Too Much Is Not Enough

by Andrew Rannells

  I listened to the cast recording obsessively, memorizing every lyric and imagining all of the connective tissue that held the songs together. I also fell in love with John Cameron Mitchell and his voice. It sounded like a cry from his heart. There was a pain and power to it that I understood and was also envious of.

  I went strutting into that audition with my special blend of overconfidence and fear of being discovered as a fraud. I decided I would sing “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen, my go-to audition number in those days. It was one of my favorite songs, and I liked singing it regardless of whether it was appropriate for the show. It fit my voice unexpectedly well, and I loved that it was about wanting desperately to leave where you are from. In this case, I figured it was appropriate-ish.

  I arrived to find that, much like my first Rent audition, there were several men there in various stages of drag. Once again, it hadn’t occurred to me that this was an option. But this time I oddly didn’t care. I liked that I was one of the only guys without eyeliner. I’ll stand out, I thought. My name was finally called and I walked into the room to find just an accompanist and the director, Dave Steakley. I sang “Born to Run,” and the director watched me the whole time, never once looking at my résumé. That’s always a good sign. Then Dave asked, “Do you know anything from Hedwig? ‘Wig in a Box’ maybe?”

  I knew the entire score—I thought—by heart. I nodded and the accompanist began to play the song. It’s an emotionally and vocally climactic moment for Hedwig, and it comes at a critical moment in the show when Hedwig is deciding to really embrace who and where she is. It started out okay, but you know how sometimes you think you know the words to a song, and then one day you are in a car with a friend and that song comes on the radio and your words don’t match their words? Because your words are WRONG? That’s what was happening here. I was singing in gibberish, and it occurred to me, WHILE SINGING, that in fact, I did not know the entire score. Dave was patient and let me fumble my way through a verse and a chorus. Not a total disaster, but not a slam dunk, either. He asked me to look at one of Hedwig’s speeches outside while the next person auditioned. I sat in the hallway looking at this speech and realized how much I didn’t know about this show. I thought my contextual skills were pretty solid, but there was a lot happening on this page that I had not imagined while listening to the cast album on my daily runs around Astoria Park.

  The guy who went in after me came out quickly. As he passed me in the hall, he looked at me with panic and said, “I thought this was a children’s show! I just got back from a five-year cruise ship gig. I don’t know what the hell this is!” At least I knew more than that guy, I thought. I went back in to read and made a split-second decision as I walked through the door. I said to myself, Fuck it. Just do what feels right. The whole message of the music is about accepting yourself and fighting against expectations and limitations forced on you by other people. Maybe I didn’t know who Hedwig was after all, but this would be my version of Hedwig.

  Apparently it went well, because I booked the job, and a month later I was down in Austin rehearsing. Having dropped out of college and never really gotten to do any serious academic acting studies, I poured myself into this production. I did research, I explored, I allowed myself to be bad at points. I tried things that ultimately didn’t work but that were still helpful with finding out what landed and what didn’t. It was exciting and fulfilling and Dave was the perfect director for me. We really got to discover this show on our own terms, away from the judgment of New York and past productions, past Hedwigs.

  I loved doing this show, but the hours offstage grew to be very lonely. I hadn’t had a ton of contact with anyone in my family since I’d gotten to Texas. I think we were still unpacking a lot of feelings about Ron’s death. That’s what people don’t tell you about mourning, or at least what no one told me: You feel better pretty quickly after the funeral. You are relieved to get back to your routine. You start to forget that there is a big piece of your heart that is gone. Sometimes you feel the pain but forget why, and then you’re like, Oh, yeah. My dad is dead. Or sometimes everything is fine, and then you are in a grocery store alone on a Tuesday morning and you hear “Mustang Sally” from The Commitments soundtrack playing over the store’s speakers. Next thing you know, you are openly weeping in the granola aisle. Emotion sneaks up on you. And not just sadness, sometimes anger, too. Why did my dad have to die at a kid’s birthday party? Why didn’t his doctor do a more thorough checkup months before? And why was my mother already dating? These are the questions that came tumbling into my brain and eventually out of my mouth one Saturday morning at a relatively quiet IHOP in Austin, Texas.

