the craptacular

Gavin Creel is sort of easy to love. He’s smart and sweet and passionate about his causes. And he can certainly rock a pair of basic blue jeans like no one else. But here’s what I love most about Gavin Creel:

He sang the single greatest note I’ve ever heard sung on a Broadway stage.

I can’t claim decades and decades of Broadway experience—I do not have firsthand memories of Liza at Carnegie Hall—but I’ve seen some great theater, and heard some great notes. Lea Salonga’s vibratoless laser beam of a note at the end of “Love Look Away.” Stokes bringing the house down with “The Impossible Dream.” Alice Ripley singing her lungs out in any number of shows. (My favorite is still the 2002 revival of The Rocky Horror Show where she and Raul Esparza were seemingly in some sort of trachea-tearing contest.) These are the great musical performers and performances of my times. And then there was Gavin.

I first saw him, of course, in Thoroughly Modern Millie in 2002, when he was giving the most underrated performance in the most overrated show of the year. While Sutton Foster got all the attention and awards, Gavin was on the same stage, singing circles around her. He navigated his way through all those vintage-y crooner numbers—hard stuff to sing—with so much panache, and with such ease. To this day, he makes that cast album worth listening to, even just to pick out his big notes in the chorus numbers.

Now fast-forward to Hair. I’ll admit it: I was one of those people who was totally dubious when they cast Gavin.

Jonathan Groff’s performance as Claude in Central Park was so winning, and so totally unexpected. Nothing about him in that role should have worked—he was too guileless, too lacking in rockstar chops, too awkward in anything but knickers—but everything did. His exuberant version of “I Got Life” ranks among my favorite performances of all time for its shear audacity, for all the work Jonathan had to do to carry it off. Never have I seen so much spit or sweat fly in the name of musical theatre, and it was pretty amazing to see.

That song is, of course, the show’s lynchpin. The actor playing Claude has to land it, or nothing else in the show works. When I saw the show on Broadway for the first time, that song was all I really wanted to see. Not just because it would be interesting to compare, but because I remembered so well what Gavin could do with that buttery, endlessly flexible voice of his. Land the number he did, and with so little effort. In fact, he hardly broke a sweat throughout the entirety of Hair. Claude is a great role, but it’s a cakewalk for him, vocally and otherwise. I’d wager that Gavin Creel sings more complex stuff in the shower on a Thursday morning than he does at any point in Hair.

Which brings me to The Note. After that first time in the summer, I saw the show a couple of additional times (ahem) in the autumn. That’s right around the time when something started to happen to Gavin’s vocal performance in Hair. It changed. There’s no telling why, but I think he just got bored. Because usually, vocal performances stay the same over the course of a show’s run. For example, while Caissie Levy is giving a top-notch singing performance in Hair, it’s the same every time you hear it. She hits the notes the same way. She goes for all the same riffs. And that’s by edict as much as anything else: Stage managers and directors are generally not cool with actors making after-the-fact adjustments to a performance in a long-running Broadway show. It’s just not done.

Except… Gavin Creel totally did. And does. Every single night. And he gets away with it because his choices are subtle, and brilliant.

One the night that The Note happened, Gavin was having one of those nights: A Night on Which Gavin Creel Sings the Shit Out of Everything. These are not particularly rare nights in the life of Gavin Creel. If you’ve seen Hair even twice, you’ve probably caught at least one—a night on which Gavin spins every single note for maximum beauty and drama. Entirely new riffs fall out of the sky. High notes materialize out of nowhere. You won’t hear anything like this on the cast album, which presents Hair, and Gavin’s performance, in the most straightforward, unembellished way possible, as though the album were a grim historical document and nothing more. These little changes feel so organic—so off-the-cuff. The effect is wonderful—as though he’s singing not simply to tell a story or convey an emotion, but to sing for the utter, shear joy of singing.

And during that performance, in the middle of “I Got Life,” Gavin did something so incredible that we actually couldn’t remember it immediately afterwards. It would be a week before we could fully sort out what happened, the exact mechanics of that note and how it made its way from Gavin’s throat to our ears.

