Oma + Broadway

Plus behind the scenes chaos of launch day

Happy Sunday! And not any Sunday…it’s TONY SUNDAY. So enjoy this letter on theatre and cheese (more than usual).

Something Tasty: A new cheese pairing to try

Oma; photo from Murray’s Cheese

I have written about Oma before, but I just had some again, this time fully back under the care of the von Trapp family ( yes, that von Trapp family), but instead of nuns and musicals in Austria, think more cheese and beer in Vermont. I had it with a chilled rosè and it was a perfect happy hour snack for the weird humid rainy-sunny-cloudy warm weather we’ve been having. Read more about this gorgeous washed rind HERE.

Something True: A true story/ reflection

2013 Tony Award opening number from tonyawards.com

It’s Tony Sunday! The Super Bowl for us theatre folk. It’s just another awards show with it’s own politics, and winning a Tony means everything and nothing and art is subjective etc, etc. But there is a certain magic to the Tony’s.

The best way to describe it is this 2013 Tony opener by Neil Patrick Harris that I watch OFTEN. The close-up patter always makes me cry- you’ll see.

If your introduction to me is through this newsletter, you probably know me as a writer and cheese person, but/and/also I am still very much a theatre person (more on this next week).

My dream used to be being on Broadway. Full stop.

And that still is a dream, always. But the version of me that was “Broadway or bust” had a very limited view of what being a theatre professional, or even a professional storyteller meant or could mean. People envision the life of a Broadway performer to be fairly glamorous, and sometimes it is, but most of the time you have to live like a nun.

Eight shows a week is no joke, it’s a very specific lifestyle you have to reallyyyy want. And there is absolutely no shame in wanting it or not wanting it.

Theatre school teaches you how to act, and sing, and dance. But they don’t spend a lot of time helping you figure out what you love about acting, or singing, or dancing. They don’t really help you figure out who you are as a storyteller.

My theory on why there are so many theatre people in food, and especially so many musical theatre people in cheese, is not because “out-of-work actors work in restaurants and get stuck there”. It’s because, maybe for the first time, they find a form of storytelling they connect with in a different way.

Actors like to experiment and play and work on things and perfect them and serve them up to an audience. They enjoy figuring out the intricacies of a new character, where they come from, why they are the way they are, create the fully embodied experience of that character, and then present that story to other people. Trade “character” for “cheese” or “wine” or “beer” or “fragrance” and you have a decent population of the artisanal product community in NYC. There is deep storytelling in food. As I always say:

Cheese is an edible story.

Actors also love to put on a show, and get a reaction. Food does that too.

Broadway is a hell of a place to tell a story. One of the best. And, wherever in the world we exist, whatever we do, a whole world of creative expression opens itself up to us if we discover what kind of stories we want to tell.

Farm to Fable: An example of food showing up in our favorite kinds of storytelling

When we think of food and musical theatre numbers, Oliver!’s “Food, Glorious Food” is the big obvious one, but I wanna talk about Omelette: the fake musical within the musical Something Rotten. The Bottom brothers are playwrights in Shakespeare’s time, and one of them pays a soothsayer to predict Bard’s next big play. The soothsayer is on the eccentric side, and not great at his job, and tells him “Omelette” instead of “Hamlet”.

Here is a video of the very silly number that comes out of that very wrong prediction with full tapping egg costumes, and HERE is the moment he says Omelette should be… a musical. If you are a musical theatre nerd like me, see how many references you can catch!

There’s some extra juicy stuff this week for paid subscribers. Behind the paywall you will find some timestamped behind-the-scenes stories on all the messy parts that happened before the book launch party…