Even The Best Minds Have Their Bad Days

 
“WHEN GENIUS BOMBS (1995)”
by Joel Achenbach

[This column by Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach was posted on “Achenblog,” the writer’s blog on the Post website, on 24 January 2013.  It’s an extension of a shorter version that ran in the print edition on 16 April 1995 in the “Sunday Arts” section.  Achenbach’s thesis is that “Geniuses mess up too.  This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.”  He provides examples of bad art by the world’s masters as evidence of this.]

(I posted about half of this piece some years ago on this blog, and will now paste in the whole thing. Titled “When Genius Bombs,” the story originally ran 4/16/1995 in the Sunday Arts section, which at that time was under the stewardship of [David James] Von Drehle [b. 1961; Washington Post arts editor, 1994-95]. Though the references to Bill Clinton [William Jefferson Clinton (b. 1946); 42nd President of the United States: 1993-2001] date the piece a little, and I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way today — it’s painfully glib, and where are the footnotes??? — I think in general it holds up well and has the redeeming quality of being essentially right about the nature of genius.)

Scene IV. Another part of the forest.

Enter DEMETRIUS and CHIRON, with LAVINIA, ravished; her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out.

Dem. So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak,
Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and revish’d thee.

Chi. Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so,
An if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.

Dem. See, how with signs and tokens she can scrowl.

Chi. Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands.

Dem. She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash;
And so let’s leave her to her silent walks . . .

That’s “Titus Andronicus” [Act 2, Scene 4; written between 1588 and 1593]. It’s by [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616], early in his career, in his “Pulp Fiction” [1994 crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963)] phase.

The basic plot is, everyone stabs and rapes and mutilates everyone else while speaking in verse, and then they all die. Lavinia’s may be the worst speaking role in the history of the stage. Character development is not the play’s strength. At the beginning of the play Titus Andronicus is a cruel warmonger; by the end, he’s exactly the same, a cruel warmonger.

Die, die Lavinia, and thy shame with thee;

[Kills Lavinia].

And, with thy shame, thy father’s sorrow die!

For centuries, Shakespearean scholars have been stumped by the play. It’s so . . . awful. Mention “Titus Andronicus” to Harold Bloom, English professor at Yale and policeman of the Western canon, and he immediately says, “Boy, is that bad. It’s just a bloodbath. There’s not a memorable line in it.”

The Bard, bad? How’s that possible? Isn’t Shakespeare the greatest writer in the history of the English language, pulling away from the pack like Secretariat at the Belmont? How could the same guy write “King Lear” [thought to have been composed sometime between 1603 and 1606] and this crappy thing?

[Secretariat (1970-89) was a champion thoroughbred racehorse who was the ninth winner of the American Triple Crown (1973), setting and still holding the fastest time record in all three of its constituent races (Kentucky Derby in May, Preakness Stakes in May, Belmont Stakes in June). The first Triple Crown winner in 25 years, his record-breaking, 31-length victory at Belmont is often considered the greatest event in horse racing history. The horse’s margin of victory and winning time (2′24″) are records that still stand.]

Here’s the best explanation: Geniuses mess up too. This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.

There is bad [Ludwig van] Beethoven [1770-1827; German composer and pianist]. There are failed [Pablo] Picassos [1881-1973; Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theater designer]. There are incorrect theories by Albert Einstein [1879-1955; German-born theoretical physicist; best known for developing the theory of relativity]. Duke Ellington [1899-1974; jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra] would be the first to say that some riffs worked better than others. In the 1940s Orson Welles [1915-85; director, actor, writer, producer, and magician; known for his innovative work in film, radio, and theater] made both the instant classic “Citizen Kane” [1941; RKO Radio Pictures; often called the greatest film ever made] and the instant trivia answer “The Lady From Shanghai” [1947 film noir; Columbia Pictures; considered a disaster in America when released but now regarded as a classic of film noir].

Just because you are a great composer named Wagner [1813-83; German composer, theater director, essayist, and conductor] doesn’t mean that everything you do will be Wagnerian. Leon Botstein [b. 1946; Swiss-born American conductor, educator, historical musicologist, and scholar], a composer and president of Bard College [Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], says of Richard Wagner’s “Centennial March” [1876], “It’s a dog. He did it for the money.”

[Wagner’s Centennia March (sometimes American Centennial March) was commissioned by the city of Philadelphia, site of the Centennial Exhibition (10 May-10 November 1876), the first world’s fair to be held in the United States, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The commission, for which Wagner was paid $5,000—a huge sum at the time, worth $150,000 in 2025—was recommended by Theodore Thomas (1835-1905; German-American violinist, conductor, and orchestrator; founder and first music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), a great Wagnerian advocate who was very disappointed with the work when it arrived. According to some sources, the composer quipped to friends that the best thing about the march was the fee he received for writing it.]

The Beatles [English rock band formed in Liverpool; 1960-70; widely regarded as the most influential band in Western popular music]: geniuses, right? Explain, then, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” [1968]. Explain “Run for Your Life” [1965].

You’d better run for your life if you can, little girl.
Hide your head in the sand, little girl.
If I catch you with another man, that’s the end-ah, little girl.

“Even outstanding people have phenomenal failures. That’s why so many people don’t achieve success, because the first time they fail they think they can’t be successful,” says Dean Keith Simonton [b. 1948; Distinguished Professor Emeritus; known for research in the fields of genius, creativity, leadership, and aesthetics], a psychologist at the University of California at Davis and author of “Greatness: Who Makes History and Why” [Guilford Press, 1994]. In his book he writes, “Creative geniuses stumble; they trip; they make horrible mistakes. Their highest and most acclaimed successes are constructed on the low rubble of humiliating failures.”

Genius is a romanticized form of intelligence and talent. We like to imagine that genius emerges from the artist like perspiration, dripping all over the place. When the reputation of a creative genius reaches a certain point — the super-genius status of a Leonardo [da Vinci (1452-1519); Italian polymath of the Renaissance; painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect] or a Shakespeare or a Beethoven — there is a natural tendency among scholars to save every sketch, note, letter, scribble, coffee stain and discarded hankie from the hand of the Great One. John Lennon [1940-80; English singer-songwriter, musician, and activist; founder, co-lead vocalist, and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles; songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney (b. 1942; English singer, songwriter, and musician; played bass guitar and piano, and sang lead vocals with the Beatles; one of the most successful composers and performers ever) is the most successful in history] wrote some short stories; they were promptly labeled “Joycean” [characteristic of the writing of James Joyce (1882-1941; Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic); in a style employing innovative verbal style, often involving stream-of-consciousness, complex language, and experimental techniques] by admiring critics.

