Let Me Be Your Star (5 page)

The messages I received from the McPhans — and even some
not-so-Phans — seemed mainly to come to the consensus that my primary
motivation for harping on various McPhlaws was (and, I suppose, is) jealousy.
Reader, they aren’t totally wrong. I’m jealous of Katherine McPhee in the way
I’m jealous of anyone who has more money than me, which is to say, almost
everyone (unless they live in Bangladesh or went to graduate school for poetry
or something). I’m not the kind of person who needs a Gulfstream, or even a
really fancy handbag (although I’m currently accepting donations if you’ve got
one going spare), but it would be nice to like, be able to get my roots done
and rent a car in the same month without feeling like it’s only a matter of
days until the workhouse. Last night, I had a dream about having a washer-dryer
actually
in
my own apartment unit, and I woke up with the kind of
anguished yearning you usually get from dreaming about still being in love and
with your college boyfriend who is somehow also Ryan Gosling.

So they might be onto something, but they’ve got the wrong
person. Katharine McPhee can’t act. She sings fine, if you like that kind of
thing, and she is, of course, a very pretty, very lucky girl. But it’s not
Katharine McPhee that I’m jealous of. It’s Karen Cartwright.

Musical theater nuns — that is, the kind of women who give
their life over to Broadway, and whatever their actual relationship status, are
spiritually married only to Stephen Sondheim — are a particular breed. We may
belong to different orders, and dress in different habits — the Webberite and
their half-masks, the Larsonians and their mismatched plaids, and who could
forget the Schwartzines, in their long black caftans and dyed green skin,
except for the breakaway Pippennes who dress only in jesters motley with jagged
felt ruffs around their necks, not unlike Kermit the Frog — but for the most
part, we heard the call very early, and it sounded like Ethel Merman singing “I
had a dream.” Or Patti (
not
Ruthie Henshall, but maybe Randy Graff)
serving past tense realness with “I dreamed a dream.” Or if you’re a strict
Sondheimian, as I am (we, in my experience, are the most doctrinaire) with
Elaine Stritch toasting the ladies who lunch, and knowing that wasn’t a
compliment, but wanting to be one and insult one at the same time.

Despite these minor doctrinal differences, most musical
theater nuns have one thing in common: We are not the kind of girls who have
everything handed to them. We are the girls with something to prove. We are the
girls who will karate chop through doors to get what we want, yet somehow are
still our own worst enemy. In high school, the most popular boys might have
hooked up with us at parties, but rarely, if ever, called us their girlfriends
in public. Elaine Stritch is one of us. Miss Piggy is one of us. Patti LuPone
(not in the safe word sense) is one of us. So is Evita, and so is Eliza Dolittle
and Julie LaVerne and every female character from
Follies
and Fanny
Brice and her American Beauty nose. (Barbra Streisand is also one of us,
although she may have thinks she shed the veil, but as far as I’m concerned,
it’s like Judaism. If Hitler would have killed you, or you can walk into any
gay bar in any city in the country and within fifteen minutes have made
seventeen new friends, you’re one of us, I don’t care how much cashmere you’ve
got on.) It’s a psychology that finds its most dramatic extremes illustrated in
the dramatic aria “Rose’s Turn” at the end of
Gypsy,
a sort of
histrionic catechism in which the
eros
of knowing what you’ve got inside
of you and the
thanatos
of the horrible existential fear that no one
will ever see it, or if they do, they won’t recognize it.

Karen Cartwright was
not
one of us.

