The Play's the Thing

[Being another in a series of entries chronicling the development of my cabaret show Just a Song at Twilight - The Golden Age of Vaudeville. These are companion pieces to Andrea Braun's Talking Cabaret with Chuck Lavazzi blogs at the web site for The Vital Voice. Performances are March 26 and 27, 2010; tickets at licketytix.com.]

At the climax of the first act of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, there’s a shattering scene in which Salieri suddenly understands the breadth of the gulf that separates him and the overwhelming bulk of humanity from a genius like Mozart. Poring over Mozart’s scores, he is struck by not only their beauty but also by the complete lack of anything resembling errors or revisions. With a sense of awe and horror, he sees that these masterpieces were set down in fully realized form with no discernable effort on the part of the composer, as though he were dictating directly from the mind of God.

For the vast majority of creative folk, of course, the process of producing art is much more arduous. The very early stages of any project are marked by false starts, wasted effort and just plain drudgery. This is particularly true of the performing arts, where the joy of performance is always built on a foundation of exercises, rehearsals, and memorization. Whether you’re a singer, dancer, actor or musician, there’s always a period of simply learning new material that you have to get through before the words, music or choreography are so well-known that they become a part of you. At that turning point, the real joy of creation takes over and rehearsals suddenly become like recess in school – a chance to start playing.

As a performer, I live for that moment. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have come home from a rehearsal and remarked to my wife “it’s starting to be fun now”. Gone are the tedious hours of writing up dialog cards and slow, plodding rote memorization. Now it’s time to start finding the subtext, working out the subtleties of character, and finding the jewel-like moments that make up a satisfying performance.

My cabaret show Just a Song at Twilight – The Golden Age of Vaudeville is finally entering that phase. I have the words and music down, I have almost all of the patter memorized (yes, you do have to memorize lines you have written for yourself) and I’m beginning to get a sense of the flow of the show. My director Tim Schall and I still need to work out some blocking (yes, even in cabaret movement has to be motivated and planned in advance) and I have yet to determine whether or not I’ll be able to work in some choreography but I am basically, as we say in the acting biz, off book.

I know I’m at this point because I no longer have to force myself to rehearse. I’m past the hard slog of getting pitches and words right and into the creative phase. Rehearsing is now a matter of discovery and actually starts to feel less like work and more like performance.

That’s the good thing about being at this stage of the project. The bad thing?  Well, that's the subject of the next post.

[Image manipulation by photofunia.com, by the way.]