Over time the master artist takes on the character of a superbeing, a cartoon genius. A piano is to [Franz] Liszt [1811-86; Romantic-period Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, and teacher] as a hammer is to Thor, God of Thunder. We can imagine Beethoven composing by day and solving baffling murders by night.

The problem here is not that geniuses are overrated. If anything, the intellectual fashion is anti-genius, anti-masterpiece. There are academic circles in which it is considered daft to believe that some individuals are smarter and better and more talented than others. Suggest such a thing and people will look at you like you’re an imbecile.

The problem with “genius” is that it doesn’t give the great talents their due for working hard and plodding through difficult problems and taking chances and knowing which ideas to dump and which to deliver. Geniuses create the same way total ding-dongs create. Geniuses still have to put on their paint one stroke at a time. [Unless, of course, they’re Jackson Pollock (1912-56; major figure in the abstract expressionist movement; renowned for his “drip technique” of pouring or splashing household paint onto a horizontal surface; see "Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 (MoMA)” [4 March 2016]) or Morris Louis (1912-62; one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting; his signature method was pouring diluted acrylic paint directly onto unprimed canvas; see “Morris Louis” [15 February 2010]). ~Rick]

Picasso would paint something, look at it — at this point it would fetch a staggering price simply because it was a Picasso — and then just paint over it, start again, because it wasn’t good enough.

W. H. Auden [1907-73; British-American poet] once said, “The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor.”

Herein lies the lesson for everyone, the pros, the amateurs, the dumb-dumbs, anyone who has ever tried to think creatively. Humans are by nature a creative species, but we have to learn to manage our creativity, feed it, weed it, prune it, whack it back if necessary. We have to forgive our mistakes. No one is always brilliant.

Children instinctively know this. It is only as they grow up that society drums into their little noggins the fact that they’re without real talent and ought to put down the crayons and the finger paint and learn to watch television like everyone else.

But if geniuses can fail, then perhaps there is hope that the converse is true: That the mediocre minds of the world, due to luck, courage, or the random distribution of quality, are not immune to spasms of greatness.

Picasso’s Fakes

There’s an anecdote about Picasso, possibly apocryphal, that illustrates the phenomenon. An art dealer was trying to sell a painting by Picasso to a potential buyer. The buyer said he wasn’t sure of its authenticity, and wanted the artist himself to vouch for it. Picasso was summoned. He looked at the painting and said it was a fake. The buyer left. The dealer was perplexed. He turned to Picasso and said, “Didn’t you tell me yourself that you painted it?” “I did,” said Picasso. “I often paint fakes.”

That’s the standard response of many scholars when faced with something lousy by a great master. Can’t be real, they say. Gotta be by someone else. Often the only reason to doubt the authenticity of the work is simply that it’s not so hot. It’s just unacceptably mediocre.

For example, desperate scholars have occasionally argued that Shakespeare didn’t write “Titus Andronicus,” or that he had a collaborator. Shakespeare himself never put his name on any published version — he surely knew it was dreck [Yiddish for ‘crap,’ ‘junk,’ ‘trash,’ from Dreck, German for ‘dirt’]. His contemporaries gave him authorial credit, but that did not squelch the theory that it was, at the very least, a collaboration, and the “bad parts” have been blamed on some knucklehead named George Peele [1556-96; English translator, poet, and dramatist]. But in 1943 the scholar Hereward T. Price [1880-1964; born in Madagascar; English author and professor of English at the University of Michigan], after poring over all the evidence and theories, wrote [in “The Authorship of Titus Andronicus,” published in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology (42.1)], “We must conclude, however regretfully, that Shakespeare was the author of ‘Titus Andronicus.’”

Mistakes and errors are integral to the process of creation. As the poet James Fenton [b. 1949; English poet, journalist, and literary critic] said in a recent lecture at Oxford, the text of which was reprinted in the New York Review of Books [42.5 (23 March 1995)], “For a productive life, and a happy one, each failure must be felt and worked through. It must form part of the dynamic of your creativity.”

George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950; Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist] talked about the “field theory” of creativity, borrowing a term from physics. Good ideas do not exist alone but in a larger field of imagination. As a young man Shaw wrote five novels. Can you name one? Shaw had to work through his novelist phase before he could arrive, in his late thirties, as a playwright.

[The novels: Immaturity (1879), a semi-autobiographical portrayal of mid-Victorian England; The Irrational Knot (1880), a critique of conventional marriage; Love Among the Artists (1881), an exploration of themes of romance, artistic integrity, and socio-political commentary; Cashel Byron's Profession (1882), an indictment of society; An Unsocial Socialist (1883), the first section of a monumental depiction of the downfall of capitalism.]

Shaw believed in productivity — just keep writing, was his advice to everyone. Norma Jenckes [1943-2022], a Shaw scholar at the University of Cincinnati, says Shaw’s attitude was that “you had to write yourself through all sorts of things, and then something might become your masterpiece.”

Geniuses work hard. They’re prodigious. They can’t stop themselves from churning out work. Thomas Edison [1847-1931] couldn’t stop inventing. Joyce Carol Oates [b. 1938] can’t stop writing. Shaw published 55 plays. Milton Avery [1885-1965] spewed paintings by the museum-load; when asked how he got inspiration, he said by going to the studio every day.

The academics who study creativity have concluded that geniuses come up with ideas and analyze situations pretty much like everyone else. “Nobody is a genius simply because of the shape of their head and their brain,” says Howard Gardner [b. 1943; developmental psychologist], a professor of education at Harvard. “People get ideas. Nobody knows where ideas come from. And they try to work them out. And people who are the best artists are very good working out the implications of those ideas. But it’s not the case that every idea is a good idea.”

Here’s a bad idea: “Wellington’s Victory.”

