A Virgin No More

No, not that kind of virgin. Please.

Last week, I finally saw a performance of the musical Pippin with my friend N. That may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but I had never seen the show before. Ever. I realize that lots of people could perhaps claim that as well, but I have seen quite a few musicals in my time. I'm a fan of musical theater, after all, so why wouldn't I have seen Pippin before now?

What's even odder is the apparently large number of productions of Pippin that must be going on around the world even as we speak. Several years ago, I went to see a production of Jesus Christ Superstar that featured two of my friends. It was in a church somewhere down in Orange County, and there wasn't much to do besides talk to a few other people in the audience whom I knew and read the program. I noticed that several members of the cast and crew had been in productions of Pippin. Since I had been living in the Southern California region for about 10-12 years at that point and most of the cast and crew were also residents of the area, I began to wonder where all of these productions had been.

After that performance, I started to read the programs more carefully when I went to see a musical. I was looking for someone, anyone, who had also performed in Pippin. It turns out that at almost every musical theater production, at least one cast member or someone on the crew has a connection to this musical from the early 1970s. Try it yourself. The next time you go to a musical, especially a "professionally" produced one, look in the program to find the people with Pippin in their past.

I thought I had found a production with no connections a few years ago when I went to see Wicked at the Pantages (during its first stop in Los Angeles, not the current "open-ended" run). None of the cast members had ever performed in it; none of the crew had ever worked on it. I thought I had at long last found the only non-Pippin performance ever, and then I read the bio for the songwriter, Stephen Schwartz. Yes, that's right. The same Stephen Schwartz who wrote the music for Pippin almost 30 years earlier.

(I have, by the way, since found a musical theater production with no connection to Pippin whatsoever: The Color Purple at the Ahmanson downtown this spring. Go figure.)

Since all of these people had been in Pippin or worked on it, I wondered why I had never even heard of a local production or even a touring company production. I just had no access to Pippin because no one ever seemed to be performing it anywhere near me. Finally, my college decided to "revive" the show for its opening production of the spring semester. N and I sat in the third row in the center of the theater, and I guess I can now say that I have been deflowered. Pippin got me at last.

I can't say that it's a great show. Only a couple of the songs seem particularly memorable: "Magic to Do" and maybe "No Time at All." The guy playing Pippin was no great singer and not really much of a dancer either. The girl playing his stepmother was a bit too nasally for my tastes as well, a sort of Fran Drescher type. A couple of former students were in the company, and they are really quite talented dancers. The staging was, as always, interesting, and I thought the way the musical played with the conventions and expectations of musical theater was clever. Still, I can't believe it took more than 44 years for me to lose my Pippin virginity. They say you never forget your first time, but sadly, sometimes the first time isn't all that memorable.