Let me put it this way: I have a friend who always says the
main difference between theater people and Hollywood people is their jeans.
(That’s jeans with a “J,” by the way, if you’re blind and listening to this on
tape.) Hollywood people have good jeans, theater people have bad jeans. In the
world of
Smash,
Karen Cartwright is a pair of size 25 Citizens of
Humanity skinnies. Ivy is an odd Marc by Marc Jacobs cocktail dress you found
at the consignment store and it’s a size too small but it was only $75 and it’s
sort of designer, so what the hell. One of those things is a human being full
of conflict and insecurity and aspiration and story; the other is a picture of
slender thighs on the Barney’s website. Sometimes the captain of the Pom Squad
does get cast as Maria in
The Sound of Music.
She might even be good.
But she’s not the one who winds up majoring in theater and barfing in the
bathroom of Marie’s Crisis four times in six months. That’s the girl who played
the Baroness. Maria sells real estate in Fort Worth and has a perfectly normal,
perfectly health-insured life, the fresh-aired Alpine bitch. The “magical”
Karen Cartwright may enjoy doing musical theater. But she doesn’t
need
it
like the Ivys of the world do, and it’s my suspicion that McPhee doesn’t quite
need — or understand — musical theater either. That somehow, Broadway is a word
that still lurks at the fringes of her subconscious as Simon Cowell’s most
cherished insult.

I believed this wholeheartedly, and it was my job to point
it out.

But I still felt like shit. Was I a bully, kicking a
beleaguered show — a show, I should add, I would have dropped everything to go
and write for, if only they would ask me — while it was down?

“You must be so excited,” an acquaintance of mine smirked,
not altogether pleasantly, when the revamped second season premiered to dismal
numbers, and it became clear we were now dealing with a case of keeping the
patient as comfortable as possible and wait for the end, now that the
chemotherapy (symbolized by the new character Jimmy Collins, an inexplicably
hostile young Turk of a songwriter, who, as played by
Newsies
heartthrob
Jeremy Jordan, seemed to occupy a strange and disturbing territory between
Mickey Rooney and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) had stopped working. “You hated
Smash,
and
now it’s dead. Just like you wanted.”

“But I didn’t want that,” I bleated, hands out, the
betraying courtier horrified to realize the king doesn’t intend to pardon the
friend I handed over after all. “I didn’t want that at all.”

Smash
was imperfect, but it was an imperfect thing
about something I desperately love. When my recaps were lumped in with and
linked to the small but vocal contingent of self-proclaimed “hate-watchers”
heaping scorn — some of it deserved; some vastly overstated — on the show, I
would get upset to the point of panic. I’ve never hate-watched anything in my
life except the Republican National Convention, and even that turned into a
delightful exercise in high camp when Elaine Stritch unexpectedly stormed the
stage dressed as a cowboy and did that thing with the chair. Picking something
apart is easy; putting it together — you’ll forgive me, but we’re nearing the
end and Lord Sondheim’s breath is cold against my cheek — even if it’s
bad,
is
really fucking hard. Yes, I was often critical of the show, but look, my
husband can be a real asshole sometimes too, and I don’t love him any less for
it.

But salvation came from an unlikely source. It came from the
people involved in the show itself. Not just from Marc and Scott, but from the
writers and producers and actors and crew members who, emboldened perhaps by
the freedom of being terminal (just like Laura Linney in
The Big C)
began
to quietly reach out to me. Somehow, that meant more to me than anything. Marc
Shaiman and Scott Wittman are hugely successful and are going to be just fine,
with or without
Smash,
but the featured players? The low-level writers
hoping for a stepping stone to bigger and better things? I don’t flatter myself
that anything I did make an iota of difference to
Smash’s
renewal or
cancellation (for the record, I doubt Theresa Rebeck was one of them, although
the time I saw her, shortly after her firing, stomping through Times Square
while eating Cold Stone Creamery with Marsha Norman will be my Number One celebrity
sighting until the day I die), but to be able to send a nice note to someone
who has been relentlessly making fun of the thing you were counting on to help
you put your kids through school and keep you in WGA insurance is another level
of class.

“I’m just so happy you don’t hate me,” I told one of them
finally, a writer I had known casually in another life. “I don’t understand it,
but I’m happy.”

He smiled. “I understand why. It’s because of all the people
who wrote about the show, you’re the only one who’s one of us.”

One of us.

