I pull up uncomfortably close to a potted ficus. I decide my car will most likely be broken into and that's ok. I also decide I really must spend more time downtown on Broad Street because just LOOK at all those sparkling pants and fake hair in those windows.
I mutter and curse under my breath at the cold and the new hazardous obstacles on the Broad Street medians which really do inconvenience one when one is trying to jaywalk. I arrive at the opposite side of the street and peep back over my shoulder at the glowing marquee of the Novempire. I think, "Hahaha. I am not at rehearsal." I then peep back to my front and realize that while I may very well be not at rehearsal I also have no idea where I actually am in relation to where I am purportedly going. Broad Street is mostly deserted and all I really know about the location I am looking for is that once during a birthday brunch in one of the upstairs apartments of that building Maggie Roop felt a deep confidence that she had observed a pimp transaction on the corner across the street.
So I look up the address on my phone because who needs to freeze to death outside of the shiny pants store on a Tuesday night when one has to die elegantly in a barnyard the next morning anyway. I locate the building. It looks like artistic things happen inside this building. You know the type. Cutesy little postcards being hip and clever scotch taped in interesting asymmetrical fashions to the windows, lots of lamps shaped in ways that you can tell are SUPPOSED TO BE CUNNING, an assortment of items that are colored pastel green, and- the largest most aggressive meaty lock I have ever seen firmly securing the front door.
So. Probably I'm not going in that way. I think about the fact that the place I am going is called "The Basement." While my friends are wise and clever and not at all overly literal I have been given reason to think that this might actually be, indeed, a basement. I had, after all, heard tell not three days prior that Nick Aliff had been spotted covered in white powder painting the poop pipes brown. Or black. Might have been black. Should be black. Nobody wants brown poop pipes, that seems to call too much to mind.
I pop around the corner and immediately spy a black metal gated rectangle concealing a flight of stairs DOWN into nothingness. Ok, it wasn't that dramatic but I began pretending at once to be in James Bond and Mission: Impossible and was spying it up for my own enjoyment. I was also wearing my blue crushed velvet dramatic evening coat which added a lot, I think, as it blew nicely in the wind while I twined my cold bony fingers around the metal grated door and squinted my eyes at my potentially dangerous surroundings. And that was a lot of fun for four or five minutes but then I realized Maggie told me the top-secret IDR was starting at 8:30 and that was coming right up. So I opened the latch (which also made me feel bad-ass because it's NOT obvious how one does that) and trotted down the steps where I encountered the most beautiful blue door I have ever seen. That made me happy so I updated my Facebook status to reflect such. The evening is off to a promising start.
Inside is a lobby which is, I predict, going to be very successful at being a lobby. Smartly designed, not crowded, the bar is in a good location and (I was later told) made of the ceiling. All the chairs and tables are different, which I appreciate, and there is a big old hard wood table that I couldn't figure out after ten minutes of staring if was made of old chairs or some part of a house, or like, the Mayflower.
Also featured in the lobby this particular evening are Annie Colpitts, Deejay Gray, McLean Jesse (who is always so lovely and who I am so sorry I didn't return her boots to in time for her to dress up like a smooth pink crayon and do a play about Rome and Katrinah), and some very familiar black curtains which I sewed for the Mill. Let it be noted said sew-age was only possible under the tireless and and unfailingly patient tutelage of one Tom WidtheventhoughhestillbegrudgesmedietSunkistsinamannerwhichIfeeltobeunfair.
I sit in a chair and play on my phone and watch a passel of girls drinking out of bags at one of the tables. Then I help (read- make everything much more difficult) McLean with trying to hang up all of TheatreLAB's publicity clippings with garrotte wire and s-hooks on what appears to be a chunk of pier stuck to the wall. Or maybe that was the table. I'm pretty hung up about that table.
That goes well, and then Maggie comes out and tells me we are going to start soon. House is opened. I am told almost immediately that no, I may not be seated in the brown leather chair onstage, so I take a seat in the back row by the sound board where I am pretty confident no one will sit next to me because I like to go to things by myself.
There are many people striding around looking mildly concerned and very industrious because this is a big new project with a lot of elements which is having its first audience. So all this makes sense. I say hello to the costume designer Emily who is awesome and to Anthony. He has on a red shirt. I don't remember what color Emily's shirt was. Probably because every time I talk to her I start thinking about how much I liked that green dress she got for me to wear in "The Importance of Being Earnest" and trying to devise ways in which I might persuade the VCU Theatre Department to let me just, you know, have it.
