June 7, 2016

Made the drive to Waynesville and finally began rehearsal for JCS. The chorus is huge (and we weren’t all there) The director blew me kisses after I had sung Caiaphas; I guess they’d despaired of getting anyone with the right range. Jesus and Judas are pretty blond strato-tenors with the requisite screaming ability (screaming is an accepted tradition for both characters). I’m singing “bass” in the chorus, too, but by bass they seem to mean high baritone/second tenor. I have F’s in my solos– high F’s– as well as the defining low F’s. Thank God screaming is in the tradition. The upshot of the evening was that I had fun. Trying to remember the last time I had fun at a rehearsal.
   
The show itself is interwoven into my past. My sister and father and I were walking through Penny’s at Chapel Hill forty years ago when we passed a display of Jesus Christ, Superstar albums. My sister said, “I’d really like to have one of those.” Father bought it for her, then and there. You’d have to be me or my sister to understand how flabbergasting that gesture was. A while later, I was cast as Caiaphas in Lynda Sarver’s summer production for Oak Hill Presbyterian, but had to drop out when I took up my assistantship at Syracuse. Some vast broken circle is closing up, beginning to roll.

Blue agate of a summer day.