Chance = Change

But gloriously clear, like crystal ice....Good morning all...and Joey, thanks for the comment...good to hear from you and to read your blog too...you write with such immediacy and clarity, it's fun, and though I will probably not agree with a lot , (I have a feeling our sensibilities will usually guide us to polar opposite opinions) it's good to read you.

Today, Alex T. will come over and we will coach his two callback auditions for the two Michael Mayer projects on Monday, including SPRING AWAKENING....I so love this young man and his intelligence and talent...I don't even mind spending an otherwise weekend day off being with him in the work....he has become a friend, to both Peter and me. He and the beautiful Caitlyn F. will come over next weekend and cook dinner here and we shall have a nice dinner party, the four of us...meanwhile, today: we work! For a couple of hours, anyway. His talent is worth it, and anyway, how can I say "no"to a student who actually thanks me in his Broadway program credits like Alex did in his HISTORY BOYS bio? I will always try to say yes to Alex T.

While I write, the Gordon McCrea-Shirley Jones movie of OKLAHOMA is on tv, and as ever, I am thoroughly fascinated by it, especially Agnes DeMille's astonishingly brilliant and forward-peering dance work....SPRING AWAKENING and its unique choreographic vocabulary comes to mind...both OKLAHOMA and SPRING AWAKENING deal directly (though the older show is more obscure in its references, of course) ...they both have directly to do with the sexual lives of young adults! This is very clear in Agnes' MANY A NEW DAY dance, with those two red petticoats exhuberantly proclaiming the "coming of age" of two of the young girls...and the enticing, chilling and deeply sexual Act One finale, that famous DREAM BALLET...there is nothing in SPRING AWAKENING more sexual, even though the stage physicality of the newer show is more blatant, not the least bit obscure as the two leads ravage each other center stage on a rising platform, no less...when i saw that the other night, I turned to Peter and said " Well,
half a century ago, Laurie and Curly wanted to do this, and now, 50 years later, on Broadway center stage, Melchior and the girl are finally doing it! Pants down, full speed ahead!"

Agnes DeMille was the genius who rocked peoples' worlds even when they did not notice she was doing so....and I feel there is physical language in SPRING AWAKENING that goes near the edge of the same ideas....there is a journey into a sort of symbolism, a poetry, in SPRiNG AWAKENING's physical expression, and of course, the lyrics...it stays with me....there is sex and young lust all over nightly television...and that does not stay with me...SPRING AWAKENING does.

I am filled with a sort of sadness today....many reasons.....I miss Barter Theatre.