Not My Favorite Performance...

For a while now, we have been working on our “audition pieces” in acting class. I was working on “I Can Hear the Bells” from Hairspray. This is a song sung by Tracy Turnblad about her cliche crush on Link Larkin. This song was a challenge for me as far as acting because singing is a stronger skill for me. I had to be an annoyingly happy girl who fantasizes her whole life relationship with this guy who she fell in love with strictly for looks. I find this concept to be a foolish one so it was difficult for me to pretend I actually cared about this made up guy I barely knew.

If I had to grade my performance, I would give myself a B, but mainly because I feel like my singing wasn’t that great and neither was my acting. I think my acting was unbelievable because I failed to portray the insanity that Tracy Turnblad did in “Hairspray.” I wish my acting would have been better. I guess this is an off week for me. I also messed up the words to the song and even though I kept going, it still was a mess up and that’s not something that can just be okay only because I played it off. I feel like this was one of my worst performances I’ve done yet in this class.

My goals and challenges for myself in this song were to perfectly execute the singing, words, and acting. I failed at all three so I did not achieve any of them. The singing did not sound the way I wanted it to which frustrates me. The acting was not at the level I wanted it to be. This is in the sense that I made people believe I was singing and meaning every word of that song and I did not believe every word while I was watching the video which also disappoints me. Also the fact that I could not remember all of the words to one song makes it just not as impactful. I might be being too hard on myself, but this is just how I sincerely feel.  

What I need to work on are those three things I failed at during my performance. I need to work on learning words a bit better and I will do that by creating a technique I have not yet thought of. In order to improve my singing I will just do more vocal warm ups and just keep trying to get a stronger and clearer sounding voice so I do not end up sounding bad. I also will work on my acting, but I also have not thought of how yet. This project was probably my worst in this class and I’m not sure if it is just an off week or I am just not as good as I thought I was, but I do not feel confident about this piece at all and slightly wish I had never done it.

My Audition Piece

https://mail.cheshireacademy.org/owa/redir.aspx?C=85ee118af3554520a7b771a20354922f&URL=http%3a%2f%2fyoutu.be%2fiK3J1042FPU

Hard Work Pays Off

Lea Michele is my favorite actress. She starred in Spring Awakening on Broadway and also is the star of Glee. Lea started when she was young and living in New Jersey. She started as young Cosette in Les Miserables and was also later in the show Ragtime. It was difficult for her to get roles as she started to grow older and she soon found Spring Awakening which she started at the age twenty. She then was offered the role of Rachel Berry on Glee and she flew to California and took the job. She now is about to enter her sixth season after years of love and loss.

Nikki M. James is an actress who plays my favorite roles in two of my favorite musicals. She is Eponine in Les Miserables and also plays Nabulungi in Book of Mormon. She started out in 2001 in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: The Musical. Her family were very supportive and worked to make her dreams come true. The people from South Park asked her to do a reading and soon the musical blew up and she soon won a Tony award in 2011 for the musical Book of Mormon. After tons of nos she finally got a yes.

VOCAL DOMINATION

We watched a three episode series called Broadway or Bust in class for the last few classes. I feel like I related the most with Erika. A girl who sang “Salt A Lake A Siti” from the Broadway musical Book of Mormon. I love that song and she did the song more than justice so I immediately began to favor her. The reasons why I believe that I relate with her most are because of her song choice, her performance, and her singing skills. I think she could have won, but her performing in the last time she sang for the judges wasn’t good enough.

Her song choice is a song that I actually have been planning to start working on with my voice teacher and that was automatically the first thing I noticed when she sang. She sang it the way I hope I will be able to after some practice and it showed that she is an example of how I want to be vocally. Her voice is a little more mature than mine, but it reminded me of Nikki James who is someone I look up to as a singer and performer. I’ve seen her in two musicals where she played two different characters, but she made them characters I want to play one day. Erika surprised me with her vocals and her talent was something I appreciated unlike a lot of the other singers in the series. Her performance was a little weak. She was amazing and her facial expressions were good too, but her body wasn’t very interesting. She needed to perform with her body as well as the rest of her. This is something I too have trouble with and it helped me see her even more as someone I can relate to. Her singing was very impressive to me and it reminded it of my voice if it were a little more mature and I liked that. I tend to like people more if they remind me of myself.

I plan to keep in mind how I felt watching her performance and to remember all the things I liked and didn’t like. I liked her voice and I’m going to watch her performance again to listen to contrast in her song so I can try to incorporate into my audition piece. The songs that we are doing are two very different songs so it will be difficult to compare them in sense, but I’m going to listen to what the judges had to say as well. She was amazing from the beginning I want to be like that too so once I’m done being sick then I will just vocally dominate the way she did. I love the way her clip just popped up and it was obvious that she was better than the others from the start. It was like a volcano on an island. Her lava was just too much for all the things on the island and it also stood out much more than just a palm tree.

