Archive for August, 2008

No choice but to fake it

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

The vacation was good. The more extended family came up for the last weekend, which was nice, as I get to see them even less often than my parents or brother. It was especially nice to see my grandmother, who has been in and out of the hospital these past years and is now pretty much confined to a wheelchair. My aunt also brought up Izzy, who is now 16 years old and getting a lot more bony and less active (but just as curmudgeonly as he’s always been… it’s as though his body has finally grown into his personality).

More blabbering on about Izzy… with pictures!

I got back Sunday evening. The flight was exhausting, as usual… I have a knack for somehow getting rearranged and shafted to the rear of airplanes, as both legs of my journey to Canada had already done so. When I saw the same thing on my boarding passes for the return flights, I spoke to the ticket agent and he was able to improve my seat on the shorter leg to Detroit, but was apparently unable to even access the much longer flight to Seattle on his computer. So the second leg had me at row 36 in a middle seat… the good news was that a family of four traded me the aisle so they could sit together; it should come as no surprise, though, that the bad news was that half the family was composed of a baby that wouldn’t stop crying and a little kid that wouldn’t stop talking.

So naturally much of the R&R I managed to accrue over the vacation was forfeit, and now between work and trying to catch up in the rehearsals I’ve missed for Rocky Horror I’m pretty well spent. It’s good to get back into rehearsing, but last night was my first time singing “The Time Warp” with the cast there and it was scary as pants for me, even though I’d worked on it just about every day while on vacation. Turns out most of what I’d worked on needed to be thrown out anyway, since there are a lot of nuances to the specific version we’re doing I didn’t know about (I only got the vocal score this week and have been working off of various recordings in the meantime). Everyone is very encouraging and supportive but the gap between myself and the others is dizzyingly wide… our Magenta especially has a stunning rock belt, and while I’m fortunate to have her backing me up, between that and the stellar vocals of the rest of the cast it’s all rather confidence-shaking.

Of course, my greatest dilemma is that the one thing this kind of music absolutely demands above all else is confidence, so I have no choice but to fake it and try to fool myself. Thankfully that’s an acting challenge rather than a singing challenge, so I’m better equipped to handle it.

Would that I could still fool myself in the moments between performing, though.

Dan.

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Secret plan

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I’ve spent the past couple of months bringing a secret plan to fruition, where I hoped to surprise my mother on her birthday by dropping in unexpectedly on their summer cottage vacation.

I had really hoped to kill two birds with one stone and help my dad out in his purchase of a new van by buying it for him in the States and driving it up to Canada, magically saving him about ten thousand dollars because that’s just how much more things cost north of the border. Importing should be almost trivial to do except that Toyota doesn’t want you to do it, and makes it extremely difficult to do so (with new vehicles especially). My dad compromises on some things, but the make, model and age of his minivan are not up for discussion.

In short, they won’t sell to Canadians, only Americans who are registering the vehicle to an American DMV. The hope was that we could use my residency status and address in America to buy the van, and it looked like it would work except that it takes 6 to 8 weeks to title a vehicle in Washington and without the title we’d need a manufacturer’s certificate of origin to import it, which the dealerships wouldn’t provide us with because Toyota is run by assholes.

We finally gave up on it and I settled on flying to Toronto directly instead of Buffalo. I caught the red-eye which included a stopover in Vegas, during which I played my first ever slot machine… I spent a dollar that someone had given me beforehand and lost it before I was able to even figure out how the machine worked. I failed to sleep on the plane and arrived in Toronto at 7:30 AM local time, all sweaty and bleary-eyed. My mom was nearly shocked senseless when she came downstairs and I was there, and much blubbering followed.

I’m now spending the week with them up at their cottage in Muskoka. I am sad that I’m not getting to see any of my Canadian friends this visit, but the downtime up here has been really theraputic for me. We’ve caught one of the most gorgeous weekends of the summer… it’s been sunny and warm and the lake has been quiet and calm. I’ve gone swimming and boating with my folks and working on my part in Rocky Horror but most of all I’ve just been lounging and resting, and it’s been niiiiice.

