{"id":4675,"date":"2012-09-06T13:18:24","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T17:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=4675"},"modified":"2012-09-06T13:19:10","modified_gmt":"2012-09-06T17:19:10","slug":"if-you-cant-take-the-heat-once-more-with-feeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2012\/09\/if-you-cant-take-the-heat-once-more-with-feeling.html","title":{"rendered":"If you can’t take the heat… once more with feeling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Can I interest you in a musical theatre illustration of my point from earlier today<\/a>?<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m quite fond of the song \u201cI\u2019m Not Afraid of Anything\u201d from Jason Robert Brown\u2019s\u00a0Songs for a New World<\/a><\/em>, and I\u2019ve embedded a nice performance of it below.<\/p>\n<\/iframe>\nHere, as in most cases when I\u2019ve seen the song performed, the actress ends the song in a place of\u00a0vulnerability. \u00a0The last line \u201cCause, after all, I\u2019m not afraid\u201d is pretty clearly a lie, and the character is at least a little aware it\u2019s a lie. \u00a0It\u2019s a reversal from the bright, careless beginning of the song.<\/p>\nIn the alternate world where I get to direct things, I really wanted to take end of this song in the exact opposite direction. \u00a0The audience already gets to see vulnerability and the character\u2019s recognition of\u00a0vulnerability\u00a0in the bridge when she admits that her lover is afraid of her. \u00a0I wanted to use the last part of the song to start suggesting how she\u2019ll react to that epiphany.<\/p>\nWe think we\u2019re watching her succumb in the conventional staging because she crumples and\u00a0looks<\/em> weak. \u00a0I wanted to stage it with her actually giving in to the temptation to feel stronger. \u00a0If I got to stage it (and when I sing it in the shower), I want to see the fear turn to anger and contempt as she hits the \u201cI am sure to win with anyone at all \/ I\u2019m not afraid of anyone \/ Not a soul alive can get behind this wall.\u201d But by the time she gets up to the conclusion (\u201cSo let them call \/ And watch them fall \/ \u2018Cause after all \/ I\u2019m not afraid\u201d) I\u2019d like her to be calm and controlled and safe-feeling. Not as careless at the beginning, but conscious of her strength and comfortable in it.<\/p>\nI think this would be nice and scary, if I could pull it off. \u00a0A lot of the time, when we talk about the \u201cglamour of evil,\u201d we mean it in a moustache-twirling, cape-swooshing kind of way. \u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0rakish<\/em> \u2014 attractive because there\u2019s something\u00a0off\u00a0<\/em>about it. \u00a0But I want to highlight the way falling back on the wrong kind of strength or the wrong kind of comfort can do much more violence to us than the thing that makes discomfits us and makes us feel weak.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\nThe other musical I\u2019ve really wanted to do this in is\u00a0Cabaret<\/em>. \u00a0In the movie, the song \u201cTomorrow Belongs to Me\u201d (below) opens the show. \u00a0It starts off pastoral and becomes jingoistic and dangerous. \u00a0The audience gets swept up in the song, and then sickened by where it ends up.<\/p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co\">http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co<\/a>\nIt\u2019s a nice effect, but I\u2019m not sure the audience\u2019s feelings of culpability are merited. \u00a0The song makes a pretty big tonal shift, and most people recoil in time. \u00a0But, in the stage musical, it\u2019s sung for the first time at a holiday party. \u00a0When I saw it at college, one of the dancers at the cabaret sings it along with an up-to-then jovial Nazi. \u00a0In the production I saw, the cabaret dancer was a blowsy drunk, and her lack of control contrasted with the polish and refinement of the Nazi.<\/p>\nBut that difference stayed constant through the song. \u00a0If I were staging the show, I would have had the dancer draw strength from martial tones of the song. \u00a0She might start out disheveled and comical, but I\u2019d like to see force of the strong straighten her back, until, just as the song becomes most off-putting, she seems to have been imbued with more dignity and beauty than we\u2019ve seen from her before.<\/p>\nHere, we can see that the dancer, and by extension, the Germans, are being tempted by a good \u2014 we do wish that comfort and loveliness for the dancer \u2014 but she\u2019s gone to the wrong source for her strength and it will destroy and corrupt her and her country.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\nStrength and peace are to be desired, but they\u2019re the side effects of something\u00a0else<\/em>. \u00a0We can\u2019t take them as the ends in themselves, or we\u2019ll be too tempted to take the shortcut of disassociation (like the girl in the first song and me) from the things that make us\u00a0feel<\/em> weak, instead of acknowledging and engaging with that vulnerability or the cheat of subsuming ourselves in some ideology (like the cabaret dancer) that let\u2019s us feel strong for some other property than that within us that actually merits dignity.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Can I interest you in a musical theatre illustration of my point from earlier today? I\u2019m quite fond of the song \u201cI\u2019m Not Afraid of Anything\u201d from Jason Robert Brown\u2019s\u00a0Songs for a New World, and I\u2019ve embedded a nice performance of it below. Here, as in most cases when I\u2019ve seen the song performed, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":4702,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,27],"tags":[51,186],"class_list":["post-4675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-morality-in-practice","category-parsing-catholicism","tag-at-the-theatre","tag-stoicism"],"yoast_head":"\n<title>If you can't take the heat... once more with feeling<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Can I interest you in a musical theatre illustration of my point from earlier today? 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