1. all day at the beach sleepy. warm skin. wet hair. salt and sand and green apple-scented shampoo. bed sheet tides pulling up and down stomach flips into mermaid dreams.
2. milky tired. early nights. wondering if you are getting sick. medicine light bones. eyelids melting closed. dizzy, dizzy, spinning into sleep.
3. drowsy car rides. soft radio buzz. pillow on the window. pulling on your seatbelt. waking up and not knowing where you are.
âI feel really strong and really grateful that Iâm not limping into the home stretch,â she tells Backstage. âI feel like weâre at the last stage of a marathon and I have a runnerâs high right now.â
Goldsberry is also thankful that in her two years of originating the role of Alexander Hamiltonâs sister-in-law, sheâs maintained vocal health. âSleep is the apple a day, really, for singers,â she says. As a mother of two young children, Goldsberry has learned to survive eight draining shows a week by resting whenever she can. âI have to be able to take a nap. Thatâs a lifesaver for me. As long as itâs early enough in the day that I can wake my voice up, sleep is divine.
âAnd you just have to know your body,â she advises. âI learned if I eat pizza too late at night, I might have a problem with my throat! Know what you can doâit might not be the same thing someone else can get away with.â
That philosophy certainly helped Goldsberry book âHamiltonâ in the first place. Although the initial casting breakdown for AngelicaââNicki Minaj meets Desiree Armfeldt from âA Little Night Musicâ ââgave her pause (âIâm a huge fan of hers, but she has a very specific bravado that was different than what I was going to walk in the room with,â she laughs), hearing the characterâs showstopping number made everything clear; Goldsberry knew how to deliver âSatisfiedâ in the audition room.
âAny kind of reservations or questions didnât really matter, just having heard that music,â she remembers. âI didnât go in because I thought I was going to get the job as much as I just wanted to meet those guys.â Only an hour after performing âSatisfiedâ for creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, director Thomas Kail, and the rest of the teamââa really welcoming, awesome group of geniusesââGoldsberry was invited to do the workshop.
âThat number in particular, even outside of the show, will be studied,â she says of âSatisfied.â âItâs such a perfect construction for musical theater in terms of storytelling, in terms of identifying and defining a character so succinctly and so beautifully.â The ballad, which stops and rewinds the story to reveal the inner workings of Angelica choosing her sisterâs happiness over her own, boasts some of the quickest rap verses in the musical. How does an actor prepare for that?
âIâve written a couple raps in my day, in my own music career that people donât know a lot about,â Goldsberry says with a smile. But the real preparation came from her foundation of classical training. âOne hundred percent, all your Shakespeare training serves you in the work in musical theater today,â she says. âSpecifically in modern musical theater, our soliloquies, and now what we call rap. Itâs the reason itâs so easy to learn, because itâs verse, itâs rhyme! It just sticks in the soul very easily.â
In fact, she adds, âSatisfiedâ is a Shakespearean soliloquy, a direct address in which Angelica takes off her mask for the audience. âIt is stream of consciousness, but the consciousness of a brilliant woman who can make a million decisions in an instant. So time really has to stop for the audience, for anybody, to show you how fast this woman thinks.â
literally hamilton is always there at the back of my mind like I canât even hear someone start a sentence with âmeanwhileâ without interrupting them with âmADISON IS GRAPPLING WITH THE FACT THAT NOT EVERY ISSUE CAN BE SETTLED BY COMITTEEâ
imagine a swarm of 8 year olds, all wearing minecraft, angry birds and minion t shirts, running up to you and viscously beating the living shit out of you while chanting youtuber intros