(no subject)
We finally got our scripts and music for Threepenny Opera yesterday evening. I had twenty minutes before I had to be somewhere else, so I scurried back to the music building and took a look at my part.
Scheiße. Lucy is high. Not the notes -- nothing goes above a Bb, which is fine -- but the tessitura. It just hangs out up there around the passagio for ages and ages of consonant-laden text. There's one part where a whole line is declaimed on a G. Um.... GAH. Help?
Also, I pray to god that I can make that aria funny. I can see why it got cut from most subsequent productions after the premiere in 1928. It's not just that it's a bit hard if you're casting more for acting than for vocal technique; it's also (I think) that the humor somehow doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the show. Weill spoofs a lot of different theatrical styles in the course of Threepenny, but they mostly center around cabaret-type things (tango, sentimental love ballads, etc.)... this is spoofing opera, and I have no idea if it's funny if you're not glancingly familiar with Verdi and Wagner (or, in the case of the Jealousy Duet, with Mozart).
I am getting some fun ideas, though, looking at the script. I love that Lucy's a raging spoiled diva, a narcicisstic conniving manipulative brat who firmly believes herself to be a romantic. SO much fun to be had.
And I do have a great deal of faith in the skill of the director. I've rarely trusted somebody so instantly to work with his actors, rather than on or through them (srsly guys, these are the prepositions that make or break a production). He'll help me be funny. I hope.
And if I give the music some reasonable work between now and January, and still sound unbearably screechy... well, I'll run with it. Lucy come Florence Foster Jenkins. Hey, it could work.
I didn't dress up as anything for Halloween, mostly because this year no one bothered to wheedle me into it. (Ari did the job the last few years of highschool, and Katy's done it the past three or so.) Besides, I didn't really want to trot out the flamenco skirts and corset and go as Carmen/a pirate/something swashbuckling for the third year in a row.
(Last year a couple of people who know me pretty well and see me often had to ask if I was actually in costume. Corset + flamenco skirt + petticoat + boots + headscarf + earrings = me on a relatively regular basis. Or at least two or three out of the above, if not all together.)
But I could have dusted off an evening gown and the elbow-length gloves and just let people make up their own minds what to call me.
I was, however, wearing a long red trench coat and knee-high leather lace-up boots. Which I guess looked fairly costume-y, because some of the swarms of hyperactive little kids roaming the neighborhood were eyeing me speculatively this evening as I walked home. Finally one of them piped up and asked "Are you supposed to be Little Red Riding Hood?"
No, honey. The Big Bad Wolf. Just you wait.
Scheiße. Lucy is high. Not the notes -- nothing goes above a Bb, which is fine -- but the tessitura. It just hangs out up there around the passagio for ages and ages of consonant-laden text. There's one part where a whole line is declaimed on a G. Um.... GAH. Help?
Also, I pray to god that I can make that aria funny. I can see why it got cut from most subsequent productions after the premiere in 1928. It's not just that it's a bit hard if you're casting more for acting than for vocal technique; it's also (I think) that the humor somehow doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the show. Weill spoofs a lot of different theatrical styles in the course of Threepenny, but they mostly center around cabaret-type things (tango, sentimental love ballads, etc.)... this is spoofing opera, and I have no idea if it's funny if you're not glancingly familiar with Verdi and Wagner (or, in the case of the Jealousy Duet, with Mozart).
I am getting some fun ideas, though, looking at the script. I love that Lucy's a raging spoiled diva, a narcicisstic conniving manipulative brat who firmly believes herself to be a romantic. SO much fun to be had.
And I do have a great deal of faith in the skill of the director. I've rarely trusted somebody so instantly to work with his actors, rather than on or through them (srsly guys, these are the prepositions that make or break a production). He'll help me be funny. I hope.
And if I give the music some reasonable work between now and January, and still sound unbearably screechy... well, I'll run with it. Lucy come Florence Foster Jenkins. Hey, it could work.
I didn't dress up as anything for Halloween, mostly because this year no one bothered to wheedle me into it. (Ari did the job the last few years of highschool, and Katy's done it the past three or so.) Besides, I didn't really want to trot out the flamenco skirts and corset and go as Carmen/a pirate/something swashbuckling for the third year in a row.
(Last year a couple of people who know me pretty well and see me often had to ask if I was actually in costume. Corset + flamenco skirt + petticoat + boots + headscarf + earrings = me on a relatively regular basis. Or at least two or three out of the above, if not all together.)
But I could have dusted off an evening gown and the elbow-length gloves and just let people make up their own minds what to call me.
I was, however, wearing a long red trench coat and knee-high leather lace-up boots. Which I guess looked fairly costume-y, because some of the swarms of hyperactive little kids roaming the neighborhood were eyeing me speculatively this evening as I walked home. Finally one of them piped up and asked "Are you supposed to be Little Red Riding Hood?"
No, honey. The Big Bad Wolf. Just you wait.