Beethoven composed it [in 1813] to celebrate a British victory over an army commanded by Joseph Bonaparte [1768-1844; French statesman, lawyer, and diplomat], Napoleon’s [1769-1821] brother. It is often compared unfavorably to another piece of bombast, the “1812 Overture” [1880] by [Pyotr Ilyich] Tchaikovsky [1840-93; Russian composer]. Jim Svejda [b. 1947; music commentator and critic], in “The Record Shelf Guide to the Classical Repertoire” [Prima Publishing, 1988], says, “As if it weren’t bad enough losing most of his army to the Russian winter and then getting mauled at Waterloo, poor Napoleon . . . also had to have his nose rubbed in it by two of history’s supreme masterpieces of musical schlock [Yiddish: something of cheap or inferior quality; junk]: Tchaikovsky’s refined and tasteful 1812 Overture and this embarrassing garbage by Beethoven.”

One need not buy it to listen to it. You can go to the Library of Congress, to the Music Division.

”‘Wellington’s Victory’ doesn’t quite work at the gut level,” concedes Sam Brylawski, a recorded-sound specialist, as he fills out the request slip. “But it’s not like listening to someone in the basement on an out-of-tune guitar.”

The request slip goes to a person at a desk. Somewhere, unseen, a record album is pulled and dusted. After about 10 minutes the album jacket, minus the album, appears, enclosed in plastic, on a dumbwaiter. The person at the desk says into a telephone, “The listener is ready.” From the other end of the line, someone decrees that you go into listening booth No. 9.

In the booth you punch a button labeled “Talk.” A voice says hello. You say you’re ready to listen. A moment later, “Wellington’s Victory” has begun.

You hear drums in the distance, faint.

They get louder. Faster. Then they get much louder and much faster. The army is approaching.

Trumpets! Or maybe bugles. They are bugling with great fanfare.

Then: Flutes, gentle, chirpy, happy, a Yankee Doodle sort of thing, like what you’d imagine a fife-and-drum outfit playing, and then some loud strings, and then an army approaches from another direction, with more drums and trumpets and a little fussy-personage music with a triangle tinkling in the background, and finally the battle royal explodes, with cannon noises and gunshots, the drums pounding, trumpets blaring, the room almost shaking with banging and whanging and thudding and thumping. If they could play it in Sensurround, you’d get injured.

Someone had the temerity to write a bad review of the piece as soon as it came out. Beethoven was incensed. He wrote a note in the margin of the review:

“You wretched scoundrel! What I excrete is better than anything you could ever think up!”

(Of course he didn’t really write “excrete.” He wrote in German. And he used a word that made the point much more graphically.)

[The offending review of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory was by Gottfried Weber (1779-1839; German music theorist, musician, and composer), and appeared in the German music magazine Cäcilia (which Weber founded) in 1825.

[Beethoven’s marginal reply in German was, according to my search: Ach du erbärmlicher Schuft, was ich scheisse ist besser, als was du je gedacht. That translates, more literally than Achenbach’s rendering, as ‘Oh you pathetic wretch, what I shit is better than what you ever thought of.’ (Scheissen is the German verb ‘to shit.’ Now you know.)]

Crossing Genres

Leonardo da Vinci notwithstanding, genius usually doesn’t carry over from one genre to another. Harold Bloom [1930-2019; literary critic] says, “[Miguel de] Cervantes [1547?-1616; Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists] was a disaster on the stage. He wrote very bad stage plays, like the ‘Siege of Numancia’ [sic: ‘Numantia’; ca, 1582]. It’s his most famous play. It failed. Badly.”

Within a field such as math, someone can be good at one thing and inept at another. The mathematician Henri Poincare [sic: Poincaré; 1854-1912; French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science] could not add. He wrote, “I must confess I am absolutely incapable of doing an addition sum without a mistake.”

Even within a masterpiece there can be a flub — “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” [1884 in Britain; 1885 in the U.S.] may be the greatest American novel ever written, but in the final few chapters Tom Sawyer suddenly reappears, and there’s a tortured sequence where Tom tries to engineer the liberation of the slave Jim even though Jim isn’t locked up and they could all just walk away. Tom thinks it must be a dramatic liberation. Huck sort of tags along. Unfortunately it’s too late to edit that part out.

Brilliant minds screw up for all sorts of extra-artistic reasons. Maybe they are doing something just for the money. Maybe they’re sick. Maybe they’re no longer sick — some scholars think Edvard Munch [1863-1944; Norwegian painter] (“The Scream” [1893]) lost his edge after he had psychiatric treatment, says J. Carter Brown [1934-2002], former director of the National Gallery of Art [Washington, D.C.].

Another problem is overreaching. That’s what happened to Einstein. He was a very smart man. Indeed he may have been the smartest human being on the planet in his day. But he could also be, relatively speaking, a moron.

In the first two decades of the century Einstein was on a roll like the scientific world hadn’t seen since Isaac Newton [1643-1727; English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author]. Einstein discerned, through thought experiments, that the universe obeyed fantastic principles of relativity, and that Newtonian physics, while valid, was still only an approximation of reality. He enveloped Newtonian physics in his new theory of relativity, which we would explain here if we knew anything about it other than clocks move slowly in really fast spaceships.

He followed the special theory of relativity with something even more intellectually astonishing: The general theory. Special, then general.

Then he tried to do something bigger. He wanted a unified field theory. This would be a theory that somehow linked gravitation with electromagnetism. That was the bridge too far. Eight decades later it still hasn’t been done. In his mad quest Einstein refused to accept many of the new orthodoxies of quantum mechanics. He thought the universe was fundamentally deterministic — that one thing followed another in a predictable fashion. His colleagues said nuh-uh. The universe is probabilistic, they said. Can’t be sure of anything.

“He was very uncomfortable with the Uncertainty Principle,” says Frank Wilczek [b. 1951; theoretical physicist, mathematician, and Nobel laureate (Physics, 2004)], a professor of natural science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where Einstein worked for several decades. Wilczek has frequent reason to think of Einstein — he lives in Einstein’s house on Mercer Street. “It is a pity that he might have made further great discoveries if he had taken quantum mechanics to heart. As great as he was, he certainly could have done better in those last 35 years.”

