Harry Williams

Just a quick note that tickets for the Peoria Players Theatre production of Little Women are on sale now.

Show dates are February 1-3 & 6-10, 2008.

Go to http://www.peoriaplayers.org to purchase tickets online, or for the box office number where you can call and reserve tickets. Don’t miss this show - it’s going to be a great production! I’ll be posting some rehearsal pictures soon.

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Disney is continuing its tradition of porting it’s classics over to live theatre shows. Beauty and the Beast opened on Broadway in 1994, and ran over 5,000 performances between 1994 and 2007 and is now being performed all over the country. The Lion King has probably been their biggest hit, playing on Broadway for 10 years, performing for 45 million people in 63 different countries, and winning 10 awards. Aladdin has a 45 minute Broadway-caliber show at Disney’s Great Adventure in California. We can’t forget the High School Musical phenomenon that has taken over the country. Finally, Mary Poppins opened on Broadway last year, and we actually got to see it on our trip at the end of last year. It was amazing!

So, now Disney has announced that the Little Mermaid is coming to Broadway, set to open in January 10, 2008. In the article, Alan Menken (Little Mermaid Composer) states:

“Once we brought BEAUTY AND THE BEAST to Broadway there was an open question about what (show) might be next,” Menken explains. “THE LITTLE MERMAID always seemed like a natural except for under the sea. How in the world do you deal with that? Nobody could quite figure it out.” Once Director Francesca Zambello entered the scene, “She and George Tsypin (scenic designer) had a wonderful concept for how to do the under the sea aspect,” Menken says. He describes the underwater portion of the set as “very open, very translucent. It really deals well with under the sea and then shifting to above the sea. I won’t give away how any of those things are done and in fact, in some cases I barely understand how they’re done. But they are beautiful.”

This is a pretty cool opening, and they are trying something new. PlaybillRadio.com is hosting a “Virtual Opening Night” for the Little Mermaid. At 9PM EST, they will be broadcasting the opening of the Little Mermaid on their website, along with backstage interviews with some of the cast and with Alan Menken.

If you’re available at 9PM EST (8PM CST), this would probably be pretty cool to listen to (unless you’re extremely lucky and have tickets to the Little Mermaid’s Opening Night). If I didn’t have Little Women practice, I’d definitely be tuning in.

Check out the article about the Virtual Opening Night.

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Now that you’ve been introduced to one of the fun projects that we did in college, I thought I’d put up the other Christmas themed project that I produced. This was the final project to my Audio Production class, which was a lot of fun. In the class, we did project on the old reel to reel tape, produced 30 second commercials, and finally got to choose to do a dramatic reading or a radio drama.

I chose to do a radio drama of A Christmas Carol, since it was due around Christmas time. So, I got my friends, Jeff & Mike, to help me out, especially because of Mike’s voice talents. And, I brought my younger sisters into the recording studio to do some of the children’s voices.

If you’ve ever looked at the original Christmas Carol script, it’s huge! It was over 60 pages when I printed the whole thing out. Since I wanted to actually finish the project, I cut it down to about 20 pages, trying to keep the whole essence of the story. Of course, with Mike’s voice talent, we again went with certain themes with his voices. See if you can figure out what voices he was trying to imitate for the various characters.

Click on the links below to listen to this Christmas classic. Or, click on the picture to view a larger version.

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI (Outtakes)

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Since it’s been a while since my last post, I wanted to make this one really worth it. So, in the spirit of Christmas, I dug through my old projects, and pulled out one of my audio projects that I did my senior year at Bradley.

Well, let me back up. Back in college, during my sophomore year at Bradley, I met 2 of my best friends - Jeff & Mike, who were both multimedia majors with me (that’s a recent picture of us). We had really similar interests, were in many of the same classes together, and used to hang out a lot. People used to call us the Three Amigos, since we were always hanging out and working on projects in the labs together (during finals, we would practically live in the multimedia labs - more on that in another post).

There was a lot of work to do, but we would always have a lot of fun working on projects. One of the projects that I had to work on was a final electronic music project for one of my music classes. I had to create a recording incorporating voice and creating all the music.

Since I wanted to do something fun for this project, I decided to do a Muppet version of the classic poem ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas. Jeff, Mike & I are all huge Muppet fans. So, I wrote up a script depicting a “reading” of this poem by various Muppet characters, did the recording, and created all of the music. And, I knew that Mike was VERY talented with recording voice characterizations, so I recruited him to help out with the project. Listen to the project, and I think you’ll be pretty amazed at the wide variety of voices that he can do. I obviously do the initial announcer voice, and I do one other voice (see if you can tell which one!), but Mike did all of the others.

The whole “reading” is around 10 minutes, but it’s very entertaining. So, click here to take a listen and let me know what you think!

Oh, and one other thing - if you like articles on my blog, then please spread the word.  Click on the link at the bottom of any post labeled “Share This.”  There, you can share that post to any of the social networks, or you can click on the “Email” tab to email the post to someone.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

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The lights blinding your eyes, your heart visibly beating in your chest, the adrenaline pumping - yes, it was audition time this past weekend. This past weekend, I auditioned for the February production of Little Women at Peoria Players Theatre. As I was sitting there during auditions, I realized what the American Idol judges must feel like. Person after person gets up on stage and tries to catch the director’s eye as they show what they can do.

