The year was 1965.  I was six years old and my family took our annual Christmas trip into Manhattan.  Thinking back, it’s no wonder my father was always a little grouchy.  It must have cost him a ton of money.  We stayed at the Hilton, skated at the Rockefeller Center rink and saw a lot of broadway shows.  Janet’s call.

On this trip, we saw The Man of La Mancha.  It’s a little heady for a six year old and knowing what I now know about ticket prices, we were about five or six rows from the stage and smack dab in the middle.  Today, those same four seats would easily exceed $1000 … and we saw a show almost every night.  Grumpy Allen had good reason.

Now I don’t remember all that much about this particular show.  The only reason I remember where we sat was that every now and then Don Quixote would hallucinate that his lover, Dulcinea, was coming to see him.  He would cup his hands to his eyes and gaze toward the back of the theater calling to her.  Well every time he did this, my six year old self was so entranced that I’d stand up in my chair and look to the back of the theater to see her.  Naturally she wasn’t there but Janet told me years later that it was pretty cute when I did it … at least the first couple of times.  

Somewhere in the middle of the second act, my scene was cut short.  All I remember is my father yanking me down into my seat. But apparently the New York audience had grown tired of me trying to steal the show and were shouting things like “get that kid to sit down” or simply directed to me “sit the hell down”.  Now I wasn’t trying to upstage anyone.  I just really thought Dulcinea was in the back of the theater.  

The whole incident left me scarred.  I never sit in orchestra seats, well except one night when my partner/husband and I went to see Sideshow and there were maybe a hundred people in the whole theater so they encouraged us to move up.  Great show.  Highly underrated.  Seems dark subject matter hadn’t really hit the map just yet.  They did a revival of Sideshow and made it lighter and happy and people hated it even more.  I don’t know what a psychoanalysis of that would reveal but the producers of the show are probably still drowning in debt.  I’m not sure why I loved this show so much but I think it had something to do with suspending belief.

Sideshow was about siamese twins yet they didn’t get all literal about the connecting hips part, yet it was always alluded to.  So if you weren’t willing to suspend your belief I guess you’d hate the show.  Now in the happy revival, the two actresses must have been duct taped to each other which severely limited their movement.  Well that was worse.  Suspending belief must have a bad rap in the business.  But how could you be a broadway fan and NOT be willing to do so?

Should we really believe that cats can sing and dance (god I hated that show) and that Gypsy Rose Lee is a famous stripper that only takes her gloves off?

So as a kid I saw a lot of stuff.  Even saw Bette Midler in Fiddler on the Roof, not that anyone knew who she was just yet.  I saw Patti Lupone, the original Evita though she ended up in the part thanks to a series of mishaps and much against the wishes of Andrew Lloyd Webber.  He couldn’t stand her and ignored all her requests for advice and even upped the key of a few songs hoping it would rupture her vocal cords.  Really.  It’s in her book.  I’m pretty sure the range for that role has to be the most difficult and taxing range of them all.  Similarly, Sutton Foster is Sutton Foster because the original actress playing Millie in Thoroughly Modern Mille broke her leg in previews.  They say “break a leg” and she did.  Speaking of breaking a leg, Christina Applegate starred in a revival of Sweet Charity.  Well she broke her leg two nights before opening night yet insisted she’d perform.  They rewrote most of her choreography to accommodate her lack of movement and it was absolutely brilliant.  She sang one song in a bathrobe hanging from a hook on a door!  Another time a rolling chaise lounge picked her up and delivered her to the other side of the stage.  Now that’s not just suspending belief.  That’s frigg’n brilliant.

I saw Lauren Bacall stumble on the edge of a rug and recover in less than half a second.  I saw Vanessa Redgrave stop her performance and insist a man with a cell phone be removed.  I mean it was a one woman show.  Her talking to the audience on a bare stage while sitting in a chair.  Oh she was pissed.  Imagine ninety minutes going solo and just how significant any break in concentration would be?  That incident showed the horror of not being able to suspend belief. For the rest of the performance, as phenomenal as she was it was difficult to get back to that state of mind.  And talk about show stoppers.  In the revival of Pippin Andrea Martin got a five minute standing ovation every night after she sang a song while dangling from a rope fifty feet above the stage.

She not only suspended belief, she suspended our anxiety until she safely got off the thing.

I saw another one man show called I Am My Own Wife.  One actor seamlessly performs about thirty distinctly different roles and never leaves the stage.  It was amazing.  There was no substitute.  Only one person could possibly do this.  If he called in sick, the show was cancelled.  The play’s title is from an anecdote that transgender character named Charlotte tells: when she was forty, her clueless mother asked “Don’t you think it’s time you settled down and found a wife?” to which Charlotte answered, “But, Mutti, don’t you know that I am my own wife?”

The actor was Jefferson Mays and clearly he was a master of suspending belief to portray thirty people.  With different dialects, genders, ages … everything.

Never heard much more about him after that.  He probably quit acting and picked up a less challenging job at Target.  Can ya blame him?