Legacy
My Dad and my Aunt, the people responsible for making me a theater kid.
My dad is the original theater kid.
He started going to Broadway shows as a kid, somewhere between the ages of three and ten. If you ask him what the first show he ever saw was – I don’t think he could tell you. His family saw shows often; it wasn’t until he experienced certain shows that his love for theater truly intensified.
My grandparents, while not the creative types themselves, appreciated a good piece of entertaining theater. They would not have appreciated the forward thinking pieces that grace the Broadway stage today, but a fun lark was impossible for them to turn down. Family legend states that the only show that my grandfather ever walked out of was the original Oklahoma!, citing that he “couldn’t stand a show with a message”. Nevertheless, he and my grandmother made it a point to take their four kids to the theater as often as they could. And take them they did. My dad started keeping his playbills in 1961; whether or not he saw anything before that is something none of us will ever know. What we do know is that the early exposure to the New York theater scene is something that never left him. Even now, in his mid seventies, his love and appreciation for theater runs deep and strong.
Sixty years later, the two shoeboxes of Playbills have been passed to me. He made sure I was exposed to theater early. I saw my first musical – a high school production of Brigadoon – when I was about three, and my first Broadway musical – The Sound of Music – when I was eight. Sadly, I have the playbill from neither production – I didn’t start my own collection until two years after I saw The Sound of Music. My dad no longer ventures into the city to see shows unless he is with me and my aunt; in true Boomer fashion, he has trouble keeping up with what’s playing.
But his legacy lives in me. Not only has his passion survived, it has grown with me. While my dad merely appreciates a good piece of theater, I create it. I perform and I write my own pieces, something he could only fathom doing. As any father does, when I realized that theater was my life and I wanted nothing else, he was nervous and scared. But once he saw just how live theater affects me, he jumped on board and supports me in any way he can. Every time I come home from a new Broadway show, he still thumbs through the program and takes it in as if he were there. Methods of ticket procurement have changed; while he was an avid purveyor of the TKTS booth, I prefer TodayTix (The no-fee offers usually get me) and the secret offers that pop up on Playbill from time to time (Seriously - $20 for an opening preview? Yes please). And unlike my dad and my grandparents, I don’t care where in the theater I end up sitting. I just want to be in the room where it happens.
Between the two of us, there are over 300 programs – and that number is growing fast. Not all of them are Playbills; some of them are from tours, some of them are from The Met, some are from my own shows. I am currently spending a small fortune on the Playbill archive Binders, buying them at Christmas and around my birthday so that I don’t drain my bank account. (After shipping, just one equals a lower-priced TodayTix ticket – you hear that, Playbill?) My friend Jen says that the Staples binders and sleeves work just as well, but honestly, Staples doesn’t sell the ones with the fold over flaps and the really old ones won’t fit into those anyway. So I buy the official ones at the holidays.
With all the wealth of these programs, the question remains: What do I do with them? I could display them on a shelf and never touch them, but somehow that seems like a waste. The programs don’t just represent who performed what role that that performance – each and every one of them, from the original Camelot to my first musical theater role – represents a moment in theater history. Maybe a notable moment, such as the opening of Forum, or something so insignificant, such as when I did Anything Goes and was a background ensemble member in a tiny little community theater production. So taking that into account, the answer was obvious: I will write about them. I wish I could say I will write about all of them; however, no one needs a rundown of my camp production of monologues when I was twelve. And neither of us have every program of everything he ever saw; off the top of my head, I can name five that I know I have lost, and three that I know he saw but I have no record of it. And for my dad’s collection, he barely remembers yesterday so asking him for particulars of a forgettable show from sixty years ago is a big ask. For those, I’ll give a brief history of the show and things I found interesting in my research.
Camelot to Six.
Sarava to Wicked.
Three Musketeers to Phantom
Whether it’s run for thirty years or only lasted eight performances, they are all significant. My dad’s collection may only continue to grow with productions of mine, but the possibilities for my collection are endless. And maybe, just maybe, a third generation will continue the legacy some day when I cannot.
