#so i am always very down to chat les mis with anyone. especially if you are willing to indulge me in the fandom school of thought for a bit | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sapienveneficus · 8 years ago

Text

I Will Sing The Song of Purple Summer

In honor of the anniversary of DWSA’s Closing Night, I’ve decided to repost my old journal entry about that night. Enjoy.

Last night was closing night. How do I even begin to describe closing night? At the beginning, I suppose that’s a very good place to start. (get the reference?) Deaf West’s revival of Spring Awakening closed on a Sunday. Throughout the show’s run, they typically did what’s called a 2 show Sunday with a matinee at 3 and an evening show at 7:30. The last day was no exception. Oh, I should probably back up just a little and explain that Saturday’s two shows were cancelled that final weekend because of Winter Storm Jonas and there was considerable concern Saturday night that Sunday’s shows might be cancelled as well. I can assure you that there was a great deal of celebrating in the theater community when it was officially announced, early Sunday morning, that all Broadway shows would be allowed to go on as scheduled.

Okay, back to closing night. The limited amount of time between the two shows on Sundays always created a rather hectic evening lotto experience because anyone who came to try the ticket lotto had to share the sidewalk in front of the theater with the fans who stayed after the matinee to get their playbills signed. So Sunday evenings had always been a bit chaotic. Well, that last night the chaos reached epic proportions. First, you had the stagedoor crowd, larger than any I’d ever seen, completely filling the sidewalk which was, as you might imagine, still covered with snow from Saturday’s blizzard. Next, you had the lotto line; wrapped around the block, snaking out into the street, through the knee-high snow, dodging parked cars and stagedoor fans who couldn’t fit on the sidewalk, all to get to the table in front of the box office and drop in their slips. Then those poor people had to try and find a place to stand and wait for the drawing that wasn’t already taken up by the stagedoor crowd or the post matinee “milling about” crowd. It was chaos personified! Despite all of that, it was fun to be there and watch the last lotto. It was fun to hear the speech the girl gives before each drawing, about how the Spring Awakening lotto is “the first ever combined ASL and spoken English lottery of all time! And we think that’s something to celebrate. So if I do not see you or hear you celebrating through applause, or cheering, or jumping up and down, you won’t get any tickets! And then you’ll have been out here, waiting in the cold, for absolutely nothing!” (okay, I may have heard the speech a few times)The best part about last night’s lotto, though, was that I could watch it without having to worry about its outcome because I already had my ticket to that night’s sold-out show.

After the lotto, I popped into to the closest Starbucks to finish up my closing night project. I had thought it would be a nice idea to write little thank you notes to the cast and also for a few of the Brooks Atkinson theater employees who’d been especially helpful to fans like myself during the show’s run. It was a nice idea and the cards turned out about as well as I’d hoped, but they’d ended up taking me a bit longer than I had planned to complete. After finishing the last card, I met one of my lotto buddies outside the theater about half an hour before the doors were set to open. We knew from experience that the line to get in would form quickly and move slowly, and we didn’t want to miss a minute of the closing night fun inside.

After chatting with a great group of fans outside the entrance, and a chaotic half hour of hilarious people watching inside the theater, it was time for the show to begin. Well, not quite. Now that the show has closed, I feel okay about sharing how it begins. Not that this beginning was top secret, exactly, but it was something unique to the Deaf West production, so I didn’t want to spoil it for anyone who hadn’t seen it yet. Before the show began, the actors would come out and perform their pre-show warm ups right there on stage. They'd stretch, do scales and vocal warm-ups, tune their instruments, put on their costumes, and play a game of ninja. It had become a bit of a thing in the DWSA fandom to share who won ninja each night. So, for the sake of posterity, Daniel Stewart won the last ever game of ninja. The actors would normally sign with each other as they stretched or fixed their costumes, but last night there was a lot more hugging and crying than signing going on. The other special detail that I want to share about last night’s pre-show was that each actor walked on stage alone (they usually would come in groups of two or three) and when they did, each and every time, the crowd cheered. They even cheered for the adult male actors as they walked down the aisles of the orchestra holding the “no cell phone” signs. So, clearly, this crowd was full of fans who couldn’t have been happier to be there to see the show one last time. But, of course, all good things must come to an end. Before we knew it, everyone had moved to their opening positions, and Sandra and Katie had taken their places on opposite sides of the broken mirror for the last time. The show had officially begun.

