It takes three

What a week.

It took...

A cut pas de deux
a carnival boy crisis
The threat of a show cancel
The great Adam Cooper
The Rodgers & Hammerstein Estate
and THREE Julie Jordans

...to get through this hell of a week, but if you could have been there on Saturday night, feeling the thrill of togetherness, experiencing the rush of an entire company plunging the period, the full stop on to the end of this violent sentence of a week; well... you would know what it feels like to overcome tremendous adversity and emerge victorious. And victory it was.

Saturday was the best show we have ever done. We burst, we radiated, we trembled with the energy--like the pile of ash that remains from a fallen phoenix. Or a collective creature raging against the dying of the light. This one is for us, we thought. This one is for principle, for nothing other than the fight. We are fighting against our fire going out, "spark by irreplaceable spark." We will not let the heroes within us expire. But Saturday? We were magnificent. Because we are magnificent, and can not be spoiled.

The crowd gave full throttle cheers from the first moment, and were wiping tears off of their chins by the end. The audience was on their feet in a way they have not been since Press Night. And we, more than we ever had, had earned it.

Sometimes in this world, we get burgled. We lay our souls open and bare, like a trusting person would a front door, and people take advantage of our openness, of our extraordinary courage to be so, and burgle us. And who knows why? Jealousy, greed, shattering envy, fear, arrogance, carelessness. The list is infinite. But the terrible transparency of truth reveals these dark forces to be brittle and stooping and banal.

What I do know is this: we could not have reached this serenity without all the violence we have known. But then again, isn't that true of everything?