You’re so in.
And thus begins a rehearsal period unlike any you have ever had, and probably unlike any you ever will have. This is no mere matter of learning blocking and memorizing lyrics. This requires total absorption and transformation, and it starts with your body. Starting six weeks before the end of the TV show, your diet and exercise routine changes completely. To make yourself more slender and wispy you do copious amounts of cardio and quasi-yogic stretching exercises, and substitute late-night sushi binges with regularly scheduled bottles of liquid kale. As a result you lose twenty-two pounds, develop an eight-pack, and have the most vivid, drool-inducing food dreams of your life.
And then there’s the vocal training. At the start of rehearsals Stephen Trask compiles a playlist of songs by artists who inspired him and John when they wrote the show. He also gives you a videotape of some live rock performances to marinate your eyes, ears, and soul in. You begin working intensively with Liz Caplan. Officially Liz is Hedwig’s “vocal supervisor,” but for you a better title would be “personal voice hero.” With a rigorous and meticulous regimen, she begins shaping and strengthening your voice into a rock ’n’ roll instrument—one up for the challenge of singing 100 minutes of emotive, frenzied music seven times a week.
Eventually Stephen and the director, Michael Mayer, send you out to perform as a rock singer. You end up fronting a couple of impromptu concerts at various Lower East Side bars, arriving unannounced, accompanied by Tits of Clay, the amazing band that Stephen pulled together for the show. The gigs go well, and they have the desired effect: you begin to understand and feel the mythic, sexual power wielded by the rock ’n’ roll front man. But you need to be a front woman, and your feminization is an ongoing process. You dye (head) and shave (body) your hair. The visionary costume designer Arianne Phillips fits you with a pair of custom heels, and from then on you and Michael Mayer and the routinely brilliant choreographer Spencer Liff devote countless hours to developing Hedwig’s gestures, postures, and movements. For you the rigors of this are as much psychic as physical. Strutting around in a huge blonde wig and bra with your wrist cocked and your hips swaying does not come naturally to you. It feels a little weird. But that is the joy of it: the total commitment, the complete immersion into the role, the gradual replacement of self-conscious awkwardness with (literally) balls-out confidence.
Previews begin in March 2014, and soon a regular preshow routine develops. For an 8 o’clock curtain, you arrive at the Belasco Theatre around 5:30, relax, eat half a sandwich, answer a few e-mails, and try to relax. Then at around six o’clock you work with Liz for half an hour, either live or by FaceTime. She leads you in a series of focused vocal and physical drills that are effective, essential, and, from the point of view of an outsider, pretty funny. In one you sing an arpeggio on the sound “Heeeeee!” while biting on your pinky, then stop, say the word “Ping!”, clear one nostril, then the other, and repeat the arpeggio a half note higher. In another you sing Mozartian-style trills with a ripped paper towel wrapped around your tongue. “Yegeeooweeooweeoooooowah,” you intone in all twelve keys, up and down, doing it so often that the word “Yegeeooweeooweeoooooowah” begins to sound stupid.
At 6:30 you sit down for your session with the youthful Mike Potter, the makeup mastermind who did the designs for the original production and the movie. For forty-five minutes you lie Sweeney Todd–victim style on a fully reclined barber’s chair while Mike and his nymphlike assistant Nicole lovingly subject your skin to a series of viscous substances including, but not limited to:
• Elmer’s glue—applied to the eyebrows to keep them down.
• Orange concealer—to hide residual stubble shadow.
• Blush—to contour the jawline.
• Rouge—to give your cheeks a severe, pseudo-trashy look. (To achieve the necessary angularity, Mike places a piece of paper from the top of the ear to the corner of the lip and applies the rouge above it. The piece of paper is a folded page from Guns & Ammo magazine, which adds extra irony.)
• Fake eyelashes. (You like to fan them with an old-style Japanese fan to get them to dry faster.)
• And of course, glitter up the yin-yang.
The makeup mirror is decorated with photos of various rock ’n’ roll idols (Bowie, Iggy, Lou Reed), along with a couple of random stock photos depicting life in East Germany back in the ’70s. There’s one picture of a forlorn young man sitting on the radiator watching a lousy TV show that you find endlessly fascinating, as it makes you imagine what Hedwig must have looked like as a young boy.
