Shifting The Script While Staying Sane
On what's working for me (and what's not).
The art of balancing a cabaret set is really tricky. There are rules, and I tend not to know them and definitely don’t follow them, like don’t open with a ballad, or don’t get too personal, don’t be too scripted, or not scripted enough. Have a nice mix of ballads and uptempos; definitely don’t have too many ballads. Did I mention the ballads? I want it to be “right,” whatever that is, and of course I want it to land. It all comes back to wanting approval - yuck.
Art, when it’s good, doesn’t always adhere to rules. Rules do make it easier to create, that’s for sure, but my shows have always been sparked more by what I sense will work. What music am I loving, what story do I want to tell with that music? And that (mostly) should be it. But sometimes I forget because I want it to be perfect. And I start to obsess about the rules.
You see, the story I tell in my upcoming re-mount of my show Ingenue You When is intensely personal and while I’m choosing to tell it, it’s scary and I want to naturally tamp down the scary. I’m protective of it / rules are ostensibly there to protect us / hence, rules.
Some of these rules have actually proven helpful; if I were given my druthers, every show would be all ballads (snizzore); my music director Howard and I joke that the tag of all my shows should be “We need another uptempo.” (This is in addition to my all-time tagline “Can we raise that key?”). But we didn’t discuss rules too much the first time out for Ingenue You When; the show followed some rules and ignored others, and it worked. Beautifully. It was like a lightning strike that you sometimes hear about with creative work; it was “right,” but the other kind of right - the right songs for the stories, the right stories for the moment, the right people to bring it all to life.
For the past few days, I’ve felt out of balance, with the show and with myself (my husband is traveling, my dad’s health has taken a hit), and I’m mired in self-reproach. In my lowest moments I’m convinced that the script never worked and so I have to blow it up completely and follow all the rules. I find myself itching for change because - what - I want to show growth? Not rely on what’s come before because that seems like cheating? I make myself bonkers trying to be right, to be perfect and as an artist I know lightning strikes are few and far between. I’ve moved one or two songs and added some new ones and this requires the script to shift, but it…won’t. It won’t balance. It just sits there, staring at me reproachfully.
I have nightmares that instead of the comforter on the bed, my Google docs have all come to life and jumped out of my computer to create a giant quilt of terrible drafts that are slowly smothering me. Talk about a panic dream. I change the opening, and the ending gets gummed up. My latest tweak makes the ending stronger, but requires me to take a song from the beginning. And so on. I have tried to shift this script six different ways from Tuesday and it. will. not. budge.
My story isn’t some big secret and it’s really not that dramatic (I’m dramatic, though - I own it!). I have been through things that a million others have been through, in some form or fashion, too. I don’t want to bore, but I do want to elevate the conversation. Sharing struggle, I think, shows compassion. And we all need that.
My brilliant director Julia Murney took my overwrought state down a notch or two. In her usual patient but incisive way, she told me to stop thinking of this process as the end-all be-all. “We’re workshopping it.” Lightning strike!! To workshop something in the theater is to move it from the initial “is this an interesting idea, will it work?” stage to the time before actual rehearsals begin where the real changes are made so that it actually does work. In other words, you make mistakes. On purpose. Like trying a new lipstick - if it doesn’t light up your face, wipe it off. You workshopped it. Make changes, try them out, let all the awful missteps and mistakes happen, and if the script keeps snapping back into place, then so be it.
Life, like art, can seem like a series of lightning strikes, but really it’s just one long workshop. Missteps and mistakes and change just help us take it to the next level. As I keep saying, some of the show will be intact, and some moments will be new, different. But which ones….well, I’m going to give the script a little space to show me. So I’m not striving for perfection, it turns out; I’m striving for compassion. For my script, for our world. For me.
And in the end, it’s just a cabaret. On Easter Sunday, of all days! But it’s my story and I’m excited to share it because I own it, just like I own this overwrought, scary process. Thanks for being here to witness it.
The creative process is a spiritual path. This adventure is about us, about the deep self, the composer in all of us, about originality, meaning not that which is all new, but that which is fully and originally ourselves.
-Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Curious to see the final product? Join us on April 9 at 7pm. We’d love to have you!
There’s a streaming option, too, for those not in in NYC.
I like to share pics from my past when I’m working on a gig to kind of show where I’ve come from as I work on where I’m going - they’re honest, they’re fun and we all have a past. (Obviously - why I do this.) And I found this! This is my little sister and I with our dad, in the early days with the ill-fated Puppy from my post about sweet Marlowe. Maybe Puppy wasn’t so bad after all…
