(You probably don’t’ get the title, don’t worry – that might be a theme today)
So, it’s an extra day (Feb 29th) and this is kind of just for me (and maybe Lisa).
In my mind, I can’t seem to forget (hence the title of this post) the show last night. Next To Normal touched me wonderfully. And I thought about this all last night, how interesting. You see Next to Normal was about manic depression and I thought it appropriate, Floyd Collins was a musical about a trapped cave explorer and I thought it was dumb (well performed, but dumb).
This contrast is made even more pronounced because the male lead in Next to Normal (Brian d’Arcy James ) is a Tony and OBIE winner. And... (....wait for it) ...was in the original (and until last month, the only) New York production of Floyd Collins – he is on the soundtrack of that show.
So, why was one fantastic and one craptastic. Here, I think, is the difference. Floyd Collins, although beautiful sung, was a show about limits and limitations. The big lesson – should there be one – was that exploring your world will lead to bad things (in his case - death). Staying home, staying in place, being content with what you have – no matter how little it is – is the answer to, if not happiness, at least to life.
The big lesson in Next To Normal is the opposite. You have to explorer. You have to strive. You have to jump at a chance for fun, or at love, or at sanity. Staying and hiding is a sucker’s bet. Maybe you’ll fall, or fail, or falter (pretty good there huh), but you might break through. Next to Normal makes me want to press on with the things I love.
Wild change of subject (unless you are in my brain). There is a song in Sunday in the Park with George (also coming to Broadway, but this song comes to mind without that ancillary piece of data), called Move On. Some lines are:
Stop worrying if your vision is new
Let others make that decision, they usually do
You keep moving on
I chose and my world was shaken, so what
The choice may have been mistaken, the choosing was not
You keep moving on
So there you go. And yes, I know that this was pretty much my mother's advice from jump street - but sometimes you have to keep learning the same thing over and over. Like, I said, today’s post was for me, now back to your regularly scheduled Nincompoopery.
Happy Extra Day!