Mike usually has ’80s music blasting during the makeup application. When he leaves you switch to dance music and do some exercises to get your blood pumping. Sit-ups always get you going. Then your invaluable dresser Danny starts helping you into your Hedwig outfit. Now, the character’s “angry inch” is of course the “one-inch mound of flesh where [her] penis used to be.” Given this, and that Hedwig wears tight pants, the first thing you do is get fully naked and put on a specially created undergarment that lifts your testicles above your wang and hides Neil Jr. in a small little flap. The end result is the “Barbie-doll crotch” referred to in the show. If all goes well, it will be an inch that for you onstage will not feel angry, and only occasionally itchy.
But wait, there’s more, because Arianne Phillips has provided you with fishnet stockings, a bra with a mic inside, a black camisole, a sexy patchwork denim jumpsuit designed to resemble the Berlin Wall, giant glittery gold fuck-me boots, a green-and-gold neckerchief, and, courtesy of hair-mistress Perfidia, a gigantic blonde wig—the first of a half dozen you’ll be wearing between now and 9:40.
Then, finally a walk backstage, past the five-piece band and supporting cast led by the incomparable Lena Hall (who plays Yitzhak), to upstage left, where you receive one final strap-on: you are strapped onto a flying harness from which you will momentarily make your first appearance onstage, descending from behind the proscenium like a sneering angel.
This is followed by 100 minutes of cooing, screaming, charming, grinding, sobbing, shredding, flirting, grieving, taunting, climbing the walls, licking the floor, gnashing your teeth, batting your eyes, spitting on a random audience member and lip-kissing another, baring yourself in every way, breaking yourself down, building yourself back up, and bowing.
And then, if it’s Saturday or Sunday, hopping into the shower, removing all your makeup, and doing the whole thing over again an hour later.
It is nerve-racking, and to make things even harder on yourself you keep an active side schedule of promotional appearances and other work, and to truly abuse yourself you specifically ask the producers not to hire an understudy. You want to walk the tightrope day after day for four months, because what makes it nerve-racking is what makes it positively exhilarating. The reason for taking big risks is that they can bring big rewards, and night after night (and Sunday afternoons) you reap them. You are the center of a perfectly crafted 100-minute communion between actor and character, writer and interpreter, and entertainer and audience. You walk offstage after every performance sore, exhausted, and alive to the core of your being. It is the most satisfying and complete role you ever play.
But Hedwig’s rewards extend beyond the dramatic. It gets you in shape. It raises your stature on Broadway. It makes you feel good about your decision to rededicate yourself to theater and helps justify your post-HIMYM decision to relocate your family permanently to New York, in a new town house in the same great Harlem neighborhood you’d lived in part-time for years. And the critical, commercial, and audience response is overwhelmingly positive. In the wake of great reviews and a massive promotional blitz the show sells out every performance, and within weeks of opening night you find yourself nominated for the entire gamut of theater awards … including the one you hosted with supreme biggiosity the previous year.
You are not one to belittle the importance of winning a Tony.2 But you had no idea how nervous the desire to win one would make you. Knowi
ng that the Tony-nominating voters were in the audience one week, and that the Tony-awarding voters were officially in the audience a few weeks later, but unofficially could be there at any time, lends a tense background feedback hum to your performances. It’s true what they say—it’s an honor just to be nominated. But darned if you aren’t nervous as hell by the time Tony weekend rolls around. It’s a spectacularly busy forty-eight hours. You are both nominated for an award and performing a song at the ceremony, and you squeeze in Tony rehearsals in the morning and early afternoon before heading off to do your usual two Hedwig shows. Then on Sunday you have an early-morning Tony dress rehearsal and a Hedwig matinee, after which you quickly don your tux, rush to Radio City, smile for the camera people, appear with Hugh Jackman in the opening number, frantically Hedwigize backstage, perform the song “Sugar Daddy”—during which you stroll through the audience, perform a lap dance on Sting, lick Samuel L. Jackson’s glasses, and rub your junk in Orlando Bloom’s face ’cause, I mean, you can—then frantically de-Hedwigize backstage and return to your seat to wait for Audra McDonald, who that night becomes the most Tony-winning actress of all time, to say who won the 2014 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical.
