Bangladesh or went to graduate school for poetry or something). I’m not the kind of person who needs a Gulfstream, or even a really fancy handbag (although I’m currently accepting donations if you’ve got one going spare), but it would be nice to like, be able to get my roots done and rent a car in the same month without feeling like it’s only a matter of days until the workhouse. Last night, I had a dream about having a washer-dryer actually in my own apartment unit, and I woke up with the kind of anguished yearning you usually get from dreaming about still being in love and with your college boyfriend who is somehow also Ryan Gosling.
So they might be onto something, but they’ve got the wrong person. Katharine McPhee can’t act. She sings fine, if you like that kind of thing, and she is, of course, a very pretty, very lucky girl. But it’s not Katharine McPhee that I’m jealous of. It’s Karen Cartwright.
Musical theater nuns — that is, the kind of women who give their life over to Broadway, and whatever their actual relationship status, are spiritually married only to Stephen Sondheim — are a particular breed. We may belong to different orders, and dress in different habits — the Webberite and their half-masks, the Larsonians and their mismatched plaids, and who could forget the Schwartzines, in their long black caftans and dyed green skin, except for the breakaway Pippennes who dress only in jesters motley with jagged felt ruffs around their necks, not unlike Kermit the Frog — but for the most part, we heard the call very early, and it sounded like Ethel Merman singing “I had a dream.” Or Patti (not Ruthie Henshall, but maybe Randy Graff) serving past tense realness with “I dreamed a dream.” Or if you’re a strict Sondheimian, as I am (we, in my experience, are the most doctrinaire) with Elaine Stritch toasting the ladies who lunch, and knowing that wasn’t a compliment, but wanting to be one and insult one at the same time.
Despite these minor doctrinal differences, most musical theater nuns have one thing in common: We are not the kind of girls who have everything handed to them. We are the girls with something to prove. We are the girls who will karate chop through doors to get what we want, yet somehow are still our own worst enemy. In high school, the most popular boys might have hooked up with us at parties, but rarely, if ever, called us their girlfriends in public. Elaine Stritch is one of us. Miss Piggy is one of us. Patti LuPone (not in the safe word sense) is one of us. So is Evita, and so is Eliza Dolittle and Julie LaVerne and every female character from Follies and Fanny Brice and her American Beauty nose. (Barbra Streisand is also one of us, although she may have thinks she shed the veil, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s like Judaism. If Hitler would have killed you, or you can walk into any gay bar in any city in the country and within fifteen minutes have made seventeen new friends, you’re one of us, I don’t care how much cashmere you’ve got on.) It’s a psychology that finds its most dramatic extremes illustrated in the dramatic aria “Rose’s Turn” at the end of Gypsy, a sort of histrionic catechism in which the eros of knowing what you’ve got inside of you and the thanatos of the horrible existential fear that no one will ever see it, or if they do, they won’t recognize it.
Karen Cartwright was not one of us.
Let me put it this way: I have a friend who always says the main difference between theater people and Hollywood people is their jeans. (That’s jeans with a “J,” by the way, if you’re blind and listening to this on tape.) Hollywood people have good jeans, theater people have bad jeans. In the world of Smash, Karen Cartwright is a pair of size 25 Citizens of Humanity skinnies. Ivy is an odd Marc by Marc Jacobs cocktail dress you found at the consignment store and it’s a size too small but it was only $75 and it’s sort of designer, so what the hell. One of those things is a human being full of conflict and insecurity and aspiration and story; the other is a picture of slender thighs on the Barney’s website. Sometimes the captain of the Pom Squad does get cast as Maria in The Sound of Music. She might even be good. But she’s not the one who winds up majoring in theater and barfing in the bathroom of Marie’s Crisis four times in six months. That’s the girl who played the Baroness. Maria sells real estate in Fort Worth and has a perfectly normal, perfectly health-insured life, the fresh-aired Alpine bitch. The “magical” Karen Cartwright may enjoy doing musical theater. But she doesn’t need it like the Ivys of the world do, and it’s my suspicion that McPhee doesn’t quite need — or understand — musical theater either. That somehow, Broadway is a word that still lurks at the fringes of her subconscious as Simon Cowell’s most cherished insult.
I believed this wholeheartedly, and it was my job to point it out.
But I still felt like shit. Was I a bully, kicking a beleaguered show — a show, I should add, I would have dropped everything to go and write for, if only they would ask me — while it was down?
“You must be so excited,” an acquaintance of mine smirked, not altogether pleasantly, when the revamped second season premiered to dismal numbers, and it became clear we were now dealing with a case of keeping the patient as comfortable as possible and wait for the end, now that the chemotherapy (symbolized by the new character Jimmy Collins, an inexplicably hostile young Turk of a songwriter, who, as played by Newsies heartthrob Jeremy Jordan, seemed to occupy a strange and disturbing territory between Mickey Rooney and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) had stopped working. “You hated Smash, and now it’s dead. Just like you wanted.”