Here’s how it worked: On the lyric, “I got freedom, brother,” when he sang it for the second time in the middle of the song, Gavin popped up the octave on the word “freedom” and held that long “e” for as long as the gods would let him. I don’t know for sure what that note was, because the song could be written up or down for him, but Google tells me that if Gavin is singing the traditional arrangement, it was a D. (That’s D as in damn, y’all.) And for all the musical theatre nerds keeping score: That’s a high D on an “E” vowel in chest voice. You know, just for fun on a Wednesday night. It was an act of showoff-y bravura—hitting a huge note simply because he could—but it also made such good dramatic sense that the effect in the moment was head-wrecking. You could feel the audience come up off their seats afterwards.

Other notable fallout: This is the note that drove me to the stage door.

I am not really one to wait for actors at the stage door after a show, mostly because I never have anything smart or coherent to say. And how do you communicate, really, how a show moves you, or resonates in your own life? Five seconds and an autograph do not exactly do the trick. But this time, I certainly had something to say.

And when Gavin came out, I went for it.

“Gavin, I just wanted to tell you that you sang the greatest note I’ve ever heard on a Broadway stage tonight.”

“What?” he said, a little taken aback. “When?”

“During ‘I Got Life’.”

“Seriously? What did I do? Can you remember?”

“It was in the middle somewhere.”

“Was it on the ‘Amen’ at the end?”

“No. Definitely in the middle.”

This, of course, is my favorite part of this story. That this person did something that very few people can do—and he had no idea. He couldn’t remember it or pinpoint when or how it happened. It reminded me of the piece David Foster Wallace wrote about world-class athletes, how they often can’t even begin to articulate or process what their bodies do. It’s all reflex and muscle memory and talent. It’s the thing that makes locker room interviews so inane, the thing that makes stage door encounters so unfulfilling, so humdrum compared with the performances that happened before them.

At some point, though, Gavin Creel must have remembered. Because he kept singing that note. I’ve heard it a few times now, and it’s always mesmerizing. After a while, you start to see the incredible mechanics of how it happens. The act of getting it out is truly physical—his arms go over his head, his entire body shoots upward. It is as magical and transcendent as Broadway gets.

If you’re seeing the show before Sunday, when the original Broadway cast plays its last performance before heading off to London, you will probably hear The Note. And you will want to hold onto it so badly, that “e” sound ringing so clear and bright. Freedom, indeed. But it will disappear, and the song will continue, and the show will end, and Gavin Creel will do other stuff, and sing other mind-blowing notes. But that’s why you go to the theater, right? Because the disappearing of that note—its evaporation into the ether—is what makes it so sweet in the first place.

The thing about Broadway ticket lotteries is this: when I lose, I am practically incapable of walking away.  By the time I’ve gone through the whole thing— rushing to the theater on time, filling out that tiny slip of paper, waiting in the midst of a gaggle of excited fans and visitors—I am too excited.  I just have to see the show and all too often I end up purchasing tickets anyway.  It’s bad.  I won’t even allow myself to admit exactly how much money I’ve spent at TKTS after losing the Be-In raffle at Hair.  That number is too frightening for my delicate budget balancing act/credit score.  And confessing it would make it real.

As you might imagine, this inability to walk away is only heightened when my trip to the theater is panicked, like it was this past Saturday.  When I’ve run from Penn Station to the Upper East Side, then hauled luggage up to my third floor apartment, arriving there with only enough time to put my suitcase down inside the door and turn around to leave again, hurriedly retracing my steps to the 6 train and heading back downtown, this time to Times Square.  After all that effort, I feel as though I’ve earned my ticket.  I feel entitled to a show.

So it will come as no shock, dear readers, when I tell you that after losing the In the Heights ticket lotto at the Richard Rogers Theater last weekend, C___ and I purchased a pair of aptly named ‘Lotto Loser’ tickets at the box office for the badass price of $41.50, which is less than double the cost of a lotto winner ticket.  I have to toast the folks at the Nederlander organization for this wonderful scheme, not only because it got me into that theater without paying TKTS prices, but also because C___ and I were not in some shitty obstructed view seats.  Plus, I suspect this little scheme is helping keep the doors open at the Richard Rogers Theater and the more theaters with their lights on in this city, the better, in my opinion.

