A person with no experience on stage is the best impartial observer of the collective genius of the theatre, particularly musical theatre.
That is me.
Never acted, can’t sing, can’t dance, never even played the recorder.
So whether writ large, or writ local, the collective genius of a stage production baffles and amazes me.
At intermission during Hamilton at Boston’s Citizens Opera House two distinct threads,—mechanical and human—merged to distill the meandering trails of my infatuation to an economic phrase—collective genius.
The concentric rotating turntables of the Hamilton stage are both conceptual and technical marvels. A work of technical superiority the turntables are synchronized with one another and with their human actors, like God’s hamster wheels. Built on the same ball bearings, belts, hydraulics, and complex circuitry as some bit of factory machinery it worked to simultaneously accomplish two competing things. It made the stage both larger and smaller at the same moment. A work of artistry no matter the soulless character of its mechanized constituent parts, the stage itself was an active trump l’oeil that made three dimensions six or seven.
In a bad seat far by the theatre’s right hand wall my view was a diagonal across the stage. The oblique spot lighting of Tyler Fauntleroy’s Hamilton on a mainly darkened stage slightly above a tight circle of cast members transfixed me as he exalted in the crescendo of a first act stemwinder.
My god I thought, these people are like gladiators. Each vocal exhalation produced a cloud of vaporized spittle that shimmered in the lighting. Fauntleroy looked like a man who had just stepped out of doors on a January morning for a good shout. The human intensity conjured those old time football news reels with steaming lineman crouching facing one another awaiting the snap, their visible breath mingling and rising as a single cloud in Green Bay or Chicago. Such intimacy. Such merging of individuals into one whole, collective genius writ large.
This is but a label for something I have felt, or known subconsciously. And the sports analogy is apt.
Chatting with a friend, I mentioned my goal to bring a practice of my sports photography to my stage photography. I look to get the third liners, on the ice for a short shifts and maybe not at all in crunch time, the linemen, the reserves on the bench celebrating what happens on the court. Maybe it’s fellowship with the underdog; maybe it’s knowing that a complete player works just as hard moving without the puck as with it. It’s a dance and all five skaters have to be in motion.
Either way, I look at the sides of the stage, and into the shadows where the ensemble is busy moving without the puck.
“Yeah,” she said, “that picture of Kassidy in Addams, she was the center of everything”
That little sliver, the steady work at seemingly small pieces of acting is a salute to the collective genius, writ local.
