if you insist, babe, the challenge delights me
aren't y'gonna arrest me?
Hi from (almost) week #3 of rehearsals!
We just finished week two of rehearsals for The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul at Buffalo’s Irish Classical Theatre Company and it’s been a pure delight. (Easy for me to say. I wrote the thing, I don’t have to stage or memorize the thing!) Putting the show on its feet is teaching me a lot — not just about what I wrote, but about the process in general. Because we’ve spent so much time in the last few years polishing the thing in readings and workshops, it’s been a good long while since we’ve had to get our hands dirty, so to speak. And since it’s never been fully staged, there’s a rawer quality to the work we have to do now that is both exciting but also terrifying? It’s easy to make a thing look polished behind music stands. Once it’s on its feet, all bets are off.
However, when your collaborator is Danny Mefford, one of the best dramaturgical minds in New York theatre (*the* best, if you ask me, but I’m undeniably biased), you know that the process is going to yield exciting results. He came here straight from directing a production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at the Kennedy Center that has been an absolute smash and I’m so proud I could burst:
Anyway. Similar magic is happening here in Buffalo (but don’t worry, nobody’s going to ask you to hop on stage at our show and spell “syzygy”…) Come see it if you can!
what’s living rent-free in my head this week
Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) in Dick Tracy (1990)
A few weeks ago I’d promised that I would dig a little deeper into my deep childhood love of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990) and specifically its antiheroine, the femme fatale chanteuse Breathless Mahoney (as brilliantly played by Madonna).
Dick Tracy came out in the summer of 1990, when I was six years old, and I remember being instantly obsessed. Part of the appeal was the cartoonishness — the comic strip color palette (I remember someone on TV saying about it that “the reds are really red and the greens are really green!” and not understanding what they meant until years later), the film noir tropes, the bad guys with exaggerated prosthetic faces:
But what really stuck with me more than anything was Breathless Mahoney. She sang amazing songs (yes, this was my first exposure to Stephen Sondheim1, seeds were being planted) and she wore incredible dresses and she walked into any room like she owned it. I wanted to be her so badly.
My mom was (well, still is) a huge fan of the soundtrack2, so I very quickly learned all of the songs. I have this vivid memory of using the brick hearth in the living room of our house in Lexington, Kentucky as a stage, stepping onto it and recreating this version of “Sooner or Later” move for move, the weird self-hug with her back to the audience, the turn and the hand on the hip:
Proud of my work, I showed my mom, who thought it was adorable, so she invited her friend over to watch me do this. So I did it again. When it was over, the friend turned to my mom, eyes huge, and said, “That was… the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen.”
My first pull quote, baby! Some people would’ve given up on showbiz after a review like that, but to quote Lina Lamont, “I ain’t people!”
Here’s the thing: having now seen Dick Tracy several times as an adult… I maybe had no business looking up to Breathless Mahoney as a six-year-old. For one thing, she’s brazenly sexual in a way I’ve never seen a woman be in a PG-rated movie:
The thing that I found truly baffling as a child is why Dick Tracy wouldn’t immediately dump his drip of a girlfriend Tess Trueheart (with all apologies to the late, marvelous Glenne Headly) when an absolute superstar is right there in front of him. Like, fully did not get it. This conundrum presaged so many dumb situations I’ve ended up in with men over the years. Look, at the end of the day, some of us are Tess Truehearts and some of us are Breathless Mahoneys. I’ve never known how to be a sweet put-upon girlfriend, I’ve only known how to walk into a room looking great but acting weird!
And Breathless is weird. Literally everything she says in this scene is weird. Sexy, sure, but the way in which she’s just having the conversation she wants to have — and not the one he’s actually having — is wild. “You don’t know if you want to hit me or kiss me. I get a lot of that.” Ma’am, this is an Arby’s.
After seeing the movie a few weeks ago at Vidiots, my friends Amy and Jessie insisted that as a follow-up I seek out Madonna: Truth or Dare, which was made around the same time. (I hadn’t seen it, largely because, again, during the heyday of my Madonna fandom I was in the first grade.)
I just watched Truth or Dare last night, and, y’all. Warren Beatty in this movie is all I’m going to think about for the next month. It was made during Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour, which was also the brief period of time after the making of Dick Tracy when the two of them were still dating, and there, captured on celluloid, is the moment that Warren Beatty realized he really should not be in a relationship with Madonna. It’s like he woke up in an Ionesco play and nobody knows it but him. The existential dread in his eyes!
It’s astonishing. I can’t get enough.
Anyway. Breathless is a terrible role model and she dies in the end (spoiler?), but, man, I love her so much. Sexy weirdos forever. We’re the ones with the best stories.
A postscript: if you don’t know anything about Warren Beatty’s efforts to hold onto the copyright of Dick Tracy by turning up in weird specials in the middle of the night on TCM dressed in his old costume, go down the rabbithole and thank me later. It’s BANANATOWN.
what I did this week
Rehearsal! A lot of it!
I’ve gotten obsessed with a fast casual chain they have here in Buffalo called Rachel’s Mediterranean. Their chicken shawarma bowls are A+++.
But yeah, I’ve mostly just been in rehearsal.
what’s next?
Tickets are going fast for the preview production of my musical The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul at Irish Classical Theatre Company in Buffalo, New York! (At least one performance is already sold out and there are a couple getting close…) It runs November 8-24. Grab ‘em while you can at Irish Classical’s website!!!
We have some reeeeeeally exciting news coming soon about the Fitzgeralds concept album Kickstarter — have you pre-saved it yet???
in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog
“Sooner or Later” may be the song that won the Best Song Oscar, but for my money, “More” is actually the best of the Sondheim songs in the film. I’ll also happily take any excuse I can to share Ruthie Henshall’s version from Putting It Together because it’s absolute dynamite:
Okay, so I’m Breathless isn’t strictly a soundtrack — it’s got stuff in it that is “inspired” by the movie, as well as “Vogue”, which is not related to or in the movie at all. It’s a killer album with some of Madonna’s best work and some of Madonna’s goofiest work side by side. “Now I’m Following You (Pt. 2)” is the sort of thing that I have a feeling made a lot of sense in the studio at 3 AM when everyone was loopy that was never actually intended to be included. That’s the only explanation I can come up with. Once she starts riffing on “Dick” being a funny word, it’s gone so far off the deep end that it defies the good/bad binary and just is.
I know this is an unfair thing to say but I always forget that Ruthie Henshall is good because the most annoying people that I knew liked her so much. (Probably someone else is saying this about FILL IN THE BLANK WITH ANYONE I LOVE right now too why not)