Ten Little Chances to be Free

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The last few days of the trip were... odd. My mental sequencing of events is confused, so I can't say very much about the weekend, but the last show was strange. We hadn't the money to get tickets to any show but the final performance, so the night of the 23rd was my first time in the theater. It was enormous and quite beautiful and they had an organ, and they were handing out little souvenir pins at the last show. The whole thing was surprisingly understated--special pins, special playbills, and a rather emotional extra bow by the full cast. No balloons, no confetti, no speeches, no encores, no closing-night antics. Just a lot of cast members (and I suspect a lot of audience members) barely refraining from bursting into tears.

Okay, I'm not a great fan of Joan Almedilla's Fantine, but she made me wibble solely by the fact that she was practically sobbing through her entire performance. Randal seemed collected enough until the second act, and then he gave possibly the best rendition of Bring Him Home I've ever heard in my life. I think we all kind of lost it at that point, him included--he got a five-minute standing ovation which he thoroughly deserved. I even warmed up to Robert Hunt, a little. He still seems too young and his Javert is far too rabid and seems like a Disney villain, but he does have an excellent voice. And I think a lot of my problem with him stems with the lack of variation in intensity--he's manically intense all the time--which was solved neatly by a more-emotional-than-usual Javert's Suicide. And of course everyone was sobbing through the finale. Even the actors, a bit.

I was expecting a bit more fanfare to mark off the end of the tour, like I said--at least some speeches or something. But the largest commemoration was unofficial: dozens of fans lining up at the usually-deserted stage door begging autographs, photos, a few minutes of conversation, whatever. It meant more that way, somehow. I usually feel so self-conscious at the stage door because I'm either the only one there or in the company of people who know the actors better than I do, but on Sunday for some reason I didn't feel like an obsessive freak standing first in line at the stage door with a dozen roses for Victor Wallace. There were people from bloody all over the place, Washington DC, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, California... no one international as far as I know, but a good turnout of people coming to stalk the tour from all over the country. Lulu and I proceeded to make asses of ourselves in front of Victor, but he was terribly sweet and seemed amused and he did like the flowers. Did I mention he's pretty?

Lulu and I ran into alligatorandme, mmebahorel, and shawk at the stage door, and of course dastardly hijinks followed. 2 am found us in the parking lot of a Steak & Shake (closed but for the drive thru, which Lulu walked through to get a replacement hamburger after hers fell on the ground), trading obsessive-fan stories, bizarre fanfiction ideas, and all manner of other fannish crack. And witnessing what were quite possibly drug deals at the other end of the parking lot. Lovely city, St Louis.

And then there was the trip back. One of us had the lovely idea to try to get home as quickly as possible after the show by leaving for Washington the night of the show. So instead of the sensible option--namely, a full night's sleep and a drive during the daylight hours--we departed St Louis at three in the morning with a lot of No-Doz, a little food, and a distressingly tiny amount of money. I don't remember much of the drive back, except that it was very long, the Midwest is the most godawfully boring part of the country to drive through, we almost got lost on the PA turnpike, and I have good cop karma. Seriously. In three years of speeding like a Nascar driver while on highway trips, I have never been pulled over for speeding. Misinterpreting directions from cops, yes. Illegal turns, yes. But I thought we were dead meat when we got pulled over in Indiana while doing almost ninety on I-70, and it turned out the cop was after someone else and was just irked at us for not slowing down when he put his lights on. And so we got off with a warning and my driving record remains lily-white.

Oh, and did I mention practically no money? It worked out eerily perfectly. We were burning through gas like crazy the first two hundred miles of the trip and thought we were screwed, but then whatever emissions problem it was disappeared, we got great gas mileage all through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, and arrived home with exactly $3.17 counting loose change. I'm still getting the car checked out, of course, but it's really odd that we had exactly enough money to get home.

And from then on all is lunacy and sleep deprivation and you probably don't want to hear about it. My only comment is that after having listened to the Cabaret revival recording incessantly in the car, both of us were rather disappointed upon re-viewing of the movie. Ew.

Ew ew ewwww, the weather is awful. All hot and humid and ick, why couldn't they have closed the tour in San Francisco in October or something?