I feel like I am ill-equipped to describe exactly what it felt like to be in that crowd, watching the last show, but I’ll do my best. As I’ve already described, the theater that night was chock full of fans. As the show began, the excitement in the room was so palpable you could almost taste it. Everyone around me seemed poised on the edge of their seats as the first quiet, soulful notes of Mama Who Bore Me rang out. They laughed uproariously at the jokes in the first scene, and exploded with applause after Mama Who Bore Me Reprise. But then, just as quickly as it had broken out, the applause died away so that the next scene could begin. This was the pattern we audience members fell into; hushed anticipatory silence, laughter, raucous applause, and then quickly falling back to silence. Now that I stop to think about it, sitting in that audience was a bit like riding a roller coaster. But the fall from applause to silence wasn’t always so quick. After My Junk we all cheered and clapped longer than the actors expected. Austin McKenzie waited patiently for us to finish so that he could start the next scene. When it seemed like things were finally dying down, he tried to start his monologue but was forced to wait again for us to calm down. When we audience members had finally gotten our collective acts together, he returned to his line by picking up exactly where he had left off. (the ‘tober of October) Then, he paused for a full stop while staring down the crowd, daring us to laugh. And, of course, we did, and he had to pause again for everyone to quiet back down. Honestly, I think that exchange best exemplifies what it was like to sit there and watch that last show. It really was an exchange between the audience and the cast. The cast was doing their best to give us their greatest performances, and we in turn were giving them all of the energy, enthusiasm, and joy that we could muster. It was as if someone took all of the best parts of seeing live theater and mixed them together to create this last show experience, and that was only act one.

During intermission, I realized that I had forgotten to write out one of my cards, so I frantically dug through my bag, found a spare card and envelope, and spent what precious little time there was trying to put together something coherent. I must here give a shoutout to the kindly gentleman sitting to my left who gracefully put up with my elbow invading his personal space as I feverishly wrote. (oh, the agony of being left-handed) Luckily, I managed to finish with a few minutes to spare. I spent those last few minutes torn between two emotions, anticipation and dread. I was dreading the second act because I knew that the sooner it began, the sooner it would all be over, and then the show would have truly ended for good. But, at the same time, I was eagerly anticipating the second act. There are so many fantastic moments in the second half of the show, but there was one number in particular that I was most keen to experience. Every Broadway show, well every Broadway show worth its salt, has one amazing, showstopping number. The kind of number that brings an audience to its feet cheering and screaming themselves hoarse. Guys and Dolls has Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat, The Music Man has 76 Trombones, Les Mis has One Day More, and Spring Awakening has Totally Fucked, and it’s a showstopper if ever there was one. On an average day, Totally Fucked would get an extended round of applause. There was even an applause break built into the timing of the show to allow for it. On an exceptional day, Totally Fucked would get a standing ovation. In fact, I’d been in the audience one night when that happened. But more on that later. But closing night, well, the closing night crowd was more amped up than any crowd I’d ever seen, so I knew that when Totally Fucked ended, the crowd would collectively lose its mind. And I was not wrong. As the last notes of the song played out, and the cast raised their hands to the sky, the audience exploded. Everyone jumped out of their seats to cheer, scream, shout, and clap and for awhile it didn’t seem as if it would ever stop. In fact, true story, the show’s producer filmed about a minute of the standing ovation and put it up on his Facebook page. So that moment has been captured on film, preserved forever.

But, like all good things, the show came to end. And when the last of the applause had died down, the show’s director, Michael Arden, and one of the show’s creators, Steven Stater, came on stage to deliver two emotionally charged speeches. Then the cast took their final bows, and it was over, well, not quite. The audience had started to file out, but I stayed because I knew there was still something to see. Austin and Sandra had this special little post-show ritual. After each show, after the cast had taken their final bows and started to head off stage, these two actors would stay behind. And then, when they were the last two remaining, they would both start moving towards each other, meeting each at center stage. They would hold hands or hug for a moment before continuing, in opposite directions, off stage. That night, it took longer for the cast to file out. But at last, only Austin and Sandra remained. They slowly made their way towards each other, meeting in the middle and falling into each other’s arms. They just stayed there, holding on to each other for what felt like an exceptionally long time. Then, Daniel Durant came back out and threw his arms around both of them. And the three of them just stayed there, holding onto each other and not letting to. It was a powerful image. These three had started this journey, this labor of love, together in a church basement in LA and now they were finishing it together, having just performed to a sold out crowd on Broadway. And it was with that last emotionally charged hug, that powerful moment between three dear friends, that Deaf West’s Spring Awakening closed on Broadway.

13 notes · View notes