LINK LARKIN IS BAE!!!!!

As a performer I believe my biggest strength is my singing. I have a powerful and amazing voice that is unique from others at the school. Being a mezzo makes singing easier for me because I am capable of singing the majority of songs. I also have the mindset that I can sing anything. I feel confident with everything I sing and I always am pushing myself knowing I can do better. What I need to work on is tapping into the meanings of songs and showing emotion while singing them. I need to perform the songs instead of just singing them astoundingly. That has always been difficult for me and that is a main reason why I took acting class this semester. I am hoping that this assignment will help me be a better performer. I am challenging myself by singing a song that is more upbeat and requires a lot of performance. I usually do serious ballads, but I feel like doing a song like this will help me get out of my comfort zone. I am planning on singing “I Can Hear the Bells”  from Hairspray, but I am still looking for other pieces. I feel like I can relate to the song on a personal level and that will help me perform it better. It is about a girl who instantly has a crush on a guy she believes she has no chance with. He then acknowledges her and it feels like the most amazing thing in the world. She then sings this song fantasizing about the future they could have all because of this one acknowledgement. This song is very loving and dreamy. She really portrays the love she has for this one person and you can tell how much of dream come true it was that he noticed her. Also the song shows that for once the underdog wins and I relate to that. I know I am not the skinny stereotype model girl, but I believe that unique people are the winners. Whether you are a little heavy or not stereo-typically pretty you should believe that you can achieve any of your goals and hers was Link. Maybe one day I will marry my Link and that is the feeling I channel into this audition song. I feel like this piece shows my singing abilities as well as my acting abilities and that is what directors look for. This might make the director think I can not do serious pieces, but if it was something serious I was auditioning for then I don’t think I would be singing this song. What I need to do to sell this audition and convince the directors that I am what their looking for is confidence. I have a lot of it, but it’s important not to lose it for nerves. I need to just go into the room and sing the song to the best of my ability and to become one with the song to make my performance believable. This assignment will challenge me and I’m excited to do my audition piece.

A Play Review About A Guy With A Really Cool Beard

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered: the point is to discover them.” This weekend I went to a play about the scientist, Galileo Galilei. It showed the life of Galileo and his discovery of the telescope. I found the play to be very informative. Maybe a little too informative, but I feel this would be a very interesting event to go to as a field trip for history class. The play overall I found very boring and it is not something I’d probably see again.

The story was about Galileo and his belief that the Earth is moving. His beliefs are extremely against the way of the Pope and the religions of the country. He disproves heaven, the location of G-d and this angers the people. He teaches his ways to a little boy Andrea who learns to believe the ways of Galilei. Though people try to bring him down and disprove his newly found knowledge. His ideas cause controversy and result in ruining his daughter’s engagement.  

The play was very hard to follow and even though I tried to make the best of it, I still found it extremely boring. To start with some positivity, the acting was really impressive. It was very interesting to just watch how these boring characters came just slightly more alive due to the very talented actors and actresses that were in the play. The projection was very good and so was the articulation. Even though I didn’t really find the actual words interesting, I still noticed the difficulty in the lines and the words that could have easily been jumbled. Memorization was also a key thing that impressed me. Remembering lines is not an easy thing and the fact that they could remember these difficult lines and deliver them with the comfortability they did was an extreme showcase of talent. Body language was very good at most times although there are times they struggled. One of my favorite parts was when Sam, who was playing a girl named Virginia, fainted. It seemed so real and I thought she actually fainted and it scared me. Charlotte really did a great job making a really boring role come to life by using body language, facials, projection, and tone. There were some parts I didn’t like as much, but there were some that I did find impressive.

The parts I did not enjoy as much were mainly from the play itself. The topic was boring as well as the story line. It was something I honestly did not care about at all. The play felt like a really boring lecture in class that I just wanted to escape from. There were moments when I couldn’t hear or see the faces of people talking because they had their backs to me and they should have cheated out a little more. There were some little line stumbles and parts that I could tell they forgot due to their faces after, but nobody’s perfect. What threw me off was after someone stumbled over a line there was a split second of them staring blank with a disappointed face. That one moment they jumped out of character made me no longer believe they were that character. These little things detracted from the performance as a whole.

In conclusion, the play was not exactly my favorite. There were some parts that I did enjoy, but the majority was a negative experience. Although I have learned some valuable lessons that I will take with me to class and try to work on during my career as an actress. No matter how boring the play is, having good facials, body language, tone, and projection can make the play just a little bit better. Also no matter what, never break character because someone will notice, even if it is for just a minute.

Final Scenes

http://youtu.be/KPJ4PIfPzPA - Freshman and senior 

http://youtu.be/JB1xE569zIs- Bo and Patti