 Actor's
Blog
Nashville Children's
Theatre is excited to share with our audiences what it is like
to be an actor at NCT. Each show of NCT's 75th Birthday Season
will offer a different actor's perspective on being in a show
and the work and fun that goes into the preparation and performance.
 Schoolhouse
Rock Live!
Blog by Ross Brooks
Posted
on Tuesday, November 11, 2006
Hello,
theatergoers and children of all ages. I’m Ross Brooks,
the second actor to contribute to NCT Actor’s Blog, and
a member of the second show in NCT’s 75th Birthday Season, Schoolhouse
Rock LIVE! This show has the longest run of any show this
season, so I’ll be hanging around for a couple of months,
through the holidays and into the new year, pitching in my thoughts
and experiences as a part of the NCT family.
To kick it off, I’ll tell you a little about myself, and then I’ll
delve into the rehearsal process which I’m smack in the middle of for SHR
LIVE! I was born and raised in Nashville, and I’ve been an actor
with NCT since 2003-2004 season. In the past two and a half years, I’ve
appeared on NCT’s stage five times, appearing first as the infamous pirate
Long John Silver in Treasure Island. SHR is my sixth show with NCT,
and this theatre has become a second home to me. I’m also a teaching
artist here as well, teaching summer camps as well as Saturday morning classes
through the year – some of you may recognize me from those as well.
So let’s talk about rehearsal. If you’ve been following this blog
site, you’ve already read about rehearsals for The Shakespeare Stealer,
related to you by the lead actor in that show, Peter Vann. Pete’s a good
friend of mine, so I’d hate to repeat him; luckily, I don’t have
to, since The Shakespeare Stealer and SHR LIVE! are two completely
different shows.  The
Shakespeare Stealer is what we in the “Biz” tend to call a
straight play, which simply means it’s a play consisting solely of dialogue
spoken by the characters. SHR also has some dialogue, but there’s
also music. A lot of music. In fact, practically every moment of this
show takes place in a song. It’s "Schoolhouse Rock", after
all, and if you’re my age – if you grew up in the late seventies
and early eighties – you know that music is what "Schoolhouse Rock" is
all about (If you want to know more about the animated television shorts that
this play is adapted from, check out NCT's curriculum
guide for Schoolhouse Rock LIVE! in the Education section of this
website – it’s chock full of history about the show, the songs
and the creators of it all. It’s definitely worth a read, so give it
a look when you get a chance). For our purposes here, let’s assume that
you (or someone who tucks you in at night) has a general idea of where this
show came from, and just say that, when you come to see the show, you’re
going to get nineteen of the smartest ways to rock out thrown right at you
as soon as you sit down. I’ll just let that get your tastebuds watering
for the show, and get back to the rehearsal process.
As I said, SHR LIVE! is all about music, and a musical is rehearsed
in a similar, yet also very different way from a “straight” play.
After all, we all whave to sing in a musical. So, on our first day of rehearsal,
we sat down with a piano, an accompanist and the score of the show and began
to learn the music (by the way, the score is the musical text of the show – where
all the music is written down so that people who know how to read that sort
of thing can do so and reproduce it on an instrument – in this case,
a piano). The entire cast goes through the score with the accompanist, and
we learn how to sing the songs, note by note, following melodies and building
harmonies until we’ve got a pretty good idea of how each of the songs
should sound. So this took up the first half of each day for the entire first
week of rehearsal. The second half of each of those days was taken up with
dancing. Yep, that’s right, dancing. A musical is all about the music,
but it’s all about having something to watch while you’re listening
to the music, and that’s where dancing comes in. The choreographer works
with the cast to learn dance steps for each song, and once we feel relatively
comfortable with each of the dances, we begin trying to work the singing and
the dancing together so that we can do both at the same time, which is a lot
harder than it sounds. Luckily, we have a couple of weeks to do it in, so we’ve
got a lot of time to run through each number over and over and over again until
we’ve got every aspect of it firmly memorized and rooted in our brains
and bodies. Then, we bring in an audience and let ‘em have it.
But that’s not going to happen for another week. Right now, we have just
begun week two of rehearsals, and we’re trying to put all of those pieces
of songs and dances and dialogue together in the right order. We’re in
the middle of stop-start rehearsals, which means that we start at the beginning
of the show and run through it slowly, one piece at a time, and whenever we
have a problem that we need to address, we stop and go over it until we feel
comfortable with it, then we move on to the next piece. It takes a while to
get through the entire show, but it’s the attention to detail that makes
any show work well. We have a lot to remember when we’re onstage, and
if we don’t go over every single second of the show until we have it
planted firmly in our memories, we could be in real trouble on opening day.
I have to say, however, that so far it seems to be going along just as smooth
as silk. It helps that we have a cast full of extremely talented and hard-working
actors, not to mention a super-smart and brilliant director who ties it all
together and makes it all happen. Considering there are nineteen songs (and
almost as many dances) to learn, we’re way ahead of the game. Granted,
two weeks isn’t a lot of time to get something that huge done, but somehow,
we manage to do it. We’ll let you, the audience, decide whether we pulled
it off or not.
So that’s all from me for now. Once the show opens, I’ll try to
give you a little insight into how actors work during the run of a show. In
the meantime, I’ll be busy rockin’ out and dancin’ my tail
off so that, when next Tuesday rolls around, you’ve got an incredible
show to come see. Hope you enjoy!
Ross
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