“But I didn’t want that,” I bleated, hands out, the betraying courtier horrified to realize the king doesn’t intend to pardon the friend I handed over after all. “I didn’t want that at all.”
Smash was imperfect, but it was an imperfect thing about something I desperately love. When my recaps were lumped in with and linked to the small but vocal contingent of self-proclaimed “hate-watchers” heaping scorn — some of it deserved; some vastly overstated — on the show, I would get upset to the point of panic. I’ve never hate-watched anything in my life except the Republican National Convention, and even that turned into a delightful exercise in high camp when Elaine Stritch unexpectedly stormed the stage dressed as a cowboy and did that thing with the chair. Picking something apart is easy; putting it together — you’ll forgive me, but we’re nearing the end and Lord Sondheim’s breath is cold against my cheek — even if it’s bad, is really fucking hard. Yes, I was often critical of the show, but look, my husband can be a real asshole sometimes too, and I don’t love him any less for it.
But salvation came from an unlikely source. It came from the people involved in the show itself. Not just from Marc and Scott, but from the writers and producers and actors and crew members who, emboldened perhaps by the freedom of being terminal (just like Laura Linney in The Big C) began to quietly reach out to me. Somehow, that meant more to me than anything. Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman are hugely successful and are going to
be just fine, with or without Smash, but the featured players? The low-level writers hoping for a stepping stone to bigger and better things? I don’t flatter myself that anything I did make an iota of difference to Smash’s renewal or cancellation (for the record, I doubt Theresa Rebeck was one of them, although the time I saw her, shortly after her firing, stomping through Times Square while eating Cold Stone Creamery with Marsha Norman will be my Number One celebrity sighting until the day I die), but to be able to send a nice note to someone who has been relentlessly making fun of the thing you were counting on to help you put your kids through school and keep you in WGA insurance is another level of class.
“I’m just so happy you don’t hate me,” I told one of them finally, a writer I had known casually in another life. “I don’t understand it, but I’m happy.”
He smiled. “I understand why. It’s because of all the people who wrote about the show, you’re the only one who’s one of us.”
One of us.
There it was again. It’s such a simple thing, but I think it gets to the bottom of the matter. It’s what Smash didn’t get right, but the people making Smash gave back to me. Broadway can be a competitive, cutthroat world full of ambitious, difficult people. But Broadway is not a reality show. That’s what all the plot set-ups in Smash, the competition between Karen and Ivy, the way it was sometimes possible, if it was really late at night and you’d had a lot of Red Bull, to lift one of Anjelica Huston’s enchanted conch shells to your ear and hear the executives wondering how they could make it more like The Voice, got so wrong until it was too late to get it right. Nobody goes into theater proclaiming “I’m not here to make friends.” Every theater kid, every weirdo, every misfit who ever wanted to wear character shoes or a cape to school, who can handily tell you which Muppet is right for which role in The Muppets’ Sweeney Todd, who is far, far more familiar with Flora the Red Menace than with Florence + the Machine (I’m doing the plus right, right? Also, that girl, whatever her name is, would be a great Miss Jean Brodie if they ever do a musical of it) dreams of the day they’ll walk through the portal that transports them to their own personal Oz, to the place they’ve always belonged. You go into theater because that’s where your friends are. Because, to paraphrase Frankie in Member of the Wedding (a role in which I was not cast in the Omaha Community Playhouse’s 1993 production) once said, “because they are the we of you.” Or rather, of me.
For some this portal will lead to a Broadway opening night party where Donna Murphy kneels before you with a bouquet of roses and then you get to go home with the beautiful and desperate young hustler (of either sex) of your choice before drinking yourself to death in your art deco penthouse lather rinse repeat.
For the rest of us (and there may be some overlap!) I think it leads to Marie’s Crisis.
Marie’s Crisis is in an unassuming basement on an unassuming (or formerly unassuming; for all I know Shia LeBoeuf lives there now) street in the depths of the West Village. Famously, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman met there in 1976. Less famously, but no less significantly, I assert that I am the only person to have performed a heterosexual sex act in its bathroom. (If you know another one, again, you know where to find me. Perhaps we can start a Tumblr.)
It’s a piano bar, but not of the usual sort. At Marie’s, there’s no song list, no sign-up sheet. Nobody hogs the mike or sings some nasally version of “Over the Rainbow” with so much melisma you can’t even hear the words. At Marie’s Crisis, everybody sings together. You stand side by side, cheek by jowl, with aging chorus boys and high school musical queens and gay bankers and off-duty drag queens in Target sweatpants and sad-eyed men with beautiful posture whose cheeks bear the furrows of a lifetime on protease inhibitors, and sing “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” all together, in unison. Big voices and small, off key and on, people who know all the words and people who just have to fake it. It might be the closest thing to a socialist utopia that we’ll ever get on Earth. At Marie’s Crisis, there are no stars. At Marie’s Crisis, we’re all just part of the ensemble, the kind of people who occasionally get to go see Shakespeare in the Park the night Tony Kushner and Mike Nichols are there.