I am late for the In the Heights party, clearly.  The show—with music and lyrics by Lin Manuel Miranda—opened in March of 2008 and I’m only just now seeing it, a whopping two years behind schedule.  I don’t even know what kept me so long, really.  Besides, I guess, life’s breakneck pace and a financially crippling love for Jonathan Groff.  This is one show that boy will never star in.

But my lateness and all the show’s considerable faults aside—you’ve read the reviews already, I’m sure, and formed your own opinions, too—I’m so glad C___ and I forked over the cash for tickets, even as Lotto Losers.  And not just because it was the day before C___’s birthday and she wanted to and she left the theater so damn happy that almost any amount of money would have been worth it.  No.  Because I’m glad I finally saw that damn show.  It was beginning to feel like a big, ugly black hole in my theater history.  And I was getting really tired of saying “oh, I want to see that,” whenever In the Heights came up in conversation.

I didn’t love it.  Or at least, after one viewing I didn’t love it.  (Sometimes, I need multiple viewings of things in order to love them.  Sometimes I’m too busy thinking and analyzing the first time, to really get it.) But I don’t know that without Lin Manuel Miranda this is a show I could ever truly love.  Because after it was over, as I tried to sort through how I felt, I realized how much of that show was Lin, and how much Lin was to that show.

That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the experience.  Because I did.  I laughed, and I cried (once quite profusely).  I felt things.  I remembered exactly where I was during the 2003 Blackout, how I’d walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to a sort-of-friend’s Aunt’s apartment and used my cell phone to light a stairwell enough to see what I was trying to climb.  I heard strains of music that made me want to dance, that I’d danced to in New York City clubs in my lifetime.  I felt a swell of pride seeing New York Yankees caps on the stage.  And perhaps most importantly, at least to me as theater fan, I saw a musical that was both thoroughly modern and obviously built on the bones of Theater’s golden past.  That made me happy for the life of musicals in general.  In that theater I was reminded of the kind of musicals I saw as a child that taught me to love theater so deeply and I imagined In the Heights will do the same for lots of kids in generations to come, especially now that it’s being filmed for the Big Screen.

Unfortunately, I also felt like something was missing and after a lot of consideration, I’m almost positive that thing, that piece that was missing, was Lin.  I’m not trying to take away from Corbin Blue’s performance.  He was lovely, he played Usnavi with an awkward charm that I know was not natural to him and he managed it without seeming over-rehearsed.  Blue let Usnavi’s words roll off his tongue with impressive facility.  But at the end of the day Usnavi is the heart and soul of that show—even as the lives of other characters unfold around him, center stage—and Lin was the heart and soul of Usnavi.  With Lin, In the Heights must have shone its brightest, soared its highest.  No matter how wonderful a job Corbin did, those words are so clearly a part of Lin that without him, their verve just isn’t the same.  Without him the show just isn’t the same.

At the end of the day, I’m glad I finally dragged my ass down to the Richard Rogers for In the Heights.  Not only because now I don’t have to keep saying “oh, I want to see that!” but also because maybe, with patience and faith, I’ll finally get a chance to see In the Heights as it was meant to be, with Lin there center stage to tell the story, and then I’ll have something to compare it to.

Oh, swoon.

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Thank you to SoonerEmily, who inpsired us.  And, you know, enabled our addiction.

Photo Credit: Gavin, BroadwayWorld.com; Aaron, Patrick McMullan.

Last Thursday night in the middle of a blizzard, something happened that’s never happened to me at the theater before. I met a guy. Actually, no, it wasn’t that. But I did meet meet a guy. Up in the balcony, sitting in the seat next to mine. He was very sweet, and we chatted, and then he name-dropped his boyfriend. But.

There was something else.

I fell asleep during a show.

I’m horrified to admit this. To my mind, falling asleep at the theater is the domain of bored dads and oafish boyfriends who’ve been lugged along to the theater by their eager daughters and girlfriends on birthdays and special dates. People with no attention span and no imagination fall asleep at the theater. Boring people fall asleep at the theater.