[The Uncertainty Principle, first introduced in 1927 by German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-76), is a core concept in quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small. In simple terms, it states that you cannot know both the exact position and momentum (speed and direction) of a particle at the same time. The more accurately you know one, the less accurately you can know the other. This isn’t due to limitations of our measuring equipment, but rather a fundamental property of nature at the quantum level, according to the theory.]

One can understand Einstein’s instinct, though. He believed in himself. He did the special, he did the general, why not the unified? He knew there was something more out there, a mystery at the fundament of creation, and it would have been unnaural not to seek to solve it.

You start reconfiguring the universe, it’s hard to stop.

One Chair

Mark Rosenthal, a curator at the National Gallery, applies the rule to artists: “The really good ones are trying extremely hard every time out. They’re always trying to make a masterpiece, they’re always trying to do something wonderful.”

Rosenthal sits surrounded by Rothkos [Mark Rothko (1903-70); Russian-born American abstract painter]. They are big, bold canvases, abstract, a visual language not everyone can understand, but which Rosenthal finds profoundly moving, like listening to magnificent music.

He says that being creative is a lonely job. Every artist’s studio is the same. There is one chair. The artist paints half the day, and sits in the chair the other half of the day, looking critically at the art. “There’s only one chair because artists work alone. And they sit there. I’m sure if we could be transported back to Rembrandt’s time, it’d be the same thing. There’d be one chair.”

Robert Sternberg [b. 1949; psychologist and psychometrician (scientist who studies the measurement of people’s knowledge, intelligence, skills, and abilities)], a Yale psychologist and co-author of “Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity” [Free Press, 1995] says creativity has three aspects:

1. Synthetic. You have to generate ideas. Geniuses come up with a lot more ideas than everyone else. “In most fields, the people who really are well known are prodigious. They’re large-volume producers. But you don’t even realize that in their repertoire is a lot of junk. You just don’t hear about the junk,” says Sternberg.

Creative ideas can be applied in unlikely places. Sternberg cites the example of a 3M [formerly the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company] engineer who was trying to make a strong adhesive. He screwed up and made a weak adhesive. So then he asked himself: Of what use might a weak adhesive be? This led him to invent Post-It notes.

2. Analytic. You have to know which ideas are the good ones. J. Carter Brown recalls the prayer that the esteemed art critic Bernard Berenson [1865-1959; art historian specializing in the Renaissance] used to say: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, give us this day our daily idea, and forgive us the one we had yesterday.”

3. Practical. You need to know how to market the idea. How to pitch it. This is the part of creative genius where someone like Madonna [b. 1958; pop singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress] excels.

Sternberg mentions Bill Clinton as a political genius who hasn’t mastered all three of these steps. Clinton is most adept at steps 1 and 3. He synthesizes boatloads of ideas, and in the right forum he’s a smooth salesman, bordering on slick. But he doesn’t self-select very well. “His good ideas get lost in the klunkers,” says Sternberg.

They Can’t Help It

Leon Botstein, the composer, says you can’t plan your breakthroughs. You just have to keep plugging away, and wait, and hope.

“Breakthrough is not when you want it, it’s not when you expect it. It’s a function of the constant activity. It is only the constant activity that generates the breakthrough.”

And what causes the constant activity? It’s not money. It’s not glory. It’s an “inner necessity,” he says. Unless you have this inner necessity to create, you’ll probably never do anything of brilliance, Botstein believes.

“Without constant, almost irrational, obsessive engagement, you’ll never make the breakthrough,” he says. “The difference between you and the person you consider great is not raw ability. It’s the inner obsessiveness. The inability to stop thinking about it. It’s a form of madness.”

So this is what separates the great ones from the rest of the world. It is not simply that they are smarter, savvier, more brilliant. They are geniuses because they can’t stand to be anything else.

Shakespeare wrote 24 masterpieces, by Harold Bloom’s count. Almost his entire output appeared in a 20-year period. At his peak he managed 13 plays in seven years. They weren’t too shabby: “Much Ado About Nothing” [1598-99], “Henry V” [1598-99], “Julius Caesar” [1599-1600], “As You Like It” [1599-1600], “Twelfth Night” [1599-1600], “Hamlet” [1600-01], “Merry Wives of Windsor” [1600-01], “Troilus and Cressida” [1601-02], “All’s Well That Ends Well” [1602-03], “Measure for Measure” [1604-05], “Othello” [1604-05], “King Lear” [1605-06], and “Macbeth” [1605-06]. As a general rule, when a creator creates most, the creator creates best.

F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940; novelist, essayist, and short story writer] experienced the flip side of that rule. His first novel, “This Side of Paradise” [1920], established him as a popular, promising novelist. He soon wrote another novel [The Beautiful and Damned (1922)] and then a couple of years later came his masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby” [1925]. Then he began to struggle. “Gatsby” was hard to follow. He began a book called “Tender Is the Night” but couldn’t finish it. Years passed. He drank a lot. He dithered. He partied with his expatriate friends in France. Still he didn’t finish the book. His wife had a nervous breakdown. Finally after eight years of labor he completed it [1934]. The novel has some terrific parts. It also has some parts that are cringe-inducing.

Linda Patterson Miller, a professor of English at Penn State, says, “I keep going back to that book, ‘Tender Is the Night,’ thinking it’s got to be better than it is.”

She cites one passage as particularly horrible. It’s when Dick Diver returns to his hotel with the young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. Diver is married. His wife, Nicole, is sleeping nearby. But he and Hoyt are infatuated with each other. They go into Hoyt’s room.

“When you smile — ” He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, “I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth.”

But he was too late — she came up close against him with a forlorn whisper.

“Take me.”

“Take you where?”

Astonishment froze him rigid.

“Go on,” she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t like it — I never expected to — I’ve always hated to think about it but now I don’t. I want you to.”

Prof. Miller says, “It’s absolutely childish and embarrassing to read.”

Fitzgerald wound up going to Hollywood to write screenplays — artistic death. Meanwhile he cranked out short stories for magazines. Did it for the money. Drank. Drank some more. Died young [44].

It’s a sad story. But the most creative minds know better than anyone else the difference between a “Gatsby” and a “Tender Is the Night,” between a “Titus Andronicus” and an “Othello.” Genius recognizes itself, and its counterfeit.

