Let Me Be Your Star by Rachel Shukert Read Free Book Online Page A

it,
but I’m happy.”
    He smiled. “I understand why. It’s because of all the people
who wrote about the show, you’re the only one who’s one of us.”
    One of us.
    There it was again. It’s such a simple thing, but I think it
gets to the bottom of the matter. It’s what Smash didn’t get right, but
the people making Smash gave back to me. Broadway can be a competitive,
cutthroat world full of ambitious, difficult people. But Broadway is not a
reality show. That’s what all the plot set-ups in Smash, the competition
between Karen and Ivy, the way it was sometimes possible, if it was really late
at night and you’d had a lot of Red Bull, to lift one of Anjelica Huston’s
enchanted conch shells to your ear and hear the executives wondering how they
could make it more like The Voice, got so wrong until it was too late to
get it right. Nobody goes into theater proclaiming “I’m not here to make
friends.” Every theater kid, every weirdo, every misfit who ever wanted to wear
character shoes or a cape to school, who can handily tell you which Muppet is
right for which role in The Muppets’ Sweeney Todd , who is far, far more
familiar with Flora the Red Menace than with Florence + the Machine (I’m
doing the plus right, right? Also, that girl, whatever her name is, would be a
great Miss Jean Brodie if they ever do a musical of it) dreams of the day
they’ll walk through the portal that transports them to their own personal Oz,
to the place they’ve always belonged. You go into theater because that’s
where your friends are. Because, to paraphrase Frankie in Member of the
Wedding (a role in which I was not cast in the Omaha Community Playhouse’s
1993 production) once said, “because they are the we of you.” Or rather,
of me.
    For some this portal will lead to a Broadway opening night
party where Donna Murphy kneels before you with a bouquet of roses and then you
get to go home with the beautiful and desperate young hustler (of either sex)
of your choice before drinking yourself to death in your art deco penthouse
lather rinse repeat.
    For the rest of us (and there may be some overlap!) I think
it leads to Marie’s Crisis.
    Marie’s Crisis is in an unassuming basement on an unassuming
(or formerly unassuming; for all I know Shia LeBoeuf lives there now) street in
the depths of the West Village. Famously, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman met
there in 1976. Less famously, but no less significantly, I assert that I am the
only person to have performed a heterosexual sex act in its bathroom. (If you
know another one, again, you know where to find me. Perhaps we can start a
Tumblr.)
    It’s a piano bar, but not of the usual sort. At Marie’s,
there’s no song list, no sign-up sheet. Nobody hogs the mike or sings some
nasally version of “Over the Rainbow” with so much melisma you can’t even hear
the words. At Marie’s Crisis, everybody sings together. You stand side by side,
cheek by jowl, with aging chorus boys and high school musical queens and gay
bankers and off-duty drag queens in Target sweatpants and sad-eyed men with
beautiful posture whose cheeks bear the furrows of a lifetime on protease
inhibitors, and sing “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” all together, in unison. Big
voices and small, off key and on, people who know all the words and people who
just have to fake it. It might be the closest thing to a socialist utopia that
we’ll ever get on Earth. At Marie’s Crisis, there are no stars. At Marie’s
Crisis, we’re all just part of the ensemble, the kind of people who
occasionally get to go see Shakespeare in the Park the night Tony Kushner and
Mike Nichols are there.
    It could be a lot worse. Isn’t that the moral behind every
work of musical theater? It could be worse. No matter how bad things get, no
matter if you never became a star even though you gave everything to your kids,
or may never find the partner who helps you survive being alive, or you did
find that person and then they left