Name a nonstandard sensory experience you enjoyed in the (live, that is) theater.
For instance:
• the soft clacking of the showgirls' beads in the "Presents for Mrs. Rogers" number in The Will Rogers Follies
• Ken Watanabe making a King and I exit so close to me I could smell whatever amberish scent he was wearing
• oh right Jeremy Secomb grabbing me by the throat during the Epiphany in the pie shop Sweeney Todd
Richard Greenberg's Our Mother's Brief Affair leads to a revelation that takes in not only a court case I'm obsessed with but a book I worked on (it's name-checked, including Random House), and I almost leapt out of my seat.
The play might as well have been written for me.
[the only time I've ever seen the show when the Kiss Me quartet stopped the show dead in its tracks, and it had earned it; the house was *shouting* its approval]
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I have a weirdly visceral distaste for "Blues in the Night" yet seem unable to bring myself to delete from my iTunes the ten versions of it I've accumulated because it feels disrespectful to Judy, Ella, etc. This is a problem.
Whistle, I'm happy to point out, does not rhyme with trestle.
Boy oh boy wait till we get to how I respond to Così fan tutte....
A favorite memory: Agnes of God, and Elizabeth Ashley acting her brains out as Geraldine decided, for some reason, to quietly converse with the back of her own wrist, and no one in the theater was looking at anything else.
Has ever a performer been more incontrovertibly beloved?
I'd forgotten that there was a TV production of Damn Yankees with Phil Silvers, Lee Remick, Jerry Lanning, Bob Dishy, Jim Backus, and Fran Allison as Meg.
You may know that Barbara Bel Geddes's father was the noted designer (including for the theater) Norman Bel Geddes. I just learned that Bel Geddes is a mashup of Norman's born surname (Geddes) and his wife Helen's middle name (Belle).
This discovery brought to you by a George Jean Nathan reference to BBG as "Miss Geddes" and my going Wait, what?
Here's a cute picture of her and Barry Nelson in The Moon Is Blue.