#1
Posted: 4/6/07 at 6:10pm
As you guys know, she opened PQ not feeling 100%. She has an amazing attitude about it!
"Block proved on opening night that her strength wasn't just for show. The most pressing, stressful and suspenseful question of the evening was "Who will turn up in the title role tonight?" Block had bailed out after about a half-hour of the last critics performance April 4 (her standby, Kathy Voytko, seamlessly assumed the role between scenes without ever stopping the show); also, Block had missed the two previous performances.
"It killed me," she admitted. "It. Killed. Me. But the stage manager [C. Randall White] put things in perspective for me when he said, 'I just want to let you know: We've done 98 shows. You've done 94 out of the 98. You're doing okay.' The bottom line is that it's live theatre. I would love to be a movie star where they say, 'Okay, go home. We'll just do your take three days from now.' But, with live theatre, what are you going to do?"
Before she threw in the towel Wednesday night, did she ask herself what would Liza do? "Yes, of course. And Liza, I'm telling you, would probably do it all. The beauty about Liza is she's Liza — so she can tell a story as Liza, she can stop singing and say, 'I don't want to sing this anymore,' and the audience would still scream and cheer. When you're playing another character, you're kind of a slave to that other character to serve it well."
The culprit was a viral infection that had insidiously snaked its way into the company and finally found the star. "When you live with a cast, they become like family," Block said. "If Mama gets sick, the baby's going to get sick, and the baby's going to give it to Daddy, and it keeps going around the family. Our family started getting sick about six weeks ago, and it was just untimely that it happened to get to Mama right when she's opening."
She was speaking from a place of personal triumph, having heroically made it through the opening-night performance, looking and sounding good while doing it — and now she was meeting the press in the Apollo Lobby of the labyrinthine Hilton Theatre. "There's always an awareness and a control that you want to have as a singer — and, unfortunately, that wasn't there for me tonight," she confessed, "but I put that aside and said, 'All I'm going to focus on is telling the story. I'm going to give my heart. I'm going to give my soul. If that means I'm going to talk some notes, then I'm going to talk some notes. If I can sustain the performance — it doesn't matter as long as I'm staying true to Grace and staying true to the storytelling — I think that I'm going to be able to reach the audience regardless.""
Click for full Playbill article
"Block proved on opening night that her strength wasn't just for show. The most pressing, stressful and suspenseful question of the evening was "Who will turn up in the title role tonight?" Block had bailed out after about a half-hour of the last critics performance April 4 (her standby, Kathy Voytko, seamlessly assumed the role between scenes without ever stopping the show); also, Block had missed the two previous performances.
"It killed me," she admitted. "It. Killed. Me. But the stage manager [C. Randall White] put things in perspective for me when he said, 'I just want to let you know: We've done 98 shows. You've done 94 out of the 98. You're doing okay.' The bottom line is that it's live theatre. I would love to be a movie star where they say, 'Okay, go home. We'll just do your take three days from now.' But, with live theatre, what are you going to do?"
Before she threw in the towel Wednesday night, did she ask herself what would Liza do? "Yes, of course. And Liza, I'm telling you, would probably do it all. The beauty about Liza is she's Liza — so she can tell a story as Liza, she can stop singing and say, 'I don't want to sing this anymore,' and the audience would still scream and cheer. When you're playing another character, you're kind of a slave to that other character to serve it well."
The culprit was a viral infection that had insidiously snaked its way into the company and finally found the star. "When you live with a cast, they become like family," Block said. "If Mama gets sick, the baby's going to get sick, and the baby's going to give it to Daddy, and it keeps going around the family. Our family started getting sick about six weeks ago, and it was just untimely that it happened to get to Mama right when she's opening."
She was speaking from a place of personal triumph, having heroically made it through the opening-night performance, looking and sounding good while doing it — and now she was meeting the press in the Apollo Lobby of the labyrinthine Hilton Theatre. "There's always an awareness and a control that you want to have as a singer — and, unfortunately, that wasn't there for me tonight," she confessed, "but I put that aside and said, 'All I'm going to focus on is telling the story. I'm going to give my heart. I'm going to give my soul. If that means I'm going to talk some notes, then I'm going to talk some notes. If I can sustain the performance — it doesn't matter as long as I'm staying true to Grace and staying true to the storytelling — I think that I'm going to be able to reach the audience regardless.""
Click for full Playbill article
Updated On: 4/6/07 at 06:10 PM
what row were you in? 
