We’ve been Singing in the Rain in the Corn Stock Theatre tent for about a week now, running the show every night.  There are so many different parts of the show to bring together between the orchestra, actors, dancing, lighting, sound, rain, and other technical aspects, and yet, it’s come together nicely.  It’s a grueling and tiring process, but well worth the effort.

The thing that is fun at this point in a production is that I’ve learned all of my lines, choreography, dance, etc., and really get to start digging deep into my character and have fun with him and his interactions with the other characters in this Singing in the Rain world.

At this point, I start to have fun with the exchanges with Don Lockwood, my childhood friend, and with the hate-hate relationship with Lina Lamont, the leading lady, whom I “cahn’t stand” (in the show, of course).  However, as I’ve become more comfortable with the role, I’ve realized that a role like Cosmo Brown is difficult to practice.  He’s the “funny” character in the show, the comic relief, the wide-eyed guy loving his job as a Hollywood musician in the 1920’s.  It’s a hard role to practice because he has so many one-liners in the show, and is so sarcastic most of the time that it’s hard to judge and play the role without an audience.

I’ve worked on a lot of live theatre productions as well as some film productions, both personally and in my multimedia work.  These productions are always a lot of fun, both on film and in live theatre because it’s all about telling a story, and bringing an audience into that story.  The beauty of live theatre is that it’s just that - Live.  No performance is exactly the same, and as a performer, you have a special communication with the audience.  You do something in the performance, and they react.  This in turn provides feedback for you, fueling your performance.

Last year, when I played “Tony” in West Side Story, this feedback wasn’t always as expected.  On opening night for West Side Story, I threw everything I had into the performance, and was running towards Maria at the end of the show when Chino shot me down.  I remember falling to my knees, and then hearing the audience first gasp and then…laugh!  Here I was, dying on stage, pretty convincingly, I had thought, and the audience was laughing?  What had gone wrong?  Not the kind of audience reaction or feedback I was expecting.

However, after a few seconds of nervous laughter, they became so still that you could hear a pin drop.  I later found out that the nervous laughter is a common reaction for that part of West Side Story because the gunshot is so unexpected.  I guess people are startled by the shot, and the shock and emotion of the scene come out as a nervous laugh.  Once I found that out, it made me feel good, first of all because I wasn’t doing anything wrong (as I had first thought), and secondly because the laughter meant that we were getting the emotion across to the audience.

So, as we go into opening night of Singing in the Rain, this time I AM going for the laughter reaction.  It’s a different type of role for me to play, but good, because it’s challenged me to grow into it.  So, tomorrow night, I’ll just go out there, and “Make em Laugh,” this time without dying on stage.

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