Hey everybody!
I hope you had a fantastic Monday to start off the week. I keep looking at my phone and in awe by how it is already mid-November! What in the world? How does time fly by so quickly??
Whitney and I wrapped up Hairspray last Sunday (8 days ago) and we have already begun rehearsals for our next gigs. Whitney started the next day on Monday, so she's been in rehearsals for a solid week and I started this past Friday. We are 45 minutes away from each other. She is doing a Christmas review show in Hershey, PA and I'm doing
Singin in the Rain in Lancaster, PA.
The transition to these jobs was pretty stressful! My mother flew into Philly last Saturday night to watch our final
Hairspray performance on Sunday and then the 3 of us drove 2 hours west to Hershey that night. Whitney was in rehearsal the next day while mom and I hung out. I was given an audition appointment in NYC for an upcoming Broadway show
Tuck Everlasting for Tuesday morning. Well, my mom's flight wasn't until 11am so I felt like I should stay with her as long as I could. After much discussion I decided to leave for the city Monday evening around 7:30pm and drove 3 hours to get to my apartment where I slept on our couch because we have 2 subletters in our rooms. Ahh... the life of a gypsy. Mind you, I have all of my things in luggage unpacked because I won't be able to move into my place in Lancaster until Wednesday afternoon. So I have all of my things in probably 5 different locations. It's the worst and most stressful feeling of not knowing where everything is and remembering where you packed that certain thing that you desperately need. So I got into Queens and hadn't even gone over my audition material, so... for an hour and half I watched part of the Disney movie of Tuck Everlasting and printed out my scenes and went to bed all the meanwhile thinking how I left my mom in Hershey, PA all by herself:( sorry mom and thanks for being the most understanding and supportive!
Another not so fun part in this industry is the fact that you have to prepare for everything even though the probability of you even doing the material in the audition room is like 30% AND the likelihood of you booking the gig especially on Broadway is 0.0000001%. Haha, I laugh out loud when I think and type these statistics but honestly it's true. Some people walk on Broadway and they somehow get the easy ride........ and then....... there's the majority of us who wait in lines, pay money to take master classes, pay money to get seen by casting directors, and take crappy low paying jobs all in the hope of getting on Broadway. Whitney and I ask ourselves periodically, is it worth it? Is all of this moving around, schedule changing, non-saving gigs worth it? Is all of this constant struggling worth it for Broadway? And always, we end up saying, it's the best of the best and Broadway has always been our dream ever since we were young. We not only want to make ourselves proud but we want to make our family and friends proud! We want that feeling on opening night of our loved ones in the audience being the most excited for our debut!! Especially since they will have all known how hard and impossible it was for us to get there. I seriously dream about this moment. I dream about the applause, I dream about the smiles from our loved ones after we're done with the show and going out for dessert in Times Square. Even if it's just one Broadway show, I think we'll be okay to move on to something maybe more consistent. We want a family in the future. And the way we're living now, it would be IMPOSSIBLE for one. I think by the time we reach 30 and we haven't gotten on Broadway, we might move on to a more stable lifestyle... whatever that may be.
I know one thing is true, Whitney and I enjoy performing and we work best when we're together. Perhaps the Lord has our own theatre management company in store for us. I know we would be a great team.
Back to before... so I'm in NYC and I get up at 7am to shower, shave, get ready. Leave for manhattan and get to the audition. This is an agent submission dance call. Which means, only men with agents can get into this audition. There are about 50 of us in this big dance room. Right away I recognize 3 dancers from the Broadway musical
Newsies. These are like "So You think you can Dance" dancers. I immediately think, great the breakdown for this audition said, movement call, which means not hard dancing. Oh, and there are about 6 people from the creative team including Casey Nicholaw who choreographed Broadway's
Book of Mormon. He is directing and choreographing
Tuck Everlasting. He begins by apologizing that this won't be a movement call but more of a dancer call. He also said they were looking for very specific people, since they've already done workshops and readings of it, they only are looking for a select few. "Great, I'm so glad I drove 3 hours out of my way and changed my life around to probably fall on my face in this audition." Well, I did the best I could and I didn't get a callback. So I left and took a nap and drove back to Hershey, PA. Our lives in a nutshell.
I bummed around Whitney's place for a couple of days which is very similar to a boarding school. Huge old mansion with many many rooms. One kitchen. On Wednesday, I moved all of my stuff into my Lancaster home where they are housing me in an apartment right by the theatre. It's a super nice 2 bedroom apt. with a roommate who is also in the show. They were working on plumbing in our bathroom so I couldn't stay the night until Thursday.
Friday began and I met my cast of 18 including myself and the creative team. Right away I knew this was going to be a fantastic theatre to work for. Everyone was super nice and normal:) We've been in rehearsals for the past week and they've been going really well. One of the leads in our show has been in 6 Broadway shows. He's extremely talented!! He's our Cosmo in the show - if you know the movie with Gene Kelly he is the one that does "Make 'Em Laugh."
Whitney's rehearsal schedule consists of 11 hour days. She does get a lunch and dinner break but her first day off is this coming Friday. So she will have worked 11 hour days for 11 days straight. It's insane! I don't understand how a company can demand all of that energy when you're a performer. Needless to say, she and I both will be looking forward to her opening so that we can actually see each other more often. We have one car, and since everything here is in walking distance, she gets the car, but in order for us to see one another, she has to drive after her 9pm rehearsal to me and then drive back before 10am the following morning. These past couple of nights she's just been too exhausted to make the drive which is completely understandable.
I'm also doing
A Christmas Carol here and rehearsals start for that on Friday. This is the show where I'm technically getting my equity card. Yay!
We are both looking forward to the Holiday Christmas season because for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we will be in Cleveland TN and then for the New Year we will be celebrating in Denver, CO with my family. We already have our flights and everything. Bring on the Holidays!
