Life Is Like a Musical

by Tim Federle

  The real stars in life aren’t just folks with their names blinking above the title. It’s those people who have “made it,” whatever it is, and then go out of their way to say, “I couldn’t have achieved this without this other person.” Stars are people who share the trophies and salute the helpers.

  My cowriter on Tuck Everlasting, Claudia Shear, and I could not have pulled off the tireless process of rewrites on a new musical were it not for our loyal script assistant, Angela. She’d stay up till 3 a.m., reformatting our pages and getting complex documents to stage managers, who’d in turn then pass out those new pages to the actors, bright and early for rehearsal. Whenever I could, I’d text Angela, “You’re the best.” Sometimes that’s all I had the energy for, at the end of an eleven-hour marathon day, when you’re not sure how you’re ever going to crack the problems in Act Two. But there’s always enough gas in the tank to say “Thank you”—or even “thx,” in text parlance. Theater is a group effort. So is being an adult—at least the sort of adult others want to be around.

  In your own life, where might you be better served by not hogging all the credit? Is it in small, private ways, like the way you coparent? Are there beautiful, sensitive things about your child that could only have been inherited from the other parent? Say it. Name it. Give credit. At work, do you occasionally manage to steal the thunder of someone junior—a team player who has completed excellent under-the-radar work under your tutelage? By letting others take the final bow—by making note of an ordinary worker bee’s otherwise overlooked efforts—you’re helping cultivate an environment where people feel more seen. More appreciated and more useful, ultimately. Life hack: That’s better for you in the end, anyway.

  Unless you plan on living your days on a desert island, start paying attention to all the people who help you cross the finish lines that make a successful life. It might not take you a whole lot of effort to help them feel appreciated, but I guarantee that, for them, it will be a moment front and center that doesn’t come often enough.

  19 BE A GOOD SCENE PARTNER

  Nobody is more conscious of his breath and general hygiene than a dancer. In a career that requires you to share close quarters with other sweaty people (and get paid for it!), you develop a distinct sense of the aura that you give off. Along the way, the so-called “best” dance partners—and scene partners, in general—are generally not the most talented. They are instead the most considerate. They develop a sixth sense about the effect they’re having on you, and your experience, and your space. That means breath mints and deodorant and changing your shirt if you’re performing a pas de deux and your shirt is soaking wet with sweat. But it means more than that, too.

  Sensitive scene partners, per the “improv school of comedy,” add on to whatever it is you’ve thrown at them. Rather than rejecting the kind of energy the other person is giving off, they work with it. We call this “yes, and” in the world of acting—acknowledging a statement that’s been directed to you, and then adding on to the sentiment with a positive response. We’ve all had work and life partners who tell us everything we’re doing wrong without suggesting ways or methods to help make a situation better. Don’t be that kind of partner. The “no, but” guy who never seems to help lift his partner to her potential, but instead points out everything she’s doing wrong. This applies across social strata and relationship type. I marvel at parents of toddlers whose resources of patience allow them to pivot their child away from an undesired activity (No, we are not getting every single toy out right now) and toward another (But look! Here’s a baby carrot that I’m going to make talk in a funny voice!). It’s all about working with what you’ve got, even if it’s an unreasonable two-year-old.

  Good partnering techniques apply to teamwork, too. I’ve heard that in certain TV writers’ rooms, staff members are not allowed to pitch problems from the sidelines; that is, if a particular scene doesn’t seem to be landing, you can’t just blindly say, “This doesn’t work,” or “This isn’t funny,” or “This bit isn’t paying off.” That isn’t being a team player; that’s being a critic. Instead, you’ve gotta suggest a way to fix it. “This isn’t paying off, but if we gave the joke more context, I bet it would—and here’s how we might try that…” Great. Now you’ve helped instead of hindered.

  Back to one-on-one stuff. In my own experience, the golden rule of dance partnering is this: Don’t drop the girl on her head. Literally. When I was twenty years old, I performed in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular alongside a partner who was also making her New York debut. Katie and I radiated youthful excitement. We were Christmas incarnate. And yet, no matter how unjaded you are, entertaining four thousand people at a time for a ninety-minute show upwards of five times a day is downright grueling. Jingle bells are only charming for so long—but a job is a job. Even when you’re bone-weary and zonked to the core, don’t let your other half down. Put another way, don’t drop her when you’ve got her in an overhead lift, because her life actually depends on you and your meager upper-body strength. No matter how tired you are, you have to dig into your deepest sense of work ethic and muscle out one more burst of energy, and you cannot let your partner careen to the floor. It’s as simple (and occasionally tiring) as that.

  A truly great scene partner means something else, as well: that you will never look better than when you make somebody else look good.

  20 BE EXTRA NICE TO THE P.A.’s

  Go out of your way to be especially respectful to the people on the sidelines who don’t have the privilege of walking around with a great deal of status. They are the secret engines who make everything hum. Not just that: Never look down on the very people who are on their way up. The bosses of tomorrow are the assistants of today, and they always remember the nice guys. Same goes for the folks who stock the aisles at your local drugstore, or pick up the towels at the gym. They remember the not-so-nice people, too.

