The Boy Who Cried
When I was a minor, I cried a lot. When life seemed unfair, when teachers were mean, when bullies bullied (as they did on a daily basis), torrents of tears would fall.
And of course, boys are told that boys don't cry. I got the message that it's not OK to cry. And then I got taken to some musicals: Brigadoon, Mame, Young Abe Lincoln, HMS Pinafore. In the audience, I got a different message: It's OK to cry. As long as you're watching a musical.
I guess I began to believe that musicals create a great release for people: they let you cry in public. Later, when I read Aristotle on the need for catharsis, I learned that this Aristotle guy had come up with the same theory of theatre thousands of years earlier.
Oddly, it was Brigadoon that gave me my first lead role in school. I was the Eighth Grade Tommy Albright to beat all Eighth Grade Tommy Albright. And, at the time, I could hum enough original melodies to make up an entire musical school. In Ninth Grade, I wrote my first musical, down on paper and everything. I went to the college where Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart had written shows, and, got the impression that I could do something that not that many people could do: write musicals. I was the youngest member of Lehman Engel's writing workshop at BMI. And I also got the impression that actors are not treated very well. So I left acting to the zillions of others who could do it just as well, or better.
At my sixth musical to get produced while I was in my 20's, I was unsure how the second act was playing, so I asked my father about it. He said "We were all crying" and I thought, good, Dad probably needed a good cry.
