BTP: Day 4

Wow!  Things are really going great!

Today I was scheduled to play for an 11am Ballet class, but I made sure to get up early anyway.  It's so much easier when you can have a wake-up call!

As it turns out, Darren actually requested me to play for his two ballet classes today!  What a great feeling, coming from the director of the dance department and associate festival director!  Very exciting... and fun to boot!

However, I managed to catch one of Garry McQuinn's sessions on Musical Theater Business.  It was quite interesting to hear the laid-back, yet astute presentation style of this Aussie.  I would think that any kind of business seminar would be boring as all get out to listen to, but he did a great job making it interesting, especially sharing his own life experiences.  Specifically, he mentioned partying with Metalica on a glacier in Iceland, before riding Icelandic ponies until the sun came up.  Crazy.

This session built on the previous one, where he had split the audience into a few groups.  Each group had come up with a show concept, and in this session he encouraged them to think creatively and imagine all the separate aspects of how to mount the show, saying, "Theater is an arena of the imagination."  From house size to target audience, it was a unique look at the other side of theater.

In the evening, I got to work on the Wicked piece again.  After all the work we had done the previous night making it a gentle ballad, the director wasn't keen on the stillness of it.  It needed something with a little more movement, a little more "oomph".  Well, let's put it this way -- she didn't have to ask me twice to "rock out on it."

Now that we were jamming out even more, we developed a problem with the traditional ending -- after the huge push toward the end, it tended to lose steam and fizzle out.  With nearly 20 girls singing it, the ending just wasn't strong enough (in my humble opinion) to support that much presence on stage.  So... I changed it up a little.

I added a few echo parts that stacked in to a nice, dense chord, and at the very end I gave them a powerful inverted 9Chord to wail on a cappella.  I really like it, although it really does change the whole feel of the piece.  We'll see!  Nothing is set in stone yet, so it could all be tweaked.

All in all though, it was so refreshing to have liberties in shaping a piece and have rock-solid harmony singers!  The talent here is top-notch without a doubt; and my group is mostly (if not completely) high school girls!  Incredible.