Saw the last show in Indianapolis. Two things were notable: one, everyone was insanely energetic. It was practically palpable. Not so good in Joan Almedilla, who is pathologically bland and overacts, but in most everyone else it was yay. And Ali Ewoldt is so cute. The second thing is that Pierce Peter Brandt was on as Javert.

Allow me a moment to go AAAAAAH OMG.

Bear in mind that I've only seen three other Javerts live: Cornell John, whom I don't remember much of; Robert Hunt, who looks far too young and plays Javert as way too much of a straight villain; and Trent Blanton, who is excellent. Pierce, however, is more than excellent. His Javert doesn't bear intense hatred towards the dangerous classes, like Robert Hunt's does (I swear his Javert thinks every thief and whore on the streets kicked his favorite puppy or something), but more a detached sort of distaste. I find it far easier to believe that he was doing his duty, nothing more. His conflict with his devotion to his job and his growing realization that the law isn't always right were clearly evident, and probably the subconscious inspiration for the über-tormented Gestapo!Javert Lulu and I dreamed up the other night in the Steak 'n' Shake. Who is all the sexier because of the sheer magnitude of the gap between authority and morality that he has to fathom.

And then we went to the stage door after the show. Melissa Lyons and Victor Wallace both recognized us, by name no less, and Victor even came up to us and hugged us. God bless that man and his sexiness. (We were fangirling so much during the show that I can't even tell whether his performance was better that night than usual, I just know that he was very good and we almost fainted dead away at "let others rise." But I'm pretty sure that the heightened energy was affecting him too.)

We also met another woman at the stage door who was, frankly, almost as much of a fangirl as us, and who offered to let us share her hotel room. (!!!!) Ye gods, sleeping in an actual bed and getting an actual shower felt so good. We're so short on money that we couldn't help pay the hotel bill, but I'm going to send her a couple hundred dollars' worth of Les Mis recordings to make up for it. She also took us out to the Steak 'n' Shake in Indianapolis and fostered a horrible, horrible addiction. Good food + cheap + open 24 hours = Lulu and I staying up all night at one just outside St Louis having tea and coming up with crack!plotbunnies.

St Louis is... interesting. We spent all yesterday in the eastern, ghetto-y part of the city without knowing there was a nice part, and ended up in some fast food restaurant bitching about all the bad mojo and worrying about finances. When our luck promptly did a one-eighty, our ability to attract weird people (or perhaps divine providence) kicked in, and a lady from the UniverSoul Circus came up to us and said we looked lost. We got free front-row tickets to the circus (!!!!), which was the coolest thing evar, directions to the nice cafés-and-bookstores district, and an offer for a discount on a hotel room. And then afterwards, when it was about five in the evening and starting to cool off, we were sitting in a park when some random guy invited us into his restaurant and gave us all this information about stuff to do in the city. And we got soup and lots of bread for about five bucks total.

Which is good, because our money is running out. My car has apparently developed an emissions problem (or maybe I just didn't screw on the gas cap tight enough, impossible to tell) and is chewing through gas at a thoroughly alarming rate. It doesn't help that we're sleeping in the car with the engine running so we can have air conditioning. We'll be able to get home, because we both have emergency money, but the rest of the stay could be quite uncomfortable and we might not be able to get as many tickets as we wanted.

Our plan, if we have much of one, is to try to find someone else to freeload a hotel room off of so we don't have to run down the gas tank, and make some money by busking outside the theater. We have costumes, decent voices, and a large repertoire of Les Mis songs, so we might be able to get either free tickets or enough money to see the show a few more times.

Yeah. Currently sitting in an internet café somewhere in the Lower West End bemoaning the fact that they won't crank up their air conditioning higher. So much better than outside though. I really don't have much of an opinion on this city yet; I don't know what to think. East St Louis is a really fucking bizarre place, but the street we're on now looks so much like downtown Bethesda that I keep expecting to look up and see my favorite French restaurant on the corner.

Why did there have to be a heat wave this week of all times? And why did they have to close in freaking St Louis?! Augh.

If anyone can give us a place to stay we would love you forever. We don't have much to shower upon you besides undying gratitude, fangirling, lots of obscure LM recordings, passing acquaintance with a few cast members, and really interesting luck... but it'd be fun. Promise.