BWW Blog: My First BroadwayWorld Blog!

Hi! This is my first blog post for Broadway World and I couldn't be more excited to talk about my experiences. I'm currently a senior at the University of Illinois studying Lyric Theatre, which is a relatively new program. I was recently cast in their production of A Little Night Music as Fredrika, but due to COVID-19, our production was postponed to November of this year. In order to stay fresh and prepared for when Broadway opens back up, my peers and I and the Lyric Theatre faculty at the University of Illinois have been actively learning about other parts of the industry and doing voice lessons over Zoom. In my spare time, after I finished school, I have been doing an online webinar called the Starving Artist Solution by Minda Larsen. Minda is someone I was introduced to by participating in the virtual Classical Singer convention about a week ago. She did a webinar about how to find yourself as an artist and how you don't need to wait until your Broadway or your Met debut in order to start making a living as an artist. Once she said this, it really sparked something in me to explore my other interests outside of singing, dancing and acting. Since starting the Starving Artist Solution, I have gained an interest in personal development and understanding more about myself as an artist and human.

As I know many others are doing, I am also catching up on shows on Netflix. Some of my favorite shows include Riverdale, Never have I Ever and Queer Eye. After awhile, I realized I wanted to find monologues from some of these shows and movies in order for me to work on my acting skills. One of the first monologues I found was from a show called Community. Community is about a group of students at a community college who have a Spanish study group. I found a monologue from the first episode of the show said by one of the male characters, Jack Winger, played by Joel McHale. The monologue is Jack telling each person in the study group how each of them contribute to their study group. I thought the beginning of it was funny because he starts off talking about Shark Week and pencils. He starts off by saying we are the only species that observes Shark Week because we can get emotionally attached and sympathize/find the good in just about anything, including pencils. His point was that the majority of the time, people tend to connect with anything but themselves.

Because I tend to think of myself as more of the youthful, optimistic character, I'm trying to explore characters that are more dramatic. About a month ago, I found a great monologue from the Social Network. This movie is about Mark Zuckerberg and how Facebook was created. In the beginning of the movie, he and his girlfriend are sitting at a bar talking about finals clubs (basically top tier frats). As the conversation goes on, she realizes that Mark is selfish and she breaks up with him. I was drawn to her character because she doesn't let her emotions get the best of her. She states exactly how she feels and what Mark does to make her feel this way. In my acting classes, I'm working on staying in the moment of the scene and this monologue would really help me stay in the present moment and be confident in my choices. As a young woman, I'm also drawn to characters who know exactly what they want, and I'm finding that television and film roles are much more complex and multi-dimensional than characters on stage.

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