I learned a little more about the magic of theatre recently. I learned what it is not and I learned a little of what it is. I have worked with preschoolers on Christmas shows and with high schoolers on full fledged musical plays. I have fretted up until the last minute whether it would come together and somehow it always has. I can’t give all of the credit to the magic of theatre because the kids and their directors, stage managers, costumers and others worked tirelessly to make it all come together. After all of that hard work, when the lights come up and the audience joins the mix, somehow there is that little something extra that makes it all come out alright.
What the magic does not do is turn nothing into something. It can not help you if you have not worked as hard as you know how. If you don’t rehearse, the director does not direct, no one cares and no creativity enters the mix, there is no amount of magic that will help you. I recently had an uninspired director tell his cast that the magic would just make it all OK- it didn’t!
But for all of the problems and lack of effort (I won’t bore you with details here) I did see the magic appear at the end of the show. I was lucky to get to perform with my son. Another member of the cast had her daughter in the show with her. While my son is nearly 27 and grown, her daughter was about 7 or 8 and this was a new experience for her. She did a really good job and each night before she went out for her last part of the show, her mom would go over what the little girl was supposed to say. As the final music was being sung, the mom and little girl would recite her lines and then the little girl would walk onto the stage to perform. On our last performance, her mom went to go over the words one last time, but the little girl fell apart, crying her eyes out. I thought maybe she was upset because she had slightly flubbed a line earlier. Another cast member thought it might be the much larger and exuberant audience we had that scared her. The mom worried the child could not go on as the child became more and more distraught. When the music was nearly at the end, the child blew her nose, wiped her eyes, fluffed her hair and walked on stage at just the right time. She delivered her lines flawlessly and watched and responded to her scene partner perfectly. As she took the hand of the gentleman she had just performed with, she made it to the wings on the far side of the stage before once again falling into sobs. She ran behind the set to get back to our side and her mom’s waiting arms.
After the final curtain call, which we let our young friend lead, we all went to the green room to catch our breath before heading out to the lobby to see friends and family. The girl’s mom came to me and asked if I knew why her daughter was crying. “No,” I said. “Why?” Her mom’s voice got soft and she said, “I told her we should go over her lines one last time.” Then her child’s eyes got big and flooded with tears as she asked if this was indeed the last time we would do this play. Her mom told her yes and the girl lost it.She asked her mom if she would ever see us again and her mom said, “Maybe some of them. It is one of those hard lessons we all have to learn in the theatre. You work together, become like a family and then it is over. Some people you work with again, some you never see again.” And it is true. You get so close as you spend night after night together, becoming characters, trusting each other to put in the effort and be there for each other on stage. You experiment with the limits of what you can do with the story you have been given to tell. You trust your director to have a vision and share that vision with you and eventually the audience. You laugh at mistakes and celebrate when you get it right. And then it is over. And everyone moves on to their every day lives, some people to new characters, some not. For this small girl, new to theatre, she thought we were a team for the long haul, not for a few short weeks.
That is my idea of the magic of theatre. Not that it will all magically come together. You have to work for it. And I hope the audience gets a magical feeling when they share the story and emotions with us as actors. But for me, on the stage, the magic is becoming a new person, telling a story and sharing all of that with a new family. Knowing it is a short term family makes you live in the moment and enjoy the experience that much more. It is what keeps pulling me back to perform and it is what makes me spend my off nights going to see friends in other productions. Even when things aren’t going right, a bad day in the theatre is better than a good day nearly anywhere else.
