The Wizard of Oz

It had been almost what 4 maybe 5 months since I had been in a show. After dealing with all the pointless and stupid crap that I put up with in the last show I was in with one of the female cast members, I had decided to take a theater break. Yeah 4-5 months isn't that long, but when you have been doing shows as often as I had in the past it was quite the break. The Scera was going to be starting their summer season soon, and I already had the shows planned that I wanted to try out for. They had The Wizard of Oz, All Shook Up, and Fiddler On The Roof planned for the Summer. I planned on trying out for the first and last one, mainly cause the director of the middle show is a horrible person, that directs horrible shows. A show she did last year made the least amount of money and was the worst show in the history of the 25 or more years the Scera has been around. So I try and stay away from her shows. Besides one of my favorite directors was directing the last one and I love to work with him. A director by the name of Jeremy S. was directing The Wizard of Oz. I made a show that he directed a few years back but decided to drop out due to some people issues. I really thought doing this show though would be fun and so I gave it a shot.

Auditioning is still the bane of my theater existence and I shall hate it till the day I die. I walked in the room sang my song and he commented on how he liked my voice, which made me feel better. Then he let us know that they would be sending out a callback email later that day, and that callbacks would be that Saturday. I went about my day and got my email around midnight. They had called me back for the Tinman!  I was pretty stoked. I went home printed out the music that I needed for the callback and went along my way. Callbacks were killer. The dancing that we had to learn was pretty intense and I always tend to worry that if they ever asked us to dance by ourselves instead of the groups they put us in, I would be screwed. Luckily they take groups of like 6-8 and have them all go at once. So we all look retarded instead of just one of us which is always nice. They then let everyone go and put us in our groups to sing of girls and guy parts. We Tinmen were the very last ones to go, and it kinda sucked cause we were there for about 6 hours. Long day.
What was cool is that they lest us know if we made the show by that night. Which is always nice cause you don't have to be paranoid for the next week waiting to see if you got in the show or not. I made the show as a Crow/Ensemble.  The Crows were considered a lead which was cool and we got our names in the programs and such. Basically there was three of us and our job was to heckle the scarecrow during his song, we got to sing and dance and threw in a bit of a funny part from a show that I can't remember for the life of me. I was actually surprised that I got a semi lead part and not just ensemble, mainly because that seems to be all I get when I audition at the Scera. So it was cool to get a decent break out of the normal role.The rehearsals were pretty easy and at the same time pretty stressful. It was a lot of hard dancing like usual, which I actually like, but at the same time sucks cause it means I have to work harder then probably everyone else to learn it. Especially since for the last week and a half of rehearsals I was out of town for a business trip. My partner for the partner dance as again Lauren. Love the girl, she is so fun to work with and really a big help. The show itself was just a blast. No drama, well mostly no drama, a lot of really great people and made some great friends. The performances went really well. We had a girl in the cast that thought she was all that and could do anything and was friends with everyone. She was some sort of dancer, but she wasn't that great so I don't know why. But one night she tried a stunt fell down and apparently busted her elbow or something. I had to fill in for her in one of the dances. We did have a few technical issues with the Virtual Wizard never really working but all in all it was such a fun show. The directors were awesome and we had some big audiences. Really loved the show, and being a Crow was my favorite. We were only on stage for maybe 10 minutes, but the 5 of us that were on stage(3 Crows and Dorothy and Scarecrow) seemed to really get the crowed into the show. Overall it was a  ton of fun and I look forward to hopefully working with this director more in the future.