I consider myself to be a relatively composed person, but that didn’t stop me from crying on stage during opening night of 42nd Street. I wasn’t crying tears of joy or tears of sadness, and I certainly wasn’t crying because of stage fright. No, it was humiliation that brought me to tears. In my defense, I’m normally the epitome of professional while on stage, but standing in front of the audience, I couldn’t stop the tears that welled in my eyes.
But I’m getting ahead of myself; allow me rewind.
I grew up in a small town with very few community theaters, and as such, any and all theater that I did was through my school. In fifth grade, I participated in my first musical, High School Musical: The Musical, and even I fell in love with performing. I loved the rush of opening night, the culmination of the cast’s hard work finally paying off. From that show on, I was committed to performing, no matter how time consuming or exhausting it might be.
My junior year of high school, our musical department announced that the show would be 42nd Street. Now, I am a bit of a musical connoisseur, and 42nd Street was not a musical that I liked even remotely. But alas, I was committed to theater, and so I auditioned anyway. It should be noted that 42nd Street is a tap show, and I am a terrible dancer. If I practice enough, I can pass as a decent dancer, but I’m absolutely miserable at learning dances on the fly. And so, you can imagine how well auditions went for me.
I ended up being cast in the ensemble, which was unsurprising and fine by me, as I knew I’d still be kept busy, as this is an ensemble-heavy show. What I didn’t plan on was being cut from all possible dances. There were about twelve girls, myself included, that the choreographers didn’t think would be able to pick up the dances, and so we ended up being background characters in most of the major dance scenes. Which was just as shitty as it sounds.
I had to stand in the background of all of the iconic ensemble dance songs, step touching from side to side. I wanted nothing more to be given a chance to dance. I knew that if they gave me and all of these other women the chance, we could tap dance just as well as all of the other inexperienced high schoolers on our stage. It felt supremely unfair that we were standing in the background while every boy was put in the dance numbers, simply because of their gender, despite lacking any ability to remember their steps or keep with the tempo.
While I, along with the other background girls, hated our roles, I resolved to just deal with it, as there was nothing we could do about it. It was humiliating to be the first dancers to cross the stage during We’re in the Money, but I could deal with it—or at least I thought I could, until someone barked in laughter upon seeing us. It was the kind of laughter that’s unique to a high school bully—the kind that drips in condescension and makes you feel worthless. As the rest of the dancers falap-ball-changed their way in front of us, tears stung my eyes, and I blinked them away, attempting to keep my composure. With a plastered smile on my face, I wanted the song to be over. What I really wanted was to have never been blocked into this number. But still, I step touched with my chin high and my hands on my hips, counting down the measures until the blackout, when I could at last escape to cry in the wings. As the song ended, the other girls and I threw our handful of glitter up into the air. As it rained down on us, flecks of glitter stuck to my cheeks, which were already wet with tears.
Comments