Preface: I am no musical theatre guy myself. I love them. I rush to see them in NYC and other places – – I have even directed a few – very few – with modest success for a tyro. But, I will never be a musical theatre teacher; I leave that work for others.
That said, today I had the opportunity of coaching one of our currently most successful musical theatre students on a monologue that he was using in preparation for a pending audition. He got up in front of me and successfully navigated the words, got to the end, and he was done. It was okay. Truly he was no better or no worse then his non-musical theatre peers, but I thought I needed to approach this differently for this young man. The first thing that I observed was that before any intense moment he would expel all of his breath and THEN he tackled the moment. He was not aware of this, but when I suggested that it was unlikely that he would expel air right before a demanding section in a musical – – he agreed. He changed his breathing time and much more came to the surface.
He was also painting the entire monologue with one level; it all sounded the same – it contained NO variety. I led him to find more possibilities for the journey of the monologue. It was as if I was encouraging him to find more notes, more rests, more pitches and simply more musicality in his monologue. I led him through out a few ideas to achieve this – and it worked.
In many ways, I believe this young man was seeing the performance of a songs as an entirely different animal then the monologue. We was certainly achieving more success when his appreciated the connections.
One thing stuck in my mind as I was working. There was such an even flow to his words that nothing was being felt or experienced. He was trying to experience WHILE he was talking and obviously that wasn’t going to work at all. Monologues must have those moments where the entire world stops, not slows down – but STOPS so that the moment can be experienced BEFORE it is spoken. I wasn’t sure how to communicate this to this young man. I know that music often has pauses and sections where the singer simply stops singing so that we can just hear the music or turn the song over to others. But I wanted this actor to experience the stop. I didn’t want him to experience more then a pause or stop as he might experience in a musical.
What I wanted him to do was to jump off the stage, grab the baton from the conductor, dismiss the conductor, feel the charged silence of the theatre and then pick up a new score. I liked that metaphor. Of course I didn’t say that metaphor. That metaphor didn’t even come into my head until I was half way to the gym. But still it’s the thought – the sometimes too late thought that counts.