Do I wake or sleep?

So the concert actually went quite well. N**** came over Friday night and we drilled the living hell out of her shaky parts--we drilled so long I was worried I wouldn't have a voice the next day. Girl just does not read music and isn't really that musical (like she does not have the instincts of a singer. Some of this is knowledge and some you're just born with). I figured out at one point she was adding counts because she thought that the fragmented measure that accompanies a cautionary key change (when there's a new system and the key changes, the composer will add a key change at the end of the previous system to alert whoever's playing/singing that the key is about to change, like this:



She thought that was its own measure and was adding counts. Anyway so I worked her through this and DRILLED. (I found out from Donna the next day that she'd basically told Donna she could read music and work on her own which obviously was not the truth. Donna was pretty annoyed.) She sounded okay on Saturday--still a little shaky (from nerves more than anything) but she didn't blow it. I felt very good about my music even though I'd kind of risked it since I'd been unable to turn down a soccer game that morning (although I forced myself not to yell). (And oh my God! I brought some oatmeal and ate it on the train and stuff the container in my bag which of course overturned on the way to the game and vomited oatmeal ALL OVER my stuff. Nice.) But it all went well and Donna was telling me that she'd heard some nice reactions to my soli. (I will admit, I know how to nail Come Away Death and The Willow Song.)

And my aunt was in town! One of my Dad's four younger sisters, my aunt Clarissa--and she's my godmother as well. After my game I ran over to Penn Station and picked her up and we took the train up to Inwood for the performance. So she got to hear me sing! Afterward she treated me to a Broadway show and we decided to see The Bridges of Madison County. I haven't read the book or seen the movie and dozed off *several* times during the first act. So perhaps some of this escaped me but I had a hard time figuring out why she had this affair when she wasn't really unhappy in her marriage. Clarissa explained some of it to me but I think perhaps the movie would do a better job--I think movies are better for communicating intimacy. I don't know. The score was certainly gorgeous and the guy who played Kincaid was terrific (and he was the standby! I think he went up on the lyrics during his last number but he was still great). Kelli O'Hara has an absolutely lovely voice but I did think she was a little mannered portraying an Italian (the hands).

Criss also gave me some family artifacts like--this is wild--my Dad's teddy bear from CHILDHOOD. Daddy gave it to her when he went off to boarding school and asked her to keep it safe for him--she has kept it all these years and now gave it to me. It is now thoroughly battered and well-loved. I put him next to Paddington and they can be friends. She said I could either return it to Daddy or keep it--I think the latter, I'm worried he won't take it from her (my Dad and his brothers are in the middle of a huge feud with my aunts. They haven't communicated in years).

So I'm doing this concert of Shakespearean songs for Donna and there's a ton of music, some of which I already know. No problem, Donna's stuff is easy enough to read. There are two other singers on the bill--one is a guy named R** who's pretty good, and the other is a girl named N**** who has a beautiful voice but has a hard time with the music. For the last two weeks Donna has been making the girl's tracks easier and easier (or giving them to me) because she just isn't getting it. She turned one duet into a solo so at this point I have FIVE soli! Wednesday night we had our "dress rehearsal" and N**** did pretty badly--worse, actually, than she's been doing in rehearsal. She was obviously very nervous. One of the biggest hurdles is this section in the "Lullaby" song (from Midsummer)--for the most part the song is in 3/4 time but in the middle part it goes crazy. 3/4 to cut time to common time to 3/4, all within one staff. It's tricky even for me--this poor girl is just at sea. Donna thinks she just needs to run it but we've done that and she's still messing up. So I asked her if I could help her, she said YES. I sat her down and talked to her about time signatures and how to read them, what cut and common times mean and then I went through the music and marked how to count, with 1, 2 etc, above the notes. I said don't be embarrassed to do this, I do it myself if the rhythms are tricky. And then I told her tonight you need to go home and sing this and clap/count. Get this passage into your mouth--let your muscle memory help you. do this 20 times tonight, and then ten times tomorrow morning. Tomorrow night, another 20 times. We made plans to get together tonight to go over the stuff and she was thrilled. I'd taped a lot of the group numbers with my iPhone so I said I'll convert these to audio files and send them to you.

Well, last night I'm trying to convert these iPhone videos to sound-only files and trying to use iMovie. It's not easy at all--iMovie is a great moviemaker but it's almost too complicated. There's actually a really easy way to do this (save the video to your desktop and then open it with Audacity, my sound editing file--Audacity only captures the sound portion of the video so then you just save it as an .mp3)--but I didn't figure out this easy way until after midnight. I'd literally been working at this for several hours, trying to convert these videos so N**** could listen to them and get the whole sound of the number into her head. Finally I'm done and ready to email the files to N****. I don't have her email address but Donna sends out SO MANY emails, I can easily get it from them, right? In fact Donna had just sent out another one at 11:30 (where she gave me MORE music that should've been N****'s so that's a last-minute change I have to incorporate--good thing I'm so reliable, right?!). The thing with Donna's emails is that she gets really weird about whether or not people have received them and always asks for confirmation. So there's this constant round of emails, followups to emails, replies to emails, confirmations and replies and it's just a LOT of emailing. It clutters up my mailbox and I get annoyed at having to reply "yes, I received your email" after EVERYTHING she sends. Anyway so she sent one at 11:30, I open it up, dutifully reply "got it," hit send and then I look at the "To" line, expecting to see Ray's and Nadya's emails.