In his notebook, Fitzgerald jotted down his thoughts on seeing his brilliance dissolve into mediocrity:

I have asked a lot of my emotions — one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high . . . because there was one little drop of something — not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

Once the phial was full — here is the bottle it came in . . .

April evening spreads over everything, the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paintbox.

[Joel Achenbach reports on science and health.  He joined the Washington Post in 1990 as a feature writer in the Style section.  In 2005, he joined the Sunday magazine, writing features and a weekly humor column, and started the newsroom’s first blog, “Achenblog.”  He was part of the team that produced a series of stories about the opioid epidemic that was honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service in 2020.

[In 1999, Simon & Schuster published his examination of the scientific and cultural fascination with extraterrestrial life, Captured by Aliens.  His 2004 book, The Grand Idea (Simon & Schuster), described George Washington’s plans to bind the young nation together through commerce along the Potomac River.  His 2011 book A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea (Simon & Schuster) told the story of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill off of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico and how the blown-out well was finally plugged.]

More Theater Odds & Ends

 

[Here’s another compilation of short pieces from various outlets—this time, two Washington Posts and a New York Times—all about some aspect of theater.  Some of these—most of them, really—I filed away some years ago (these are all from the 2010s), and I’ve enjoyed rediscovering them.  I hope you find them interesting.] 

“THE LEAD HAS A BROKEN ANKLE?

GET THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR!”

by Rebecca Ritzel 

[The following article was originally published in the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 12 February 2014.  It was previously posted on the WaPo website as “Backstage: For Theater J, breaking a leg for real leads to 'Yellow Face' recasting scramble” on 11 February.]

“Call the understudy, I can’t go on tonight,” is the closing theme from the cult television comedy “Slings and Arrows.” The show about backstage drama at a theater company debuted in Canada in 2003, but in the ensuing decade, the refrain has become a bit dated.

[Slings & Arrows was a darkly comic TV Series, aired on Canada’s Movie Central cable channel and The Movie Network streaming service in 2003-06, and in the United States on the Sundance Channel, 2005-07.]

These days, it’s not “call the understudy,” it’s “text the assistant stage manager.” And post-recession, there may well not be an understudy to call.

Jessica Soriano, an assistant stage manager at Theater J, got the dreaded text message [Tuesday,] Feb. 4. The actor sending it was Al Twanmo, one of the leads in the play “Yellow Face.” He was at the hospital, being treated for a broken ankle after falling on black ice. Soriano then e-mailed (still no phone call involved) the production team with the bad news.

[Yellow Face, a 2007 play by David Henry Hwang, played at Theater J in Washington, D.C., from 29 January to 23 February 2014.  It was directed by Natsu Onoda Power; at the time, Ari Roth was the artistic director of the company. (Roth was fired in December by the theater’s parent organization, the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, for protesting the DCJCC’s cancelation of a series of controversial plays about the Middle East (some of which were critical of Israel). See my post on Rick On Theater “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux,” 13 February 2015.]

With little deliberation, Wednesday night’s show was canceled (ticket holders received refunds), but the actors were called to the theater. Director Natsu Onoda Power had an idea to make sure the show would go on sooner rather than later.

First, she re-blocked the entire play, allocating many of Twanmo’s lines to the four other actors in the ensemble who play multiple roles. But replacing Twanmo’s main character was going to be tricky. David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” is a satirical comedy about racial stereotypes. The lead character is Chinese American, as is his father, who Twanmo was playing. The only Asian actor Theater J found who could read for the role on short notice was, in the words of artistic director Ari Roth, “30 years too young.”

Undeterred, Power turned to Roth.

“There was just one person who knew the part, who is not Asian, and who the audience would accept in this role, and that’s Ari,” she said late Thursday night after Roth, a 50-something Jewish playwright, made his professional stage debut playing an elderly Chinese American banker.

Roth maintains that he wasn’t actually acting, “I did this as a reading, everyone else was up there acting,” he protested, adding that he was “doing Al” and did his best to match Twanmo’s cadence.

The part of the father is written in broken English, with lots of stubborn humor, given Twanmo’s character is an immigrant who worked his way up from a laundry worker to the chief executive of Far East National Bank. Before his fall, Twanmo had received praise for his work in “Yellow Face”; Post critic Peter Marks called his performance “beguiling” in his review of the show. Roth will not be nominated for a Helen Hayes Award [the Capital area’s local award for excellence in theater; Helen Hayes (1900-93), the “First Lady of the American Stage,” was a native Washingtonian] for his one-night stint as a substitute, but what he will take away is a bouquet of yellow roses, and some insight into life outside an artistic director’s office.

“I have never spent so much on my personal grooming,” Roth said, “At 5 p.m., I stopped doing my computer work and started preparing for the show.” Those preparations included both streaking his hair with gray and spending some time in front of the mirror trimming nose hairs. He came away not only with more respect for his actors but also for the stage managers and others working behind the scenes at Theater J.

“I have been running this theater for 17½ years,” Roth said, “and I’ve never been backstage watching for an entire show.”

When Roth did come out onstage, it was in a wheelchair, a change Power kept when Twanmo returned to the stage Saturday. In Act II, the script calls for an ensemble member to play the father’s doctor. In Power’s revision, the doctor (played by Mark Hairston) will always wheel Twanmo out. But there’s still a major challenge that they’ll have to deal with until the show closes Feb. 23: a massive set of file cabinets surrounds the stage, and only one entrance is wide enough for the chair.

“The scenery is not wheelchair-accessible,” Power said.

Casting a wider net

Theater J learned its lesson in staging accessible theater the hard way, but several other theaters in the Washington area are deliberately seeking to be more inclusive in their casting, and are succeeding artistically as a result. At Studio Theatre, Nina Raine’s play “Tribes,” about a deaf son in a dysfunctional family, has been extended through March 2. Out in Herndon [Virginia], NextStop Theatre Company is mounting a well-reviewed production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” with a deaf actor, Ethan Sinnot [sic; Sinott], starring as the murderous monarch.

Also worth noting: Deaf actor Hector Reynoso is a company member at Synetic [a physical theater company located in Crystal City in Arlington County, Virginia], and next month’s World Stages international theater festival at the Kennedy Center will include Israel’s ­Nalaga’at Theater for deaf and blind actors.