Well, count me among their ranks, because somewhere in the third act of Present Laughter, the revival of the Noel Coward play that’s running at the American Airlines Theatre, I started to doze. Maybe it’s because there was a third act to begin with, one that didn’t involve much singing, and my poor musicals-attuned brain just couldn’t take it. Like it has an auto-shutoff function—like sleep mode on a computer—for anything that doesn’t involve a power ballad or Gavin Creel or both.

And maybe it’s because I was just exhausted. Thursday afterwork nights in New York City can be a drag to begin with. Plus, there was the snowstorm.

I decided to see Present Laughter because the show was advertising cheap tickets, presumably to fill seats because of the snow. That wasn’t actually the case. The show was really just advertising its rush seats, which it sells every single day, at the exact same price. In short, I could have gotten those tickets on any night. Including one, presumably, that didn’t involve hideous, soul-obliterating weather.

I really wanted to see the show anyway, though, because I love Victor Garber. The 1994 revival of Damn Yankees, for me, is One of Those Shows. One of the musicals that happened in the long darkness before I lived anywhere near New York City, when my only access to an original Broadway cast was the Tony Awards and the original cast album, which I listened to so often that it’s a wonder that I didn’t burn holes in it. Plus, I’ve seen every episode of “Alias” more times than Jonathan Groff, and this was my first opportunity to see Victor Garber onstage. In short, I was excited.

And the first act was delightful. I don’t have a lot of experience with Noel Coward, so this was really my first exposure to his tightly-wound, mannered, meticulously cheeky universe. And Victor Garber was great. Playing a mildly over-the-hill actor at the center of a hurricane of friends, producers, lovers, and hired help, all of whom are, he thinks, conspiring to make his life miserable, his performance was rather extravagantly overbaked. Which, for this character, is just about right. Likewise good was Harriet Harris, who I haven’t seen onstage since Millie, as his vinegar-tongued secretary. But somewhere in the second act, something changed. Or didn’t change. And maybe that was the real problem.

After an hour or so, everything happening onstage started to seem a little… same-y. Garber’s tone from beginning to end, and in fact the whole tone of the show, hardly shifts an inch. The plot loops back and repeats itself. The inevitable… happens. All of this is, of course, for comedic effect, but by the time the third act started, I could have used a toothpick or two to prop up my eyelids. Midway through it, I was doing that thing I used to do in math class where my eyes half-closed, then completely closed, then jerked back open again because the teacher called on me. That thing called sleeping.

My temptation was to blame myself at first. But I don’t think I have a low tolerance for lengthy or challenging entertainment. I like Russian movies and opera, in addition to Aaron Tveit with his shirt off, thanks. Maybe it really was Present Laughter‘s fault, even though I liked it. The parts that I saw while I was awake, anyway. I would recommend that you see it. If only so you can tell me how it ends.

They’re done.

The nature of the evidence doesn’t matter, the source of your juicy gossip. Whether it’s airtight or speculation or friend-of-a-friend conjecture. But let’s be real: You know that it’s true. And regardless of what anyone’s told you, or what you’ve read, you know that it’s true because it just feels true, and it feels like shit.

And weird as it is to say this, I think it’s OK to talk about it. I’m not talking about the part that’s about them. We can’t know anything about that—how it unraveled and why—but I think we can talk about the part that’s about us.

So let’s start here: They were together. I can vouch for that, because I saw them together, and if you’re one of the nine gazillion other people who happened to see the two of them in the same room in the last four months or so, you’d know it, too. They were dating and they were in love. And despite their lack of public comment on the matter, they weren’t hiding it from anyone. They dated openly. I am not exactly a theatrical girl-about-town. I don’t work in theater. My friends are not actors. I don’t live in the theater district. But for most of the autumn, Gavin Creel and Jonathan Groff were the loveliest nonsecret in NYC, and that’s to say nothing of the National Equality March, and all the stories and photos that emerged from that weekend.

