Original expanded essay (originally published on Playbill.com)

We were in the middle of a six-course epicurean dinner and I had just had been served my main course, which looked shockingly spare to my American eye. Two scallops, three shrimp, and little else on the large, white plate. It didn’t take me three minutes to disappear all that, and so I was all ears—and appetite—when the ship’s doctor approached the table and stood ominously still. 

That night I was seated at a table of eight, including a few of the featured actors on this beautiful Playbill Travel cruise down the Rhône River and two passengers. We had eaten a seasonal tomato salad and a traditional French onion soup, followed by the main course. We were relaxed and in what the French still call the “sorbet course moment” of the meal (even if they’re not actually serving a pungent sherbet), the moment of relaxation and renewal before you tackle the remaining courses. I knew Bud, the ship’s doctor, from the night before when my mother and I had dined with passengers Jerry and Paula. Jerry and Bud were friends, and it was clear Jerry had been on many cruises before—though not as many as the doctor, who has been on all of them. 

The Playbill cruises are that way. You can sit at one table and end up speaking to guests at the table next to you; friendships seem to bloom easily after days of shared excursions at chocolate factories, olive farms, and vineyards. People bring their families, sisters, parents, neighbors. The dinners in France were especially designed as cultural studies—a chance to taste a lot of amazing wine, with an onboard sommelier guiding our meals and explaining how the Rhône valley wines being produced all around us should be enjoyed: how a Chateauneuf du Pape  might best be paired with the quail dinner, or how a Cote Rotie would suit a plate of peppery filet. 

I had already started the process of procuring a copy of “Bring Him Home” from Les Misérables for the ship’s doctor. Over dinner the other night, it had seemed clear that it might be wonderful to give him a cameo appearance in my Saturday night concert. He had been on over 14 cruises and, singing for me a cappella, right then proved he had a lovely, pure voice with all the necessary Irish tenor stretch.  

But, at this moment, his face indicated that he was not thinking about his potential impending discovery. We had a problem, he said quietly. In moments, I gleaned that the pianist Seth Rudetsky’s daughter was off to the hospital, and the two fathers went with her. It was not deeply serious but it appeared she needed medical care and antibiotics. 

And now, Seth wasn’t on the boat! The show was canceled. I looked at my watch. It was 9:07. People were leaving the dining room. The theatre was open at 9:00 and the show due to begin at 9:30. On a Playbill cruise, there are concerts nearly every evening, and tonight was supposed to be an evening with Lillias White. Because of the lure of great food and wine in France, the first evening on board had been a lengthy and delicious epicurean dinner, with no performance after. The second evening was Rebecca Luker’s beautiful solo concert. Now it was our third evening and passengers were ready to get into the momentum of a theatre cruise. They were ready for a show!

​My mind started racing. It’s the third night, they’ve only seen one show typical of the cruises so far. I said to the other actors, “Come on, we can pull something together! A Q&A at the very least!” Marc Kudisch and Rebecca fully agreed—but they had yet to finish dinner (their entrees were a bit more robust than mine) so I went to investigate. 

Someone told me there was a passenger who could play the piano, who was upstairs playing right now in the lounge. His name was Michael. They were escorting him down. I ran up the stairs, as he was coming down the other stairs. Finally, I met him at the base, and I greeted him with, “Hi! So, you can play the piano? Great! What songs do you know?” By now people are all heading to the theatre, looking forward to the performance.

A bit taken aback, Michael managed to say, “Uh. ‘She’s the One’?” I looked encouragingly at him. He paused for a long time.

“It’s a song I wrote,” he said at last. 

“Ah,” I said. “That’s so wonderful… but, gosh, we wouldn’t have time to learn it. But we will get to it, that I promise. What else do you know?”  (I had forgotten the first rule of show business: everyone is a songwriter.)

 Soon we had a setlist of songs he thought he could play that I thought we might know:

“If I Loved You”
“Over the Rainbow”
“Yesterday”
“Autumn Leaves” (“Oh great!” I thought. “I know this in French! This will work out!”)
“What a Wonderful World”
“You Raise Me Up”
“Time To Remember” from The Fantastiks (I actually think it’s “Try to Remember,” I thought, but no matter… that’s a good one. People like that one.)
“Greensleeves”
“Tammy”
“Hi Lilli-Hi Lo”  

I had reached the bottom of the paper. “Done!” I said, “This is our setlist!” I gave the paper to the wizened-seeming Bulgarian ship’s officer at the desk who was watching this. I asked for copies, and he said, “How many?” Suddenly, to my surprise, he was in the show, he was in show business, he was on my speed! (I had briefly forgotten the second rule of show business: everyone wants to be in show business.) He was caring and heated up and ran to the back room and came right back with copies. 

