The one-person show Every Brilliant Thing, which was brought to Broadway this season as a vehicle for Daniel Radcliffe (who was, by all reports, amazing) has continued on, replacing Radcliffe with Mariska Hargitay and now with Tracee Ellis Ross, who will be closing the show this weekend.
It had sounded like an intriguing idea – the story of a person who sets out to write a list of ‘every brilliant thing’ – good things about life that you should take note of – and with a theatrical device of using the audience as ‘the rest of the cast’. I was in the office yesterday and decided to go grab a ticket. I had it in my head that it was in-the-round, so assumed it was at Circle in the Square, but no, it’s at the Hudson Theater, which turns out to be on our side of Times Square on 44th St. So I went out at lunch and got a ticket, then hung around the office (a block away, basically) until 6:30 and headed over.
It is in-the-round in the sense that the sides and back of the theater have been made into seating areas, and there is a wide staircase in front of the stage. Ms. Ross was actually on stage during the half hour before show, talking to the audience members coming up, and to the staff who was keeping the audience under control.
(the woman on stage in the darker jeans is Ross) Staff were also in the house, handing out slips of paper with numbers and sentences on them to lucky audience members. I had a really good seat, off to the left.
When the show finally started (took a while), Ross (as her unnamed character) told the story about, when she was 7, her mother had made a suicide attempt, and during the recovery from that, she decided to make the list as a means of showing her mother that life was worth living. Ross would declaim the list like this:
Ross: Number 1!
Audience Member: Ice Cream!
Ross: Number 2!
Another Audience Member: The Beach!
(and so on)
This went on (from time to time) for the whole show – there were mikes around the audience to catch the readings, but of course some audience members didn’t read them well, or missed them, or whatever. It mostly worked. One of the numbers (10,000) had been given to every audience member inside the program, but I didn’t notice until I opened the program when I got home. But it was very exciting when the whole audience declaimed, “waking up late with someone you LOVE!“. (I just assumed a lot of people had that one, not everyone.)
The other way she interacted with the audience was to do a scene with her “father” or “teacher” or “lover” by grabbing a random audience member and helping them through what they needed to do. Sometimes this worked beautifully, depending on how on the ball the audience member was, and sometimes it fell flat. (and sometimes it was hilarious, when the audience member had to extemporize a summary of a classic novel or a wedding speech)
As a theatrical presentation, I thought it was kind of light. I wanted it to move along more quickly. Ross was just fine, but I’ll bet it would have been riveting in the right hands. I was intrigued by the theatrical devices enough to order the play script this morning, to see how much leeway there is in the script. (for one thing, there’s enough leeway that the gender of the actor doesn’t really matter) The ‘theatrical device’ of it did take a good chunk of my brain away from the story and wondering about the mechanics of it, which I actually didn’t mind. For instance, there is a lot of (recorded) music in the show, given as favorites of her record-loving dad, and a lot of it seemed sort of black culture-y (Ross is black, the daughter of Diana Ross), but the previous actors in the role were not and I’m wondering if the music is specified by the script or each actor comes up with their own playlist. Just as far as the theatrical device of it all, it reminded me of a play we saw years ago, Eat the Runt, which was fascinating. The play itself (and story it told) was perfectly enjoyable, but the theatrical device was all the actors were prepared to play all the parts, and so you might be watching a straight romance and realize with different casting, it would be a gay romance, and how would that make a difference? So there’s a part of your brain doing the ‘meta’ pondering as you watch the show.
But yeah. I liked it just fine, but thought it could have been better. But since then, I keep thinking about it, it clearly hit me in a way that art should and doesn’t always. Not only about the meta theatrical device, but the basic story of ‘this person I love is broken, and maybe I can fix…’ and maybe no matter how wonderful the fix idea is, it still isn’t going to work. And this may be true of depression or alcoholism or cancer or… And so there’s a lot of resonance there.
And of course you do walk out the door suddenly open to noticing ‘every brilliant thing’ that you may want to add to your own list. This morning, I put on some random classical music and what should pop up but Mozart’s clarinet concerto, which I hadn’t heard in a long time. Here’s something you may not know – the clarinet concerto was written right before he died (at the age of 35), making it one of his last works. And also most mature. And you can hear that maturity. And it makes you realize that, as much wonderful Mozart as we’re familiar with, he may have just been hitting his stride when he died – which means almost all the Mozart we know is juvenilia. Isn’t that a thought. Anyway, the clarinet concerto is joyous and melancholy and scrumptious and absolutely a “brilliant thing” and it’s funny to me that it’s one of the first classical pieces I ever learned, so I didn’t really get how extraordinary it is until after much more learning and life.
What else? The week after my little road trip was the weekend (and Monday) we did our VLOG summer concert – once in New Rochelle, once in Manhattan. The New Rochelle one was followed by a picnic, and I had a great time chatting everyone. It’s such a nice group, and the concerts were lots of fun. They’re about to hold auditions for 1776 and I’m going for it. I figure there might be plenty of room for someone of my voice and age and body type, particularly since I’d be delighted with pretty much any role.
A couple of days after the Monday concert, I went on a social adventure. I’d been seeing ads for a gay group that puts together dinners for single gentlemen. The group is called “Mingleo”, which we decided was pronounced “Mingle-Oh”. You fill out a little questionnaire and pick one of several possible dates and then they tell you which restaurant to go to. And you have dinner with a little group of strangers and maybe you hit it off with one or two, and maybe not, but at least you can be polite and chatty through a meal. Great idea, right? So I did one and it was really a nice time! The guys were all about my age, mostly Manhattan-based. Two of them had been at one of these dinners together before, so they already knew each other. One of the other guys had been to about four, so we pumped him for info. It was nice to be in a social situation where we all knew why we were there, but there was no competition and no pressure (we even had no problem divvying up the bill). Afterward (the next day or whatever), you go online and rate the experience and also indicate for each guy whether you liked them (as people) and whether you want further contact. (If two of you each want further contact with each other, then I guess they give you each other’s contact info and you take it from there.) I voted “I liked everyone, but don’t want to reach out to anyone”. But it’s a sound idea and I’ll try it again in a few weeks. I think the fear we all have is that the pool will be too small and we’ll just keep seeing the same guys over and over, but I guess the fix for that is to talk it up and get more people involved.
And finally, my friends are starting rehearsals for The Sorcerer at the G&S Festival in Buxton, England. For the first summer in four years, I’m not there with them. And, although I had lots of reasons to not do the show this year, I am mopey about that. Oh, well. I’ll watch the live-stream, even though it will start at 2:30 EST on a workday. We’ll figure it out.
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