Theater: Next to Normal

Next to Normal—a searing, brilliant, Pulitzer-winning rock opera examining the lives of a family whose mother is desperately struggling with bipolar depression—opened on Broadway 15 years ago today. The show beautifully captures the swings between the ridiculous highs and the soul-crushing lows the disease brings to those of us living in its fogs and terrors ... and to the selfless teams of people who care for us.

I’m fortunate enough to have seen the original production, very soon after I’d been diagnosed as bipolar and had found myself caught in a rather terrifying struggle to wrap my confused, exhausted brain around the fact that mental illness was no longer a mysterious entity in other people’s lives; it was MY life, and I had no idea how to manage it or what potential and very real horrors to expect from it.

The musical is rough to experience from any perspective, but seeing it for the first time tore me apart ... and then put me back together with its closing anthem, “Light,” which features an almost casually placed lyric that is at once devastating and hopeful and never fails to sneak up on me and emotionally gut me even though I know it’s coming: “The price of love is loss / but still we pay / we love anyway.”

Back when I saw the show on Broadway, selfies were new and weird and shameful—and for you young folks, it was the Middle Ages when our smartphones had cameras that faced only one way and didn’t let us see on our screens what our selfies would look like so we just had to hold our phones in the air and hope for the best—so I took this one-try selfie as quickly and discreetly as I could to ensure an entire city of complete strangers wouldn’t judge me. It turned out rather well, although I cut off the last letter of the sign. Which means as far as any of you know, I actually just saw a knockoff production called Next to Norma.

I've been invited to be the Bipolar Person in Residence and talk to the casts and audiences of Next to Normal productions at two local theaters over the last decade. And while I hope it was helpful for the actors as they rehearsed and found their characters' realities, it was extremely helpful for me to have an opportunity to articulate the swings and uncertainties and terrors of living with a mental illness—both so I could explain any weirdness I've personally exhibited and to help the actors help their audiences better understand these realities.

I also maintain a blog of my journey, struggles, triumphs, thoughts and research into bipolar disorder and mental illness in general at TMIpolar.blogspot.com

While every bipolar mind is different and therefore every moment of Next to Normal doesn't exactly mirror my experiences, every note and every word of the show is brilliant and hits brilliantly close to home. And that closing anthem—sung by the characters not to each other but to the audience and to the present and to the future—encapsulates the struggles and hopes I live with every day in astute prose and powerful, emotional, wall-of-sound vocals:

Day after day,

We'll find the will to find our way.

Knowing that the darkest skies

Will someday see the sun.

When our long night is done,

There will be light.

Dead ahead

The RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and started sinking 112 years ago today at 10:40 pm Central Time.
(This exact time is actually hotly debated; Titanic's constantly moving Ship's Time doesn't translate hour-for-hour/minute-for-minute with the fixed time zones on land, and there were conflicting timelines for the collision and sinking reported by the survivors. Also: Daylight Savings Time wasn't established in the US until 1918 [time zones themselves were established in 1883, just FYI], so whatever the exact Ship's Time was, it does translate to true Central Time here.)

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the tragedy—mostly from the perspective of wanting to know what it was like to be on such a grand ship ... and then to have it slowly, terrifyingly disappear under my feet. I’ve recorded the sinking as an annual event on my google calendar so I get a pop-up reminder every year to take a moment to think about the people who died and the horrors they and the survivors endured.

 
We’re 112 years later still in the murky waters of a seemingly endless Titanic metaphor: Things we’d taken for granted as unsinkable—from industries and economies to legal equalities and merely going out in public and hugging our friends—have sunk beneath dark waves that have lapped at our feet for years. Political wars, cultural wars and actual wars never stop rising to the sky and crashing down around us. Gun violence has gotten so commonplace that it’s become almost unremarkable. Class divisions and the desperation of the poor keep being more and more impossible not to see. People we personally know and love have succumbed to covid and drowned, literally in the fluid filling their lungs.

 
Those of us who are still safe and healthy know we’re extremely lucky to be so—and that covid, though largely under control, is not entirely behind us and our circumstances can change with something as innocent as having a short conversation. But it takes just one cough, one shooter, one extremist official with the power to vote away our equalities … and our own world can sink out from under us.

 
It’s terrifying, it’s sobering and it’s devastating—and I’ve found that living amid the social terror and existential exhaustion wrought by all of this has profoundly underscored whatever emotional connection I’ve given myself to the Titanic passengers and crew I technically know nothing about but still mourn.

 
Unlike those Titanic passengers and crew, we're lucky that we're able to keep solid ground reliably under our feet. And I urge you to consciously maximize the benefits of that advantage. Don’t wait for an annual reminder of a century-plus-old tragedy. Don’t wait for the next devastating blow of the current tragedy. Take a moment—take MANY moments—every day to be thankful for the people you love in your life while you can.

It's Still Here

Happy 53rd anniversary to Follies, the glorious, epic, mold-breaking 1971 musical by Stephen Sondheim, James Goldman, Harold Prince and Michael Bennett that ended up being too lavish and probably too jarringly mold-breaking for its own good. The most expensive Broadway production to date when it opened, it drew a full spectrum of critical reviews but didn't get the musical-theater-pantheon foothold it deserved and closed after 500 performances without recouping any of its investments.

I was unfortunately three when it opened and I couldn't get tickets, but my heart and endless fascination and I were eventually—inevitably—pulled into its magical, inspiring, gorgeous, heartbreaking world when I saw the 1987 London revival, which gave Eartha Kitt a much-needed comeback when she replaced the broken-ankled Delores Gray (just like what happened to her in 42nd Street!) to belt the iconic "I'm Still Here"—which, as coincidences never cease, was the song in the 1971 production that brought Yvonne De Carlo back from the brink of terminal embarrassment after playing Lily Munster on TV.

Thankfully—inevitably—Follies has since then finally achieved the musical-theater-pantheon stature it deserves, and I've been fortunate enough to have seen more productions of it than I can count in New York, D.C., Chicago and beyond. I'm obviously overflowing with fanboy knowledge and trivia and opinions and lyrics (oh boy, am I overflowing with lyrics) about the show, but if I even want to come close to sharing everything about its brilliance that's waiting to burst out of me, I'll have to schedule a six-week subscription-series symposium at a local college to get it all Jakesplained to you. 

Fun fact: It opened at the Winter Garden Theater in NYC, which—again with the coincidences—is the theater where I just so happen to have seen my first-ever Broadway show (Cats, the fact of which I am hard-stop-sun-comes-up-coffee-cup not willing to discuss).