Backstage and on Broadway from the wings....

I wondered tonight how many shows I have worked through, and ultimately listened to. If I have worked in the theatre, basically nonstop since 1993, then I have heard well over 5000 performances. The breakdown would go something like this: Cats = #1 (having worked there for 2 1/2 years) then The Scarlet Pimpernel (all 3 versions), Saturday Night Fever...and so on, and then it becomes more of an even mix of numbers...per show/play. Most shows I worked on for at least a year. If you don't miss a day of work, which many times I didn't, that is 416 shows a year. Some were short runs, some closed too soon. I have always considered this a real privilege. I love my work, it isn't my "A" plan, but it is an "A-" plan for sure. I work with brilliant artists, and it affords me my studio...
Backstage.
Listening to Laurie Beechman singing Memory from Cats. How many times did I listen to her, perhaps a hundred times? More, maybe? Her amazing voice I can still pick out in my head in brief moments...such a fierce peformer and singer. Douglas Sills singing Into the Fire, maybe 600 times? Sandra Bernhard singing about the rivers on Mars, Genius. I will hear a song from a show I've worked on, and in my mind I see exactly what I am doing, at that moment and with whom, backstage. I don't usually see the performance of what is happening, just who I am interacting with, and what task is at hand. In many of the shows if I didn't have a cue I would pick out a special moment and watch from the wings. Watching Carol Channing every night walk the passerelle in Hello Dolly, or eating the potato puffs with Horace. Claudia Shelle would quietly run through the White Cat adagio all by herself in the dark. Every show. Sometimes quickly, but with the same concentration, and application. As beautiful as watching her perform it moments later for the audience of the Winter Garden Theatre. Tonight I watched Alice Ripley's reaction at the end of singing Didn't I See This Movie when her husband Dan walks in. Shocking...unbelievable...beautiful and haunting. I watched it twice today, being a two show day. I was curious what happened at the end of this rocking song, so I watched from the wings. Even busy with changes backstage, I listen carefully to I Miss the Mountains, the previously mentioned song, and a specific line she says about grief. The way she says it every night tells its own story, all by itself.  What I get from these performances each night, from each show I work on, I have never quite been able to calculate. I know the energy of working with a performing artist enables me to constantly think about my own work as a painter, which one might think of as constant/not live...but I think of what Fosse said; "pretty picture" and I think of each picture, of each second, of each moment that a stage performer works to convey; amidst all the scenery, lighting, music, and staging. Each moment conveying an ever reaching arc of emotion that lives on in the audiences memory, reflecting the human experience...and I strive for that 'live' feeling in my work. Listening to a performer while backstage, usually in the dark, it feels to me like you are being let in on a secret. Not seeing them, just listening, gives it a nuanced air that might get missed in viewing it onstage. There are so many distractions designed to coerce the story along to its conclusion. And rightly so. For me, I try to let the viewer in on a secret too, in my paintings. Silently looking at the story and noise, color and shape, texture and harmony of its picture.

Dancer in Attitude 

Wire sculpture

9"