  Every musical has a whole bunch of production assistants who stick to the corners of the rehearsal studio. In the old days they were called gophers—as in, they’ll “go” out “for” just about anything the boss/director/stage manager needs, which generally falls under the category of “coffee” or “more coffee.” These folks are frequently just out of college, bright-eyed and Broadway-tailed and living in one-bedroom apartments with three roommates. And though they might not have a lot of measurable power in the world now, you never know who they’re going to become.

  That local middle school student who’s paying for his after-school dance classes by washing the studio’s mirrors? He might someday grow up to win a Tony Award. That’s what happened to my friend and mentor Tom Schumacher, who started out in the theater doing any odd job he could, just to be as close to the greasepaint and the spotlights and the box office as possible. He was crafty, and commanding, and made a lot of connections, and he grew up and became the producer of Broadway’s The Lion King, among dozens of other worldwide projects. He still remembers the people who gave him a chance when he was a “nobody.”

  Nobodies aren’t actually nobody.

  (By the way, even nobodies aren’t actually nobody; I’m a huge believer in treating everybody with dignity and humanity—but there’s a reality to how we view the unpaid helpers of the world, and this is your encouragement to treat them as if they deserve your full respect. Because they do.)

  A special note to any low-on-the-rung readers out there, right now: I was you, once. Genuinely. Before I was a writer, I made the transition from dancer to dance captain to associate director on various musicals. I’ve held a clipboard in shaky hands, and tried to make sense of my place in the room, and often I found myself feeling disregarded in my position as the support staff to a senior member of the creative team. Many people in the cast and crew didn’t even know my first name (let alone my unpronounceable last) after weeks of rehearsals. So listen up: If it feels as if nobody is noticing all your hard work, keep at it. There are a lot of flakes out there, especially in the arts. People who fa
ll away, fast. People who can’t handle the actual demands and heavy lifting of the real world, and who are only “in it” for the perceived glamour while lacking the necessary grit. Lean in to your grit. The right people will notice you—if they don’t, they aren’t the right people. Not for you to populate your precious life with, anyway. If you commit wholeheartedly to your gig, and to working diligently on the sidelines with good cheer and a whole lot of follow-through, your Swiss-army-knife-like effectiveness will earn you a place at the table, and in the room. I promise.

  The bosses of tomorrow are the interns of today. Not only is it the right human value to treat them as equal members of the team, it’s also a savvy business technique: The first thing that assistants do when they hang up from a nasty phone call is report in to their boss—or forward the email, for that matter. Be the person who leaves the assistants smiling. Sooner or later, you might be working for them.

  21 MAKE STUFF. DON’T MAKE FUN OF STUFF

  Have you ever tried making something from scratch? Like, something harder than pancakes but easier than, say, Hamilton? It’s hard. It’s humbling! To work on your own, or even on a team, attempting to build a product or a musical or an anything, is to become aware of how challenging it is to take a vision and whip it into a reality. It’s easy to make fun of stuff and difficult to actually make stuff.

  I see it on social media all the time. The sniping. I’m guilty of it, too. Particularly in the days leading up to me writing my own material, before I was brought to my knees by how hard it is to translate your brilliant vision into an actual, actable script. And yet, we’ve all been sofa critics. You’re watching an awards show, or seeing a new musical, or tuning in for a red carpet. And you think: How could a person be so clueless as to prattle on at the podium or design such a garish dress? Half the time this sense of judgment is residual resentment from your own efforts not being met with acclaim. The rest of the time, we’re speaking from the wild naïveté of someone who has never attempted to give a speech, make up an original dance, or create a garment. We’re heckling the TV screen from behind a bowl of Doritos.

  I was perhaps the most prototypical snarky gay teen who ever lived. When you grow up getting picked last for dodgeball, you learn how to fight back with your words, if not your fists. I’d think nothing of watching the school play and then turning up my nose at what felt like a misfire (even though I’d been too scared to audition for the play myself). Later, I’d see touring shows come through Pittsburgh and proclaim that “I could have been better up there.” When I was seventeen. Watching Les friggin’ Miz. I roll my eyes at that little Tim now. Because, having now written my own shows, half a lifetime later—not to mention screenplays and books (and dating profiles, oh, the dating profiles)—I know just how hard it is to get anything right. Particularly when it’s your heart that’s on the line. It’s tough to make stuff people like. Hell, it’s tough to make stuff I like.

  This isn’t about not being critical. Observing your otherwise competent boss completely bungle a new product launch is an opportunity to reflect upon how you might have approached it differently. But talk is cheap. It isn’t until you’re facing a boardroom full of employees that you realize how hard it is to make things look easy. In a broader sense, anyone who has ever stared down the blinking cursor of a blank page can appreciate how extraordinary it is for any piece of art, let alone a hit musical like Dear Evan Hansen, to make it to Broadway. That show—a completely original idea in an age of branded reboots, about a modern teenager who finds himself at the middle of an unintended social media maelstrom—sprang from a couple of writers’ brilliant, ambitious minds, and went on to play to audiences held in rapture, all the while being supported and guided by dozens of people backstage, from wardrobe crew to techies. None of them would have gigs now if the show’s creators had only sat around talking about how smashing their show would be someday. They had to actually make the thing.