Locally, the two leads in “Tribes” and “Richard III” share an interesting connection: Sinott is chairman of the theater program at Gallaudet University [prestigious university in Washington, D.C., for the deaf and hard of hearing], and James Caverly, who plays the lead in “Tribes,” is one of his most successful graduates. Yet until he drove out to Herndon recently for a dress rehearsal, Caverly had never seen his former professor act. Caverly loved the concept – and the performance.

“It was brilliant!” Caverly wrote in an e-mail message. “For so long, I’ve thought of Richard III as it was written in the text: a hunchback, hobbled, and writhed villain who’s sole ambition was to destroy those who had more power over him. I never perceived him to be deaf. And it does make sense when you correspond it to a real-life scenario. Most of the royal court chose to seclude him because of his deafness, which eerily echoes with the daily basis of deaf people everywhere. . . . This is a big step for the DC theater scene, and [I’m] proud to be part of something bigger.”

[Rebecca Ritzel is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 20 publications in the United States, Canada, and the U.K.  Ritzel regularly contributes arts and entertainment articles to the Washington Post, the Washington, D.C., City Paper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer.  Washington’s Theater J, founded in 1990, produces plays “that are part of the Jewish cultural legacy.” 

[I have posted performance reports on three plays by David Henry Hwang (“Golden Child,” 9 December 2013; The “Dance and the Railroad,” 17 March 2013; “Kung Fu,” 8 March 2014) and a performance by the Nalagaat Deaf-Blind Theater Ensemble of Tel Aviv (Not by Bread Alone, 12 February 2013) on ROT.  Earlier, my friend, the late Helen Kaye (1934-2020), who reviewed theater for the Jerusalem Post, sent me her own review of Not by Bread Alone, which I posted in “Dispatches from Israel 1,” 23 January 2013.

[Coincidentally, Ari Roth’s experience filling in at the last minute in a stage role happened to me once, years ago.  I happened to think of it just the other day.  I was in college—May 1967, the second semester of my sophomore year.  I was taking a directing class, the final exam for which was to direct a one-act play.  I had finished my final rehearsal for the presentations the next day and one of my classmates, who’s rehearsal was scheduled to follow mine in the university theater, approached me.

[One of his cast members had been taken ill and wasn’t going to be able to do the show the next evening, and my classmate asked if I’d fill in.  Well, I couldn’t let him down for his final grade, so I agreed to learn the part—it was relatively small, even for a one-act play—but he and his cast would have to help me out.

[I said I could learn the lines and the blocking for the next day after the one rehearsal that night, but the rest of the cast would have to keep to the lines as written, especially the cues, and the blocking as rehearsed—no ad libs or improvisations when I was on stage.  I wouldn’t be able to handle deviations.

[I don’t remember who the director was, or the play, and I don’t know what grade he got on the project—but we made it through and, as far as I could tell, no one knew what we’d had to do.  I do remember being totally keyed up for the whole scene in which I appeared, which was only a few minutes but seemed like at least a half hour to me. 

[I’m sure I collapsed as soon as the curtain came down—and I probably found a drink somewhere as soon as I could get to it.  (In Virginia, where I went to school, you couldn’t buy a drink in a bar or restaurant at that time.  You had to by a bottle in a state package store and keep the booze at home.)]

*  *  *  *

“WITH TRAINED NARRATORS,

BLIND THEATERGOERS FIND A SIGHTLINE”

by Caitlin Gibson 

[Caitlin Gibson’s report ran in the Washington Post on 5 May 2016 (sec. C [“Style”]) and was posted on the paper’s website on 4 May as “'He's picking his nose': How volunteers help the blind 'see' a theater performance.”]

‘Describers’ bring onstage action to life

On the brightly lit theater stage, the first scene of Robert Schenkkan’s Tony award-winning play “All the Way” is in full swing: President Lyndon B. Johnson [1908-73; 36th President of the United States: 1963-69] is pontificating behind a podium. A large desk is wheeled into the spotlight. An agitated secretary darts into view.

[All the Way is a 2012 play by Robert Schenkkan about President Lyndon B. Johnson's efforts to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where it premièred 25 July-3 November 2012. The play was produced in 13 September-12 October 2013, at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the production premièred at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre from 6 March 2014 to 29 June 2014 (27 previews and 131 regular performances). It won the 2014 Tony for Best Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play.

[The Arena Stage production of All the Way in Washington, D.C., ran from 1 April to 8 May 2016 on the Fichandler Stage (the arena theater). Jack Willis played LBJ; he was nominated for a 2017 Helen Hayes Award as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Play.]

Steps from the bustling action in the Fichandler Stage at Arena Stage, about 20 audience members are not actually watching the drama unfold. They sit silently, some with their heads bowed, others with their eyes closed. They are all blind or visually impaired; they either can’t see the stage at all, or it appears as little more than a haze of light and shadow.

But these theatergoers aren’t missing the action: Through the headphones clamped over their ears, a woman’s voice is explaining everything happening onstage, in detail, in real time.

The voice belongs to Rita Tehan, a veteran theater describer for the Metropolitan Washington Ear, a nonprofit organization that provides audio services to the blind and visually impaired in the Washington region. Tehan sits behind the crowd in a dark, elevated sound booth as the fast-paced plot — depicting the efforts of Johnson and civil rights leaders to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — unspools below.

Tehan speaks crisply into a plastic audio mask linked to a large radio transmitter, explaining what’s happening on the set as vividly and efficiently as possible.

“He waves her away, and pats her on the rear end,” she says when Johnson abruptly dismisses his frazzled secretary.

“LBJ is picking his nose — really deep,” she says during one of the show’s comic moments, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the audience’s laughter. “Hoover is watching.” [That’s J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), the first, and longest serving Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1935-72).]

Tehan points out when Johnson turns from one character to another mid-sentence: “He’s talking to the tailor now,” she quickly interjects. She makes sure that her listeners don’t miss the joke when Johnson, frustrated by his strict diet, swipes a bite of Sen. Richard Russell’s [1897-1971; Democrat of Georgia (1933-71)] dinner. (“LBJ stabs a pork chop on Russell’s plate and pops it in his mouth,” she says. “Russell’s eyes widen.”)

She continues for well over an hour, until the stage lights dim and Act One comes to an end.

