"Sin" Scene 12

“Get There”  Faith has reached the pinnacle of celebrity and found it lacking…her life feels empty and she feels as if she’s betrayed her core.  Alone on the stage, she reflects about her life, gradually coming to the conclusion that nothing matters.  She sees the knife that Santana has left in front of her and is thinking about using it on herself…just in time Devlin appears and shocks her out of her trance…he yells at her not to make the mistakes he made, not to throw her life away, not to give up.  Broken and confused, Faith runs off. 

I originally wrote “Get There” for Charles Herrera when we were recording his album in 2003 or so.  Musically it was inspired by the kd Lang cover song “My Old Addiction” mixed with the background music commonly found in the weirdly cool recordings of radio personality “Joe Frank” on NPR.  

With this song, I set out to create the saddest, most depressing song that ever existed.  It was a definite low point for me personality…I had “lost the thread” of my life, as they say. 

I had achieved most of the things I’d wanted in life and though there were still things I wanted it seemed, increasingly, as if I’d never get those things or, having gotten them, they wouldn’t seem worth the effort. 

It’s possible I was clinically depressed…I think I was really just going through a bad patch, I’ve been through quite a few in my lifetime so I recognize them for what they are now and I don’t fear them so much anymore. 

In each dark phase I would inevitably get so lost I could barely find my way out of it.  Still, I was able, somehow, to pull myself out by thinking, “I wasn’t always like this, and I won’t always be like this.”   But I know first-hand what a terrible trap that kind of depression can be, what a fine line it can be that you walk at such times and how awfully it can affect everything and make you feel hopeless—and desperate for an out…ANY out. 

Art has always been my salve at such times, the thing that keeps me sane, and I suppose writing such a depressing song was cathartic.  Charles resisted it, suggesting we tag on a line of hope at the end.  My intention was to write my own version of “Is That All There Is,” without realizing that Peggy Lee’s song actually does have shades of hope here and there (“Then let’s keep dancing…” etc).   The original “Get There” lyrics reflect my life up until then and offer no hope or joy, just a shade of all-consuming gray.  I don’t listen to it much, to say the least, and I owe Charles a debt of thanks for singing it, and doing it so well.  Rather than share the original version, which is really just too personal and sad, here is a version Charles recorded with new lyrics in Spanish.  It’s still a melancholy song but not nearly so bleak or raw as the original:  https://youtu.be/fV7wM7q9VII

I knew from the start “Get There,” with updated lyrics, would be part of “Sin.”  One of the ideas I push in the show (in the next song, actually) is that “hell” is a place where you feel nothing—no passion, no drama, no love, joy or feelings at all, good or bad, just emptiness and boredom.  Well, maybe that’s just my own personal idea of hell, to someone else it might be a relief.  At any rate, the idea in the story is that Faith has done everything imaginable and has no idea how to proceed.  I have known friends and peers who have suffered through addiction…using chemicals to chase after the feeling of “feeling good” until your body no longer knows how to feel good on its own, leaving one feeling empty or, worse, craving. I had my own relatively simple experience with this with cigarettes—I was surely an addict, and surely felt “nothing” a lot, as I drugged my nerves and dulled my senses so I could avoid living my life.   

I wanted to portray this in my show…partly because it made sense for a story that examines the nature of “sin” and “good and evil” and “right and wrong,” partly because I really wanted to try doing something sincere, serious and emotionally charged in a theatrical piece that was sung-through. 

The scene was a mixed blessing…in purely technical terms it cleansed the palate from the frenzy of activity that came in all the scenes before; emotionally it really brought the house down and, potentially, the show stopped being “fun” for a while.  That part is up for debate and it depends on who you talk to, but the one thing I did notice was you could hear a pin drop while the song was going, the audience was so into it.  And it did, in fact, carry the story along and set up the more serious second half of the show. 

More importantly, it was a performance moment…Kehau Gabriel first did it as “Faith” on the demo, and none of those of us who knew her then could quite believe how much emotion she poured into it, while still doing a great job technically.  I think she also saw it as a way to legitimize a character in “Sin” that, up until then, perhaps came off as shallow or thin.  After this moment in the show, no one could think that way about the character—or the performer playing her.    Kehau’s version is here…I used the demo because in the sing-through video in 2011 she kept her “Lady Gaga” costume on and it really is kind of unfortunate—the costume worked for her previous song but comes off clown-like in such a serious number, creating a weird effect—it couldn’t be helped given the way the sing-thru evening was conceived, but it doesn’t do the song, or her performance, justice, so here’s the demo version instead:  https://youtu.be/WPMOcFsQCp0

Then there’s Sarah Kennedy’s performance in the 2015 show.  Not much needs be said by me, her singing speaks for itself, and says more than even my words.  Sarah was literally a gift from the gods, I was so fortunate to have her perform in my show.  Somehow her rendition fills me with hope too.  Anyway, here’s her version:  https://youtu.be/G2IszMeemUk

And so “act 2” begins (although there was never a clear division).  Everything has been introduced and worked through, and now it’s time to see the consequences of “sin” in action…