Saturday, June 27, 2009

On the death of Michael Jackson

Since this is something which is on a lot of peoples’ minds at the moment, I thought I’d get down what my own thoughts are regarding the death of Michael Jackson.

‘Indifferent’ would be the most apt description. I mean, I wasn’t a fan – or, at least, I hadn’t been a fan for many, many years; technically, Thriller was the first album (cassette) that I distinctly remember getting. And I did listen to it a lot. But I have no idea where that tape might have ended up, and it wasn’t one I eventually re-acquired on cd.

An aside: there is only one cassette I ever re-acquired on cd: Def Leppard, Hysteria.

My then-taste in awful NWOBHM aside, what it means is that my interest in Michael Jackson lasted only as long as my interest in Thriller. By the time Bad came out my musical tastes had shifted (though I can’t recall to what; that would have been before my interest in Queen began) – or perhaps, since I’d turned 14, I’d become perceptive enough to realise that the discrepancy between Michael and the image he was trying to portray was more than I could deal with.

Bad? Seriously? There were girls in my Year 9 class who could have kicked his skinny no-longer-black ass. Though it’s probably fair to point out that they could have kicked mine as well...

Dangerous – probably more apt than Bad, but not for the reasons he’d have preferred – appeared in 1991, and by then I’d definitely moved on. Plus, he’d really gone beyond eccentric into full-on creepy-weird, and that had a serious impact – people might have bought the album, but not too many people advertised the fact.

A few years after it came out I discovered I had one friend who owned it, and I listened to a few songs; nothing really jumped out at me. Black or White had that great clip but song itself didn’t interest me that much; the only real interest I had in it was trying to establish whether or not it re-used a riff from the Jackson/McCartney collaboration Say, Say, Say – and I still think it does. But I’d have to listen to both again in order to be able to explain it, and don’t have either at hand.

So, not what you’d call a fan. In fact, I recall an argument that I had with a flatmate over a televised Jackson concert, which was the typical lavish affair with dozens of dancers and him changing costumes and so forth; this kind of self-indulgent rubbish offended my then-grunge-obsessed sensibilities and I said so.
Missing his artistic output, then, was never going to be an issue for me whether he was alive or dead.

And his non-stop bizarre behaviour didn’t help thing either. I would have been perfectly content to never hear another word about him; obscurity would have done him the world of good. But he just couldn't seem to stay out of the news.

Weirdness, and my own preferences aside, I do understand that people did (and still do) like his music, and that, because of that, his loss is a significant one. As someone who’s lost several of his musical heroes, I can appreciate how much of a blow that is.

I mentioned Queen earlier; I was quite a serious fan at the time Freddie Mercury died (November 1991) and his sudden death was extremely upsetting; it didn’t help that I was already upset when I heard it announced on the radio – it was the day I moved away from the town I’d lived my entire life in. A had a bit of an emotional breakdown somewhere near Mackay, Queensland - much to the surprise of my then sister-in-law, who is in the car with me.

Losing Elliott Smith nearly twelve years later was even worse. While I’d liked Queen a lot, my connection to Smith’s music was on a whole other level. I spent the whole day in shock – I was on my way to work when I heard - exchanging text messages with my flatmate who was also a fan. The overwhelming feeling that day was one of frustration: because I’d never get to see him live, or hear any new songs, or maybe even talk to him after a gig, or – the worst one of all – that he never really got the chance to be appreciated on the level his astonishing, astronomical talent deserved.

Not quite what I imagine the MJ fans are feeling right now, but near enough that I can empathise with them about how they’re feeling – and, as anyone who knows me will tell you, that isn’t something I get accused of very often.

Anyway, enough about me.

I’m not all that surprised by the media response; it’s what they do, after all. They’d had Jackson in their sights almost his entire life – though I also appreciate that they wouldn’t bother if no-one bought the magazines to read about it. I can take some solace in the fact that I haven’t contributed even a single dollar to their coffers, other than whatever miniscule advertising revenue the small handful of websites I visited to get information garnered from my presence.

One of the odd things I read, though, is that record stores (I don’t care that they mightn’t sell actual records; I like how it sounds) are selling out of Jackson’s material as fans go on buying frenzies. Why is this odd? Well, I’d have thought that, if they were big enough fans to be upset by his death, they would already own the damn albums.

Now, I guess we wait and see if any more facts emerge – well, just the one: what was it that actually killed him?

Apart from that there’s not a lot, other than reminiscing – something the commercial radio stations and music television channels/programs will be indulging in, probably to the point where people will never want to hear another of his songs again.

