Sweeney Todd
The show was an ensemble piece, singularly unique in the fact that all the performers remained onstage almost the entire time, and completely accompanied themselves on their own instruments. So when it began, I was immediately able to see her.
She isn’t hard to recognize. Her distinctive features had been burned into my brain many years ago, when I saw the pictures of her in Anything Goes. The pictures of her from Evita were more grainy, but in Anything Goes, I had come to know what she looked like from all angles. Also, of course I knew her from the television show she had been on in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Life Goes On, in which she had played the mother of a teenager with Down’s Syndrome. I had watched every episode religiously.
No one looks like her. Her profile is extraordinary. She has a strong, prominent nose that juts out from her face in a hawk-like way. Her chin is also strong, and her mouth is a huge slash across her face. Her upper lip curls upward on the side, suggesting either a sneer or mischievous hilarity, depending on the context. Her eyes are brown, and glitter like jewels. All of these features make her stand out onstage even from a great distance, even though she is only 5 feet two inches tall, the same height as I am.
In Anything Goes she had had red hair, but for this show she wore a jet-black wig with a chin-length asymmetrical style. I recognized it from the brief glimpse I’d had on Entertainment Tonight. She wore a white apron and ripped black tights, and carried a triangle instrument that she periodically chimed.
She looked just as I knew she would. It was that strange otherworldly feeling, of seeing someone right in front of you that you are used to seeing only on television or in pictures. She was older now, of course. She was fifty-seven years old. She was heavier than when she was very young, but still a very petite woman. Her voice was the same, that quality reminiscent of a foghorn, strong but of a quality that I described in my mind as plush velvet.
Conrad asked me later if I was disappointed that her appearance had changed with age. I truly did not notice any substantive change. To me, her appeal was one that could not be touched by the passage of time. I thought she was as strikingly beautiful as I always had.
I could barely follow the plot of the show. All I could think was “There she is! There she is!” I marveled at how close she was, how if I had wanted to be inappropriate I could reach out and touch her. Then I thought about Wicked, about the young performers I had seen. I thought about how people like Patti and all these other performers were bringing real joy and magic to people’s lives every single day. I’d been alone at home with Max for almost four years. But suddenly, I was here in New York. I could feel the energy of the city. Our friend George, who had grown up on the East Coast, had told us that you feel so powerful when you walk the streets in the city. He was right. You feel like anything can happen. You feel like you can make anything happen.
I had been transported, by this trip, by the miracle of finally seeing Patti, by the inspiration of seeing performers and having the startling realization that I might just be able to do that myself.
I’m not the kind of person to aggrandize myself. If anything, I have always been the opposite. Too timid, too uncertain, never really believing that anything I did could have any real purpose. It had been why I’d been such a failure as an attorney. Intelligence, work ethic – those hadn’t been the issue. The issue was I didn’t take myself seriously. I thought I was a young kid, or at the very most a small, ineffectual woman. The clients could sense it, and so could the other lawyers.
But now, all of a sudden, somehow, during that first act of Sweeney Todd, everything changed. It was as if all the years I’d spent not really caring what I did, feeling disconnected from my own life and future, were over in one instant. Something had been jolted loose in my psyche back when I was eighteen years old, and then somehow, through this event, had clicked back into place. Suddenly I felt whole again, and in charge of my life again, and hopeful, for the first time in too many years.
Patti had turned back time.
And so when the lights came up at intermission, and Conrad asked me how I liked the show so far, I responded simply, “The second part of my life starts now.”
