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“I’m not sure I would put Andy in the stress-reducing category.”
“Well, he might be the exception.” Russell stopped scrolling on his phone and looked at me. “How familiar are you with Jonathan Larson?”
“Who?”
“Oh my god. Hold on.”
* * *
“Let me get this straight,” I said as I cranked down my window—it was starting to get really hot in the car. Russell had just played me songs from Pal Joey, Carousel, Once Upon a Mattress, and The Light in the Piazza. “All these people are related?”
“Yeah. It was Rodgers and Hart, then Rodgers and Hammerstein. Then Richard Rodgers’s daughter, Mary Rodgers. Then her son, Adam Guettel.”
“Talented family.”
“I’ll say.”
I looked away from the road for a second and across the car at him as he scrolled though his phone, totally absorbed. “Is that hard for you?”
He looked up, frowning. “Is what hard?”
“I mean… with your dad. And you wanting to do music too.” I shook my head, knowing do music was not the best way to put this.
Russell lowered his phone and looked out the window for a moment. “It’s both really great and really hard,” he said slowly. “Like, he’s the first person I play stuff for because he just gets it on a different level than my mom or any of my friends. But at the same time—I know whatever I do will be compared to him, and probably not favorably. It’s just… a lot to live up to. I think it’s the reason I was drawn to musicals in the first place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just as a way to separate myself, since it’s not what he does. But also—I always loved the storytelling aspect of it. How you can really tell the story of a triumph, or failure, or great love…”
“Or how hard it is to be Spider-Man.”
Russell laughed. “Well, exactly.” There was a pause in which we just listened to Jeremy Jordan sing about unionizing. I was about to ask him to turn it up when Russell spoke again, his voice hesitant. “I actually… talked to my dad about it when he called. About what he did to get me in. The whole Michigan thing.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I mentioned what you told me he said—and that I could see he was trying to do a good thing. And that I shouldn’t have thrown it back at him.”
“Oh, wow.”
“But then he said he hadn’t seen it from my point of view. And that I don’t have to go if I don’t want to. If what he did really changes how I feel about it, it’s my choice if I want to go or not. He said he’d still donate the money.”
“Oh, well, that’s good. That school is famously underfunded.” Russell smiled and looked out the window, turning his phone over and over in his hands. “So what are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure. I just… I wish there was some way I could know. If I could do it on my own.”
“Well… you could do that, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t get into the Michigan theater program, right? Just—the regular school?”
Russell sighed. “Yeah.”
“But you said you really wanted to do a BFA track somewhere.”
“I did,” he said, and I could hear some frustration coming out in his voice. “But I didn’t get in.”
“No, I know. But since you’re not even going to the part of Michigan that you wanted to go to, couldn’t you just, I don’t know… defer for a year? Write a different musical and then apply to where you really wanted to go? USC and… what were the other schools?”