Goodbye, Michael. You brought happiness to a lot of people – me included, even if only for a short time.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Those Old After-Show Blues

[Update, June 2017 – I just finished a show, a great show (Jekyll & Hyde) and I'm anticipating being more than a little down in the weeks to come; it therefore seemed like a good time to revisit this old blog post.]

The premise is fairly simple: doing theatre can be intense, crazy fun; however, when the show finishes, the fun stops – and then what I call (and probably about a gazillion people before me; I make no claims to have originated the term) ‘the after-show blues’ can set in.

I say ‘can’ set in because it doesn’t always apply. Well, not to me at least – and, as far as I can tell, not to everyone else either. There are, of course, those people to whom it happens after every show; this is usually a sign that one is a ‘theatre tragic’ – and they’re a different breed altogether. This is more about the people for whom theatre is a big part of their lives – but by no means the only part.

The reason I’m writing about this now is because (as you’ve probably guessed) I’m going through it myself at the moment. I was in Me and My Girl and – for the first time in quite a while – I actually really enjoyed myself. And it couldn’t have come at a better time since, had it been a miserable experience (as some of the shows I’ve done have been) I may have given it up for good.

But, because I had a good time doing it, I’m now having a bad time missing it - and it’s made me think about those old after-show blues – something that I think about from time to time but something I’ve never sat down and really delved into.

The symptoms of after-show blues vary from person to person and seem to include actual depressive symptoms and thorough analyses of one’s own self-worth and talent (‘Oh, I’m so unhappy and now I’m scared I’ll never get cast in anything again); a sudden increase in presence on social networking sites (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) and the usual overreactions to having a sudden increase in free time on one’s hands – cleaning the house, picking up old and neglected hobbies (yes, that includes blog-writing – I admit it) and so forth.

Others deal with it by not dealing with it at all, and attempting to drag it out as long as possible by trying to spend time with people from the show. This can sometimes work and may lead to an actual long-term friendship – though that is another thing that isn’t a guarantee with theatre; simply because you had a fun time with people in a show doesn’t always mean that you’re going to be BFF afterwards. Is that a story for another time? You betcha.

An aside: you can, of course, avoid (or, at least, diminish) the effect of post-show blues by minimising the amount of time between the end of one and the beginning of another. Halfway through the run of Me and My Girl I landed a role in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace but, since rehearsals won’t start until around two months, I’m not really dodging the bullet at all – though it is of some comfort to know it won’t be long before I’m back ‘up there’.

But some from this most recent show aren’t waiting that long – a few auditioned and got parts in Jesus Christ Superstar, and they began rehearsals for that on the Monday after we finished. So, they won’t have gone 48 hours between the curtain falling on 1930s England before they’re thinking about 32 (or so) CE.

That’s happened to me before, too – in the first year I did theatre I did The Matchmaker in the middle of the year and went straight into Emma at the end. However, since I didn’t enjoy the former there weren’t going to be any blues anyway, whether I’d gone straight into another show or not. It may have contributed significantly to my not enjoying Emma either.

But sometimes you don’t have the option of another show, and – if it’s a show you’ve enjoyed doing – you’re going to be stuck with the blues. Enjoying a show, however, isn’t always a guarantee. In fact, the sad truth of it is that enjoying myself to this extent doing theatre has happened in fewer than half the shows I’ve done. But that’s another story, too.

So, back to the blues.

Obviously, it’s going to be relative to how much you enjoy doing the show that’s just finished – but what makes a show enjoyable? It’s important to note the success – financial and/or critical – might not be the most significant factor. One of the shows I was most glad to see the end of was the one which won that year’s award for Best Drama – Amateur.

Yes, I can blow my own trumpet – but not to play the blues, apparently.

Anyway, I think that means that, to an extent at least, the genre is significant - I’ve never done a drama that I’ve really enjoyed. Been proud of? Yes. But enjoyed? No. It might happen one day, but I suspect that I’m only going to really enjoy the comedies and the musicals. But even that’s not the key. I’ve done a few comedies and one musical in which I didn’t have that great a time.

Therefore, the conclusion I’m coming to at this point is that it’s really about how much you enjoy the show, and that’s dependent upon the people and the finer dynamics of the process of rehearsal and performance; a combination of the personalities involved, and the situations which arise during the production. Not all casts bond to the same extent, and the same people may not bond if in a different show - and to say that the analysis of that is a topic for another time would be an understatement. Heck, there’s probably a book in it somewhere.

And, as unhappy as having the after-show blues might make me, it’s actually something to be happy about – because you can’t have the blues unless you had a good time in the first place. Which, when it comes down to it, is why I do theatre in the first place.

It’s a small price to pay.