And they were awesome. It goes without saying that they were nice to look at, and there was something so romantic and charming and meant-to-be about them. (If you could have seen the way they looked at each other…) But it was more than that, too. With Jonathan’s career on the very brink, and Gavin’s activism in brilliant full swing, they were poised to become one of the most high-profile gay couples in this business we call show. You could see it coming. They stood next to each other and it nearly buzzed around their heads; it had the potential to be utterly barrier-shattering and world-changing.

Which is why their rumored breakup sucks so much. They were really cute, for sure, but they were also important. And let’s face it: we were rooting for them, for the seemingly magical thing they had going. We love them so much individually. All the better, then, to know that these two very sweet, very handsome, very talented people found each other. And they were symbolic, too. If that kind of romantic rightness could exist for them, maybe it exists for all of us.

Now we’re left with Sad Gavin, who’s clearly in a lot of pain. But of course, Sad Gavin is Real Gavin, and his candor, as always, has been oddly soothing. It gives shape to our own disappointment, but mostly, it lets us offer our support in the safest ways possible. You can send hugs on Twitter, after all, with very little presumption or intrusion. It’s also a pretty moving reminder that shit can happen, relationships can end, your show can ship you across an ocean, and you can be sad about it. You can be devastated, in fact. And you won’t die. You’ll still do eight shows a week. You’ll still post photos of your dog on Twitter. You’ll still sing like you’re bulletproof, like it never even happened. And at some point, it’ll be OK. If that’s all we ever know about what happened between him and Jonathan, that’s OK, too. Because that’s the part worth remembering, the part that, more than anything, is worth saying out loud.

Today’s fantasy musical is: A Francesca Lia Block-esque rockstar fairy tale about star-crossed love between a vampire prince and an ornithologist. Set in San Francisco in 1984 and starring Natascia Diaz and Gavin Creel. She is, naturally, cute and bookish and misunderstood. And fearlessly independent. He works as a waiter in a deli and moonlights as the lead singer of a punk band, among other things. They both yearn to be loved for who they are.

If you go see The Pride off-Broadway during its limited run (and you should, because the show is good), you’ll notice a slip of paper tucked into your Playbill. On it, you’ll find a politely but pointedly-worded warning.

The first part is a pretty standard request to turn off your cell phone. The last reminds you that herbal cigarettes will be smoked during the show. And boy, are they. But we’ll get to that in a minute. What caught my eye was the text in the center of the page, bolded and underlined lest you attempt to ignore it. It says:

Due to the quiet nature of The Pride, there will be absolutely no re-admittance to the theater during the play.

It goes on to say that if you have to leave your seat for any reason during the show, you won’t be let back to it. Which is basically another way of saying the exact same thing.

The Pride is a quiet play, and an intricate one, too. Set in two time periods—postwar and present-day London—it focuses on the intertwining relationships of three characters, two of them gay. None of the actors are head miked and most of the dialogue happens in the intimacy of living rooms and on park benches. Unfortunately, the show is playing at the Lortell on Christopher Street where, I swear, the stage sits directly on top of the 1 train, because you’ll hear (and feel) it rumble intermittently throughout the show. But that was nothing compared with the cacophony that Ben Whishaw, Hugh Dancy, and Andrea Riseborough had to compete with on the night I saw the show. The only thing rumbling (and wheezing, and shifting, and dramatically sighing) louder than the subway that night was… the audience.

Never in my life have I heard so much coughing during a play.

Yes, the characters do smoke herbals during the show, as that little slip of paper so kindly warned. Packs and packs of them. Were they real cigarettes, I’m sure that all of us would have cancer by now, and I only saw the show three nights ago. And yes, the herbals did irritate my contact lenses so badly that, at one point, I thought I had Pringles stuck to my eyeballs. But oh, the coughing.

Endless coughing. Choruses and choruses of coughing. Harmonized coughing. During scenes. Between scenes. During the nearly silent  moments. During the arguments and din. It was gross. It was positively pneumococcal.

