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ONSTAGE & BACKSTAGE: Jennifer, Julia and "Something's Coming"
By Seth Rudetsky
15 May 2007
This week was chock full of belting.
First of all, on Monday I played piano for Jennifer Hudson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a fundraiser for their costume collection. I got to the sound check early, and a beautiful African-American woman asked me if I was going to see Jennifer later. I told her I would, and she asked me to say hello for her.
Me: Sure. What's your name?
Her:…Naomi.
Me: (Awkward pause…Naomi? As in supermodel Naomi? Must clarify. Wait…what's her last name? Collins? Petrified I'll get it wrong…let me phrase question without using name) Um…aren't you famous for modeling?
Her: (Laughs.) Well, not that much anymore. (She leaves.)
Sound Man: Seth, you know that was Naomi Campbell, right?
Me: That's her last name!
Sound Man: (Glares)
Ooh! Just realized, I never gave the message. Jen, if you're reading this, Naomi says, "Hi." Wait. Is this my future? Intermediary between supermodel and Diva? Patti, if you're reading this, Iman says, "What up."
For the Met event the organizers asked Jennifer to sing "La Vie En Rose" because they were honoring somebody French. Now, while I think the song is pretty, it's not known for bringing down the house. Since it was the opener, I refused to let Jen do a mellow Piaf fin. Instead, I made up an arrangement for the ending. She sang it through, and then we did a tag:
(Slowly building) La vie en….
(more) La Vie en…
(Tremolo in piano) And-I-am-telling-you-
(Fermata in the piano as she riffs a la "You're gonna lo-o-o-ove") La vie-e-e-e-e-e-e-e en-
(Pause, then a la "me-eeee!") Ro-ose!!!!!
It made no sense, but got huge applause. Then she belted out two more songs ("Run to You" and "I Am Changing"), took her bow and exited. Well, the audience went wild! They demanded an encore. We hadn't planned one, but luckily, because I was too lazy to separate out what she was singing that night, I brought all of her music to the gig. She came back onstage and knew the audience would go crazy if she hauled out a certain song. Yes, she took centerstage and belted a fierce "It's a Scandal, It's an Outrage" from Oklahoma! Anybody? No, actually I played three G octaves, and she launched into "And I Am Telling You." Brava!
Tuesday I interviewed Stephanie J. Block and Alain Boublil for my Broadway show on Sirius. I spent a good part of the hour trying to pronounce the first and/or last name of Monsieur Boublil and essentially turned it into a combination of Eileen Brennan, Michael Bublé and Bebe Benzenheimer.
Stephanie is such a cool person who has been plagued by opening-night nachtmares. First, the night before she was supposed to open Wicked in Toronto, they were trying a new entrance for "No Good Deed" where she would fly in on a broom. It was a late-night rehearsal and, suddenly, one of the wires broke that was holding her up. The crew tried to get her down, but the computer kept overriding anything they did, so she was swinging around repeatedly above the stage, literally crashing into the light poles!
Then, during Pirate Queen previews, everyone in the cast was spreading around a debilitating virus. She was able to avoid it until the critics came. She started the show on the big critics night, and ten minutes in had to leave and have her understudy take over. Take this in people: She was starring in a show and couldn't perform on a critics night! Do you know how sick you have to be to let yourself miss one of those nights? She was devastated. Stephanie told me she's accepted that openings will always be weird for her. I told her the good news is that after each opening, she'll always have a fun theatre story to tell; that is, once her debilitating psychological and physical traumas have slightly healed. . . . Her silence spoke volumes.
I was then obsessing with Alain about how much I love Frances Ruffelle as the original Eponine. He said that at the time of her audition, she was in Starlight Express in London, and they didn't think she'd be right. But when she walked in, she literally looked like those nineteenth-century illustrations of French waifs. And, I might add, she could belt an E ("I'm gonna scream, I'm gonna warn 'em here!") I remember interviewing Frances, and she told me that she was only 19 when she first did the show and didn't feel totally comfortable onstage. When they were staging her number, she didn't know what to do with her arms, so she folded them across her waist. Like a clichéd movie scene, everyone said, "That's it! Don't move!" That's right. The signature Eponine pose was really because of her uncomfortableness onstage. Brava, Mme. Ruffelle! Way to "take it from where you are"!
I then accompanied Stephanie as she sang her Pirate Queen opening song and subsequently couldn't get the melody or her seamless voice out of my head for the rest of the week. At first I loved it, but then it became phenomenally annoying, and I had to cleanse my compulsive noggin by listening to 1776 from start to finish. That score is brilliant! The orchestrations are superb. And so what if half the leads have nary a vibrato in site, the performances are amazing! Continued...
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