It astounds me that so many of my friends (especially the music nerds) don't like musicals at all. Clearly, they're all brain damaged. I can't comprehend why people would not see the appeal of dozens of people, randomly bursting into song and dance at the same time, all to carry a plot forward and prove some kind of big idea, like how Kansas City's gone about as fur as they could go, or how money makes the world go round, or how besides which, you see, I have confidence in me. How is that not awesome? Answer: It is awesome, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.
Yesterday, the guy who videotaped the musical revue gave us the DVDs, and I watched mine today. It's deeply irritating how he taped "One Short Day" in such a fashion that the choreography cannot be seen (it's all too close. That number was made to give a splendid overall picture, goddammit, and now Bryn Mawr won't notice it and they won't let me in), but that aside, it's interesting to note the range of talent that we have at Centaur High. The boys are just stunning, and it's really delightful to hear them in "Nothing Like a Dame"; they'll do a terrific job in South Pacific. The girls are all marvelous, too, but there are more stylistic differences with people's natural singing voices. At least, I noticed them more. E sounds pretty because she has such a clear tone, and her voice is sweet, but not sickly so. Just the right amount of sweetness. O has a deep, mellow voice, and A has a bright kind of voice (when she isn't pushing too hard). K's is very distinctive, and her mike was very high during the entire show, so it seems like she was the only one singing sometimes. Listening to yourself singing is weird, though. I like my voice, for the most part, but I think it's too operatic. I always sing from vowel to vowel.
While I was working on the revue, I went on a Fosse binge. I watched Chicago and Cabaret and All That Jazz, which was disappointing in that it had way too many disturbing details about Fosse's life about which I would have been much happier not knowing and not enough dancing. I didn't need to see a man getting heart surgery and sleeping with anything that moved. I wanted to see breathtaking choreography! But I loved Cabaret. I mean, it was terribly creepy and depressing, of course, but the editing was great and the dancing was amazing. The lyrics were running through my head for weeks afterwards, and I had choreographic visions of Liza Minelli- very scary. (I don't care how well she can sell a song, she looks like some kind of alien creature. Especially with that haircut.) I was still in my Cabaret daze when my math teacher told us to put a clever title on our probability papers, so my "clever title" was : All The Odds Are In Your Favor: Winning Jeopardy the "Cabaret" Way. My poor, poor, math teacher: that title baffled him. There was nothing in my paper that actually was related to Cabaret, naturally: to win Jeopardy the Cabaret way, I guess you'd have to sleep with the person who wrote the questions, or maybe get in a fight with some Nazis and end up in the hospital... yeah, I got nothing. But my teacher went on Wikipedia and looked up the musical, and finally just wrote on my paper, "What does this mean? Is there a joke I'm not getting?" He's a nice guy, just not a musical theater type, I suppose.
I think I need a couple years of jazz study before I take on any more musical theater choreography. I sort of wanted to become Michael Bennett, with more estrogen, but I am almost exclusively trained in ballet. Watching the revue, it's not really obvious that I mostly do one style- I didn't try to make J and C do the Rose Adage during Sixteen Going On Seventeen or anything like that- but a more diverse education will definitely do a lot for my technique. The only time a solid knowledge of ballet is handy when one is doing musical theater is during the dream sequence in Oklahoma. And everybody hates that part.
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