I’m not sure whether everyone in New York City is just sick right now (and if you weren’t before you entered the theater…) or if coughing is both virally and psychologically catchy. Maybe, once you hear someone cough, the urge suddenly strikes you, like you hadn’t thought of it before until you felt that old guy’s spittle on the back of your neck. I don’t know. All I know is that by the end of Act I, I wanted to kill all of these people. Or run out at intermission for a bulk-sized bag of Sucrets and a giant bottle of Purell, the latter of which I planned to keep all to myself.

Here are some other people I wanted to kill: The people who, upon hearing the coughing, thought it would be a great idea to discourage the aforementioned coughing by heaving great, annoyed, New York City sighs of judgement and disappointment, while shifting in their seats. That was awesome, too. It sounded like this:

Balding man in enormous sneakers: Hacking, phlegm-filled cough

Woman in square plastic-framed glasses and a long black coat: Sigh, elaborate weight shift including the crossing and uncrossing of legs, understated click of tongue

Oh. My God.

The thing I also don’t understand is this: If you have an uncontrollable, Richter-magnitude cough, why don’t you do take some precautions before popping in to see your favorite pindrop-silent gay drama? You could, for example, purchase your own bag of Sucrets beforehand to save me the trip at intermission. You could see your physician at Westchester County Medical. (Cough medicine with codeine is… amazing. It might help you enjoy The Pride even more.) You could, perhaps, wait to go to the theater until your obviously serious and plainly audible illness is cleared up. You could go see another show, like Hair for example, where you could auction off a car in the right box or light a bonfire on the balcony during the second act, and no one even would notice. The cast would get confused and think it was part of the show. Or even if they knew it wasn’t, they wouldn’t care. They’d think it was great. You’d look up and Will Swenson would be sitting next to you, toasting marshmallows.

At one point during The Pride, I seriously expected the lovely—and prodigiously talented—Ben Whishaw to offer his handkerchief to a guy in the front row. God knows, actors have broken character in the past to tell off rowdy audience members. (Hugh Jackman, anyone? Patti Lupone’s epic mobile-device-related meltdown?) And as the show continued, I started to fantasize about how something like this would play out. I imagined Ben slowly turning to the audience, all squinty-eyed, and saying something like, “I am so sorry to interrupt you, but I am English and an artist. I played Hamlet to glowing notices at The Old Vic. And as such, I would ask that you please remain quiet. I will leave it to you develop your own working definition of ‘quiet’ as it pertains to this show.”

And then the action would resume and everyone would start coughing again.

Leaving the theater, we speculated on why everyone seemed so bronchial. The Mick blamed the age of the audience, hypothesizing that coughs are just a more common thing when you’re 80, and that they tend to get worse when you stay out past eight. (She also noted that this audience didn’t even attempt a standing ovation at the end, probably because their knees couldn’t take it.) I thought it might just be a matter of epiglottal willpower, and a distinct lack of fruity candy.

Whatever the reason, all of that—the coughing and the sighing—somehow didn’t ruin the play for us, which is a testament to its power, and the talent of the actors onstage. Or maybe it’s just a testament to how Hugh Dancy looks in shorts. I would go again. And I really would bring cough drops to hand out. You know, so the audience could spend the entire show slowly… slowly… unwrapping them.

Confession: I didn’t get the whole Cheyenne Jackson thing up until about three weeks ago.

He’s just so…beefy.  And shiny.  And his eyebrows!  They’re second only to Joe Jonas’ in their visual presence.  Plus he’s just so damn handsome.  Like, so handsome it seems calculated.  So handsome I convinced myself he couldn’t possibly be anything more than just handsome.  Because, I told myself, the universe in which I live could not even handle putting any more wonderful things into one package.

So I was anti-Cheyenne Jackson for a long time.  For years.

And then, this happened.  @Cheyguynyc came to life on January 31^st, 2010.

I was probably softening up a bit beforehand.  I’d run into him several times on the streets in December and January.  (You know, like that time I was talking volubly about Aaron Tveit’s nipples and, unbeknownst to me, Cheyenne was standing beside me.  That was fun.)  I’d witnessed his graciousness as ladies in the street tried to accost him and tell him how lovely he is/was/forever will be.  And I’d gotten some perspective on how his eyebrows really aren’t that over-powering or over-plucked, and his eyes are even more beautiful up close.

