But I cannot choose but weep

While I am off to Washington D.C. tomorrow in hopes of digging through Fritz Loewe's letters stashed away at the Library of Congress I don't think I have the heart to think about research today.

We're back to soul searching I suppose. I found myself in tears last night. (And this was after I used quite a few onstage for my final performance of Ophelia). And it's not like I don't understand the process. In fact I was thinking about it yesterday. Theatre kids, even seasoned ones, have a difficult time closing shows, tend to hang onto the moment and the important people attached to it and I think it's because they understand deeply the emotional implication of the "life" cycle of doing a show, to put it simply. There is nothing more organic than a good creative show. The collaboration of working with people to create a process, something on a page that literally comes to life. It is born and grows. You put it in front of an audience and it breathes life. And then the day comes when it must close (and everything must close someday ,,,Phantom..take a hint). And when it does I think it's usless to ignore the mourning process. I think children, who feel things so intensly and understand the pain of loss without ignoring it, might cry when a show closes. I did when I was eight.

And then I did again last night. I won't bore you with too many gritty details but it did make me feel like a child again. And I felt slightly justified because it was really a release from the last two shows I worked on (essentially most of the same cast came straight from Arcadia into Hamlet...try that brain fucker sometime). But there are maybe little things. Like my Hamlet, who is a remarkably talented young man who knows Hamlet better than some of my professors, who proclaims he may not go on stage again (I respect spending time with God but at the cost of theatre? I'm not that kind of girl.) Or maybe it is the end of the season. Spring might bring birth but it also is rife with closure (and allergies I might add) and therefore has never been an entirly satisfying time for me. I don't like when good things end. Maybe a little bit steams from the thrill of playing Ophelia, something I most likely will never do again...and honestly after this expereience I don't know that I would want to do it again. But mostly I just feel like a child again...emotionally anyway...letting it all come out without much matter for who sees me do it, or reads this I suppose.

And it comes from this individual deaths that we experience every few months that actors begin to learn to store up their emotional strife, and bottle it for the next appearance onstage. Sometime my bottle spills I'm not gonna lie. And if it spills at the end of this beautiful season I don't mind so much. The last five months have reminded me of who I am.
So I find solace and happiness, a) in the library doing research b) writing c) being onstage d) singing really loudly. Too bad no one will pay me to do any of those things :) It's strange to be twenty-five and still figuring out who I am, but then again, I am grateful that at least I know this much. And I am grateful I have had the oppurtunity to do it all at least once really well. Thank you.

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We Know What We Are But Know Not What We May Be

Well I supose I should begin with a Trude update:

The Sound of Her Music: Musical Arranger Trude Rittmann's Life and Work, has officially been accepted by the Graduate Office at SFSU and I guess will be available in their library starting in the fall...I actually have no idea if that is true but I do know that it is currently being bound and all that. One hundred pages and I don't even feel like I've begun to do her justice. Exploring two ballets, two choral numbers and a couple of moments of underscoring doesn't even come close to expressing the sweeping talent and body of work. I'm really not joking when I talk about making it a book, but I'm also kidding myself to think that I will have the time or resources to really do it any justice any time soon. I guess it's ok to be 25 and already have a lifelong goal, something you feel you have to finish before you die...it just makes things feel more urgent already.

The reason I'm not settling in to write the book is that I would like to get a job in order to make some money in order to get off my parents payroll and therefore have some greater sense of independence (not to mention get married and have a family etc. etc.) So I'm searching for jobs...maybe not as hard as I should be. But the problem is there is nothing quite like sitting in the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center and doing research all day. And then talking to someone like Bruce who understood me. And then coming home and writing it all down at Peet's. I'm not at the stage in my life where anybody is going to pay me to do that. And I understand. So I'm taking the CBEST and applying for teaching jobs, and editing jobs, and anything that I can see that remotely relates to theatre.

But I have this other problem. I'm falling in love with acting again. We had a falling out. I made the decision not to pursue it as a profession, and I still stand by that. But being a part of a company that feeds my soul, and being onstage in delicious roles. It's all too much. I love it too much. And so I desperately want to find jobs that understand this and can work with this "addiction" as it were. But who knows what I will find.

At the TBA conference one speaker talked about finding your personal mission statement. Or at least that's how I interpreted it. So I jotted some notes in my journal about feeding my theatrical desire, my desire to write about theatre, and spending plenty of time with my loved ones (specifically that really patient man I share a house with).

