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.