A Performance Diary
A Performance Diary
By Annie Hamilton
Annie Hamilton is a writer and performer from NYC. This is the inaugural entry in her seasonal diary for Metrograph, recounting her adventures and encounters across the city.
Annie Hamilton photographed at home by Leia Jospé.
MAY 5 - SWEENEY TODD
I’m getting into musicals. Growing up, I was encouraged not to see them, aside from Sondheim. Regardless, I didn’t even see Sondheim. I did have a crush on the one Method actor in my high school, though. After being cast as Kenickie in Grease, he’d recline against the lockers, smoking candy cigarettes.
In April, I went to see Sweeney Todd on Broadway, knowing little about it beforehand. I had heard whispers of cannibalism, but as the fog hit the second row, I could no longer control my body. I had a physically explosive reaction. Hand over mouth, knees pulled up to chest. Shocking turns! Annaleigh Ashford is a modern-day Giulietta Masina. Her performance really did remind me of Nights of Cabiria (1957).
Beyond the production feeling like some sort of interactive tour/rollercoaster (in an involved way, not a tacky way), the lyrics behind those TUNES! “Johanna”!!
There’s probably nothing more worthwhile than being a musical theater performer (and nothing cooler, or more impressive, than being a rock star). The musical actors in Sweeney Todd are rock stars for another set. The song “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir” felt like being on drugs. I’m sober, so I seek out drug-esque experiences, and I think the American musical is that for me. I don’t know why people knock ’em.
MAY 18 - COMMENCEMENT SPEECHES ON YOUTUBE
I went to The Strand bookstore early one Saturday morning in May and bought a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power Of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. That’s where I’m at. I simply cannot stand being inside my own brain. I’m tired of knowing what my problems are and doing nothing about them. Rather than work out, or meditate, or try DBT, I figured I’d start in the self-help section.
So I’ve been waking up at 6am, making gratitude lists and guzzling kombucha, and it dawned on me that perhaps a more worthwhile activity might be watching notable speakers at college graduations on YouTube. Like I said, I’m at a crossroads, and I could use some life guidelines.
Turns out these writers and celebs and politicians really know how to churn it out for graduating classes. Watching Aaron Sorkin speak to Syracuse’s class of 2012 had the same effect on me as watching an early aughts Best Picture Oscar-nominee. You get the whole dramatic arc, the strife and then the inevitable uplift, all in a clean 16 minutes. I went from videos of speeches by Sorkin, to Matt Damon, to Steven Soderbergh, to David Foster Wallace, to Denzel Washington, to Jim Carrey. I like that these men, from what I’ve gathered about their personal lives, absolutely do not (or did not) have it together. But when given the premise of performing wisdom, they become teachers, survivors, advocates even. Good advice can often come from an aching person. Putting on the costume of insight-giver instilled these men with an assuredness that made me feel like I, too, might be filled with endless possibilities. Or that at least, I probably should try just phoning it in for a while.
JUNE 3 - THE NOTEBOOK
I’m leaning into my schtick with this one. I keep promising myself that I’ll find meaning elsewhere, not through the timeline of a relationship—and I keep vowing that I’ll stop publishing my love life—but God, it’s so easy. It’s too easy. So here we go.
After a three-month, gorgeously cinematic, nihilistic spring romance, I was getting ready to say goodbye to my lover, and I didn’t want him to leave. It was the type of relationship I’d always dreamed about, that I hadn’t yet experienced—we loved each other, but it just wasn’t right. It wasn’t going to work. It was doomed. The whole relationship was a performance of sorts, but the sincere kind. We lived a movie. At some point it had to end.
The week leading up to his departure from New York, I started playing The Notebook (2004) whenever he left the house. When he’d get home, he’d catch me at the rowboat scene, or the “That’s what we do! We fight!” scene, or James Marsden’s marriage proposal, or some other meaty moment of emotional train-wreckery. Obviously I was watching it constantly to get him to realize love is the best thing on planet Earth, and that it’s hard to come by. “Don’t throw me away! I’m irreplaceable!” Well, that was the plan.
What I realized, though, in watching The Notebook over and over is that that movie, along with all the other romcoms I bled for growing up, fucking poisoned my sorry ass. I perform in relationships not just because I’m terrified of someone getting to know me, but because I want the fight for love. I want the blow-ups as proof that coming together is profound. I stomached box-office-bait romcoms, arty French romcoms, all of Warren Beatty’s amorous pursuits—my adolescence is marked by the romance movies I was watching. And they poisoned me! They’re the reason I don’t want the slow, dependable kind of relationship my friends are always urging me to have. I want the fireworks and the insanity, I want to go down with the ship, because that’s living! So, yeah. The Notebook is tops. I generally reject that question, “What’s the one thing you’d bring to a desert island,” but I’m bringing it up here now ’cause I could watch this movie every day of the year and never tire of it. It bums me out that my personal taste is the opposite of what I make, or write—the movie I’m working on now is a nasty-ass vaudeville romp, the kind of thing my heroes would think is cheap. But if I could make anything, it’d be The Notebook. The Notebook is my dream escape. It’s what I want life to be.
