Rehearsal #7: Solo Songs

Tuesday night we worked on singing. We had David Norfleet come to rehearsal to play music for us. He's somewhat afraid of Bollywood as a genre, but I think Mandy is pushing and pulling him in the right direction. He will be playing most of our shows, and I'm sure he'll be wonderful. As the producer, I'm in charge of scheduling the musicians, and I still have 2 open nights to fill. If you know someone interested in improvising Bollywood Music, let me know. I also would love to hire a second musician to accompany David for a few of his shows so that David can do percussion. He is, after all, a drummer at heart.

We focused mainly on solo songs, but we didn't just throw everyone up on stage alone one at a time and make everyone sing. Two people went up and started a scene, one as a puppet and one as a person. Then when the moment was right, one character would sing a song.

I sang a song as the puppet Marcel (my favorite puppet) about being in love and air and I don't remember, but it went fairly well. Once I latched on to the air metaphor things went better and I need to remember to sing loud even when I'm not sure of what I'm singing.

One of the new cast members is struggling with the singing portion of the show, but in a very good natured way. He reminds me a lot of how I was early in my improvised singing life, which just serves to remind me how far I've come. Of course I've also worked on it a lot. The very first year we did Let It Snow (4 years ago! Eeep) I spent about 6 months leading up to that show taking voice lessons. I think I'm just now starting to get some of the things she was trying to teach me.

I think Theater The Musical was the first show where I wasn't particularly petrified of singing. Now, I think, I'm actually looking forward to it!