Yesterday, for the first time in 24 weeks, I booked a ticket to a piece of indoor theatre.
And man, how I cried.
I'll be honest, it doesn't take much to set me off at the moment, but the thought of actually getting to sit in a theatre (albeit socially distanced) with other humans, and enjoy a musical is a lot.
The phrase "you don't know how much you'll miss it till it's gone" has never been more applicable than it is now.
I really did know that theatre was a huge part of my life, but I don't think I'd fully realised that it was my life. I've never really stopped to think that it is both my employment and my home. I really do consider theatre my home.
Throughout some pretty turbulent times in the past 8 years, theatre was there for me to escape to, to cry at and to be healed by. There isn't a single time I've been to the theatre and one of those hasn't happened (apart from that year everyone did Macbeth and they were ALL terrible...!)
I'm always booking tickets for stuff. Like, I memorised my card details years ago so that it was just easier! But I couldn't let myself book anything during this time. It hurt too much when an entire year's worth of shows vanished in the space of a few weeks.
But now, we appear to be moving again.
Tomorrow, I am going to the first musical for 23 weeks (and honestly, if you'd told me it was going to be Joanna Riding and Janie Dee in A Little Night Music I may have told you that Covid-19 was worthwhile to have to live through...) and I'm going to get to see so many friends tomorrow, which again has been something I've missed. In person, human conversations about theatre, geeking out, has been something I've really missed.
I have two more outdoor musicals booked in August and September, and then in October, we return to indoor theatre. It's sort of ironic that The Last Five Years will be the first proper indoor musical I see after this madness, as it was the first 'virtual' musical produced in lockdown...
It's been an emotional time, and I'm really not ready for the amount I'm going to cry tomorrow when I'm back with 200 other people, watching theatre.
Yesterday, the Government moved us to Stage 4 of the 5 step plan: socially distanced performances indoors. I'll continue to shout at their useless approach to everything until we, the arts, get what we deserve.
But for now, we are moving forward. Even if it's at a snail's pace...
"And we will come back home, home again"
The Greatest Showman, Pasek and Paul
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