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Thirty years since Rent premiered on Broadway, Adam Pascal still worries about forgetting the lyrics to “One Song Glory.”
The actor appeared at The Festival over the weekend in Kingston, New York, alongside his fellow Rent cast members for a special 30th anniversary reunion and looked back on his time in Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning musical.
On Sunday, Pascal was joined by longtime friend and collaborator Anthony Rapp for an hourlong set featuring covers, Rent songs and more — but warned audiences that he may flub a lyric or two.
Before a performance of “One Song Glory,” Pascal revealed why the song is staged the way it is, with the character of Roger sitting on a table for most of it. That wasn’t necessarily the vision, said Pascal; it was set up that way out of convenience.
“The way that song was blocked is that Roger is pretty much sitting on the table for the whole song,” he explained, adding that the character sings the first and second verses from the table and crosses downstage to belt out the word “Glory.”
“The reason why this song is blocked that way is because I cannot remember the lyrics,” Pascal revealed. “And I wrote them down on an orange index card, and I stuck them right to the table. So I had to sit on the edge of the table and every once in a while, look back at the lyrics. And I did this for the entire run Off-Broadway.”
When the show moved to Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre in April 1996, Pascal brought that orange index card with him. However, because the Nederlander is much bigger than Off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop — with a mezzanine — it just wasn’t going to work.
“[Director] Michael Greif finally said to me, ‘Adam, you have to get rid of that card. When we were downtown, nobody could see it, but now we have a balcony and people can see, so please get rid of it,’” Pascal recalled.
While Pascal complied, he was never really able to shake the nerves of forgetting the lyrics to his solo song and warned the crowd at The Festival that it could happen at any time.
“About 10 years ago, I was doing a live performance of ‘One Song Glory,’ and I was accompanying myself on guitar, and it was on Good Morning Houston, their affiliate morning show,” Pascal told the crowd.
Five seconds before they were to go live on air, the actor went “completely blank,” he said. “I can’t even remember the first line of the song, which of course is the title of the song.”
Luckily, Pascal had a friend who was there with him, so the actor asked him to stand next to the camera and start mouthing the lyrics as he performed on live TV.
“I tell you this story as a cautionary tale,” Pascal said. “If you see me just stop singing randomly, start singing and help me out!”
Pascal then went on to deliver a flawless performance of his Act 1 solo from Rent, sounding just as he did 30 years ago when the musical opened in the 1990s.
The day before, he sang other songs from the rock opera alongside his fellow cast members, including Rapp, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Fredi Walker-Browne, Taye Diggs, Wilson Jermaine Heredia and more.
Read BroadwayWorld’s full recap of The Festival, including what happened at the Rent reunion here.
Photo Credit: Austin Ruffer
