Oct. 5: Doing musical theatre when you've never done theatre

I can't sing. It's just something I never learned to do. I don't have much natural musical talent and I may be partially tone deaf. The bottom line is that I just can't sing. Oh I suppose I can carry a tune if I absolutely have to but I'll never win any prizes at a karaoke contest and I'll never play the phantom of the opera. My singing ability is somewhere between Alice Cooper and a gravy ladle.

I was on the Muppet Show, darn it.

Strangely enough, I love theatre. I studied drama for three years at the post-secondary level. I've acted in a few plays, although I haven't graced a stage for more than a decade and I must confess that I miss it terribly. Right out of high school, I attended Rosebud, a Christian theatre guild school that mounted four productions every year. Pretty much all of 'em had music. I felt useless. I wanted to act but I knew I couldn't sing and I didn't want to sing onstage because I didn't like knowing that people were paying their hard earned money to hear me sing poorly. Luckily, the only singing I did was as a member of the tenor section that sang Vivaldi's Gloria during the second part of the Christmas concert in 1991.

And now I am going to get sentimental because I remember my friend, Bill Hamm, working very hard with me to get me good enough to sing in that choir. Bill conducted us and he wore a tuxedo and he looked so happy on opening night and it took me almost a decade for me to realize what a monumental achievement that was for him.

He was conducting Vivaldi.

For a paying audience.

An audience that gave him a standing ovation.

He was living his dream.

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I guess I'm lucky in that I rarely ever get stage fright. I had it once really bad in 1992 when Rosebud mounted a dinner theatre production called An Evening with McSleuth and I got cast in the lead role. Man was I nervous. I'm not sure why. I got paid for that show (not much) but since money changed hands, I thought of it as my professional debut.

And now we fast forward four years and I'm directing a play that I wrote. It's opening night and one of my actors is very nervous about going onstage.

"You know this is my first time, right?" he asks.

"Yeah."

"So how come you cast me?"

"Because there always has to be a first time for something."

My young actor friend was still petrified. Said he didn't want to go on. Was scared he'd embarrass himself.

And so I told all the other actors to leave the room so I could talk to this guy alone. They did. Once we were alone, I put my hands on the guys' shoulders, looked him straight in the eyes, and said this:

"In the entire recorded history of the theatre, no actor has ever shit their pants onstage."

I went on to explain that the theatre gods (Dionysys, mostly, but he could have some help from St. Genesius) make an actors' sphincter shrink to the size of a subatomic particle. My actor friend was happy I told him that and he turned in a pretty darned good performance.

But he didn't sing.

No one sang.

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I got to Rosebud in September of 1991. The first thing we did was go to a camp so we could pray and sing Christian songs and get to know each other better. That is also where we auditioned for the upcoming season's three plays, which were:

- Skinflint out west (an adaptation of Moliere's The Miser)
- Larry (written by Lyle Penner and Ros Hirsch and directed by a guy named Randy Ritz, though it was originally supposed to be directed by James D Hopkin)
- The Bishop's Candlesticks (an adaptation of Les Miserables, directed by Royal Sproule)

An aside: Why in the world my brain insists on holding on to that sort of information is beyond me.

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Other things I remember about that first weekend in Rosebud:

- On the way, we stopped at a hotel because all the guys wanted to watch Canada play the United States in one of the Canada Cup finals. We learned that at the hotel, one of the banquet rooms was being rented by a guy named Bishop Washington Ogonyo Ngede, who was hosting a fundraiser for his Power of Jesus Around the World Church, which is still a big deal in Kenya.
- The camp we went to was a fully stocked Christian camp. The Archie comics were Christian, meaning that Betty and Veronica were all about sharing God's love and there was no mention of Sabrina the teenaged witch.
- We all went to this jumping rock overlooking a crystal clear (but very cold) lake and I was the first one to jump in. (Serena later came out with a leech stuck to her thigh.)
- Jodie getting stung by a bee and this causing a mild panic.
- Me having a mini breakdown over sins I'd committed in the past.
- Going to a readthrough of The Blackleg Miner, which was Rosebud's fall production that year. I saw that play about a dozen times over the next few weeks.

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I was an idiot because I did not audition for Larry or Bishop's Candlesticks - I only auditioned for Skinflint. I really wanted the role of Lafleche, who is the clown of the show - the miser's assistant, a fop who seems to mess everything up. I did not get the part. The role went to Lyle Penner, who wasn't an excellent singer, but he was able to cover that up by just pretending to be Lafleche.

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I have a friend who has never done theatre and now finds herself as part of the chorus in a musical.

I don't know if she's nervous. I know she can sing. I don't think she should be nervous.

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said "I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.”I never cared for that quote. I find it woefully elitist. There is nothing wrong with community theatre. There is nothing wrong with professional theatre.

People need to be free to pursue happiness. If acting in a play makes them happy, they deserve that opportunity.

Even if they can't sing.