Anyway it's all really complicated...as life should be. If it wasn't I'm pretty sure I would spontaneously combust.

Bustibility, bustibility combustibili-

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Incredible!

I found a quote today (which I can't believe I haven't read up until this point) that made me remember why I'm doing this. From No Intermissions: the life of Agnes de Mille by Carol Easton:

According to Trude Rittman, rehearsal pianist on Brigadoon, “Aland and Fritz didn’t trust Agnes. They though, ‘She is so much involved in the balletic aspects, she doesn’t have the whole show in mind.’ On every show, it was always a struggle for her. Rarely did she get what she needed-not just for herself but fro costumes, for whatever she needed for her dance! We used to say that we had to be doubly as good as men in order to make it in the male-dominated theatrical world. It was marvelous that we had each other to exchange our private jokes and comments about all these men for whom we worked. We used to talk about how ridiculous Lerner and Loewe sometimes were with their women. Incredible! Fighting over girls, fighting over divorced women. Always a crisis. They loved each other, couldn’t work with anyone else, but then they hated each other. Agnes was very often much stronger than these two men together. She would fight for her rights, and the creative aspects of certain things. They always felt. ‘She’s going overboard and ruining our show! It’s not her show, it’s our show!’ Nobody won; they compromised.”

Can we take a moment to thank Trude for so beautifully put into one sentence the impetus behind why I'm doing this and why no one knows about her... "We used to say that we had to be doubly as good as men in order to make it in the male-dominated theatrical world." There it is right there. I couldn't have put it better myself. Here she is, being totally brilliant, literally picking up these strands of music and filling them out into the reason we love these shows, and she had to work twice as hard just to make that happen. Think what she would have been doing if women weren't always forced to prove themselves. In the words of Trude Rittmann and John Adams both, "Incredible!"

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There's gotta be something better than this...

Woho! So I have got 3 chapters and 30 pages...if there was a good way of posting them I would but that's a lot of reading for anyway to do...
I'm writing out of frustration for a totally different reason now. My thesis proper is going very well. So far chapter one is a little rough (it is this vast overview that I feel needs to be trimmed). Chapter 2 is everything I know about her early life (her niece's email address bounced back so that's not a whole lot) and the ballet (which I could write a lot more about but honestly I'm not that knowledgeable in that area anyway). Chapter 3 could probably go on for days but I've ended it for now. It's an overview of musical theatre in the golden age, specifically all the various types of composers and what they do. The really cool thing is for vocal and dance arrangers I have these long lists that Trude compiled for a lecture or something so I know have this incredibly defined description of both of those roles with examples etc. I'm pretty proud.
So that's not what I'm worried about. What I'm struck with now is Trude! The One Woman Show. I've thought about this for some time and now that I have this weekly assigment in my "playcrafting and dramaturgy" class to creat an adaptation from a non-fiction source and describe it in a page and then give a sample of the script. So it's not like I even have to come up with the whole thing. And as soon as I got this assignment I knew that was what I wanted to do...but I can't think of how...that's much more difficult. I thought at first it should just be her..but I think that would miss out on stuff...and I still like the idea of having a pianist be symbolize the composers and play and the dancers doing bits of choreography and also symbolizing the choregraphers...but then I need a through line and I thought it would be fun to put me as the narrator...but now I just feel dumb. That is all. So I'll probably turn something dumb in and I feel dumb about that obviously...but I don't know if she's meant to be a show folks...that's all I'm saying. Oy.
The things I like most right now is a kind of overture that is a medoly of parts of scores she was responsible for...starting with Small House and ending with the big beautiful vocals at the end of Camelot.
Anyway.
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If I start writing now...

It's harder to start writing than I want it to be. There is no lack of love for Trude by any means. I just really have trouble sitting down and saying to myself: ok it's your thesis write it now! That's rather difficult I'm finding. The research part is easy. I could do that all day, and once I start I rarely want to do anything else but what good is it if I can't write it down. I've been pretty good at writing throughout this whole grad school thing but maybe this is just harder because it's this big looming thing. Everytime I tell someone about Trude I get excited. That means I can do this right? I just need to buckle down and make a plan. Oy. Ok. Just writing this gives me ideas about what I need to do. Oh blogging you are wonderful.
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It's a metaphor...