I am wise to "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" because about a year ago Adam and Maggie and Matt and I made burritos in my kitchen as we are wont to do and watched the movie. I also watched a recording (which I'm not sure if I'm supposed to know exists) of the Firehouse Theatre Project production starring JB Steinberg over at JB's apartment one night when we were planning to watch "Anne of Green Gables" but then Hedwig came out, Robyn O'Neill came over, wine got opened and Steve Perigard got a questionable voicemail instead. So, I was not surprised when members of the band started milling about. I didn't know any of them. One of them had red hair. One of them looked like a cross between John Story and Jason from Hardywood who I see on Matt's front porch with some regularity. That one, incongruously, had a glitter in his hair. But I think this was secret glitter. Secret mostly from him. Starlet was there, looking fab, and then, as per usual, the drummer was kept in a plastic box over somewhere out of the way so he doesn't damage people. There was another fellow wandering around as well, who I noted, after a passing observation, had a very attractive section of himself between his hips where his jeans cross his private area. I guess you'd call that a groin. It was Bianca. So that was good- well played TheatreLAB and Spin, Spit, & Swear.
I get a suspicion that Matt Shofner is going to make his Hedwig entrance FROM THE BACK. This suspicion has nothing to do with innate sensitivity to coming events and more to do with watching Maggie and Annie cut their eyes to the back of the house in surreptitious manners. I can't remember if there was a curtain speech. I was tired.
Suddenly, IT BEGINS. Matt Shofner makes his entrance from the back of the house, as predicted, looking like an elegant pastel eagle Superman kind of thing. He has wings. He and Maggie have been raving about these wings and how great the costumes in general are, for weeks, so I am not surprised, but yes. Fabulous. He floats himself- I should say herself (I met Hedwig and realized she was an actual person one night at Hardywood while we were all wearing black and sweating while we sang Fleetwood Mac on a pile of old rugs and I told (who I thought was) Matt where I had placed his cup of water. Matt did not answer. Hedwig did. I liked her. She didn't even get mad at me when I lost her $100 pair of wood sunglasses)- right up onto the stage where she brilliantly doesn't knock any of the mic stands over with her wooden arm extensions. There is a number performed. I don't remember what it was; I think because there was so much to look at. But it sounded great. Under the wings, Matt is wearing a denim onesie he apparently lifted from a Cabbage Patch Kid and some fishnets. I made a note in my brain to point out the glaring run in said fishnets along his upper left inner thigh. But he knew. Apparently it's an acting run and is there on purpose.
There are some parts where Hedwig goes over to an offstage door and opens it. It's supposed to be that what is beyond the door is outside, and I must say the sound and light effects here are A+. Truly, technically, actingically, visually, this show is VERY WELL DONE.
I knew all the words Matt was going to say due to my sitting in a chair in his living room one night two weeks ago and running lines with him while he made fried rice. I also knew all about how he was going to look because I get the daily rundown from Mr. Paul in the barnyard every morning when he reports to me how many hours of his night were spent working on needlepoint for Hannah and how many spent sewing, caressing, spraying and coercing Matt's fake hair into big shapes that have feelings. And that after the first draft of fake eyebrows, they were to be lower in the future.
Things I did not know about: how perplexing it is to wonder about WHERE all of the boy parts go when the boy parts become invisible. Maggie and I drove the entire way home from Party City in the West End last Friday discussing all the potentially available options for where one could stuff things. Or- how admirable and effective it is to see a performer pick one spot on the wall with their eyes and STICK TO IT for an entire ballad. Or- how very very pleased I would be when I saw HedMatt spit water onto a person and then choose NOT to do that to me, thusly preserving our friendship.
Bianca has what I've determined to be the greatest role in all of musical theater as her responsibilities include 1. sitting on a barstool and 2. eating sunflower seeds. Begrudgingly. Or so I thought that was the extent of her responsibilities. Oh no. In addition to acting her groin off, Bianca left at one point and came back looking like a Holiday Barbie Spectacular: Gold Edition.
Matt spent some time later in the show laying on the floor upstage center in the dark by a movie screen. I wasn't sure what he was doing- I mean, I knew he must be tired, and maybe Maggie had allotted optional nap time if needed- but then he stood up with a silver X on his face and I was reminded that he is VERY ATTRACTIVE. Which I thought, well shoot. Now brunch at Joe's will be awkward. But it wasn't.
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