Once again in life, I find myself standing at the beginning of a new adventure.
It's not as grand as going away to college, it's not a career change, it's not even a new haircut.
This time around, my new beginning is a musical.
The decision to blog about this came to me spontaneously today... maybe it had something to do with the fact that this morning, I caught Julie & Julia on PittTV and was madly inspired, or maybe it was just simply because I want to hang on to every minute of this experience, and the best way that I know how to do that is through writing about it.
If you were to ask me how I wound up as the student director of William Finn's 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, I would be obliged to tell you the story of how Musical Theatre Club came about.
The Reader's Digest version is as follows: last year, my friend and roommate Larissa decided that it would be jazzy to start a Musical Theatre club on our campus (which until now has been painfully devoid of the art form.). A few forms and signatures later, we were official. As we came to discover shortly after, that had been the easy part. The response that we received from the students was INCREDIBLE, and before we knew it, we had something on our hands that was bigger than Larissa or I could ever have imagined.
Our first project as a club was putting on a musical variety show, featuring songs from everything from Spring Awakening to Cabaret. With a cast of 35 performers, every waking hour of my fall semester was consumed by schedules and rehearsals and pages upon pages of sheet music. The result was an outstanding night of music and theatre... performed before a packed house.
With one show under our belt, I guess you could say that we felt pretty lucky, because we decided to try our hand at doing a REAL show. I still can't tell you exactly how we worked everything out, but in the blink of an eye, we had a performance contract from Musical Theatre International and were drafting documents for our Student Government Board to approve our funding request.
The night that would decide our fate came on a Tuesday, when we had to appear before the board at their meeting to pitch our case for funding. We had an outstanding showing of club members who were every bit as committed to musical theatre as Larissa and I were. As the board deliberated, we sat with fingers crossed, until the miraculous words "request approved in full" came forth from the mouth of the SGB president himself.
Two seconds later we were scheduling auditions, finding a pianist, and holding callbacks.
Now, as I sit here (during the time when I would normally be in Astronomy, thank you Snowpocalypse!), the show has been cast, and we are all waiting with bated breath for the arrival of our scripts so that we can begin rehearsals!!
This whole experience has taught me several things about myself: it's taught me to be a leader and all that, but most importantly, it has reminded me of my undying love and passion for music. I don't claim to understand it, I definitely can't read it, and I'm pretty sure I have about as much vocal talent as a dying whale, but there is nothing on this planet that affects me or moves me like music. There's just something about it that can transcend knowledge, language, and everything else that might separate and categorize we human beings.
I've always been a die-hard musical theatre aficionado, and leading Musical Theatre Club has definitely helped me rediscover that. It's strange, and kind of funny... throughout my life, I've had periods where I've been involved with theatre, then gotten away from it, and just when I think that that door has shut completely for me, something comes along and kicks my butt right back into it.
And now here I am, trying my hand at directing for the first (official) time. I've got my perfectly organized, color-coded-tabbed director's binder ready to go, I've done some basic set design sketches, drawn up some costume ideas. I can sing the show in my sleep, backwards and forwards... I know the characters, what drives them, what motivates them.
At the same time, I know that there are going to be so many things that I have NO CLUE about (pit orchestra. where can i find one of those? hmmm...), but I'm ready to take all of that and figure it out.
As the opening song from the show goes: "it's a very big, very fraught, simple but it's not, it's a very big undertaking". That to me is the show. It's a very big undertaking, and it's scary. It's taking a jump off a cliff and hoping you land on something soft, it's setting out on a voyage across the sea with a whole crew depending on you to get them there safely.
I'm a little intimidated by it.
But to tell the honest truth, I am excited.
Petrified.
But excited.
