Opening Night Thoughts

To my regular blog followers, I apologize for the small hiatus from entries. It’s been a crazy tech week for Babes, with classes and rehearsals during the day and preview performances at night. Lunch and dinner are about the only breaks we get. When I come home at night, I have the choice to shower, sleep, or blog. Unfortunately, blogging hasn’t been at the top of my priority list.

With six preview performances down, tonight is the official Opening of Babes in Arms! We’ve gotten great feedback from our viewers so far, and seem to be hitting our target audience rather successfully. Our director, Gray Simons, has a very specific sense of humor that lends itself well to this classic Broadway musical. Babes is an over-the-top, happy-go-lucky show that will leave you feeling like life couldn’t get any better. Sometimes you just need to laugh, and that’s what Babes does well.

The idea of “larger than life” has been a recent theme of my thoughts lately. Musical theatre in general demands a heightened sense of reality that oversteps the bounds of most modern realism. (And by realism I mean the genre of theatre that is naturalistic and more true-to-life than say, melodrama.) I first began to grasp this idea while working on the role of Kathy Selden in Singin in the Rain during my first year at Regent. Early in the rehearsal process, I found myself approaching Kathy as if she was Arkadina in The Seagull. After two semesters of studying Chekhov and Meisner, it was the only method that seemed appropriate. My director kindly challenged me with the idea that musical theatre is not realism, but is in fact a completely different genre and should be treated as such. At first I took serious issue with this idea, believing that anything other than realism would simply not be believable. But after more discussion and thought, I began to see his point. After all, what is real about bursting into song and dance in the middle of the street? I don’t know about you, but that could only be normal for me in a world where the stakes are significantly higher than my everyday reality.

Working on Babes in Arms has reminded me a lot of Singin in the Rain, and Gray, much like my former director, has absolutely created a world of heightened reality. He has encouraged us to think of our individual roles as contributing to something bigger than ourselves. Our lines extend beyond the present circumstances into a future that is dependent on our choices now. Babes is very much about community and teamwork, so his request isn’t hard to acquiesce to. The world these characters live in is one much bigger than our own, and requires much more energy to survive. When speaking can no longer express a character’s thoughts, song takes over, and when there are no more words, dance.

I really appreciate the idea of striving toward something bigger than myself. It’s incredibly refreshing in a business where it’s “all about me.” It’s a good reminder that I am serving a Greater Good, both in the story and in my life. I love acting techniques that train you to focus on the other person or on something outside of yourself. It is way too easy to get wrapped up in what we like to call “actor thoughts” that take you out of the moment and back into yourself. It’s too easy to worry about what people think of your performance or to get self-conscious and afraid to try something new. Pride is the actor’s greatest enemy, whether we all acknowledge it or not.

The best actors in my opinion are the selfless ones, giving of themselves unconditionally and expecting nothing in return. Where there is no pride, there is no fear. This profession isn’t for divas and isn’t for pansies. It takes guts to be vulnerable, and that is why I keep coming back for more.