There it was again. It’s such a simple thing, but I think it
gets to the bottom of the matter. It’s what
Smash
didn’t get right, but
the people making
Smash
gave back to me. Broadway can be a competitive,
cutthroat world full of ambitious, difficult people. But Broadway is not a
reality show. That’s what all the plot set-ups in
Smash,
the competition
between Karen and Ivy, the way it was sometimes possible, if it was really late
at night and you’d had a lot of Red Bull, to lift one of Anjelica Huston’s
enchanted conch shells to your ear and hear the executives wondering how they
could make it more like
The Voice,
got so wrong until it was too late to
get it right. Nobody goes into theater proclaiming “I’m not here to make
friends.” Every theater kid, every weirdo, every misfit who ever wanted to wear
character shoes or a cape to school, who can handily tell you which Muppet is
right for which role in
The Muppets’ Sweeney Todd
, who is far,
far
more
familiar with
Flora the Red Menace
than with Florence + the Machine (I’m
doing the plus right, right? Also, that girl, whatever her name is, would be a
great Miss Jean Brodie if they ever do a musical of it) dreams of the day
they’ll walk through the portal that transports them to their own personal Oz,
to the place they’ve always belonged. You go into theater because
that’s
where your friends are.
Because, to paraphrase Frankie in
Member of the
Wedding
(a role in which I was
not
cast in the Omaha Community Playhouse’s
1993 production) once said, “because they are the
we
of you.” Or rather,
of me.

For some this portal will lead to a Broadway opening night
party where Donna Murphy kneels before you with a bouquet of roses and then you
get to go home with the beautiful and desperate young hustler (of either sex)
of your choice before drinking yourself to death in your art deco penthouse
lather rinse repeat.

For the rest of us (and there may be some overlap!) I think
it leads to Marie’s Crisis.

Marie’s Crisis is in an unassuming basement on an unassuming
(or formerly unassuming; for all I know Shia LeBoeuf lives there now) street in
the depths of the West Village. Famously, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman met
there in 1976. Less famously, but no less significantly, I assert that I am the
only person to have performed a heterosexual sex act in its bathroom. (If you
know another one, again, you know where to find me. Perhaps we can start a
Tumblr.)

It’s a piano bar, but not of the usual sort. At Marie’s,
there’s no song list, no sign-up sheet. Nobody hogs the mike or sings some
nasally version of “Over the Rainbow” with so much melisma you can’t even hear
the words. At Marie’s Crisis, everybody sings together. You stand side by side,
cheek by jowl, with aging chorus boys and high school musical queens and gay
bankers and off-duty drag queens in Target sweatpants and sad-eyed men with
beautiful posture whose cheeks bear the furrows of a lifetime on protease
inhibitors, and sing “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” all together, in unison. Big
voices and small, off key and on, people who know all the words and people who
just have to fake it. It might be the closest thing to a socialist utopia that
we’ll ever get on Earth. At Marie’s Crisis, there are no stars. At Marie’s
Crisis, we’re all just part of the ensemble, the kind of people who
occasionally get to go see Shakespeare in the Park the night Tony Kushner and
Mike Nichols are there.

It could be a lot worse. Isn’t that the moral behind every
work of musical theater? It could be worse. No matter how bad things get, no
matter if you never became a star even though you gave everything to your kids,
or may never find the partner who helps you survive being alive, or you did
find that person and then they left you, or were killed by giants, leaving you
to raise your beanstalk IVF baby all by yourself even though you don’t know
what the fuck you’re doing, you’re — again, you’ll pardon me — you’re still
here. You’re here. And you get to take a bow at curtain and soak in the
applause, and sing a reprise of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” even if it’s only in
your head.

It could be a lot worse.

When I started writing this, I thought I’d come to the
conclusion that a lot of people who have written about recapping do. I figured
I’d keep beating up on myself, bitter that I’d written hundreds of thousands of
utterly disposable words — enough to fill three lengthy novels — about a show
with which I had nothing to do, that didn’t know if I existed. That I’ve become
known for something utterly extraneous, with no more staying power than a
single lighted match, with no more significance to the world than a single tweet,
quickly drowned in a sea of other tweets, lost in all the amusing, disposable ambient
noise that makes it impossible for any of us to actually hear, to feel, to
make.

But now I’m at the end, and I don’t feel that way. Maybe I
should, but I don’t. Because it may not have changed the world, but it did
change me.