  My mom and Natalie had decided to visit and see Hedwig about a month into the run. I was nervous for them to see it; it was so different from anything they had seen me do before. But I was also excited because I was really proud of this production. They would only be in town for the weekend, but they were going to see the show twice, which was sweet of them. They really liked it. Or at least they said they did, and that’s really all any actor wants to hear.

  The next day we decided we would grab some breakfast and go see an early screening of the Britney Spears/Kim Cattrall vehicle, Crossroads. I had been working day and night since I’d arrived in Austin and hadn’t had time to find all of the cool and “weird” stuff yet, so we ended up at a local IHOP. Not the most personality, but at least we knew what we were getting.

  I don’t know how it started. I really don’t. The mood at the table was tense to begin with. Maybe it was the travel, maybe it was my mom seeing her son in drag, maybe it was too much IHOP coffee. All I know is before I knew it, we were truth telling. Somewhere in our minds, Natalie and I decided that a crowded pancake house on a Saturday morning was the perfect place and time to confront our mother about how angry we were that she had a new boyfriend. We hadn’t planned this, but once one of us opened the door a crack, the other one went barreling through. It turned out that we both had more anger in us than we had expected. Our conversation got extremely heated and, at times, extremely loud. But being the good Midwesterners that we are, anytime the waitress approached the table to refill our coffee or see how we were doing, we slapped smiles on our faces and tried to mask the epic familial meltdown that was occurring over our Rooty Tooty Fresh ’N Fruity pancakes.

  CHARLOTTE

  You have a lot of fucking nerve speaking to me like that!

  WAITRESS (APPROACHING)

  More coffee?

  CHARLOTTE

  Well, that would be wonderful. Thank you so much! This is all so delicious!

  And then:

  ANDREW

  You could have at least tried to show a little discretion!

  WAITRESS (APPROACHING)

  Are you all done?

  ANDREW

  Oh my gosh! I am stuffed! My eyes were bigger than my stomach, I guess!

  THE WHOLE TABLE LAUGHS MANICALLY.

  This argument continued as we paid the check and walked to my rental car. It continued on the drive to the movie theater. It continued in the movie theater parking lot. Finally, having had enough and noting that if we wanted to get good seats for Crossroads, we were going to have to get inside, my mother decided to end the argument definitively by shouting at Natalie and me, “I’m sorry your mother’s a whore!”

  With that she got out of the car and stormed away. Natalie and I sat in silence for a moment. Stunned. Saddened. Embarrassed. Vindicated. And then Natalie said, “Where does she think she’s going to go?” We awkwardly and somewhat sadly chuckled and got out of the car. We found Charlotte on the steps of the movie theater with three tickets in hand.

  “We are going to see this movie, damn it,” Charlotte said.

  If you haven’t seen Crossroads—sorry, Shonda Rhimes—don’t worry. Here’s the gist: Britney and her two high school pals go on a
road trip after their graduation, to find Britney’s mother, who abandoned her shortly after birth. After zigzagging their way across the country, on a trip that includes boys and fights and a wildly unrealistic karaoke sequence, they land somewhere—I want to say Florida—to discover Brit’s mother, played by Kim Cattrall, dressed as a zookeeper. (If you’ve seen the film, you know what I’m talking about.) Kim admits to leaving baby Britney, but she doesn’t regret it. She essentially slams the door in Britney’s face. This rejection opens Brit-Brit’s emotional floodgates and gives her the artistic and personal strength to finish writing the epic ballad “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” which in the film starts as a poem Britney wrote. Maybe that’s the most unrealistic detail in Crossroads: Britney is a poet.