And the winner is … you!
You kiss David and walk onto the stage, basking in a standing ovation. A wave of gratitude and humility sweeps over you. You accept Audra’s warm embrace and shiny trophy and begin:
A year ago I was hosting the Tonys. This is crazy-pants.… Playing Hedwig is an absolute joy. It is a role I was terrified of and taking it on has changed me and challenged me, and it’s exhausting and it’s so fun to perform it and I love doing it.… I’m such a fan of the show and John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, you’ve created a character that is so beautiful and songs that are so amazing to sing …
Then, after thanking Michael Mayer, Liz Caplan, your spectacular personal dresser Danny Paul, the rest of your support team,3 the three other members of Team Burtka-Harris, and the three original Ruidosan members of Team NPH, you do something you know better than anybody can be murder on an awards show—you go long and talk over the exit music. But you can’t help it. The poignancy of the moment requires one final callback.
Lastly, I would just like to say thank you to the people who inspire us creatively like teachers: Churchill Cook, Danny Flores, Diane Keeson … these are teachers in small-town New Mexico who showed that when sports was the only option, creativity had a place in the world. And without them I would never be able to do any of this.
Lena wins for Best Featured Actress and most important, the show itself wins for Best Revival. Both awards are deserved, and both help rid you of any lingering suspicion that your Tony was given more as a token of appreciation for your work bolstering the theater than genuine recognition of a quality performance.
When your run ends in August you are good and weary. The show goes on, with the terrific Andrew Rannells taking your place, but you decide to take a brief respite from theater while you attend to a few other items of business, like promoting your upcoming bizarrely premised memoir. But the Hedwig experience never leaves you, any more than the experience of playing Toto as a ten-year-old in the Ruidoso High production of The Wizard of Oz could ever leave you. Looking back on your life, you realize one is only the natural outgrowth of the other. The boy enthralled by the way makeup could transform him from human to canine is now the man enthralled by the way makeup can transform him from Neil to Hedwig. It is still thrilling. It is still all about preparation, precision, commitment, and artifice. And, three decades later, it still draws you to the stage like a moth to the f(l)ame.
The only difference is that now, when Heineken Light calls offering you a whole bunch of money to endorse their beer, you don’t have to turn them down on account of being underage.
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You’re ready for your closing number. Go HERE.
* * *
1Note: It is scientifically impossible to talk about Hedwig and the Angry Inch for five minutes without making a double entendre about penises.
2Come to think of it, you are the last person to belittle the importance of winning a Tony.
3Although you egregiously forget to mention two people on said support team: your brilliant publicist Shea Martin and your even brillianter assistant Zoë Chapin. Both extraordinary human beings, ridiculously hard workers, and lifelong friends. Your excluding them from your acceptance speech will haunt you for many lifetimes or, at least, weeks.
Your four-year-old twins, Gideon and Harper, share a number of relatively unusual characteristics. For example, they are the best kids in the whole wide world, yes they are.
Gideon is a boy. More accurately, he is a boy boy. He likes to play with pretend guns, which you’ve been told is normal. He is crazy about knights and swords and enjoys pretending he’s galloping on his horse. Last Christmas you got him a drum set and he loved it. He also likes anything nautical and is especially obsessed with anchors, dating from the time when your friend Diana Jenkins let him pull up the anchor on her yacht. But his interests evolve rapidly. As you sit re-editing this manuscript, you realize that in the last few months he’s entered his construction phase. He loves trucks, diggers, and cement mixers and walks around in a hard hat. By the time this book is published it is entirely possible he’ll have moved on to online poker.
He is quiet, cerebral, a natural problem-solver. His vocabulary is amazing. At three years old he uses words like “gargantuan” and “barbarian.” If you ask him if he wants something, he’ll say, “I’d like that, perhaps.” He likes making up stories about, oh, robots caught in a ditch but then the ditch has a spacecraft in it so he escapes in the spacecraft and flies into the mouth of a giant corn dog. That type of thing. (That plot still makes a lot more sense than Purple People Eater.) He is a lot like you. If you had to wager, you’d guess he is your biological son. But you don’t have to wager, and it doesn’t matter.