I sent Michael upstairs to practice, then I raced upstairs to see a full house, and hit the stage running. The evening was taking on the speed of a French farce. My mind was spinning with images of people walking down the stairs, and up the stairs, with people suddenly in the show, suddenly uniformed Bulgarians involved, a pianist drafted at the last moment, with nothing but speed to cure-all.

Hi, everyone! So, you may have heard, we are doing this, we are just doing this. I introduced Michael. I explained that I had met him three minutes ago. I brought my microphone over and asked him how long he had been playing the piano? “All night,” he replied. The audience was with us. The room had the same excited-frightened feeling you get after a hurricane: people rallying, sharing food, with all the electricity out and only candles burning. 

I started with “Over the Rainbow,” which soon became a wonderful singalong. “If I Loved You” was next. I looked at Rebecca on the stool beside me. “What key?” she whispered. I looked at Michael.

“Whatever key we get!” I whispered back. Louder, I asked, “Who is singing this in Carousel?”

“Julie and whatizname!” she answered. 

“OK, I’ll be whatizname.” 

“Billy Bigelow!” the audience yelled at us in unison.

We killed “If I Loved You.” And the next hour was as wild—and successful—a performance as I’ve known in 30 years. We moved on to “Tenderly,” which had been kindly printed up for us but in type too small to read. Fortunately, our audience was of an age group from whom it was easy to borrow reading glasses. 

Then I brought volunteer singers up from the audience, Ralf and Jerry. I improvised giddy patter about everything that seemed relevant, including the French movies I had been watching and my love for Michel Legrand (so intense that an agent of mine had once ended our relationship by saying “I love her music”). I sang, “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life.” (“Don’t play the melody!” I begged Michael, who was.) I always love to talk about Sondheim and fortunately, Marc joined in with terrific Sondheim tales. (“I’ve played every asshole Sondheim ever wrote, “he confided to the audience.)  

We shared our worst audition stories—mine was getting dressed up as a cat for an audition of Cats when every other girl was in a cocktail dress; Marc’s was being asked to audition in a Speedo for a superhero part: He had to kill a dragon in his undies with a plastic sword. “I went to drama school for this?” he asked himself. 

I asked Marc what wisdoms he had from years in the business, and he was enthusiastic to share that he has come to realize that none of this is about the actors; it’s all about the audience. That’s true, I thought, as we headed for home with two huge sing-alongs: first of “Try to Remember” and then of “Doe, A Deer,” Michael heroically pounding away and everyone singing. Always about the audience—never truer than that night. We had made a show on a showboat.  (Oh, yes: Rebecca being the warm and generous woman that she is, learned the truly lovely tune to “She’s the One”, and sang it to Spencer, and to his wife. She is the one.)

At the end of a week in France, on and off the boat—and with a steady stream of French musicals watched every night by my mom and I—I’ve come to feel that France has two faces. There’s the educated face, the systematic side: the epicurean meals, the formal gardens, the order, the elegance that education provides. 

On the other hand, France promises us la vie boheme. The world of the can-can and the Moulin Rouge, where girls spontaneously flip upside down to show us the ruffles under their skirts and men dance and the artistes try to make us laugh and cry.  The organ grinder on the street breaks our heart because he still sings the songs of Charles Trenet, with words that will outlast the poets and live on in people’s hearts. The poet may be forgotten but not the emotions and the sensuality the poet made.

So on our boat, we returned after that night to elegant and educated occasions but always lit from beneath by that French abandon, by French appetite. By Wednesday Seth had returned—his daughter’s doing fine—and we were singing a formal classical concert in Viviers at a 900-year-old cathedral where Rebecca Luker and I sang the famous soprano duet from Lakme—both of us careful to avoid our usual concert décolletage—and Seth played “Rhapsody in Blue” on a brilliant piano. We met the mayor, and 200 French locals joined our audience and welcomed us.  Marc sang Puccini and Lillias White moved us with a selection from Once On This Island. We did group numbers by Jacques Brel, and I, at last, sang Michel Legrand in French. 

There have since been more meals and solo concerts by Marc and Lillias. I perform tomorrow night, in a new show I’ve assembled called Amour and After. The voyage will be coming to an end.  The pilgrimage as it were, is over. Why do we travel to France? To be transported, to have an experience—we want to go home changed or shifted in some way. This French pilgrimage along the river will leave us with the electro-magnetic memory of two fields of sensation: the orderly and the bohemian. We will have felt the solitary moments of strolling along cobblestoned streets, and we will have joined together every night in a music hall of our own Broadway invention.