Great. So now I have tons and tons of information, a very real deadline, and not an ounce of energy to get through this. Trude still makes me really excited but I am just not making this happen right now. Here I am approaching the end of my break (the optimal time to be working on this paper) and I truly have next to nothing concretely finished. I mean yes I have a lot of information. So much information I'm maybe a tinge overwhelmed. But when it really boils down to it I'm scared and lonely and that makes things difficult I guess. And writing here makes me feel a little more confident, or at least motivated, if not more lonely and less important but c'est la vie here it goes.

I'm in Arcadia right now and while I'm in the 19th century part I'm listening to the modern part and so much of it is about research and finding truth, trivial as it may be. I guess I am finding truth, or at least putting two and two together. Hannah is convinced that the Sidley Hermit is a symbol of the romantic meltdown. Does that mean that I can believe Trude is a symbol of the integration of America Musical Theatre? I mean I know I don't need the permission or anything but here's my thought process. Trude's exceptional musical talents coupled with her unique understanding of dancers and choreographers makes her sort of the power behind the intgrated musical thought process. Bringing together book, music and dance to tell a story is perfectly combined in the person of Trude Rittmann. I don't want to go making her into a metaphor but I think that she's maybe a bigger part of the picture than I originally thought. She's not just a fascinating character with an unreveled story, she's an instrumental part of what makes these iconic shows great.

With that said I think that maybe I've collected enough courage to go back to my first chapter. Updates as I need the rant space.
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Gott Sei Dank!!!

So 2010 is off to a bang. And by bang I mean like 25 hours at the performing arts library in New York focused entirely on Trude Rittmann. (I've been spelling it wrong because at one point she just gave up trying to get people to spell it right...but two n's is correct.) So besides having compiled into this little computer more information about Trude Rittmann than probably exists anywhere else in the world, I also meet the nicest man in the world who far from thinking what I'm doing is stupid thinks that it's very important and wants to help me in any way he can. Bruce Pomahac is the head of music at R&H and besides being wonderfully kind and generous wants me to know things. And by things I mean everything he could tell me about Trude, who he spent time with in the last ten years of her life. He told me she was a lovely woman who, at least to him, expressed no animosity toward Richard Rodgers (even though Agnes de Mille apparently thought differently). Among the most exciting things about meeting with Bruce included his complete admiration for what she did, and even though he probably knows more than anyone what exactly it was that she did (for Rodgers anyway) there remains the question of if what weather what Trude did was arranging or composing. He played me bits of music, conveying how she had elaborated on them to create that magic that seemlessly bled into Rodgers original work. Every doubt I might have had about the importance of my looking into the life and work of Trude Rittman was completely blown away by Bruce's excitement and passion for what she did and he's excitement that I was going to make it known to the world. He sort of endowed me with the power to be a musical theatre historian...he was maybe the first person who knew anything about what I was saying and what I meant when I said it that didn't laugh. In fact he encouraged me, and honestly I can think of no better way to start than by writing the story of Ms. Rittmann.

And that's not even anything about the library. Oh the library. 25 hours on the 3rd floor...most of it spent in the special collections reading room typing everything that might be even a little bit relevant...for example the entire transcript of Nancy Reynold's interview with Rittmann. You can't make copies of it...but you can look at it for however long you want, and while you do that you can't have a pen (only pencil on the third floor)...but you can have your computer. Shhhh don't tell the NYPL but I pretty much have a digital copy of that interview transcript...all 87 pages...don't joke it took me two days (the second day of which I spent 5 1/2 hours sitting and didn't even get up to pee). I knew going into this research trip that if I got nothing else out of it I would at least be able to read that interview. The real problem became that there were so many other things to look at. Folders filled with miscellaneous notes about her credits, how to be an arranger, how arrangers and choreographers should work together; not to mention the scores. 33 folders full of her scores (many hand written). I even got to touch the infamous Small House score with her notes to Bennett about the orchestrations and a "Gott sei Dank!!!" at the end to mark her completion. I found the infamous photo that I had been searching for that I could have swore had Trude in it (it totally does by the way) and even a bio in the Gigi program which described her as having "a creative skill in developing songs of a musical into ballet music, vocal and music continuity arrangements which have made her name well known to musical theatre audiences throughout the world." I was flabbergasted. Clearly this meant that she should be a well known name...and I'm going to make sure that it becomes one. Not whining about the credit she never reserved, but exploring the work she did do and pointing out its complex beauty and complete brilliance so that she could never possibly be looked over in the future.

So off I go into the wild blue yonder of thesis writing. Armed with many names Bruce is going to give me contacts for, the hour and a half interview with him, and most of the typeable documents the NYPL had to offer...and I've only just begun.

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