I’ve been performing all of my life, since the age of 3, and it’s funny how you still get nervous every time you audition or perform. Granted, it’s MUCH better now, as I’m usually well prepared by the time I get up in front of people. But, you still get that nervous, tense feeling as your body knows a performance is coming up. The trick is to channel that energy into the performance, and use it to actually help you perform.

Anyway, I auditioned on Sunday afternoon, and then was called back on Sunday night to sing one of the solos for the part and to read some of the lines. Later on, the email was sent out - and, I made it! I will be playing the part of Theodore Lawrence III, also known as Laurie, the lead guy in the show. Yes, it’s the story about a girl named Jo, and a boy named Laurie. Maybe names were different back in 1868.

This will be a really neat show for me to be a part of, since all of us read the book as kids. The show is a musical, and it opened on Broadway in 2005. The story follows the classic Louisa May Alcott story, and the music was written by Jason Howland with lyrics by Mindi Dickstein.

The complete cast list for Little Women is:

Jo March - Jennifer Gordon
Marmee - Barb Couri
Laurie - Harry Williams
Meg - Rebecca Meyer
Amy - Hope Grandon
Beth - Stephanie Meyer
Professor Bhaer - Dave Schick
Mr. Brooke - Bruce Colligan
Aunt March - Pat White
Mr. Laurence - Bruce White
Mrs. Kirk - Sarah Robins
Hag - Mary Keltner
Troll - Carole Rogers
Rodrigo - Joseph Pluth
Braxton - Andrew Werner
Clarissa - Andrea Williams
Clarissa’s sister - Katie Meyer
Knight - Charles Brown

If you haven’t heard of the Little Women story, check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Women

And for more information about the musical, check out:

http://www.littlewomenonbroadway.com

Just to give you the heads up, Little Women performances will run at Peoria Players Theatre from February 1 - 10, 2008.

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I’ve been taking voice lessons from a teacher at Western Illinois University for about a year now. He is a master of the art of singing, teaching the whole range of singing from pure classical singing to his specialty of musical theatre belt technique. Every lesson is a lot of fun as we do different kinds of exercises and “games”, exploring different techniques and styles of singing. As he has said “In what other kind of job can you get paid to play games with students all day?” So, our lessons consist of playing “games” of vocal exercises, singing through my songs, and learning about all sorts of things.

He has really helped me with two things (besides obviously the vocal technique) - my acting skills and selling the songs. I’m preparing for a couple of auditions coming up, and so in my lesson a couple of days ago, he had me sing my audition songs for him. Let me tell you, it’s the most nerve wracking thing (besides the audition itself) to stand in front of your voice teacher full-on and sing with his undivided attention on you. It’s much easier when he’s busy playing the piano or something else while you’re singing, but to have him watching you the whole time is unnerving. But it’s awesome preparation for the auditions because that’s exactly what happens in an audition. And that’s where I discovered my “ism” - my “harryism” to be exact.

There I was - standing there, singing my song, trying to think of all of the good technique tips he has been giving me, and feeling awkward because I hadn’t really thought of selling the song much. Selling the song is about convincing my audience that I’m not Harry anymore - I’m the character in the play singing about something, and it’s about convincing them to believe in what I’m singing about. When I was finished, he smiled and told me good job. The song had sounded really good, he said, and I had incorporated a lot of the vocal techniques he had been teaching me. BUT - he had discovered my “ism”.

He explained. An “ism” is what you unconsciously do - an action - when you’re not thinking about it. My “harryism” (since it was MY “ism”), he told me, was the action of throwing my arms out to the sides, palms forward, and then quickly drawing them back in. Throughout the song, he said, I had done this same exact action 5 times.

My first reaction was “That’s ridiculous! I didn’t do that!” But as I began to think about it I began remembering parts of the song where I HAD done that action, really without thinking or consciously knowing it. He told me that the perfect way to find a person’s “ism” was to have them stand in front of you and sing a song that they haven’t totally prepared for yet. The “ism” will work it’s way into the performance since it’s their “comfort action”, what they default to when they don’t know what else to do.

My voice teacher then spent the rest of the lesson purging my audition song of the “harryisms”. The first step in getting rid of the “ism” is to become aware of it, he said. And then, you just have to consciously substitute other actions into the song that help you act out and sell the song. This was pretty challenging, but he’s a master as pulling me out of my bad habits and helping me to substitute good ones in their place.

As I was thinking about this on the way home, I thought about how applicable this whole concept is to normal life. How many “harryisms” do I have that I’m not aware of, not just in performing, but it normal life? I’ve been noticing lately that I do certain things when I’m just standing somewhere, folding my arms a certain way, standing a particular way, doing something with my hands. When I’m teaching at Bradley (which is a kind of performance), what are my “isms” there? Not all “isms” are bad, since as humans, the only way to survive our hectic days is to rely on and cultivate habits. But, in an audition or performance, an “ism” is bad because it suggests the person doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I think that everyone should at least become aware of their “isms” so that they know how they come across to other people. I literally had no idea I was doing my “harryisms”! But now, after this past lesson, I’m happy to say that by audition time, my songs will be completely “harryism” free. This is good food for thought for everyone, though, something we really don’t think about.

Ask yourself: What’s your “ism”?

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