The cows and chickens are goin’ to the dickens

We’re two weeks into the run now. Audiences have been packed and enthusiastic. Some of the messages that Sue has sent our way from happy watchers have been gushing.

Lots of fun technical elements in this show. Bea and Jerry have dressed the newsstand with a panoply of old cheesy pulp magazines salvaged from eBay—racing and turf news, turbo-charged action stories, comic books, pinups and confessionals (“Why I Am a Prostitute” is one cover story). The only bad thing, for us, is that the mags are stapled closed onto the set piece. I’ll never get to read that interview with Ava Gardner.

I have a great costume of olive greens and golds, incorporating a hat that I bought for myself about 15 years ago, a bad-plaid sports jacket that somebody’s ex-husband once wore, a 40s-era psychedelic necktie with still more greens and golds, and pants (built by Anita and Maggie) with a waist that sits under my rib cage.

The orchestra sounds great. Brian has found five woodwinds (including bari sax!), five brass, acoustic bass, drums, and is filling in the rest with keyboards. I particularly like the bit in the overture where the “A Bushel and a Peck” theme is introduced with piccolo and bass clarinet.

I’m liking my fight choreography in the “Havana” sequence: Dana clocks me with a serving tray, twice, and I finish with a back fall (make your legs into a figure 4, land on your well-padded tushie, and roll the rest of the way down). The only hard part, oddly, is getting up again. Sometime during tech week I pulled a muscle in my chest trying to bounce up too quickly in the following blackout. In fact, I’m nursing a couple more dings and scrapes from this show (one of them definitely my fault) and the rest of the cast and crew seem mildly cursed as well.

I love the grammar lesson that Sarah gives to Adelaide at the end of the intro to “Marry the Man Today:”

ADELAIDE: Now doesn’t that kind of apply
To you and I?

SARAH: You and me.

I think the best thing about doing an ensemble role like this is that I’m so focused on doing my own work well (cleaning up fuzzy bits of choreography; trying to make the inner harmony I have in “Oldest Established” audible) that I’m not wasting energy worrying about what everyone else is doing. Well, that’s mostly true.

Sometimes, just before curtain, I will get all New Age and lay my hand on the floor to pick up some positivity. I think about the many times I have performed in this theater, all the way back to The Foreigner in 1989 when each night I would step blind into a trap door, with Mary Jane’s hand guiding my foot down. So last Saturday night, I placed my palm on the wooden stage deck (instead of the concrete around the edge, like I usually do) and I could the vibrations in the boards as the rest of the cast was moving into place. I felt bubbles of anticipatory energy, just the way Leta describes it.

I’m having a good time.