Further Thoughts on Too Much is Not Enough

For today’s Book of Rannells, we’re revisiting Andrew Rannells’s memoir. As a person who’s admittedly watched/listened to/read what might be considered a somewhat-beyond-reasonable number of interviews with Andrew Rannells, I couldn’t help but notice how thoroughly Too Much is Not Enough lines up with consistent themes that he likes to bring up in interviews and appearances, most of which revolve around the struggles of being less successful than you want to be.  If you line up the various references he’s made, stories he’s told, and mini-treatises he’s given, it becomes clear that Rannells makes it something of a mission to 1) dispel the notion of overnight success and 2) get real about how hard it can be to get into acting, while at the same time 3) showing that, disheartening as it can be, the struggle can still be worth it.

First, right from the opening, Rannells hits on a notion I’ve seen him bring up before:  the months of unemployment and desperation that are conveniently left out of people’s “tidy bios.”  When Rannells talks about being a struggling actor, he makes no bones about literal years of struggle, of seeing the finish line but not knowing how to get to it.  His book and his interviews make frequent mention of the long string of soul-sucking, mind-numbing day jobs that kept him afloat while he was trying to make his dreams come true, and he admits how modest successes (like regional theatre and summer-stock gigs) just made him feel even further from that goal than ever.  He gets into the weeds of auditioning, both the obviously-disastrous ones and ones where everything seemed to go right but he still didn’t get the part.  He includes the periods where he considered giving up on acting, as well as one stretch where he did give up on it, and he shows the toll of seemingly-constant rejection.

Within that toll, Rannells discusses anger, disillusionment, and jealousy.  He talks about being unable to be happy for friends’ success when he wanted the same thing so badly, and he looks at some of the auditioning “logic” he established (“Well, he and I have both played this role, therefore we’re the same type, so if he can get cast in that role, I should be able to, too!” that defied his need for it to be reliably true.  He doesn’t disguise pettiness of it, the ugliness or the shame.  He, multiple Tony nominee that he is, even named the boy who was cast as Oliver over him in the first community-theatre role he ever tried out for.  Rannells of course has no fond memories of any of these feelings, but he doesn’t shy away from sharing them.

I respect Rannells a lot for his honesty and dedication to talking about these experiences and feelings; it’s obvious that he feels it’s important to talk about these things, especially for the sake of young people who want to pursue acting.  He wants them to go in with open eyes and understand how hard it might be, how long it might take, and how much it might wear them down.  Not to say that it can’t be done, that it won’t eventually bear fruit, or that in rare instances, the obscurity-to-stardom move doesn’t get fast-tracked.  But in his interviews and his book, he speaks directly to those in search of “the secret” or “the shortcut,” and he doesn’t have one to offer.

Which, in itself, is really valuable.  If Andrew Rannells of The Book of Mormon fame, who blew the roof off of Radio City Music Hall when he performed at the Tony Awards, had to survive so many humiliations and so much rejection, if he had to weather so much jealousy and self-doubt, that can help prepare others for that reality, either allowing them to think long and hard about how badly they want this or helping them put their experiences into perspective and get through it.