  The movie ended. We sat, in the near empty movie theater, in silence for a minute. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to have to re-enter the reality we had created at breakfast. The reality where all our cards, the genuine and the petty, were on the table. Charlotte finally broke the silence. “Well, at least I’m not as bad as Britney’s mom.” We couldn’t help but laugh. I can’t speak for Natalie, but I immediately felt selfish and regretted many of the things I had just said. My mother was not the villain here. She was a victim of loss and shitty timing and she was in pain, too. We all made our way back to the car. We didn’t need to talk anymore. We had said enough for one day.

  As I was getting ready for my performance that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about our day, our argument. I was applying the final layer of glitter to my makeup. My insane Hedwig wig was tightly pinned to my head, my lashes were firmly glued to my eyes, my lips were aggressively painted over my own. Underneath all of that drag and in some way because of it, I could see my mother in my face. I had always been told that I looked like her, and even though I had never seen my mom in grotesque punk drag, I imagined that this was what she would look like. I recognized her in my mirror and I recognized her in my feelings, too—the loss, the anger, the sadness, the confusion that followed Ron’s death.

  Getting to pretend you are a different person for a living has its benefits. You literally get to walk in someone else’s shoes. You get to try on a life that is very different from your own and see how it feels. See what they feel. The role of Hedwig is an absolute gift to any actor who gets to play the part. There’s a lot to mine in her story, and if you are feeling angry or sad and judged or lonely, there is a place for all of that in Hedwig. All of the sadness about my dad went into that show. It also brought up unexpected feelings as well. Feelings about my moving to New York from Omaha. Feelings about my first sexual experience with the forty-year-old. And more recent feelings about my mother that I hadn’t really allowed myself to process.

  That night I lost myself on stage thinking about my mom and her life. (As I learned from O, The Oprah Magazine, I was having an “aha moment.”) She had lived the majority of her life as a mother. She had always told us that it was all she ever wanted to do. She thought of it as her dream, her vocation. But here she was, thirty-three years later. Her children were all grown. She needed another dream. She was figuring out what would be next, just like I was doing. And my mother’s new relationship and my father’s death were two separate issues. One didn’t cause the other, but each complicated the other. Something gently cracked inside me that night on stage while I was singing “Wicked Little Town.” I sang the lyrics:

  The fates are vicious and they’re cruel.

  You learn too late, you used two wishes like a fool.

  And then you’re someone you are not, and Junction City ain’t the spot.

  Remember Mrs. Lot and when she turned around.

  I loved my mom very much, and she was also in pain and needed my love and support. In return, I knew I would receive it back from her. It was going to be a process and maybe a constant negotiation, but it had to start from a place of forgiveness and understanding. Just as John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask had shed some light on this moment, I also saw that Britney Spears had helped, too:

  I’m not a girl, not yet a woman.

  All I need is time, a moment that is mine.

  While I’m in between.

  Okay, I’m lying. The lyrics of “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” were not helpful or directly healing in this moment. But I can’t think of Hedwig and that argument without also thinking of Britney and Crossroads. Memories, like feelings and Christmas tinsel, are complicated, and most of the time they come out in a clump that needs to be pulled apart slowly in order to make it pretty. Charlotte and I were trying. That was the important part.

  Everything Is Rosie

  If you are going to enter into a career in the arts, it’s important to know that the most common feeling you will feel, and I’m talking on a daily basis, is rejection. Even if you aren’t actively rejected that day, the feeling of lacking something, of losing out, is always just stuck on you. You can’t shake it off, so you learn to plow ahead. You distract yourself and you build yourself up with positive thoughts and a good therapist. Trips to the gym become like a job, household errands become an all-day event. You make yourself busy while you are waiting for your career to begin.

