Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (3 page)

“Great. Moving on. This is the chorus.” And he sang:

Even more chills spread themselves around my body. Everyone in the room nodded and grooved to the music, and to the gorgeous melody of the
love
s, suspended and rising and falling and ringing out.

“Okay, let’s try that much.” And we all dove into the chorus, our voices soaring and blending, the sound fantastic and full and exhilarating. “Wow. You guys sound
great,
” Tim said. “I wish you could be sitting where I’m sitting. It’s
enormous.
” He jolted his head back as if he’d been hit with a giant splash of cold water, his eyes wide, his eyebrows just about reaching the ceiling. “
Really
great.” He nodded decisively, and played the opening chords again. “Okay, let’s put it all together. From the top.”

And we sang, our bodies pulsing to the rhythm of the song, our voices hushed and rich. The progression of the song felt perfect, with the short, syncopated phrases of the verse releasing into the open, flying notes of the chorus. When we finished the chorus we all applauded.

“That’s great,” Tim said. “Really great.”

I peeked back over at Jonathan, and he was now grinning one of the hugest, most delightful, satisfied grins I’d ever seen.

“So,” Tim said, “that’s the basic tune. There’s another verse, and solo bits, and you break into parts in the chorus—the first verse is all in unison—but that’s the gist of it.” Well, if that was the basic gist of the song, it was already extraordinary. I could only imagine how amazing it would be with the rest of it in place.

That night after rehearsal I sat on my bed and played through my songs on the demo tape, reading along with the libretto. I didn’t hear anything quite as stirringly beautiful as “Seasons of Love” in the rest of the music, but there was melody and heart in all of it. There was also the occasional lyrical clunker: in “Cool/Fool,” a catchy, rhythmically inventive song between Roger and Mark, they needle each other by saying,
“For someone cool, you’re a fool,”
and Mark berates Roger by calling him
“Mr. Negative ’cause he’s HIV-positive.”
I cringed when I heard those bits, but I played on.

I took an immediate interest in the relationship between Mark and Roger, which reminded me in some ways of my relationship with my brother, Adam: Mark is always trying to get Roger to open himself up (in this case by bringing him to an AIDS support group), and Roger adamantly resists, preferring to stay shut down. While the specifics were not the same (Adam is not HIV-positive, for one), Mark and Roger’s dynamics were similar to those between Adam and me, and I was instantly able to hook myself into them, to begin to mesh myself with Mark.

In the next song, Mark and Roger’s friend Collins shows up at their apartment with his new boyfriend, a drag queen named Angel, and they also invite Roger out to the support group. He declines, and an argument between Roger and Mark follows, which gets particularly heated, with Mark pushing and pushing and Roger resisting and resisting, until at last Roger hauls off and punches Mark in the stomach (I wondered if that punch would work onstage). Mark then sings a plaintive, elegantly melodic song, “He Says,” which features this exchange:

I loved the economy of the music and the fullness of the moment—it revealed so much about the mutual resentments that had been building up between two good friends and gave valid voice to both at once. Happy to have such a rich moment to play, encouraged by it, I plowed on through the score, listening to chunks of everyone else’s songs, but mostly concentrating on my stuff.

Nothing else of mine jumped out at me until the end of the first act, when I discovered I got to lead the way in a rousing number called “La Vie Boheme.” Mark starts it out by toasting:

It was my kind of song: fast and fun and exuberant, the lyrics tumbling out almost faster than my ears could follow them, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, all percolating above a funky bass line reminiscent of Vince Guaraldi’s famous theme for the
Peanuts
cartoons. I leaned forward into the speakers to keep up.

After Mark’s opening verse (a whole verse to myself!), the rest of the company joins in, escalating in intensity and harmony, throwing out lists of famous bohemians in cleverly rhymed couplets and triplets:

A true party atmosphere erupted out of my tiny boom box speakers, and I found myself bobbing my head in time to the music. I
loved
this line:

This was a
musical
? You wouldn’t hear that sentiment in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows. Or Sondheim’s, for that matter. Nor this:

I had to shake my head a little to diffuse the jolt that hit me with that line. It was so joyful, so true, and it expressed
exactly
how I felt. In 1994 this was still a revolutionary idea—that it was possible to live a full life in the face of AIDS or cancer, that being ill didn’t mean being dead. Jonathan proclaiming that in a musical, in a song that was all about celebrating life on the fringes, was unprecedented in my experience. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to express all of this myself; I couldn’t wait to be in the rehearsal room with the rest of the cast and revel in the shouting out of those words.

