A Little Love Note to Theater

Recently I sat in the audience at a community college theater, a very nice one, and watched the red curtain ascend over the opening guitar riffs of Jesus Christ Superstar. The intro to that musical goes on for several minutes with no performers on stage, and no lyrics, but my eyes welled up immediately with the urgency and earnestness of the music alone. Before the lights went down fully, I texted my husband about how excited I was. I am not even a big fan of Jesus Christ Superstar. Crying is simply what happens every time I go to see a musical—if not at the very onset, then shortly into the first act when I cross the line into feeling immersed. And I always cry at the end. It could be a comedy like The Book of Mormon; doesn’t matter. I enter and leave every performance bursting with awe at the energy and skill of the people who put on the show.

I don’t know anyone at community college, but I have a friend who lives in that community, happens to be an excellent singer, and got cast in this short run of JCS. It’s only because of this friend I’m familiar with the show at all. Years ago, when we did karaoke together regularly, he hired a band and staged a full performance of the score with his karaoke buddies including me. (I sang the relatively small part of Simon Zealotes.) Seeing the show in 2025, starring students who were just children when we put on our little show, brought back good memories, but it was a lot more than that too. These performers were mostly Gen Z, a cohort I don’t know much about except that they came of age in a world that is absolutely saturated with an always-connected mentality and the influence of social media. Part of me wants to be a crotchety old person and tell you that I was glad to see those kids put down their phones for a couple of hours! That would be an overly simple thing to say, but not so wrong. Honestly, I was touched to see a cadre of young performers stepping away from the now to devote themselves to a musical from 1971. Theater is such a deeply sincere pursuit. It connects us to our humanity through the drama on an actor’s face, the sweat and muscle and that go into building scenery, the heart and sleepless nights that a writer devoted to crafting the songs. When I watch actors move about the stage, I see a line all the way back through generations of people who have gathered in theaters to tell stories and understand one another. Theater is timeless, and that feels poignant in an era where too many people move fast and break things.

This particular era is turning dark quickly. A right-wing regime is not especially friendly to the arts and the kinds of people who make art: the sensitive, the quirky, the nonconforming. Not to overly project my own thoughts onto others, but many of the actors on stage that night seemed to be genderqueer, and I felt a little glow of appreciation for their freedom to come as they are in this specific place and time. (I hope it stays that way.) I admired the whole cast in an oddly proud way, the same way I did when I watched a high school production of The Lion King a few years ago. (My former mentee worked on the lighting for that one.) It takes courage to share one’s talent with an audience, and passion to rehearse night after night and deliver a convincing performance on show day. I’m not a performer, but I know that these can’t be easy pursuits. Neither are they particularly cool in a mainstream way, or economically productive, or other aspirations that tend to occupy us in a capitalist society. All the more reason to cherish those who throw themselves into it.

I’m still not a huge fan of Jesus Christ Superstar, but it stuck with me for several days. I liked it well enough that I listened to the soundtrack afterward, getting some of the songs re-stuck in my head. I also had a renewed desire to watch more musicals, remembering the half dozen bootleg videos sitting on my computer, waiting for me to pay attention to them instead of Hulu. Despite everything I write about here, I haven’t seen a ton of musical theater. Theater tickets are expensive, and when I’m tired or stressed out at home, streaming “Sex and the City” is my balm of choice rather than investing time and emotional energy into a musical. But next month I’m throwing financial caution to the wind and taking myself to New York, where I’ll see Jonathan Groff sing Bobby Darin in Just in Time. It’s a jukebox musical, so I don’t know how moving I will find the content, but seeing a talent like Groff in real life is certain to leave me in tears.