But @Cheyguynyc was the nail in the coffin, methinks.  I mean…have you read his twitter?  Please tell me you have.

He’s hilarious.  And charming.  And sharp.  And hilarious.

Best of all, he’s all these things without even trying.  This is not some show he’s putting on.  This is just…what Cheyenne is thinking.  He used the word ‘manscara’ so subtly I almost didn’t notice it.  And when I did, I laughed at his tweet again.  Loudly.  Plus, he got Christopher Sieber and Will Swenson to do Blue Steel with him, and that sent my heart aflutter for about fifty-six different reasons.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I was wrong about Cheyenne Jackson.  The universe can put many, many awesome things into a beautiful package, like brains and humor and a set of pipes.  And the fact that I just confessed to ever having been wrong about anything in the history of human existence is kind of a miracle in and of itself.  I think Cheyenne—in addition to making me laugh—may have just taught me a life lesson.  Epic.

Two important things happened completely by accident last Monday night.  First, I got drunk.  Second, I kind of fell in love with Andrew Kober.

I know, it seems stupid that both of these things occurred by accident.  After all, I was the one who purchased tickets to see his Koberet performance, and who buys tickets for a concert/show/thing they have limited interest in?  And how, exactly, does a girl get drunk by accident?  Was I not serving my own beers while I played Guitar Hero in my apartment ahead of the show?  Did I not place each of the three gin & soda orders myself?  Shouldn’t I have known better?

The drunkenness I’ll blame on the uhh…generous pours of the bartender at Joe’s Pub who very graciously remembered my stupidly girly order that involves a splash of cranberry.  That lovely man let the gin bottle hover over my glass far longer than the soda gun, bless him.  I mean, when you can still taste the booze in your third drink you know that there’s going to be a problem.  Unfortunately at that point, it is also too late.

The falling in love with Kober part is entirely Andrew’s fault.  Entirely.

I think it was “Le Salon” that won me over, which is hands down the best French Whorehouse story I’ve ever heard.  There was a point during that story I actually thought I might snarf up my booze.  It was strangely refreshing to laugh that hard on a night that I’d expected to be sort of—to quote Lucky—insufferable.  But I can’t lie; Koberet was more than just one good number.  Andrew really blew my expectations out of the water all the way around.  Hence, you know, the falling in love thing.

I can’t pinpoint what it is that made me feel like Kober was a pompous ass in the lead up to Koberet when, clearly, so many people quite love him.  Maybe it was the public Twitter shaming of a young fangirl who had foolishly but innocently crossed a line.  Maybe it was a million other things.  Maybe it was my own stupidity.

I can tell you that my lack of interest in the show was a lot less about Kober personally—I kind of like pompous jackasses (?) and anyone who has seen Hair knows the boy can sang—and a lot more about this whole ‘Koberet’ business.  Because it seemed as if this was more likely to go wildly wrong than to turn out right.  Koberet?  Really?  Talk about going for the low-hanging fruit.  Talk about something that has enormous potential to be absolutely dreadful.

If we’re going to be completely honest here (and we are, see: Gavin Creel Has Gone Radio Silent and the World Is Concerned) I really bought the ticket for people watching potential.  And with more than a little hope of up close and personal @Hairtribe crush sightings.  Not that I harbor any inappropriate feelings like that.

But regardless of why I was there, last Monday Andrew Kober changed my mind, about Koberet and maybe about pretty much everything.  He was funny, self-deprecating and warm.  And fuck it; he put together a great show.  Sure, he made some predictable choices.  But he also sang Jamie Cullum’s “Twentysomething,” and that is basically a direct path to my heart.  Then he busted out the Rock Band and that very cute Ryan Watkinson joined him on stage in a tight tee-shirt.  And in my intoxicated state, I thought this was incredible and groundbreaking.

I ended the night eating cup-o-noodles on my couch at nearly two am, trying desperately to sober up a bit before bed.  I had work in the morning, after all.  Adulthood was calling.  But mostly, I was just pleased with how unexpectedly wonderful my night had turned out.  And how I had just witnessed an early, important chapter in what’s looking more and more like a long and storied career.