Our first concert with our Orchestra Iowa season tickets!

And our seats turned out to be pretty freaking awesome.

I am where I wanna be

I’m sorry, but I just belted endless choruses of this brilliant, layered, driving anthem surrounded by a 14-piece orchestra and a 10-voice pit chorus with 50 soloists and singers alternately crooning and belting on the stage above us—many of whose lives are affirmed profoundly by these lyrics—and I’m at once happy and weepy and so so proud to be a part of this amazing show with all of these amazing people.

Follies pit singer sitzprobe!

Or you could say Fpitzprobe. But no, you should really never say Fpitzprobe.

Throwback Thursday: Mally Holiday Edition

Here is a rare, valuable and unquestionably alluring photo of me tinkling the imitation ivories with the McKinley Junior High School orchestra at our gala holiday concert in front of the JCPenney at Cedar Rapids' relentlessly beige Westdale Mall:

You can tell I'm totally into the music because my eyes are closed and my hair is floofing dramatically with every arpeggio I summon from the depths of my artistic soul. You can tell it's a winter concert because of our coats piled haphazardly like broken Christmas dreams in the background. Right in front of the picket fence surrounding the dented-but-still-dancing Santa display that exuded all the holiday magic and wonder of the Midas carburetor aisle. And by the Hawkeye Rose Bowl pin dwarfing my chest. A quick google search tells me the Hawkeyes went to the Rose Bowl in January 1981, which would have put me in seventh grade. A quick reality check says that a giant macho football pin doesn't cancel out the fact that I'm gaily playing "Suzy Snowflake" on a partially tuned, poorly voiced mall piano.

Fun fact:

There’s a camera in the Theatre Cedar Rapids pit that’s aimed directly at the face—and the very cold, black soul—of Benjamin the music director as he conducts Elf The Musical. He thinks it’s there so we backstage singers can follow him when we sing in the stage-left backstage-singer place.

But it’s really there so we can see if he ever picks his nose.

Sitzprobe (noun)

1. A seated rehearsal that merges orchestra, vocals and body microphones for the first time in the production of a musical; 2. A vaguely naughty-sounding German word that though it may seem so at first reading doesn't really lend itself to clever sexual innuendo and don't even think you're going to come up with the elusive and brilliantly definitive "probe" joke because millions of very talented and clever and profoundly disturbed actors and singers before you have exhausted every last possibility a thousand times over; 3. THE COOLEST REHEARSAL OF EVERY SHOW OF YOUR LIFE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE; 4. I'm sportin’ my emergency new merlot-at-twilight-hued hoodie I just bought at Target because it’s damn cold today and I proudly but stupidly wore just my flimsy new Disney race shirt when I left the house this morning; 5. That has nothing to do with Sitzprobe but I didn't have any other place to fit it in today; 5. WE HAVE SUPER-NEW, SUPER-TECHY, SUPER-COOL, SUPER-LIGHTWEIGHT, SUPER-SLENDER, SUPER-SUPER NEW BODY MICS; 6. It’s too bad Andrew is always so boring and plain-looking:

Wandelprobe is over—and without a single inappropriate giggle from anyone who said it out loud. So we count that as a win.

Oh—and our orchestra is freaking AWESOME. This show is an absolute vocal-gymnastics pleasure to sing, especially now that we’ve finally layered in our small army of instrumentalists.

And thanks to the geographic witchcraftery of the theater, I just took a selfie that’s simultaneously in the Tottenham Court tenement AND Henry Higggins’ study at wherever the hell 27-A Wimpole Street is. Life upon the wicked stage is NOT for the logical.

Tomorrow is our billion-hour tech rehearsal. And then the full-time magic begins. Just you wait ...

Wandelprobe isn't just the mysteriously-absent-from-the-movie Von Trapp child

It's THE COOLEST OF ALL REHEARSALS FOR A MUSICAL. At the Wandelprobe, we get to sing ("Wand") for the first time ("del") with the orchestra ("pr") as we move ("ob") about the set ("e"). SEE HOW EASY GERMAN IS?

Anyway, I'm about to sing a lush, gorgeous musical score with a massive chorus and a full orchestra all together for the first time, so I don't have time for your pro-America-isolationist-don't-know-how-to-translate-German-correctly distractions. I'm going to be too busy being loverly.