Rehearsals soon moved from Times Square to East Fourth Street, to the top floor of the brownstone next door to the theatre. There was much more air and light in this room (it even featured a skylight), and it was much closer to my apartment, so I couldn’t have been happier. The days zoomed by, crammed full of music learning and quick, inspired staging; we had to get the whole production on its feet in only two and a half weeks. Michael and Tim worked efficiently and improvisationally, giving us tons of room for input, while Jonathan silently soaked it all up, occasionally interjecting his support when Tim got stuck teaching one of Jonathan’s particularly complex rhythmic or melodic phrases.

Toward the end of the first week, Jonathan brought in a new song, “Over It,” for me to sing with Sarah Knowlton, who played my ex-girlfriend-
turned-lesbian, Maureen.

“This is great,” Tim said as he handed us the music. “It’s kind of Donnie-and-Marie-ish, but not in a bad way, just really fun, and very pop.” Jonathan sat off to the side, beaming, as Tim set about teaching us the song.

The joke of the song was that I was telling Maureen she was going to get over being a lesbian (
“You never even wore flannel shirts”
was one of my arguments), and she was telling me that I was going to get over being in love with her. I was happy to have this whole other set of issues to bite into in Mark’s story, and to get to come at Maureen with such fun lines as:

Sarah was trippy: tall and intense and dramatic, a chain-smoker with big brown eyes and full dark lips and a tangle of tight dark curls framing her pale skin. Her Maureen was dry, pretentious, and funny, a wannabe Laurie Anderson, with more attitude and more lipstick. I felt young and small next to her and wondered if our onstage relationship would be believable, but I tried not to worry about it; we just had to make sure our moments worked between us. This song was turning out to be strong enough that it didn’t seem like it was going to be a problem.

On the break, I went up to Jonathan, who was poring over some music in the corner, counting it out in his head. We had spoken little since rehearsals started, mostly just exchanging hellos and goodbyes. I stood next to him and hesitated before saying something, not wanting to disturb him, until he looked up at me.

“Hey,” he said, smiling.

“Hey,” I said. “I just wanted to say that I think this song is great. It’s very fun.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“No, thank
you.
”

I was at a loss as to what to say next, like I was a starstruck fan instead of a fellow artist and collaborator, and Jonathan looked away for a moment, down at his music, and then back at me.

“You know,” he said a bit shyly himself, “I’m really glad you’re doing this.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t expect him to say
that.
“Me too.”

“I got really excited when I saw that you were coming in.
Dazed and Confused
is one of my favorite movies.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I love that film. And then you came in, and I was so happy that you could sing.”

“Wow. Thanks.” I felt like I was saying “thanks” about a million times. But what else could I say? I was truly flattered.

“Yeah.” He looked down at his music. “Anyway. This is all pretty exciting that it’s happening.”

“Yeah.” I felt like I should say something more, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. I didn’t want to keep fawning, though; I wanted to get to know him better. Finally, I swallowed and said, “Well, it’s exciting for me, too. This show is great.”

He looked back up at me. “You think so?”

“Absolutely.”

He nodded. “It’s going well. I can’t believe it.”

I nodded too. “Yeah.” We paused again for a few seconds, my jaw tightening and my cheeks burning as I searched for something else to say to break the silence. I hoped we could talk more freely and possibly even become friends, but I couldn’t think of where to go from there. Jonathan seemed at a loss as well, and then Kristen, the stage manager, called out, “We’re back!” Jonathan and I quickly shared a nervous smile, and returned to the comfort of work.

Work got more emotionally intense as we delved into Act Two. “Seasons of Love” had evolved into a full-on gospel number, complete with handclaps and the amazing soaring notes of our soloist’s voice flying high above the final chorus. It was staged with absolute simplicity: all of us walked out during the elegantly simple piano introduction, took our places at the edge of the stage, standing in a straight line across the footlights, and sang the song from there.

As he was staging it, Michael told us, “I want to encourage you all to be yourselves in this song. To me, it’s a very exciting opportunity in the show to sort of strip yourselves of your characters a bit, and let yourselves be exposed.” I loved that notion, and it was one I had never heard expressed by a director. Michael had also spoken to us about his desire for the show to feel like the blending of a rock concert and a theatre piece, mixing straightforward storytelling with more presentational moments, and this last bit of direction seemed to fulfill that vision very well.

In working through the act we discovered that in context “Seasons” takes place at Angel’s funeral, albeit abstractly, and the following scenes in Act Two occur in flashback, detailing the events of the year leading up to the funeral. Midway through the act, during “Contact,” a desperately sexual song filled with chanted words and phrases (
“Please don’t stop please / please don’t stop stop”
), Angel’s death suddenly rings out in a transcendent swirl of house beats, as he undulates and writhes and sings over and over: