42nd St. Moon Blog

Yes, Greg leaped in to respond to my queries with the following missive. (And I was right: it has been a LONG time since Greg trod the boards at the Moon!)

Actually, dear, you were around during my last foray onto the stage in a Moon Musical. It was Jerome Kern's Very Warm for May during our 1995 Hammerstein and Hart season, and I played Kenny, a reformed gangster. It was a dream role, really; I had 20 fabulous minutes at the top of the show, then sat in the dressing room reading Agatha Christie and mainlining Diet Pepsi until my 20 fabulous minutes at the end of the show, which concluded with me singing a reprise of "All the Things You Are" with a stage direction per the script to "sing badly," which of course, I followed to a "t."

I remember vividly our closing Sunday matinee, we had a spontaneous standing ovation, which sent us out on a high, and the rest of the cast went out to party, while I stayed at NCTC to run the dress rehearsal of the show I was directing on my off-nights from May -- that would be I Married an Angel, starring Joseph Lustig, Lesley Hamilton, Marcia Pizzo and -- oh, gee, who else was in that cast? Oh, that's right ... Spencer Aste. [Ed. Note: plus a yet-to-be-prominent blogger making her 42nd St. Moon debut, yes, that would be me!]

I can't believe I had the energy to do that. The only thing that made it possible was that, for that year only, we dumped Thursday nights and did Saturday matinees instead -- so we rehearsed Angel on Sunday through Thursday nights and, I believe, some Saturday mornings, and took Fridays off (when I had May performances). I'm practically having a nervous breakdown just remembering that schedule...

You may or may not recall that the OJ Simpson trial reached its verdict one night just before our dress rehearsal, which only added to the general feeling of craziness (for me.) And then Angel opened to that rave Chronicle review, and I had a lovely week off before I started directing Three Sisters. Okay, I need to stop now, I'm scaring myself.