#103 Get Back on Stage

If you asked me a year ago, I would have said (and wholeheartedly believed) that 2013 would be the year I would get back on stage, but alas, it looks as if it is not to be. Not for any lack of effort, that's for certain. As soon as I finished graduate school (okay, before even, I went to an audition the week before I graduated), I started hitting the auditions.

There were several things I didn't expect:

• I didn't expect that I would be so rusty. 
• I didn't expect the theatre world to be SO musical theatre based.  (Do people not enjoy just plays any more?)
• I didn't expect my nerves to so incredibly get the best of me. 
• I didn't realize how much competition I was up against, even locally. 

Sigh.  I certainly was rusty.  At my first audition in May, I made a TON of beginner's mistakes. Things I even tell my students NOT to do, I slipped and did myself. Nerves really had a lot to do with it. I don't know what was wrong with me, but at the first couple of auditions I went to, I was a nervous wreck.  The second one was better than the first, and the third audition was actually really good, but I don't know where this anxiety came from.  I do not usually get nervous about performing.

I also didn't realize that the local theatre scene has blown up.  Years ago, when I was a teenager, a lot of these little tiny theatre groups didn't even exist and the ones that did certainly did not have hundreds of people showing up to auditions. That is literally what is happening now. Hundreds of people are showing up to the auditions I am going to. (Yet they still seem to have trouble nailing the parts for young men... what an unjust world we live in. Oh that I were a man...)  It is no wonder I cannot compete.  If it were straight acting, just cold reading or monologues, then I think I would stand a better chance, but I have not had voice lessons in almost 15 years, and my resume has little to no musical theatre on it.  I love musical theatre, but I just haven't had the opportunity to be in a lot of it.

And then there is the dancing issue.

I don't know how to dance, which is so funny to me, because I want to SO badly.  I don't know when this changed in me, because as a kid, I really wanted nothing to do with dance. I quit dancing when I was like 8.  I think it really was a coverup because I so very much hated the dancers I danced with.  And I'm not speaking about any specific girls at any specific studio or dance group, because I tried a few different things as a kid, but I really just disliked dance girls.

Anyhow.... this is kind of another post, so I will continue this in that post.

But, my point it, yes it is only July, but the nearby theatre circuit doesn't seem to have anything else I would be able to do between now and when my students will have their show, so I will need to wait until after that is over in November and then get back to the auditions.