“This is intermission,” she says. “It will be about 15 minutes.”

Then she lowers the mask and exhales.

An art in itself

Tehan’s preparation for “All the Way” began weeks before the May 1 matinee, one of more than 50 annual performances with description services provided by the Ear. Describers typically see a performance at least once or twice before they narrate it live, to familiarize themselves with the script and note important visual cues.

The Ear’s roughly two dozen volunteer describers serve more than 250 blind or visually impaired people at seven local theaters every year. They take special requests, too — a couple of years ago, a describer accompanied a blind fan to a Lady Gaga concert at Verizon Center.

“It takes a very special person to be a describer, someone who can think fast on their feet,” says Neely Oplinger, the Ear’s executive director. The people who sign up — and pass a rigorous audition — tend to stick around; many have been volunteering for 10 years or longer.

Tehan joined the organization in 1992, but she had practice long before that: Her father went blind from diabetes when she was a teen, and she used to describe his favorite television shows to him.

“They are so dedicated, and most of them really know theater,” Oplinger says of the group’s volunteers. “But it takes a lot more than knowing theater.”

They also have to know the rules: When describing a performance, you have to slip all the description into the gaps between dialogue. You shouldn’t make judgments; instead of concluding that a character looks “disappointed,” you note simply that he frowns and his shoulders droop. You must capture any movement that’s essential to the plot. And — as with any live performance — if you make a mistake, you have to keep going.

These guidelines were created by Margaret Pfanstiehl, who founded the Metropolitan Washington Ear in 1974 to improve the lives of the blind and visually impaired. Pfanstiehl, a Virginia native, suffered from a degenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which eventually left her almost entirely blind.

At first, the Ear was a radio reading service — still a core part of its identity. The Silver Spring, Md.-based nonprofit has nearly 400 volunteers who read newspaper and magazine articles over closed-circuit radio, and the organization offers a dial-in service for listeners to hear recordings of articles from major publications, including The Washington Post, the New York Times and many others. About 5,000 people in the Washington area use the service.

But Pfanstiehl, who died in 2009, was also a devoted opera fan and theatergoer who longed to find a way for blind audience members to enjoy live performances.

“I always wanted a little voice to tell me whether it was a gunshot or a slamming door onstage, if the villain was walking across the stage with a dagger, and whether or not the lovers were facing each other,” she once told Reuters.

In 1981, Arena Stage approached the Ear about making live performances accessible to the blind. Pfanstiehl — then Margaret Rockwell, a divorcee — recruited longtime Metro spokesman and radio pro Cody Pfanstiehl as the first volunteer describer.

They watched dozens of movies together, says Oplinger, and he described the scenes unfolding onscreen. “Together, they devised what they called ‘the art and technique of audio description,’” says Oplinger. “And in the process, they fell in love.”

The couple, who married in 1983, went on to develop a comprehensive training system, teaching hundreds of volunteers to capture live performances for the blind.

Of course, the human mind is not a camera, so the description process is perhaps more like translation — an art in itself: The word choices matter, as do the pacing of the narration, the tone of voice and the clarity of enunciation. A secretary doesn’t just run into view, she gallops. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t touch his wife, he gently strokes her arms. The describer has to engage in a sort of verbal dance with the actors, gracefully avoiding overlap or interruption.

And like any art, it’s imperfect. Sometimes details are missed, or a describer talks over a character, or the audio sounds muffled. But even with minor hiccups, the effort makes all the difference to a blind member of the audience, says Freddie Peaco, president of the Ear’s board of directors.

“You can hear the voices, but you don’t know the setting of the stage. The audience gives a great gasp, and you don’t know why they’re gasping,” she says. “With the describer, all of that comes to life, and I can’t tell you how meaningful that is.”

The show goes on

For a describer, Tehan says, “the moment the curtain rises, you’re on your toes” — and so she is as the second act of “All the Way” begins. She stands in the dark booth, her eyes trained on the stage.

“House lights are fading to black,” she says.

After the show, her listeners will praise her performance —“You did a great job, a great job!” one man will gush, grasping her hand — but Tehan won’t be entirely convinced. Even now, halfway through, she’s frustrated by details she couldn’t capture, by how little time she has to speak between the actors’ lines. An artist is never satisfied.

But the show goes on. Tehan cranes forward to follow the actors, her glasses reflecting the glow of the stage lights. She raises the mask to her face. In the seats just beyond the booth windows, all ears are on her.

[Caitlin Gibson is a feature writer focused on families, parenting, and children.  She joined the Washington Post in 2005.] 

*  *  *  *

“INVESTING IN THE THEATER

CAN GET A CHILD’S FOOT IN THE STAGE DOOR”

by Liz Moyer 

[Liz Moyer’s report appeared in the New York Times on 27 May 2017 (sec. B [“Business Day”)].  It was posted on the Times website on 26 May as “To Invest in Your Child’s Theater Dreams, First Invest in the Theater.”]

Dean Roth, the owner and president of a New Jersey company that makes parts for the tool-and-die industry [William T. Hutchinson Co. in Union, New Jersey, a third-generation family business], admits he has utterly failed to talk his teenage daughter out of pursuing a career in musical theater.

Instead of watching helplessly as she bounded down an uncertain career path, he became a Broadway investor to get an inside track: He said his initial $1,000 outlay [equivalent to $1,400 today], in the 2011 revival of “Godspell,” was “tuition for me to find out what the business was like.”

[The Broadway revival of Godspell, conceived by John-Michael Tebelak, who wrote the book based on the Gospel of Matthew, with music and new lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, ran at the Circle in the Square Theatre from 7 November 2011-24 June 2012 (30 previews and 264 regular performances).

[The production was directed by Daniel Goldstein and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, with scenic design by David Korins, costume design by Miranda Hoffman, lighting design by David Weiner, sound design by Andrew Keister, and projection design by Daniel Brodie.]

Since then, he has invested in 22 other shows, with six returning profits so far. And he and his daughter, Kim, now a musical theater student at Syracuse University [see my note following the article], have come to an understanding about where to draw the line between meddling parent and struggling artist.

Like so many parents juggling feelings of pride and concern as their children step into adulthood, Mr. Roth said he wanted his daughter to understand the risks — as well as the rewards — associated with a career in the arts, and the only way he could see doing that was for both of them to get closer to the business.

