So Snoopy opened over the weekend to varied responses. For opening night and the Sunday Matinee, the audiences were pretty responsive, which is a nice thing for the actor as it gives us something to work with.
On Saturday night, however, the audience was as unresponsive as a sleeping catatonic monkey. This led the cast to work harder and harder, but it was to no avail. The cast just got more and more discouraged until we just wanted to go home.
However, the final stake in the heart occurred during the last song.
The song expresses a beautiful sentiment, and is a nice, albeit very slow, way to end the show. The basic premise is that if one person believes you, then there's bound to be second person out there who can believe in you, and then a third, and so on. Basically, it just counts up the number of people who believe in you.
For this song, I sing the first verse by myself. So I started out singing:
If just one person believes in you,
Deep enough, and strong enough,
Believes, in you,
Hard enough and long enough...
And this is where the confusion set in. The first four lines are essentially the same in every verse of the song, but the last two lines get changed, and for whatever reason, I have the hardest time remembering the end of each verse. So, sometimes I'll start singing the wrong lyrics, but then I'll realize what I've done and fix it before I get the whole song off track.
Unfortunately, on Saturday night, I was particularly sweaty. I was so sweaty, I started to think, "Man, I'm sweaty. I've got to figure out some way to dry myself off before I sing this sweet song because I'm sure that it is distracting to the audience." And so when it got to be time to sing about how two people believe in you, I finished the verse like this:
There's bound to be some
Other person who believes in
Making it a threesome,
Making it three.
At which point, I thought, "Oh man! How did I manage to forget the number two? How did I graduate from college and still apparently not understand that two comes after one?"
I was later told that apparently the whole cast's eyes got really big at that point, as they were all wondering how they could fix the monster that I had created.
The band was the one who ended up saving the day, however, as they just skipped ahead and went to the music that went along with those words, and we just finished the song.
In a final analysis, the audience was probably tuned out anyways, so it probably wasn't really noticable, but I'd like to think that I can do better than that. Talk about embarassing.
What a spectacular way to end an already discouraging show.
16 hours ago
2 comments:
Yeah, that's the big joke of the song. All of us snickered through rehearsal when we got to that line.
I know that houses range in responsiveness, but it's just crazy to me how extreme the variances are.
Ooh. I should also add that there was a point where I'm supposed to decorate the doghouse with Christmas lights. When I preset the lights, I untangled them, but by the time I was supposed to decorate, they had gotten tangled again, so I ended up with just a clump of Christmas lights.
If only I would have been Charlie Brown, it would have made for a very appropriate Charlie Brown Christmas.
And yes, that happened on the same night. And no, though the cast was laughing their heads off back stage at my jumble of lights, not a single person in the audience laughed. It seems like that out of everything would have been funny to them.
Oh well. You've just got to take the audiences as they come.
I played Snoopy in the show. I wanted Charlie Brown (because it's just about the only part I could ever be typecast for, and it might as well work to my advantage sometimes, right:)), but Snoopy is actually a better part, albeit somewhat more difficult in that Snoopy, because he's a dog, doesn't ever get to really talk or interract with any of the other characters, which makes his whole role basically one long monologue.
Wow. That was a beast of a sentence.
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