Wednesday

I have to go to the dentist today, which is not my favorite thing, I'll be honest. It's just a cleaning, though, and I'll get to leave work early. So, in light of that, it might almost be considered kind of a decent trade-off.

In other news, I have been locked in my apartment learning my blocking and trying to sing through the role to build stamina, since of course, Mozart in his brilliance decided to put the hardest aria in existence at the very end of the opera. In the past, I've been the kind of singer that lets her singing suffer so that she can throw her body into the acting-- which really was probably a defense mechanism, a subconscious attempt at covering up or compensating for a lot of vocal inconsistencies. So that's been a habit I've been working really hard at breaking-- and since Lauretta, I think it's starting to sink in. In Puccini, it's almost as if he's written the music to account for the things you'll be doing on stage, so that the movements that feel right also work for you vocally, at whatever point you are in the score (with the exception of the dying/lying down bits. Ugh). I felt that Musetta was that way. But Mozart. Oh my. In terms of the drama and action, my body may feel like it wants to travel in places where I know I just have to stand still and SING to make it sound the way it's supposed to. This is especially true in the aria, where I feel that sometimes even the slightest dramatic slouch of my shoulders truly compromises the breath that I dearly need in that piece. So it's been a process of finding those places and working them out and REMEMBERING where they are, in order to prepare for them.

I of course have to take breaks, and when I do, I turn on my DVR'd Flying down to Rio with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire (their first big movie together!), and watch little pieces of it. Oh the clothes! Oh the dancing! Oh everything! After ten minutes and some diet gingerale-- I'm ready to work on dumb old Mozart again. I think I might be obsessed. And before that, it was that Cary Grant movie where he's gotten a divorce from his wife, and then they fall in love again. I can't remember the name of the movie, but the glamor of the era is so mesmerizing to me.