There's nothing, only Donna's email. She emailed it to herself and bcc:ed us. I don't have Nadya's email.

I go through all of Donna's MANY emails. All of them were bcc:ed.

WTF WHYYYYYYYYY? Why does she have to make it so complicated? Why, for God's sake? Why would she hide our emails from each other? What possible reason could she have for that? I emailed her IMMEDIATELY asking for Nadya's address--remember, she'd emailed me just 30 minutes before and she (of course) asked for confirmation. I didn't hear from her so I texted her at 12:30--nothing. Finally at 2:00 am I emailed DONNA the fucking sound files and asked her to forward them to Nadya. I was super-annoyed at the whole thing. Donna, I am doing YOUR cleanup because you didn't realize this girl can't read music. I am doing this not because I need to--hey, I know my stuff--but because I want us all to sound good. It kills the vibe when someone's up there sounding terrified, and I want my friends who are coming to see a good show. Furthermore I really don't have time to do go over this with N****--my aunt is coming to visit tomorrow and staying with me and I'd really like to clean the place and just relax. Donna has talent blinders on sometimes--she just doesn't realize how BAD some of these singers are. Oh my God, some of the talentless guys she's had in her concerts--I was insulted to share the stage with them, frankly. This girl is not really bad--she does have a lovely voice--but she can't really read music at all, which means you need to work with her a lot more. And Donna should've realized this and made sound files, drilled her, whatever. It shouldn't be my job.

Having said this, since I am doing this, the least you could do is not hide our effing contact information for no reason! I just don't even get why she would do that. She sent me this rather defensive reply this morning--Donna, go ahead and get defensive because you need me a lot more than I need you! I am far and away the best musician *and* singer in this little concert (Ray isn't bad but I am better) and well she knows it or she wouldn't be throwing me MORE stuff (as a direct result of this girl's inability to learn the music) at the last minute.

We had Friday and Saturday off from rehearsal.  I welcomed the opportunity to forget about the show for two days, but I wanted to work on the tap solo and NAIL that entrance, so I booked space at Ripley-Grier for Saturday afternoon.  I've also been sick the past week--Friday night was brutal, I could not stop coughing--so dragging myself out of bed Saturday morning wasn't fun!  Susan and I drilled the hell out of the solo and by the end I was nailing it AT tempo.  Triples and everything.  Yay!  So I think the key is to warmupwarmupwarmUP every night.  Run that thing over and over and over, and then run it listening to my iPod.

I dragged myself back home and curled up in bed, pausing only to email regrets to a Halloween party.  Ugh...

Yesterday I felt a little better.  We had a clean up rehearsal and went over a lot of the music and much of the dance.  Vocally there was a decent amount to clean up--there are a LOT of discrepancies among 1) what we were taught by the music director, 2) what he notated in the score (he wrote many of his own arrangements) and 3) the vocal tracks he recorded for us all.  Kind of annoying, mainly because he's a bit of a dick, one of those guys that is brittle and will not take well to any pointing out of mistakes.  The mistakes are a bit more apparent to me than to the other two altos (I'm singing alto on this) because I read music and see the mistakes he's made--uh, what I'm hearing on the vocal track is NOT what is in the score in front of me!  His arrangements are great though, I'll give him that, I especially like the last number.

Singing alto is weird for me--I enjoy the opportunity to sight-read (sopranos usually just get the melody) but the parts are always a little low for me.  I can hit the notes but they're not terribly comfortable.  And I'm not used to hearing the alto line, I'm trained to hear the soprano line.  So I had to work harder than normal on the score for this.

I gotta say though, I'm a little nervous about two performances.  I have a strong suspicion that the guy who plays Frank N Furter is tone-deaf.  This is not a death knell--Tim Curry talks his way through much of the score--but if that's what he needs to do, then DO it.   Don't massacre the score by trying to sing what you can't, just commit to talking it.  I'm not sure how familiar he is with the score--I don't believe he's seen the movie as he didn't want to go on a cast outing to see it, he was afraid of being influenced by Curry's performance.  (To which I say--man, you need to develop stronger acting instincts.  I've seen the movie many times, and my take on Columbia is nothing like Little Nell's.)  Anyway, I guess he doesn't know the score but in that case, LEARN IT.  Get the soundtrack and listen to these songs, even if it does influence you.  The Sunday before we open is a little late to be stumbling over the Charles Atlas song.  It's a good thing he's a good actor--his performance (other than the singing) is pretty decent.

The other performance is Steven as the Narrator.  Again, don't know if he's seen the movie but his take on the Narrator is all wrong.  The Narrator is the CONTROL character--he (like Janet and Brad) is quote-unquote normal.  He's not a freak, he's commenting on the freaks.  He's supposed to show up how weird this whole journey through his normality.  Steve's playing it almost like he's excitedly gossiping on the story.  Noooooo!  Deadpan, controlled, sober--THAT'S the Narrator.  Not giddy and excited, it undermines his function.  And this is small but it gets on my nerves nonetheless--he sings the last verse of Superheroes instead of speaking out.  Now Steven does have a lovely voice but the way he delivers it, he's all soulful and sad, NOOOOOO!  Again, that's not the Narrator.  This didn't happen to YOU, you're the messenger.  And I know he's singing it not because it's a character choice but simply to show off his (yes, lovely) singing voice--but it's not appropriate for the character or the show.  Ergh.

We have tech/dress tonight and tomorrow, and then an invited final dress for Wednesday.