Coming Up...

So far, the results of my "Musical Mission: A Quest to be Cast in a Musical in the Next Year" has yielded equal parts good and super awkward auditions, leaving me with the conclusion that I should look into some voice lessons in the future, because I am seriously out of practice.

However, my musical mission must be put on hold for a while, but it's for a very good reason: I am working like a dawg.

The Play:
I am thrilled to announce that I have been cast in No Tea Productions' next show, "Space Captain: Captain of Space"!

The show is written by Jeff, co-artistic director of No Tea, and it is a Flash-Gordon-esque, 1930s space serial. This marks my fourth full production with No Tea and I couldn't be more thrilled to work with them again! I've been sporadically attending No Tea's writer's meetings since finishing Work: A Play, and I even wrote a short piece for the most recent Reading Series that we did in March. So I've been lucky enough to read the play as it was being developed and it is going to ROCK.

I play Princess Astra, daughter of the Evil King Xayno.

The show is multi-media, so it doesn't actually go up until August-September. Our first read-through is tonight, but we won't actually start rehearsals for the live-action stuff for at least a month. The majority of May and June are going to be used for filming all the video segments.

I am so FREAKING excited.

The Webseries:
Recently I was contacted by a fellow graduate of SUNY New Paltz, who was working on a webseries called, "Sherwood." It's based on the Robin Hood myths, and he wanted me to play Maid Marian. 



After a very successful IndieGoGo campaign during which we raised over $3,000 to fund the first season, we filmed the pilot in Upstate New York a couple of weeks ago. 

I get to work with a couple of guys that I haven't seen since school, as well as some very talented new blood, and one of my former professors. And I get to use a kick-ass British accent.

The Boyfriend drove up with me, along with Best Friend Jen and Fiance Jared, who were getting their engagement photos taken in New Paltz. We all stayed the night in Poughkeepsie with Best Friend Cate and her Bearded Man, and the next morning we went into New Paltz, had brunch at the Bistro (across the street from the apartment I lived in with Cate senior year) and then we all went to New Paltz to see the closing performance of Cabaret.

I got to show The Boyfriend the campus, bought some $1 LPs at Rhino Records, and caught up with my Voice and Speech teacher, Nancy.

It was nice to go back up to school and be able to answer the "What are you up to" question with something other than, "Oh... auditioning, waiting tables, you know, making money..."

Suck it New Paltz, I'm working!

The Reading
Next weekend I am taking the train up to Poughkeepsie to be in an outdoor reading of two plays written by Best Friend Cate as part of her ongoing mission to make P-Town into more of an artist community.

The Short Film
Though I know I'm booked for the next couple of months, I still happened to come across an audition for a short film on Actor's Access.

We held auditions for Space Captain at Shetler Studios on a Sunday morning, and I came in to read with the actors. The audition for the film, "Broken Identity" was the next day, in the same studio and in the same room.

And after sitting on the other side of auditions for the first time since college, I was filled with a new level of confidence, mainly because my headshots actually LOOK LIKE ME. I couldn't believe how many people walked into the room looking NOTHING like the photo they submitted.

Also, it is never a good idea to send a naked picture out for an audition. You'd think that wouldn't need to be said. You'd THINK.

So I went to the audition feeling quietly confident. I was the first to arrive, and the first to audition. The role is small, and the script is still being developed, so in addition to my monologue, they only had one line for me to read. So I read the line, took an adjustment and read it again, and then I went home and cooked my Boyfriend dinner.

And two days later I found out that I booked the role.

Booyah.

So hopefully there shall be much more to blog about in the coming months than awkward musical theatre auditions.

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.