Young Americans, Part 3 (First Tours)

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.

I walked into the first day of my first tour rehearsal with a decidedly substandard understanding of what I was about to do. I had seen a single show, and had talked to my friends who had been on tour, and that was the extent of my working knowledge. Luckily, about sixty percent of that cast was in the same boat as I was, and two of our cast members- Autumn and O, didn't even have the luxury of a New Kids experience to fall back on. Bill was up in Michigan rehearsing an entirely different cast to go to Germany, and so Robyn put the show together by herself. (To this day only a handful of us can say we've been conducted by Robyn during choral.) There is still something idyllic about that first tour rehearsal experience, start to finish, that made me love YA rehearsal. I honestly enjoy it far more than performing. Young Americans, on the whole, is a testament to the educational doctrine known colloquially as "flow theory," and nowhere is this more apparent than in the intensity of the rehearsal process.

In terms of innate performance ability I am easily one of the least talented people ever to tour with the Young Americans, and I can comfortably say that I am far and away the least talented Young American ever to tour eight times. There is no feigned humility in the statement- I'm also smarter than 95% of the people I've ever toured with (dammit Jeppy!) The reason this is important is that in 2003, the show we were touring with had already been all over the country, we were the last cast that was going to perform those numbers. This is the same show I had seen two years previous, and it wasn't a great fit for the cast. We had a fairly wide margin for error, which was alternately comfortable or debilitating, depending on the kind of person you are. At that time, I was the former.

This isn't to suggest that the cast itself wasn't capable. Some of the most talented performers I've ever had the pleasure of knowing were on that cast (O sang Take My Hand, so you know THAT was amazing,) but as a whole the show really didn't do much to showcase that assemblage of people. What I didn't understand at the time, but would later come to realize, is how little this actually mattered. The first act I had seen- nearly identical to the one I later got a chance to perform- was a collection of moments, and most of them (like seeing Sam play the Bass) were based on a sort of visual acuity that existed independent of the cast as an entity. I hesitate to use the word "formulaic," but there was most certainly a calculated simulacrum of the show I had seen nested somewhere within the one I was performing.

It is impossible to forget your first time teaching with The Young Americans, mine just happened to be extra memorable because it was the hometown of my three New Kids roommates and by the time I arrived there, I knew far more about Grand Island, Nebraska than all of the other cities on that tour combined. It was also where I got the opportunity to teach my first soloist, a guy named Derrick who would later become a Young American himself. Lucky for me Derrick was a patient guy- he could tell I was new at this. Another soloist, TJ, four towns later, also became a Young American and ended up as the Company Manager for my tour to Germany. One of my homestays, (remember that word?) a guy named Nick, became a Young American and a good friend. Nick and I drove a truck from California to Michigan one summer.

I have been on many casts since that first tour, but none of them have ever been quite as magical. Bill told us, when he came out to direct, that we were such nice people that even if we had been terrible performers he wouldn't give us one single note on the show for fear of damaging that sense of kindness. Nebraska tour spoiled me for a lot of things, and it took three years before I was able to really enjoy another as much. The tour staff was both humble and genuinely interested in the workshop. We toured with flats, the old floor, the old curtain, the big scaff AND the tinker scaff, and two-story tall spot towers (rolling death-traps) and we consistently loaded out in half an hour. We also never had lights set up until the second day, and it never made a difference in the workshop. (Sorry for all the emphatic formatting, I get carried away sometimes.)

There were singular experiences on that tour that carved my ideas of what a Young American should be in stone. In Kansas we taught two split two-day workshops to two separate age groups simultaneously, while casting and performing two different shows. We consistently set up and struck the show at top speed without any machismo, cheerleaders, gaff ball awards, or stage manager edification bullshit. Some Fridays after a 12 hour day of workshop, every YA would independently make the same decision to go cheer on the local high school football team. (There were times when our cast of 40 doubled the number of spectators at the game.) This wasn't an enforced decision. Hell, it wasn't even a suggestion. It was simply something that everyone decided to do. Our cast meetings were short and to the point without anyone telling us they should be. Literally everyone on the cast voluntarily ate with the kids, including the staff. On days off we tended to stay as one big group. If you were never a Young American and are thinking "I don't understand," take comfort in the fact that every Young American who reads this and wasn't there is thinking the same thing. This was not atypical behavior on an individual basis, but collectively, unilaterally, it was exceptional. Of course, at the time, I assumed this was the norm. Then I went to Michigan.

That next tour, the one that started in Michigan and ended in UK, gets a bad rap, mostly because of March 15, 2004 in Coloma, MI. How the heck could I possibly remember that date? It was my birthday. B&R had started the tour as our directors (we sang for Muhammad Ali in our first town, Bill's home town,) and then they had buggered off overseas to work with the Germany cast. Apparently, Young American tour casts are like bonsai, and if left unchecked overtime they can require some pretty severe pruning. This was probably the most cited example of the aforementioned psychological warfare for my "generation" of Young Americans. Unfortunately the directors went a little over the deep end in their dramatic exaggerations, and most of what is remembered today is played for comic effect. (At one point Bill told us he'd rather have a cast member smoke a cigarette center-stage in a spotlight than ever have one person use sarcasm. In retrospect this was maybe not the best thing to tell sarcastic people.) This is easily the angriest I've ever seen both of them, and the reality check of going from the bliss of Nebraska to being a total disappointment in Michigan was thoroughly devastating. Being relatively new, it was completely unclear to me what I had done so wrong, other than use sarcasm. If being sarcastic was inherently bad, I was- by inference- probably one of the worst people alive, (the sarcasm hides the sensitivity, see?)

If I had to characterize the entire difference between my experiences in Nebraska and Michigan I could do it in one sentence: "In Michigan, we had a solo section." For those of you who don't know, a solo section is a kind of arbitrary medley where everyone in the cast is showcased on their own, albeit momentarily. It is also a good metaphor for how that tour operated. Forty brief lives, completely independent of one another, attempting to achieve a common goal without first establishing a common dialog. There were some great moments, like the first time I saw the Boyne stage, and getting to make my parents laugh in Cincinnati, but these are largely overshadowed by the negative memories.

Most of the cast went on to tour another three months in the UK, but six of us stopped after Michigan (for whatever reason.) Of the six, I was the one of only two who hung around in California to do the spring production with the resident company, the oh-so creatively titled "Really Big Show." This involved hundreds of students from dozens of elementary, middle, and high schools across Southern California, and was up until that time the largest group of kids I'd ever seen in a single show. Later, as a result of not getting to go to the UK, I was given the opportunity to travel to Ojai, California with the newly returned Germany cast and teach a workshop with them. Although it was only a single workshop, I have always felt that this experience helped redeem a lot of what the Young Americans was for me. It was also an amazing chance to see a brand new show that had largely been written around the Michigan cast take on a life of its own and fit perfectly on the Germany cast. Those three days in a thirteen person homestay (with one bathroom!) were enough to convince me that I wanted to keep being a Young American. The baggage from Michigan wasn't gone, however, and it helped pave the way for trouble to come.