It could be a lot worse. Isn’t that the moral behind every work of musical theater? It could be worse. No matter how bad things get, no matter if you never became a star even though you gave everything to your kids, or may never find the partner who helps you survive being alive, or you did find that person and then they left you, or were killed by giants, leaving you to raise your beanstalk IVF baby all by yourself even though you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, you’re — again, you’ll pardon me — you’re still here. You’re here. And you get to take a bow at curtain and soak in the applause, and sing a reprise of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” even if it’s only in your head.
It could be a lot worse.
When I started writing this, I thought I’d come to the conclusion that a lot of people who have written about recapping do. I figured I’d keep beating up on myself, bitter that I’d written hundreds of thousands of utterly disposable words — enough to fill three lengthy novels — about a show with which I had nothing to do, that didn’t know if I existed. That I’ve become known for something utterly extraneous, with no more staying power than a single lighted match, with no more significance to the world than a single tweet, quickly drowned in a sea of other tweets, lost in all the amusing, disposable ambient noise that makes it impossible for any of us to actually hear, to feel, to make.
But now I’m at the end, and I don’t feel that way. Maybe I should, but I don’t. Because it may not have changed the world, but it did change me.
On my last day of theater school in college, the head of the department said something I’ll never forget.
He said, “Don’t think about trying to do great things. Think about trying to do small things, with great love.”
I never knew what he meant before.
I do now.
Extras for the DVD
From “The Church of St. Gummer,” recap of Season One, Episode Nine, in which I realized four constant themes in my work thus far and wrote a song about it. Here are the complete lyrics, to be sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things”:
Meryl and Sondheim and Richard Santorum
Bettelheim’s witches and Whoopi in Forum
Adolf who prances and Patti who sings
These are a few of my favorite things
Golden retrievers and salmon sashimi
Ice cubes and vodka and bars that ID me
Flexible morals and secretive flings
These are a few of my favorite things
When my feet hurt, when the bills come
When the card’s declined
I simply remember my favorite things
I then I don’t really mind
* * *
March 22, 2013, marked the 83rd birthday of Stephen Sondheim. The following instructions for observing the religious holiday based on same were considered for, and ultimately cut from, my recap of March 27, 2013 (Season Two, Episode Eight): “The Naked and the Dreaming.”
The Festival of Sondheimas is celebrated each year on March 22nd. It is a holiday especially enjoyed by children, who love the ritual of sitting in the festively decorated “barber’s chair” in the mall to tell Sweeney Todd what they would like to receive for gifts. If they are good, they get what they ask for, if they are bad, Sweeney’s accomplice Mrs. Lovett comes and bakes them into a pie. At Sondheimastime, carolers in limp costumes roam the street, singing madrigal versions of heart-warming holiday favorites such as “Sorry/Grateful” and “In Buddy’s Eyes.” Schoolchildren perform in pageants consisting of all the vaudeville acts from “Gypsy,” although the more religious variety pageants depict the virgin Anne Egerman giving birth to the Baby Stephen, as her husband Bobby looks on, unable to feel. On Sondheimas Eve, celebrants gather around the communal table and talk deeply and searchingly about their interpersonal relationships. Those incapable of intimac
y gather in adjacent rooms, playing word games, or sit solo, quietly doing crossword puzzles in ink. That night, the three wise Armfeldts help Santa Sweeney to make/deliver his gifts (they enter through the false chiffonier). Grateful children leave gifts of figs and raisins next to their hip-baths; those expecting punishment may spread pitch on the stairs, to impede their path. Houses are typically decorated with branches, foliage, tree trunks, and other implements so as to resemble a vast metaphorical woodland, Traditionally, one decorates one’s Sondheimas beanstalk with ornaments in the shape of sharks and jets. On the day itself, people dress in traditional festive Sondheimas colors, such as red red red red red red orange. Typical foods for the Sondheimas feast: egg rolls, spare ribs, lychees, kumquats, fried rice, sticky buns, and just a loaf of bread, please. You leave an extra eggroll out for Mr. Goldstone when you open the door for him. He visits every Sondheimas table in the world.
(Additional Sondheimas research provided by Betty Aberlin, Jose Piano, Emily Gould and Molly Pope.)
* * *
In Season Two, Kyle Bishop (né Cohen), called Goblinweed in the recaps due to his resemblance to a sort of dutiful house-elf/woodland sprite, was introduced to the show’s cast of characters. In the complicated cosmology of my alternate Smash universe, he was a relative of Ellis Dappledawn’s, and his Manichean opposite, the light to his dark, the Ahura Mazda to Ellis’s Angra Mainyu, the Edgar to his Ellis’s bastard Edmund, the Bernadette Peters to Ellis’s Patti LuPone. No wonder he got run over by a car and killed, an occurrence immortalized in my recap of May 5, 2013: “The Sacrificial Goblinweed.” The following is a funeral dirge I composed in his memory, which was later cut and replaced with an abbreviated, Kyle-specific version of Auden’s “Funeral Blues.”
Let Me Be Your Star Page 4