Harper is a girl. More accurately, she is a girl girl. She loves princesses. She is tender and kind. Last Christmas you got her a dollhouse and she loved it. She loves animals with an all-encompassing “Awwww, look at that ant, it’s so sweet!” kind of love. She likes to put costumes and wigs on Watson, your big Labradoodle, and parade him around the house. (Watson is cool with it. Fred, your Cairn Terrier, is less so, and is not shy about yapping his disapproval.) She loves to play with her stuffed animals. Kitty Kitty is her pink cat. Pinky the Elephant is her security blanket. You repeatedly try to explain to her that Pinky is in fact a lifeless object incapable of independent thought, much less protection, but she refuses to listen. Instead she puts on “Let It Go” from Frozen and lets loose on the kitchen counter.
Harper has a big personality. If she doesn’t get what she wants she can scream at the top of her lungs with a ferocity that suggests a future career in musical theater. When she is three, you catch her singing Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball,” a song nobody should sing until they’re at least dead. She is also precocious. Sometimes you and David worry that you’re raising a stripper because she has such an affinity for taking her clothes off. And what a shameless flirt! She has a boyfriend in her preschool class whom she is going to marry. As a two-year-old she climbs up a slide at a park in Harlem, waves to the basketball players at the nearby court, and shouts, “Hey boys, look at me!” She is sassy, extroverted, and nurturing. If you had to wager, you’d guess she is David’s biological daughter. But you don’t have to wager, and it doesn’t matter.
Like many twins they always have each other’s back and miss each other terribly when they’re apart. They love to play games together and play robot or veterinarian or, when they’re feeling fancy, robot veterinarian. One Saturday morning you’re asleep when you hear a ruckus downstairs. (Parents are the only people who ever hear ruckuses.) You investigate and uncover a saltwater apocalypse: Gideon and Harper have opened the top of your fish tank, reached in, tossed most of the coral out, and are now throwing things in—paper clips, penci
ls, chicken bones, whatever’s around. They’re not trying to hurt the fish; they’re trying to feed them. But when you try telling that to the fish, they just don’t want to hear it.
From the beginning they’ve been gourmets. This is largely due to the influence of their Daddy. (To the kids, David is “Daddy” and you’re “Papa.” You find it a more convenient system of nomenclature than “Daddy 1” and “Daddy 2,” or “Sinners A and B.”) David is a formally trained chef, and he does not let any junk food pass their lips. As soon as they’re able to eat solid food, he goes to the market, buys fresh produce, and purees it himself. Every day. Then when they’re ready for real food, he makes them real food. Curried carrots. Zucchini with herbes de Provence. As one-year-olds they wolfed down prosciutto, truffled cheese, and sushi. They love bold flavors. Harper’s current favorite foods include lox and asparagus. Gideon frequently devours two sashimi platters at one sitting. Seriously. Two entire sashimi platters. And he’s rail-thin. There may very well be a wormhole to another dimension somewhere in his digestive tract, because it is otherwise physically impossible to explain how so much food can disappear into such a little body.
They are not allowed to watch TV during the week. However, so as not to totally alienate them from the medium that has been so kind to Papa over the years, they are allowed unlimited TV time on the weekends, so long as it’s kid-friendly. They enjoy this indulgence immensely. Harper will sometimes binge-watch three consecutive Disney movies. You don’t see too much harm in this, although occasionally you worry it will give her the wrong idea about how much spontaneous singing and dancing takes place in castles and aquariums.
They are your children, Gideon and Harper, the ones you worked so hard to get, the ones you waited for so long, and you love them madly, crazily, bottomlessly. When you’re home you spend as much time with them as you can, and every evening you and David read them good-night stories, then let them repeat them to you in their new and much improved way. But the realities of your job(s) require you to be away from them far more than you’d like. It’s hard to conceive what parenthood was like before modern video technology. When you’re gone you FaceTime them at least once a day (at bedtime). And you miss them like hell. And you and David tell them that Papa is gone doing things to help the family, which is true, but does nothing to allay the missing-like-hell. So you fly home as soon as you can, and savor as many moments of the terrible twos and the throttling threes as you can, because every moment is awesome.
Neil Patrick Harris Page 22
