| | Whoo! Another busy semester, packed to the brim with credits and I'm enrolled in all nearly all possible vocal ensembles including...
INTO THE WOODS!
I was the accompanist and one of many auditionees vying for a role in the musical. I sang "Mr. Cellophane" and "Dancing through Life" - just sixteen bars, and did some cold-reading of an excerpt from "The Emperor's New Clothes". I didn't think I did that well since I was still flustered from sight-reading some of the most difficult pieces ever invented to torture the audition accompanist - Sondheim is definitely one of those to blame and so is Jason Robert Brown. Then I played for callbacks for certain roles and I had heard that other people had already gotten parts and I was getting more and more worried that I wasn't selected at all! I was pretty miserable for that entire day since the musical director - also my vocal teacher, made no mention of it. I resigned myself to the unhappy notion that well, maybe I wasn't what they were looking for...
BUT...
Come night time, a friend and a tenor par excellence came up to me excitedly and congratulated me. Still in a blur I gave him a quizzical look and he told me that I had gotten the part of JACK!!!
HOLY COW! (and there's a pun for you if you know the musical!)
Jack's one of the main characters of the musical alongside the Baker, his wife, Little Red Ridinghood and Cinderella. You'd know Jack as the beanstalk-climbing, giant-slaying young lad from good old fairytale anthologies and this is essentially the very same Jack! He's got probably the most famous song from the musical called "Giants in the Sky", which will put pressure on me to do it as best as I can. It's quite nerve-wracking going from playing mostly chorus members to assuming a lead role! I've gotta properly analyze my character, which is I think a lot of downplaying the histrionics since he's a daydreaming, naive, earnest, simple-minded youth, who also thinks a "piggy" makes the perfect pet.
What an exciting endeavor into Sondheim's music, which is some of the hardest composed for the musical theatre setting! His harmonies are oftentimes quite dissonant, with the song accompaniments barely hinting at what you're supposed to be singing. One song - "Your Fault" is probably the most intimidating to me since it's all really fast speech-like singing and it's an ensemble song where the cast needs to come in very accurately to prevent it from sounding like a big chaotic cacophony. Then again, there's also the issue of all the dialogue to be memorized! And what's more - here's a Malaysian who's gotta make sure he enunciates and articulates well enough to be understood perfectly and hopefully not sounding a bit at all chinese during the whole show.
OI... but that's the whole deal with theatre - a huge amount of effort, in a limited timeframe, with meager monetary compensation, with a lot of separate elements needed to come together as one magical masterpiece!
I have my teacher to thank for all this... he even wanted me to do the part of the baker initially - who has even more dialogue I think and even more acting, but the director thought otherwise and my teacher said that it was a bit too low for me anyway. He's also employing me as his "executive assistant" (giving me that title with a wink and asking "does that sound impressive enough?"), appealing to school to make an exception for me to work for him for a semester instead of the Polynesian Cultural Center! He pulls all the strings and breaks down all the walls for me again and again so I can be involved in his performing groups... gosh! What an awesome guy!
Today we start the first day of rehearsals for the musical! Can't wait!!! WHOO!
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| | Posted 1/18/2007 3:14 PM - 56 Views - 10 eProps - 5 comments
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