I want to give you a little background on myself because I think if you could understand what I started with, you’d see that just about anyone could jump into theatre. If I can do it, certainly you can.

To start, I was never much of a theatre person; my first love is music. I did a lot of more traditional choral singing in high school, and I didn’t care for theatre at all…my shallow impression was that theatre people were too melodramatic for me. Between high school and my first Walnut class (Heidi’s musical theatre) in Fall 2007, I didn’t really do anything theatre-ish (no performances, except a few instances in medical school, where the audience comprised our classmates in varying degrees of drunkenness, so anything we did was entertaining). I remember in the first day of Heidi’s class, as I waited my turn to introduce myself, my heart was racing; I could hear it throbbing in my ears and I could see it pounding in my chest. This was completely normal for me — I had always been very shy and easily struck with stage fright, even for stupid things like reading aloud in class in grade school. At my high school graduation, I had to give a speech, and I was so nervous that I started crying and had snot all over my face and my sleeves.

I more or less coped with this anxiety for 26 years, simply accepting that I was an awful mess when I was the center of attention. When I decided to take Heidi’s class, it was because I was finally frustrated with myself for the way I let the anxiety ruin my performance, whether it was presenting my lab work, solving a problem at the chalkboard in school, or singing karaoke with friends (which I pretty much never did; I always just looked thru the song book and chickened out). In every case, I knew I could have done better, but I just let the nerves fluster me. More than anything, I wanted to be able to sing. So, I took Heidi’s class.

As I learned the basics of performing a song in Heidi’s class, I started going to community theatre auditions. With Heidi, I studied voice privately for the first time; she was a huge resource in terms of both vocal technique and her experience in this new theatre world I was exploring. More and more, I learned that singing ability wasn’t really as important as I thought; there was much more emphasis on the “theatre” part of musical theatre. That was a major lesson for me. At some point, I began to understand that theatre isn’t the melodramatic garbage that I had previously thought it to be; I understood that theatre is a form of communication, exactly the kind that I needed to learn and practice in other facets of my life.

I tried to go to every audition possible, regardless of whether I was a good fit for any of the roles. I learned a lot from those experiences, from the various ways that different groups ran auditions to the weird things that would affect my audition (for instance, accompanists who are not as good at piano as Heidi, performing in front of all the auditionees vs. just the directors, auditioning on a stage vs. in a very small random closet-like space, and so forth). More than once, I came home and cried about how I did because I knew it wasn’t my best. More than once, I came to Heidi and ranted about how arbitrary or unjust the process seemed. I also got a feel for the theatres where I auditioned, and this knowledge became useful later as I considered auditioning for their other shows.

I place great trust in Heidi and ran just about every audition by her, whether it was one I considered going to or one that I needed to rant about. However, as much as I learned from Heidi in class and in private lessons, the pace and quantity of learning I acquired while in a show were greater. There is no substitute for performing experience and what I learn from it, about theatre as well as about myself. For instance, I’m a decent soprano, but I would still be nervous about anything above an F. After working on Godspell, I pretty much have no qualms about anything up to a high C. I learned that sometimes I’m vocally tired and can’t do it, but it will be there in a few hours or the next day. (I don’t think I’m doing any vocal damage, since I’m not hoarse; I just get tired.) I would never have volunteered for those high soprano parts, but for whatever reason, the music director assigned them to me…and I realized that for me, the key approach there was the same as with auditions: I needed to face the challenge, remembering that things wouldn’t go the way I wanted every time (and this is VERY hard to accept for a type A person like me), but improvement was inevitable, and most importantly, the anxiety would subside.

I will add that perhaps one natural advantage I have is that I don’t take myself too seriously and can laugh at myself, which makes me and my temperament amenable to the vagaries of theatre I have observed. I still get intimidated by a lot of the people I see at auditions or work with in shows because they clearly have much more experience than I (and when they seem to exude that experience with a purpose, I start to get even more tense). In those cases, I remind myself that I am there to gain experience myself, I am there because I love music and musical theatre, and I am there because the experience ultimately helps me better myself as a whole. And it doesn’t hurt to also remember that I bring a lot of other kinds of experience to the table, and who the heck knows what the director is looking for anyway!