By the Heartstrings
I love live theater!!!
Matt and I saw the touring company of Rent at the Merriam last night. I’ve been immersed in the cast album and print materials for years—this show, for a time, was going to be one of the texts examined in the dissertation—but I’d never gotten up to New York to see it.* I saw the film when it came out, but I was still eager to see the original score and libretto performed, and to see the difference between the minimalist art direction of the stage show versus the photo-realism of the film.
I’m vefry glad I did so, and I think I may be glad to have waited so long.
One of the actors—Bryce Ryness, who was playing Roger—just had something about him. Something in the passion and the voicing of this young man’s performance reached into my soul. He quite literally brought tears to my eyes a number of times throughout the show.
And it turns out this fella has also been a member of the company in Vox Lumiere. Not in the cast that performed Hunchback at the Prince last fall, but it’s still an association that makes sense to me:
I was inexpressably, instinctively drawn into that show too.
There’s no explaining which shows, which voices, will affect me so deeply. Still, it’s a wonderful thing when it happens.
I love live theater.
* Obviously, if it had stayed in the diss, and if I’d finished the diss, I would have made the trip. But it didn’t, and I didn’t, and that, as they say, is that.
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