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.