My biggest complaint is that we only have dial-up Internet access here, and I didn’t discover until I arrived that my fancy-pants laptop doesn’t actually have a modem in it, so I’m forced to use my dad’s computer for all Internet-related activity. I’m trying to goad them into getting high-speed up here, mostly because I think it’d be fantastic to lounge around on the lower deck out by the water with a wireless connection to the rest of the world. Don’t think they’ll go for it any time soon, though.

For the curious, I have some pictures of the cottage taken a couple of years back in my gallery. Pretty much everything is the same… except the baby ducks have grown big and fat now, and still like to hang around our little bay.

Dan.

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Tenor rock screamer

Monday, August 11th, 2008

So I realize it’s been a while since my last post, but I’ve been keeping busy. I had a stream of auditions and (what I like to think were) near-misses. Then something weird happened last Friday, when a friend let me know that the guy who had been playing Riff Raff in an upcoming production of The Rocky Horror Show down in Burien had backed out, and they were looking for a replacement.

Now Riff Raff is kind of a dream role for me, and I knew at least four of the other people who were going to be in it, so I responded and asked my friend who I should get in touch with about it. After some thought, though, I realized that it was strange that I hadn’t auditioned in the first place for it, and I wondered why. Digging up the theatre’s website and their audition page I soon realized it: they had been looking for a true “tenor rock screamer” to play the part, so when I had previously seen their audition notice I had naturally dismissed it as unattainable, as I am none of those things.

I spoke with the director on the phone and explained this to him, and said while I would love to play the part, I’d never sung any rock before, and without the aid of some kind of futuristic genetic therapy I simply wasn’t of that vocal calibre. He told me that had been their ideal and he had since come to accept that he wasn’t going to find exactly what he was looking for there, and he had seen me perform in a couple of shows before and liked my work, so if I thought I’d be able to hit the notes he’d cast me.

All I had to do at that moment was say “yes”, and I’d be in.

I hesitated, though. I told him I wanted to discuss it with my singing teacher and get back to him. I called Nikki and talked to her about it… sent her some YouTube clips of The Time Warp and Over At The Frankenstein’s Place. We discussed it and I phoned the director back and left him a message, telling him I could hit all the notes but some would have to be in my falsetto and not as strong as when Richard O’Brien sings them in the movie, but if he was okay with me backing it up with strong character choices then we’d be in business.

What followed was about the most agonizing day and a half in recent memory, while I waited impatiently for his non-response and dwelt upon the opportunity that had slipped through my fingers. Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Show. I could have been the utterly creepy manservant who sings “The Time Warp”. The part so awesome that the writer of the show had to play it in the original stage production and in the movie adaptation. All I’d had to do was say “yes” when I had the chance… sure, I was just trying to do my due diligence, but if he said “no” after hearing of my shortcomings, or used the time to find someone else… well, sure, they were the same shortcomings I’d have anyway if I’d jumped at the offer, but he might have come to accept them more readily after working with me for a while, and I wouldn’t have missed out on what could easily be a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity…

So I was pretty much shivering with anticipation when I finally got the call and he told me that I’d been given the role, and he’d see me on Sunday.

And just like that, I get to play Riff Raff, easily the coolest role I’ve ever had an musical. Check it out:

So now I’m plagued with insecurities about how I’m going do vocal justice to this character. At the read-through on Sunday he played music from the 2000 revival cast, and it was very clear where he got the idea for a “tenor rock screamer”, as opposed to the original version, which was rocking but nowhere near as… well, rocktacular. The director expects us to provide the usual staples of good theatre but has made it clear that this is a musical about sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, and the importance of that third element cannot be denied.

I’ll just have to do my darnedest.

Dan.

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