The Rise and Fall of Holly Fudge

Today is the day I told myself I would write my Holly Fudge blog post, but, if I’m feeling honest, I don’t really feel like I’m in the self-promotion mood. So, while this post is still going to be related to Holly Fudge, rather than my typical link to ticket information at the very end you will find a link to donate to the victims of Club Q.

I’ve been saying a lot recently that I am not good at making sure people know that The Rise and Fall of Holly Fudge is a funny play. I talk a lot about the heart of it —  how Holly Fudge is about a relationship between a mother and a daughter in the middle of monumental change. COVID. Protests.

Queerness.

There is a line that makes my soul ache that has been sitting at the base of my heart since I first read this script. Carol, Holly’s mother, is trying to understand why her daughter would “choose” queerness when she has dated men in the past and liked them. She says:

Who knows how long you two will be legal. Like a rubber band, the world could just snap back, they could haul you away.

I first started my work on this production in the spring of this year. Back then, it was one of many good lines that stuck with me, one of the many examples of Trista Baldwin’s honesty.

Then, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

I tried to read all of the opinions, tried to struggle through the legalese to really read what I was hearing about Justice Thomas’s opinion. The opinion that the court should revisit other court cases that relied on the Roe precedent of substantive due process.

Contraception, Griswold v. Connecticut.

SNAP.

Interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia.

SNAP.

Gay marriage. 

Like a rubber band.

Who knew a show about a COVID Christmas would get more relevant the further we move from the winter of 2020?

This weekend, we put all parts of The Rise and Fall of Holly Fudge together in tech. I’d been in the theatre for so long that I didn’t see the news about Club Q until yesterday morning. How to describe the feeling of reading that headline? Pulse is a wound that still feels fresh and raw. How can I go into rehearsal tonight and watch the show and laugh at well-meaning moms not understanding queerness? How can I talk about this COVID Christmas story with humor and levity when the community at its core, a community I am part of, is grieving?

The answer, simply, is that I must.

For too long, these acts of hatred taught me fear. Fear for my loved ones, fear for my colleagues, and fear for, and of, myself. In 2008, when the rubber band snapped in California and I watched my classmates cheerfully condemn the “gay lifestyle” by celebrating the ending of legal gay marriage, I burrowed deep into the recesses of my closet. I didn’t even tell my own parents that I was queer until 2019, not because I feared what they would do, but because I was terrified of what it would mean to be out, fully, and own my queerness the way I have to own the mixed identity spelled across my face.

Today, the instinct to hide is still here. It’s insidious, whispering that no one cares, that me speaking will stir up too much, that it would be better, easier, wiser, to hide behind my loving cis-male partner and just pretend to be straight.

Instead, I can think of no better way to combat the hatred that took 5 lives and injured dozens more on Saturday than to find joy in my queerness. I am grateful to be working on a play that uplifts empathy and love as the way through discomfort and pain and fear. I am grateful to be working on a play about owning your identity, about loving your kid and trying to understand when you don’t. And I’m grateful that it is, in fact, funny and sweet and, yes, it has a happy ending. Right now, we all need one.

Donate to the Colorado Healing Fund, to assist in immediate and long-term care:

https://www.coloradogives.org/organization/COHealingFund

Reflections on Virtual Work

I am currently in the midst of directing Working: A Musical at CATCO in Columbus, Ohio. Well, I’m not actually in Columbus. In fact, while the majority of our creative team and three actors of six are in Ohio, only two of them are in Columbus. The rest are scattered in Cincinnati, Nebraska, New York, and here in Chicagoland, along with me and our music director.

This is the first virtual musical I’ve done. I’ve worked on other virtual pieces, but none of them have had as many moving pieces as this. Our music director is basically mixing an entire studio record. We have a digital designer, whose job includes editing, collaborating on framing, and figuring out how we make this look good.

Every night, we get on Zoom in our respective homes and “rehearse.” I put this word in quotes because what we’re actually doing is filming. The actors are one-person crews, setting up lighting, getting in costume and hair and makeup with guidance from our costume designer. Our digital designer and I talk them through framing, where to put their scene partners in their rooms, which area of their house we want to see in this section of the script. Our choreographer talks them through the music, dancing along with them and shouting choreography through the video conferencing software that is always slightly behind because of the Zoom lag. Our stage manager gives us a slate as she plays the tracks, lovingly mixed by our music director, of the actors singing, sometimes with music fading out so that they can speak their monologues. The cameras on their phones capture the chaos as it unfolds, take after take after take.

This process has been so radically different from everything I have ever done. Before the pandemic, I may have naively said that about every show. “Every show has its own challenges,” past-Daniella would wisely say. “Every show is a new process, a new opportunity for growth.”

“Oh, you sweet child,” current-Daniella would wistfully say. “If only you knew what awaited you.”

Musicals are already miracles. I have been part of shows that barely made it to stage by first preview. I’ve seen musicals that haven’t made it to stage by first preview. Through hard work, vigilance, and a sprinkle of theatre magic, they always manage to come together at the last second for opening night to produce exhilarating moments of connection.

Virtual musicals? Dear lord. What exists above a miracle? Cosmic events? We are essentially doing all of the things that are normally involved in creating a musical (namely, learning music, choreography, and character and marrying them together) along with everything involved in creating a film (storyboarding, recording and mixing audio, setting and framing shots, doing multiple takes, editing it all together). Movie musicals take years to produce, months to gather all of the content needed and piece them together. We’re doing it all in one month, and from our homes where roommates scream, plumbers work, neighbors gawk, and pets, spouses, and children (rightly) demand our attention.

In the same way that I have never been so pushed by a process, I have never felt so grateful to be working. In a time when theatre is nearly non-existent, I get the opportunity to innovate, to be “in a room” with other artists in a way and once again collaborate on how to make the impossible possible.

There are things that I miss. Tonight, we finished recording a song that I love fiercely. Two nights ago, we finished a song that made me sob the first time I heard the actors read the words aloud. I won’t get to talk to those actors about those numbers in that way again. I won’t get to listen to them every night as we run the show, lovingly guiding each number night by night to where we want it to be. I won’t get to watch my mother listen to Tagalog being sung in a musical, or my father hear the song about fathers building a legacy for their children. I won’t get to sit in my seat on opening night, half-terrified and half-exhilarated by the prospect of audiences seeing this little piece of my soul that I’ve bound to so many others to create the experience of the show.

Will it be good? I think so. I will admit I’m biased. I’ve poured a lot of time, love, and energy into this show. My friends and my fiance barely see me. But that’s no different from any other show. What is different now is the way it will be presented. We are not pretending to be anything but what we are: a group of people creating in a time when it is nearly impossible to create, each physically far away from the other but joined together for these moments. The final product will not look like any theatre you have seen before. It will likely not even look like most virtual theatre you have seen. But I hope it will touch on something human, something deep within us all, about how our work defines us. Because that’s what Working is ultimately about: what people do for a living, and how they feel about it.

Working: A Musical opens April 29, 2021 and runs through May 9. More information may be found here: https://www.catco.org/working/