The New Year's Resolution Blog Entry.

There was no musical theatre program at my college. That isn't to say that there were no musical theatre-themed classes at SUNY New Paltz. There were several, and I took them all. There was just no Musical Theatre concentration as far as majors go.

While I was there I took Voice for Theatre (One and Two--I took Two twice), Musical Theatre Workshop and Musical Theatre Singing Ensemble (which was this awesome choral class where we did all the big group numbers.)

All the classes focused on acting the song, and not so much on technique. This is a clip from my senior year final, when I did Sally Bowles from Cabaret.



My freshman year a friend of mine named Roxie was taking Musical Theatre Workshop. Her assignment was to hop the train down to the city one day and go to an actual audition. Best Friend Jen and I decided to go with her. We thought it would be fun.

It was an open call for Ragtime, and Jen was a big fan. We had no headshots, and so we printed our best available Facebook profile pictures onto 8 1/2 by 11 paper and slapped together resumes with High School credits on them.

The audition was at Ripley Grier, and in the grand tradition of Open Calls, we were two out of 700 hundred girls and young women, all of whom looked a lot like us. We were there all day, and we didn't get to sing. Instead we were typed out.

But it's our first audition. We are tourists in Times Square, too mesmerized by the flashy billboards and neon lights to notice that it's crowded, nobody seems to know how to walk and it kind of smells funny.

We did one musical a year at SUNY New Paltz, usually the first production of the fall semester. My freshman year auditions were the first week of classes, I really didn't know what I was doing. Sophomore year I made it to the final four girls called back to play Dot in "Sunday in the Park with George." Junior year I got Reno in "Anything Goes," and senior year I played Penny in "Urinetown."

I have a good voice, though I've never been trained, and by the time I left school I was confident that I could hold my own in a musical theatre audition. But after a few years it seemed like I was going to that Ragtime audition over and over again. Sitting in a waiting room among 700 hundred more qualified girls, with a mediocre headshot and not enough musicals on my resume.

I couldn't afford the voice lessons, and what good did they do when I just got typed out every time I got in the room? So I stopped. I was booking film work, and comedy, so I thought that might be enough.

But recently I went to go see a show that got me thinking again. An entertainer a greatly admire just released an album, the contents of which are new arrangements of old musical theatre standards. Little-known Sinatra and Sound of Music stuff, and at the end of the show I got to meet the composer who'd done all the arrangements. The whole thing got me thinking about musical theatre and how much I miss it, and I've decided that this would be my New Year's Resolution.

I am going to book a musical by next year. Maybe not Broadway, but here's hoping. And in reaching for that goal, I'm going to see about voice lessons, and dance classes. I'm really going to try to turn myself back into a musical theatre performer, hopefully minus the pretentiousness.

Game on.