Voice Lessons by Cara Mentzel

Author:Cara Mentzel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Lesson 8

HOW TO LOVE A WITCH

Wicked opened at The Gershwin Theatre on October 30, 2003. Dee was starring as the misunderstood green witch of Oz, Elphaba—affectionately referred to as Elphie—in a musical adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked. The theater boasted close to two thousand seats, the most on Broadway. Before me hung a formidable dragon that spanned nearly the width of the stage and hovered over the first few rows of the orchestra. The dragon appeared to be made of armored scales layered together with steel pins like medieval suits of armor. He was a massive puppet, a marionette, with visible strings that held up his batlike wings, claws, neck, jagged teeth, and crocodile snout. Behind him hung a massive parchment map that depicted the Lands of Oz, with the Emerald City at the center lit up in a green spotlight. The innards of a giant clock, its cogs and gears, surrounded the map, suggesting an emotionally deadened, manufactured landscape.

I sat between Mom and Dad, as I so often did for Dee’s performances, and as I had almost eight years earlier for the opening night of Rent. I felt those eight years; I felt older. There had been an innocence in me, an idealism back then that was now elusive as I sat before the stage and admired the set design. A couple of months had passed since I’d asked Jon for a divorce. I’d lost fifteen pounds—if the gentleman in the seat behind me had sneezed, the force might have sent me flying into the front row. At night when I lay in bed asking the universe for guidance, whatever divine portal had once brought me access to my purest inner voice had shut. I’d once believed people when they said, “God never gives you more than you can handle,” but it was starting to smell a lot like bullshit. I’d believed “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be,” bullshit. “Everything will be all right,” bullshit. But the truth was that things could be worse. In fact, if someone had said, “It could be worse,” I wouldn’t have called bullshit. I was jaded. I knew it. And I didn’t like myself that way.

But some things never change, like those potent minutes before Dee makes her entrance onto the stage. Mom’s hand in mine, Dad’s wide grin and glassy eyes, the heightened awareness of my heartbeat, and the way I shiver, a product of air-conditioning and anticipation.

I pictured my sister in her dressing room a couple of hours earlier, in the tiny bathroom with the toilet a mere foot or two from the plastic curtain of the standing shower. I imagined hearing her sing scales of “Ave Maria” in the steam, just like she had when we were children, back when I drew hearts in the fogged bathroom mirror.

This time her makeup artist would be there to greet her when she emerged from the shower. Dee had explained to me the lengths to which the makeup artist had gone to find the best way to transform her into the green witch.

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