Surviving Musical Theatre

I sang.

I survived.

Some might say I did well.

The thing that our Musical Theatre Directing professor (who is a brilliant, highly accomplished, nurturing professional, and she doesn't take crap from anyone) is driving home is that Musical Theatre isn't this whole big show, performance "jazz hands" kind of art that people assume it is.  I absolutely buy into this ideal.  Not to say that there's no place for jazz hands...  but the quote she said today really kind of puts her ideal into perspective: "Musical Theatre isn't singing...  It's feeling on pitch."  She keeps telling us that it's about having the audience empathize with you...  Just sympathize with the character, and I think that's a very important distinction.  The whole point of these characters singing their feelings is that they've run out of words...  the music is there to heighten the emotion...  It adds depth where words just can't do enough.  Our voices are so deeply connected to who we are, and you really have to go to some really deep (dark?) places to access that emotion and not perform it for the audience, but to really access it, feel it, and make the audience feel it along with you.  The singing breathes life into the songs.  Pretty crazy awesome stuff.  


Anyway, the song I have to sing (I think I posted it before) is "I'm Still Hurting" from The Last 5 Years by Jason Robert Brown.  It's ridiculously difficult music...  written in 9/8 time signature, very few of my notes that I sing are in the accompaniment, lots of words, blah blah blah...    It's the opening number to the show, and my character's husband has just left her, seemingly out of the blue.  The structure of the musical is really cool...  It's all done through song, and my character tells her story of the relationship from the end and goes backwards to the beginning, while the male character tells his story of the relationship from the beginning to the end, and they cross in the middle.  I *love* the song, it's absolutely beautiful.  But...  me being me, having a terrible time getting out of my head and just singing the emotion of the piece without worrying about the words.


Without going into all the gory boring details of the hour or so we spent workshopping it this morning...  I sang through it once as we had rehearsed, and then Terri (my prof) walked us through some exercises to try and access the emotion and really pushed for me to delve into those "dark, uncomfortable places" to access the emotion of the song.  Not to perform the emotions, but to really access them and feel them onstage.  While I'm very positive I probably missed all the notes, it didn't really matter, because the emotion was there, and raw, and accessible to the audience, and THAT was really cool.  I'm not usually a crier, but there were tears (I think I cried through a lot of the song) and there were some in the audience too.  (Not that I like to make my friends cry, but you know...  acting.)


This is NOT a performance class.  This is a directing class.  So it's not about doing well, or being able to sing, or any of that.  But going through the difficulty of being pushed to do something that scares the living bejeezus out of me will be really helpful when I'm going through a lot of the same trials with my students, especially if singing is NOT their thing.  We've seen different techniques, tried and felt different things...  And will see more as we workshop more songs in class...  so I'm looking forward to it.  Now that i have my workshop out of the way, (as well as the workshop for the song I'm directing) some of the pressure is off, and i can really watch without being distracted or nervous about my own workshop.


We still have to direct and rehearse with our directors, and still have final performances of our songs on Saturday (when the session is over,) so there's that looming...  but now that I'm over the hurdle, that should be slightly less intimidating (but still scary as hell...)


And NOW...  I'm off to go out to dinner and go bowling with the rest of the people in the program.  Tomorrow is our first day off since getting here, and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of the half-weekend that we have!  We're going to see a melodrama in CleElum, and go see the fireworks in Ellensburg tomorrow.  And I've turned off my alarm clock.  SLEEPING IN!!!!!!!  It will be great!