The grind of doing eight shows
a week for 52 weeks a year can wear on you over time. Doing the same
blocking night after night or reacting to a line you’ve
heard hundreds of times before can start to feel more
like factory work than an artistic endeavor. To
keep things fresh and to break up the monotony on stage,
sometimes it’s the little things that take place
off stage that can mean the most.
I joined the Broadway company of Miss Saigon in
its fifth year. One of the first things that
I remember when I arrived at the theatre for my first
day of rehearsals was the warm, welcoming and festive
atmosphere of the stage managers’office.
What served as the office was actually
one of the dressing rooms at the Broadway Theatre
that had been
outfitted for the purposes of managing the show. Where
there might usually have been costume pieces, wigs
or make-up; there were instead copious shelves full
of reference manuals, rule books, scripts, scores and
binders of reports and forms. A few filing cabinets
had been added and arranged to facilitate a productive
flow and in one corner of the room was the office computer
on which daily reports were filed…and numerous
games of FreeCell were played.
As an alternative to the harsh
incandescent glow from the make-up mirror bulbs,
strings of decorative lights
had been hung around the room. The zigzagging
cords covered the ceiling and hung from shelves and
the frame of the doorway. The charming rainbow
of colored lights; glowing Santas and Snowmen suspended
in space; and black cats and jack-o-lanterns peering
down from their tethers provided a remembrance of holidays
past.
But what struck me the most when
I first entered the room were the pictures. On the walls, on the
mirrors, on filing cabinets, on practically every flat
surface in the room were dozens, perhaps hundreds,
of Polaroid photos. There were snapshots of cast
members, pictures from celebrations, photos of crew
members and a plethora of candid shots of fresh-faced
little Tams - in essence a pictorial history of the
Broadway production of Miss Saigon.
I must have spent an half of an
hour examining the frozen moments of the show’s past and I remember
feeling an amazing comfort and euphoria in knowing
that I was now a part of this “family”and
its history. I wondered if the people starring
back at me had felt the same feelings while standing
in this place.
During that first week as I rehearsed
for the show, I spent a great deal of time in that
office. As
I got to know the stage managers, I also got to know
the people in the pictures. I’d pick out
a photo and ask who the person was or what was happening
in the shot. Little by little the pictures came
to life and told the story of a group of people brought
together for a singular purpose.
In the time that I spent with Miss Saigon,
more and more pictures made their way onto the walls. My
mug made it up there a few times and it made me happy
to be part of the mosaic. Eventually the free
space in the office became filled and the pictures
began to creep out into the hallway. The Polaroid
kudzu had taken over this little corner of the Broadway
theatre and threatened to engulf the entire building.
The montage became a shrine for
me. Whenever
the tedium of the show started to grate on my nerves,
it always helped to stop by the office and discover
what new shots had been added. If there weren’t
any new pictures I would scan the old ones and focus
on one that made me remember a particularly funny or
silly day. Then pretty soon whatever petty problem
I was dealing with that day would get washed away in
the tide of thankfulness for being a part of something
special.
I moved on to another show before the end of Miss
Saigon’s run. When the day of the
show’s closing finally came, it made me melancholy
to think of all those pictures simply disappearing
with the rest of the refuse that would be thrown
out to make way for the theatre’s next tenant. Those
photos had meant a great deal to me and to a lot
of people.
Then one day, a short time after
the closing of the show, I received a very pleasant
surprise. A
manila envelope arrived from one of the stage managers
of the show. Among the contents of the package
were six of the Polaroids. They were all pictures
of me that had been up on the wall. A couple
were shots of me in a Tam outfit which I had created
for myself (long story), one showed me hard at work
on a project –no doubt for a practical joke,
another was a shot of me expressing myself with the
middle finger of my right hand and two shots were of
me on my final day with the show.
I was speechless. I couldn’t have gotten
a better present than if the infamous helicopter had
been presented to me with a big red bow on top. Looking
at the pictures I was instantly transported back to
my days at the Broadway theatre, and that same feeling
of comfort and euphoria that I had felt my very first
day washed over me once again.
It’s a fact of this business that shows come
and go. And although Miss Saigon’s
marquee no longer hovers over Broadway, the show will
always be running for me because I own a piece of the
wall.
