"Sin" Scene 10

“I Won’t Wait Forever.”  Faith, who was eager to make it as a singer, has let Devlin coerce her into signing over her soul in a contract with Santana (the devil); as a result she has been immediately catapulted to fame and fortune and we find her selling out the “Hollywood Bowl.” Things have changed, however. Her “theme” song, which was a country-music ode to her faith, (and her choreography), has now been reworked into a dark, “soulless,” rather run-of-the-mill pop song focused on lust and sex.  Luis (God) continues to watch from the sidelines, increasingly concerned—even if he knew it would all happen as he always does, it’s disconcerting to see one of his “faithful” going this direction.

“I Won’t Wait Forever” was the original title of this song when a young female co-worker wrote it and sang it around 1992, as I mentioned before.  The original version was a plea to the man in her life to stop wasting her time and either commit or go.  As I also mentioned before, even in 1991 I had this idea of a “rock” version of the song, a “dance” version and a “country” version (that I shared earlier).  This made the song ideal to be a kind of grounding element motif for “Sin,” where you get to hear the song presented in different ways for different moods throughout the show (as a prayer, as a trashy dance song, as a declaration moment near the end). 

This was one of the moments I was most looking forward to when I had the idea to do “Sin,” perhaps one of the “hearts” of the show (there are four; “Sin” tells four stories). 

On the one hand, musically it’s my “turf,” I’ve been doing 4/4-stomp “dance” music since I was able to record, having been around when disco first went mainstream and following it through every permutation it’s been through since (some speculate “disco” is the longest-running musical genre in history.  I don’t know about that, we’ll see in another hundred years or so I guess). 

I don’t know why I’m so fixated on this style of music, and it likely doesn’t matter why, I sincerely love all that synthesized, arpeggiated stuff, and so I wanted to see if I could do a show that featured some of it. 

I tried it with “Ecstasy” (the title song) but even there it was watered down a little to sound more themed-in to the show idea, which was early-70s (pre-disco, to everyone’s confusion who came to my show and thought it would Xanadu or Roller Boogie, oh dear) and more organic. 

With “I Won’t Wait Forever” I decided to just go for it, there’s not a single “real” instrument sound in the song,  it’s as digital as can be.

Some people undoubtedly hated it musically but most people in the audience saw it for the dynamic, fun, halfway-point climax of “Sin” that I hoped it would be.  If nothing else, it got people’s pulses racing, and seeing the actress playing “Faith” change from a naïve, sincere country girl into…Lady Gaga…was always a fun surprise; I enjoyed seeing the audience reaction anyway.

A word about that—transformations…obviously I’ve gotten a lot of comments about the transformations in my shows… “What is it with you taking plain-looking women and turning them into female ‘female impersonators?’” 

I don’t know.  I long ago stopped guessing.  I’m not into “drag” myself, despite how quick everyone is to assume when they see one of my characters dressed up that it MUST be me in drag (sigh). 

Not that I have anything against it, of course not, I love it all—and I did do drag for Halloween many years ago at the request of a makeup artist friend (you can read about it in my book of short stories, “Draw Me a Picture”—and yes, I was FABULOUS ha ha).

But I’ve just always enjoyed seeing the difference between women in and out of heavy makeup.  I can guess the roots of it…my grandma, mom and sister had heavily-made-up Barbies around a lot when I was a kid…my mom had taken some glam photos when she was young and wore very specific (and pretty heavy) “glamor” makeup and hair at times…I was obsessed with the transformation Ann-Margret goes through in “Tommy” when I was a kid…and then, once more, thanks to Ken Russell, I was obsessed with Kathleen Turner, both in and out of her “China Blue” drag in “Crimes of Passion.”  Carla Gugino as a China Blue tribute in “Elektra Luxxe.”  As I said, I no longer ask why—anyone who knows me at all knows it’s a thing with me (and has likely seen my drawings of what they once called “va-va-voom,” pinup-style female characters). 

There have been big transformation scenes in my short films and stories, and my first show “Ecstasy” was practically a coming-out story for females in over-the-top 70s drag.  Of course I’d have a scene like that in “Sin” (and do it one more time in “Ruby” a year later, where we finally got it exactly right at last). 

I’ve been so fortunate to have performers willing to play along and get into the spirit of it.  Kehau did the sing-through in 2011 and, as I mentioned in the last entry, had about 5 minutes to get into costume and come out ready to sing—she never once complained and seemed to have a lot of fun with it. 

I actually found a wig called “Lady Gaga” for her for that performance…Gaga was still relatively new and still doing platinum blonde wigs back in 2009 or so.  In truth, “I Won’t Wait Forever” was done (sorta) in Gaga’s pop style from that time, or maybe a few years before (*trivia—I designed the song/moment so it could be updated to whatever pop sound was current if the show needed to be updated, with the assumption that there’s always likely going to be a genre that includes women dressed up like Barbies singing about sexuality). 

Kay came up with some fun, “jerky” moves for Kehau for the sing through—the two of them had worked closely together on my show “Ecstasy” and coordinated all the dancing so it was fun to have them work together again.  I think it’s a fun, silly, and even sexy moment and, again, they were both good sports for putting up with my crazy ideas. 

When it came time to do it again for the 2015 version I came up with the idea of doing an all-out parody of the “When I Sing About You” country version of the song that plays earlier in the show…the dance moves would replicate the original but with a more sultry, and slightly soul-dead vibe, but adding overt sexuality.

As I mentioned before, I don’t know that Sarah was thrilled about having to get into all that tacky garb and do all the grinding (especially with her family in the audience some nights) but she did it perfectly every performance and was a really good sport all around (and I do believe she had a lot of fun with it ultimately, or hope so anyway).   

It was a tricky thing to do, just on the edge of bad taste or could be taken as rude or sexist in some ways, so I’m only sharing clips and not the whole videos of the scene…it’s theatre, a “you had to be there” moment that doesn’t work the same in a recorded version, and part of the contract between performers and show creators is being respectful of what they did live that they might not have done otherwise. But hopefully give you an idea.  For the 2015 video I laid the “country” version from earlier in the show over the top of the pop version, so you can see how the choreography was a mirror.  I don’t honestly think anyone ever picked up on that in the audience, and it’s OK that they didn’t, but it was there in case anyone noticed. 

In truth, although I think the song is lots of fun and really gets the middle of the show charged up, it once again proves that 3-minute, traditionally-structured pop songs don’t really lend themselves to musical theatre.  You get the “joke” of the scene fast and, having relayed that joke, the story should press on.  I definitely noticed audiences getting restless about halfway through the song—it doesn’t go anywhere, just keeps repeating (in pop music, non-theatre-music style) and in terms of “story” made its point fast, so the endless repetition that goes with this sort of song makes it kind of redundant. We also didn’t give the audience much to look at (although I was told in no uncertain terms by many looking at Sarah and the dancers was more than enough to sustain an entire 75 minute performance alone!) Plus the pace of the story has picked up a bit at this point in the show, and this song stops it all in its tracks. 

A fun moment, for sure, and I know people enjoyed it…but I’d be sure to revisit it if we ever did this show again. 

At any rate…here’s the original demo version with all vocals by Kehau Gabriel, probably the closest to a "single" you could pull from the whole show:  https://youtu.be/XvLMAN49tGo

Here’s the version from 2011:  https://youtu.be/XvLMAN49tGo

Here’s 2015:  https://youtu.be/PE2WDP8vyyU

Up next, “The Rise and Fall of Faith,” a show-within-a-show that was a nightmare to perform live…as one person described it to me sarcastically (echoing the tagline for “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”), “Who will survive…and what will be left of them…?”  haha…