Today is World AIDS Day and O Bar had pulled together a special Celebrate Life event to mark the event in partnership with several HIV advocacy organizations. We had struggled to pull together a table group for the night, but I don't regret that we did because it was a great show. Beyond the performances being amazing, there was a lot of heart in the production from start to finish and they really delivered an appropriately emotional production to commemorate the day.
Beforehand Tobie and I were speculating what numbers we might see during the show and all I could think of was at least one round of Seasons of Love from RENT. Now that we've gone through the event, I can now share that they made a lot of excellent song choices and featured a lot of pieces about keeping up the good fight or being strong, which totally makes sense in hindsight. Given I know they didn't have a lot of time to pull this together, I'm all the more impressed with the literal magic needed to put on the caliber of shows that the O Bar team consistently does night after night after night.
It's easy for an individual artist to come up with something. It's a whole other deal to coordinate such a large group of performers to create a line-up that makes sense and accommodates various costume changes and other logists behind the scenes. Then you need find time to actually rehearse the numbers and figure out the lighting and other bits of blocking and choreography and then bring it all together in time for the next time the bar is scheduled to operate. It's a crazy cycle of creativity on overdrive and that's just part of why we love them so much and try to support them as best as we can.
I'm just on a bit of a high from this weekend as we had some amazing back-to back shows. And both Friday and Saturday were meaningful in different ways and I know that I'm feeling quite emotionally charged after all this. But that's how it is.
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