  I was born into a demographic that is given a lot of opportunity. There is no shortage of jobs for tall white guys in musical theater. There is also no shortage of tall white guys trying to make it in musical theater, but at least there were plenty of possibilities over the years. I am glad that our industry is finally starting to add some long-overdue diversity to extend those possibilities to everyone. Still, jobs are scarce. It’s a hard business, but over time you toughen up. It’s just a survival mechanism. You go through a few heartbreaks, and then you realize that maybe it’s better to just expect less and be surprised if it actually goes your way. The problem with this method is that it numbs you. The losses and the wins start to bleed together in your mind. You stop feeling anything because everything seems so fragile. You seem so fragile. I was fragile.

  I started learning this lesson while still in Omaha auditioning for community theater. There was a production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. I auditioned for the role of the Telegraph Boy.

  I was too tall.

  Then there was Marvin’s Room. I auditioned for the role of emotionally disturbed teenager Hank.

  I didn’t seem disturbed enough.

  Once in New York, as we have discussed, I had my countless attempts at Rent.

  All the hand-knitted, striped scarves in the world were not going to make me look like I was squatting in the East Village.

  And then there was the off-Broadway production of The Fantasticks. A job I was certain was mine.

  Too tall again!

  And then there are the worst rejections of all—the ones that go beyond not looking or sounding the part; the ones where you know, without anyone telling you, that you simply weren’t good enough.

  While I know now that these rejections helped me develop a thick skin, there is one audition story that I look back on that still stings. Not because it would have changed my life or because the show was a huge success, but because it came out of nowhere and it came during a time when I swore I was done with show business. I had told myself that I was finished with auditions and callbacks and rejection—but I got pulled back in so easily. I was completely seduced by the possibility of this long-shot dream becoming my reality.

  I had come back from Austin and my production of Hedwig thinking that I had some momentum behind me. I was crushed to learn that no one in New York cared about a successful regional production of anything—not even one that was a personal triumph for me. I was licking my wounds and feeling generally sorry for myself when I got a phone call from one of the producers of Pokémon Live! His name was Norman and he ran a large production company called 4Kids Entertainment. He asked me to meet him at his office. Since Pokémon Live! had ended, I had p
eriodically done voice-overs for some of their animated Saturday-morning shows. I was not booking a ton of theater work and I was happy to do it. I met with Norman, and he explained that his company had acquired a large block of time on Saturday mornings to program and they found themselves with a lot of new content but not a lot of staff. He was offering me a job to direct the voice-over part of these new animated series.

  I was flattered and confused by this offer. I asked him if there would be flexibility with the schedule to accommodate my potential Broadway career. I still wanted to be free to audition if asked. Norman looked at me with a mix of sternness and sympathy and said, “Andrew, how much longer are you going to chase that? This is a great opportunity, it’s more money than you have ever made, and it will put you in control of your life. I’m giving you a great opportunity here.” I thought about what my dad would think of this chance I was being offered. I thought about all the rejection I had experienced in the past years. I thought about the dreams I’d had for years, and then in an instant, I changed them. I accepted the job, and days later I was working at 4Kids Entertainment.

  Months passed and I was able to almost forget about the Broadway dreams. I loved going to the theater, and some of my closest friends were still acting and having successful careers on Broadway. It was painful to be so close to it but also so far away. But I was comforted by something else—stability. I had never experienced that in my adult life and it felt wonderful. Wonderful and dull, at times, but mostly wonderful. I was feeling nearly settled in this new corporate life of mine when, one day, I got an unexpected phone call from a casting assistant at Bernie Telsey Casting named Craig Burns. He had remembered me from my countless Rent auditions. He told me that there was a new Broadway show that Rosie O’Donnell was producing about the life of Boy George. It was called Taboo. There was one part still available, the role of Marilyn, an aggressive, gender-fluid party boy from the 1980s Leigh Bowery London club scene. Craig thought I should come in for the part. I was hesitant. I had banished all thoughts of returning to acting. I was living a different life now. But I was also a sucker for “signs” and “second chances,” so I agreed to come in. There was a lot of music to learn and a lot of scenes, but I immediately liked the material. The part reminded me of Hedwig in a lot of ways. I was intrigued.