It’s been a while.
I’ve lost a bit of my connection to my musical theatre roots. When I was first bitten by the acting bug, it was for a musical. I got pulled into the chorus of my high school’s production of The Drunkard (with music and lyrics by Barry Manilow — how’s that for trivia), and I’ve never really looked back since. My first community theatre shows, in Regina, were musicals. The first show I ever performed in while studying at Queen’s University was a musical. After I graduated (with an engineering degree!) and joined the working world, I performed in seven musicals with Orpheus Musical Theatre Society over a span of less than four years. And when a small group of us joined forces with Ken Godmere to form Zucchini Grotto Theatre Company and produce I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change in 2003, it was actually the beginning of my professional acting career (side note: one of the nice things about having a blog that goes back more than seven years is an ability to link to my old posts about producing and performing in professional musical theatre for the first time). My links to the form run deep!
We formed Zucchini Grotto because there weren’t any professional musicals being produced in Ottawa. Arguably, there still aren’t many. Zucchini was going to change all that — but producing musicals is very complex and expensive, and you can only risk your life savings so many times before… well, before you lose them. In addition, my acting interests expanded and shifted, and now I spend most of my time working on non-musical theatre because a love of Shakespeare is far more likely to win me the glorious chance to wear tights on stage. Anyway, aside from cabaret nights that Zucchini Grotto still occasionally produces, I rarely get to sing for money. And as my resume grows and my older credits start to fall off the bottom of the page, it is starting to look like I have no musical theatre experience at all.
I really miss doing musicals. Any time I get to do a play that involves a little bit of singing (fortunately, this is a big part of the Canadian theatre aesthetic), I feel very comfortable and quite at home. However, if I were truly passionate about a career in musical theatre, I’d have to leave Ottawa in order to find any kind of regular employment (assuming I could find any; competition is fierce and most theatre is not of the musical variety). And I’d have to work VERY hard at bringing my atrophied showtune muscles back up to snuff.
Thankfully, I’ve got the Show Tune Showdown to help me reconnect with my long-lost musical theatre roots. It’s a fundraiser for Tone Cluster, a local gay choir, and Zucchini Grotto has entered the competition for the past four years. I participated on our team in the first year, but have been unable to participate in the previous two years due to scheduling conflicts — I’m thrilled to be back at it! The showdown takes place between three teams of performers, each of whom prepare four songs to present to an audience and a panel of judges. In between performance rounds, there are trivia rounds where teams can win points by correctly guessing the same of a musical theatre song and then performing it without rehearsal. There are terrific chances for audience participation, and the whole thing is a raucous good time.
What makes this year’s competition really interesting — and truly incestuous — is that members of all three teams are quite deeply connected to one another. Members of all three teams have been part of at least one Zucchini Grotto production or cabaret. One team is from Orpheus Musical Theatre Society, and all but one of the Zucchini Grotto team has been (or still is) a member of that community theatre group. The third and final team is from Sheridan College’s music theatre training program, and one of our Zucchini team members is a graduate of that program. So: despite whatever show of competition we put on for the sake of the audience tomorrow night, what unites us is our shared experience and love of musical theatre.
We had our final team rehearsal earlier this evening, and we’re all set to go. I’m looking forward to having a wild time. Here are a couple of videos of past Zucchini outings. I’m in the first one, and the team members there are the same ones we have for tomorrow night:
The second video features Constant Bernard, who is on the Sheridan team this year. See, I told you it was incestuous.
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