“I wanted her to go into this with open eyes and know what she was getting into,” Mr. Roth said.

As with practically everything in New York, especially the insular world of Broadway, connections mean everything. Being a child of an investor in a show doesn’t secure a part or even an audition, but it can create opportunities that open doors.

“Getting to know a director and having the opportunity to observe a rehearsal or a script reading to get a deeper understanding of the business, that is a definite advantage,” said Pippin Parker [b. 1969], a playwright and the dean of the drama school at the New School in New York City.

Ken Davenport, a Broadway producer [the current Gypsy with Audra McDonald and the upcoming Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal; he’s produced two Tony-winners] and blogger who raises money for shows and has worked with Mr. Roth [the 2011 Godspell] and other investors, said he has seen more parents invest in shows to encourage a passion they share with one of their children or to bolster the child’s career prospects.

“The parents don’t have the friends or relationships, so they do it the old-fashioned way by writing a check,” he said. “All that check does is get you in the door. It’s up to the kids to prove themselves.”

Of course there’s no substitute for talent, Mr. Parker and others said.

“Investing is a wonderful and glorious activity, but unless you know what you are doing as an investor, the best you can hope for is a glass of Champagne with Bette Midler,” said Peter Cooke, the head of the drama school at [Pittsburgh’s] Carnegie Mellon University, which sends many graduates on to Broadway careers.

The only career path he can see, he said, “is being well trained.”

There are different ways productions raise money, but for many shows, affluent individuals play a key role. Typically, these are people with at least $1 million of investable assets — what the finance industry calls an accredited investor, who is presumably able to swallow the considerable risks associated with this type of investing.

Producers raise the money by putting together pools of investors, who tend to give an average of $25,000 to finance a production in a Broadway theater. Sometimes there are different investing tiers, and those who give more can get perks like having their names printed above the show’s title on posters and Playbills, or getting an invitation to a dress rehearsal.

The investor pools are usually organized as a limited partnership, like a private equity investment fund. Very often these investors are people who know the show’s insiders, including the actors, writers, directors and others bringing it to the stage.

Tim Speiss, a former board chairman of the Abingdon Theatre Company, a Broadway production group, said he once auctioned an item for a production in which the winning bidder could get his or her child a small speaking part in one performance. “There are some very clever ways to raise money,” said Mr. Speiss, who is a wealth adviser at EisnerAmper, an accounting and advisory firm based in New York.

Once a show gets up and running, the investors might get their money back, proportionate to what they put in, plus any profit after the show’s expenses are covered.

Many shows are money losers: Just one in five will end up being profitable, and even fewer are runaway successes. But Mr. Davenport points out that those odds aren’t much different than those of any other alternative investment in which a high-net-worth investor might dabble. As far as privately held start-ups — a favorite of private equity investors — some 50 percent of new companies fail after the first four years, according to labor statistics.

Linda Huber, an executive at a financial services company in New York, began investing in Broadway a few years ago when her daughter, now a high school senior, showed an interest. Her daughter, Claudia Lopez-Balboa, gives her advice on which shows to bankroll. So far she has invested in four, including “On Your Feet,” a musical about the lives of Gloria and Emilio Estefan [Marquis Theatre, 5 November 2015-20 August 2017], a story that resonated with her daughter’s part-Cuban heritage.

“For art that’s worth making, it’s the responsible thing to support these endeavors — it’s a thing to do together,” Ms. Huber said.

Her daughter is about to graduate from St. Paul’s School, a New Hampshire boarding school, and plans to go to the University of Michigan in the fall to major in finance and minor in arts management.

Ms. Lopez-Balboa said that Broadway had captured her imagination since she saw the show, “Bring It On” [St. James Theatre, 1 August-30 December 2012], as a middle-school student — she recalled skipping all the way home afterward.

“I wanted to produce a show that would make you leap in the air,” she said.

She reached out to Daryl Roth, a 10-time Tony-winning producer (and no relation to Mr. Roth, the tool-and-die executive) to seek out an informational meeting about the business.

Ms. Roth recalled that initial meeting and said she was impressed by Ms. Lopez-Balboa’s energy and interest — enough to hire her as an intern for two summers.

Ms. Roth, the lead producer of the show “Kinky Boots” [Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 4 April 2013-7 April 2019], said she understood where Ms. Lopez-Balboa was coming from because her son Jordan had also dived into the theater world. “I wanted to help Claudia learn and be excited about working in theater,” Ms. Roth said.

For Dean Roth, the industrial company executive from New Jersey, the first $1,000 investment got him and his daughter invited to a cocktail party at Sardi’s, where they mingled with other investors and met the show’s director, Danny Goldstein.

Some of those contacts advised Kim Roth on whether she should pick college or an acting conservatory (she chose college), gave her tips for getting started in the business, and helped answer other novice-level questions.

Ms. Roth, who interned for Ken Davenport one summer, has one year of study left at Syracuse before setting out for what she hopes will be a career as an actress, singer and dancer on Broadway. [She got her BFA in 2018; see below.]

“Living so close to the city just getting to make those networking connections is definitely helpful,” Ms. Roth said. [Westfield, New Jersey, where the Roths lived at this time, is 23 miles from New York City—a 35-minute drive or an 85-minute train ride.] “Knowing someone doesn’t necessarily help, but it doesn’t hurt.”

[Kim Roth (b. 1996), originally from Westfield, Union County, New Jersey, completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in musical theater from New York’s Syracuse University in 2018, and is now living in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey.  She’s had additional training at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, on whose stage she’s performed (The Merchant of Venice, 2016).  Acting, singing, and dancing are her passions.  Roth is a member of Actors’ Equity Association.

[Liz Moyer is a journalist with experience reporting and writing about finance, markets, public policy and consumers.  She was most recently a reporter at Barron’s; she was previously an editor at the New York Times and a reporter at the Wall Street Journal.  Moyer has a Master of Science in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1991).

[My friend, and a generous contributor to this blog, was, with his late wife, a small investor in a Broadway musical (Memphis, Shubert Theatre, 19 October 2009-5 August 2012).  It won several awards, including the 2010 Best Musical Tony! Read about his take on being a “Broadway Angel” (by Kirk Woodward, 7 September 2010).]