Tuesday 3 June 2008

New post....last month

Ok, there's some kind of weird blog feature that if you start a post and save it as a draft, when you finally post it, it shows up on the date that you STARTED it. So, actually, this way it looks like I'm not totally delinquent, that the Easter Feaster post has been there the whole time... how conveeeenient.

Anyhoo, if you want to read up on my fabulous Easter Extravaganza of Food, scroll down (just past the California post) or click here.

Enjoy!

Broadway Baby

To paraphrase Frank Sinatra:

If I can’t make it here, I can’t make it anywhere.

There were about 23 of us at the first audition, for I don’t know how many parts. I saw the audition call on the Medicine Hat Musical Theatre website, and was excited by the possibility of dancing again… especially on a stage, in a production of Footloose! I rented the movie (double feature with Flashdance! Yo!) and figured that I had the dynamic dancing style that they would want, as long as I didn’t have a singing part. Besides, Footloose is really about DANCE, not about singing, right?

I realized there would be trouble when they handed me a form to fill out, and it asked for my Musical Theatre Experience. Huh.

Actually, I realized there would be trouble when I walked in and noticed that the ratio was 18 high school kids, to 4 fifty-somethings, to me.

Anyway, I put my dance background down on the form. (I should have mentioned that that I was a paperboy AND a schoolboy in the St. Marguerite’s stunning 1988 production of Oliver.) I also said that I was aiming for dancer/chorus. (I should have put “willing to lip-sync” on there too.)

We were numbered and sorted into 2 groups. Group A started with the singing, Group B started with the dancing.

Lucky me, I was Group A. We went into another room, and the first person got up to sing. Eep. With only one exception (guess who?), everyone sang showtunes, and beautifully, with near-professional voices, gestures, etc. In short, they performed the hell out of them. I was literally shaking from head to toe when I got up, and gave a brief disclaimer: that I’d only sung by myself in public once before, and I had been drunk (the rest of the karaoke nights, I’ve done duets, also drunk), and that I had ‘prepared’ Leaving on a Jet Plane.


Well, it didn’t sound BRUTAL (to me), but my voice was shaky, I was way out of my league in there, and I know I had terrible stage presence/looked like I was about to fall over from fright/vomit.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone in Medicine Hat can sing unbelievably well. I’m saying that auditioners #1-14 and 16-23 do.

See, I get nervous for dance auditions, too, but at least I have that “maybe I’m ok at this” feeling when I walk in, even if it turns into “why did I think I could dance?” after. This was just pure dread, in an “I can’t sing, I KNOW I can’t sing, and now I have to show everyone else here that I can’t, because maybe they don’t know yet” way.

Well, they know now.

After the last vocal virtuoso brought the house down, we switched groups, and learned a little 6 8-count dance, fairly straightforward, and quite similar to Renegades style (and no pirouettes!). Without exaggerating, I can admit that I kicked a$$ at the dance – I was performing, I was on, I was sassy. It was nice to see the director, who had been looking at me with pity before, smile and wink at me while I was performing, so that’s something!

My only hope was that the next night’s crop of auditioners didn’t produce a singer AND a dancer…maybe I’d have a chance!

So, call-backs were mid-May, and the final casting would be done by the end of May.

The phone call came last night.

Sigh.

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