  How easy it is, when the lights come up at any given intermission, to say, “God, this sucks.” It’s so much harder to sit with the thought: Gosh, I wish this were better.

  The truth is, nobody sets out to make a terrible thing. Including you. Even if your “thing” never becomes everyone’s thing, your appreciation of fine work will deepen—but only if you stop criticizing from the sidelines, and start contributing.

  22 CREATE A NEW FAMILY FROM YOUR CAST

  Next time you find yourself approaching a family gathering with some trepidation—not to mention any potentially “loaded” holiday—try to go into it with the mind-set of a theater performer, who generally only gets one day off at a time. Only so much can go wrong, I’ve learned, when you’ve just got twenty-four hours to celebrate something. A lot can go right, though—even when you don’t end up with any family time, at all.

  The first time I missed a Christmas at home, I felt this dull emotional ache in the days leading up to it. Like many people, I’d grown up with by-the-numbers holiday celebrations—namely, matching red sweaters for me and my older brother, Amy Grant’s Christmas CD blasting over my dad’s Bose stereo system (it was the nineties!), and quiet suppers brimming with Midwestern angst. (The sound of a metal knife on a porcelain plate still makes me shudder; pass the gravy and the Xanax, please.)

  Fast-forward past my teen years, please. At age twenty, I was cast in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. With just one day off for the holiday, it was impossible to get back to Pittsburgh. Flights were prohibitively expensive. Moreover, by the time the calendar hit actual Christmas Eve, we’d been singing carols at the tops of our lungs since Halloween, which is when rehearsals started. I was jingle-belled out. But instead of going home, for once I was going to work, for a few hours of professional cheer.

  And then Christmas morning arrived, and I got to Radio City. Every dancer in the show had brought in a casserole dish, something to pass around in the dressing rooms during the brief forty-minute breaks we’d get between shows. I remember being struck, anew, by the array of faces and backgrounds that surrounded me—how clear it was, on this holiest of days, that I was huddling up with not just Christians but also Jews and Muslims and atheist artists (hey, a gig is a gig!). And all of us were crammed between costume racks, wearing sweatpants and fake eyelashes, wolfing down such nontraditional Christmas fare as Zabar’s Upper West Side chocolate babka (better than gingerbread!) and rugelach (better than sugar cookies!).

  That first Christmas away from home was the exact opposite of the awkward, sit-around-the-fire affairs that had defined all my previous holidays. There wasn’t a lot of lounging at Radio City. Only sweating and giggling, overeating and performing, and finally collapsing. But not a lot of kicking back—and not much crying, either. There was no time to miss home, not when we were entertaining so many tourists who were away from their own.

  If you find yourself separated, voluntarily or not, from your blood relatives, try embracing and cultivating a makeshift family made of friends, coworkers, and neighbors who may be in the same boat. There are a whole bunch of us holiday orphans out there: people who, for whatever reason, fly solo or stick to the sidelines. The real holiday miracle of adulthood is that you don’t always have to go back to your hometown to feel as if you’re at home.

  23 GO WHERE THE LOVE IS

  If it’s true that everybody likes to be liked, then nobody likes to be liked more than people who literally get applause for a living. (In my writing career, it is consistently startling to not hear a group of people clapping, once I turn in a new book. The stage spoiled me.) But if a life in showbiz is largely marked by rejection, why do so many of us refuse to go where the love is? Why do we downplay the yeses and keep chasing after the nos?

  Many of us have a hard time accepting the affection and admiration of a partner who actually wants to love us or an employer who thinks we’re a fantastic hire. We either mistrust people’s enthusiasm for us or, worse, we vastly undervalue what it means to be appreciated, constantly looking over our shoulders for an even deep
er high. We think there must be something wrong with people if they think there’s something so right about us. (As in: “I only got hired for The Little Mermaid because I once shared a cab with the assistant casting director.”)

  Ironically, this causes a lot of us to fall into a pattern of addiction. Not to drugs, or booze. In this case, it’s the lightheaded buzz of winning over as many people as possible, as opposed to going where the love already is—where someone is already saying, I like you, I want you, I need you. We write that person off. He must be crazy. We cast loyalty off as nepotism, and get all starry-eyed about making the next group of people love us. And after we work ourselves into a lather, we rinse and repeat, in perpetuity.

  Loyalty isn’t the lazy way out; it’s often only in those comfortable, ongoing relationships that we can truly get our most dynamic work done. Many of theater’s most memorable moments were created by longtime duos. I’m talking about Donna McKechnie and Michael Bennett, who collaborated on Cassie’s iconic dance in A Chorus Line after years of dancing together in other shows. In fact, the muse list goes on and on, from Bob Fosse creating Sweet Charity on Gwen Verdon to Crazy for You creators Susan Stroman and Mike Ockrent. Heck, Tommy Kail and Lin-Manuel Miranda went to the same college years before they joined forces to make Alexander Hamilton sing.