The KTB Music Theatre Chorus 'silly season' has been cut short this year, dear reader. The march of time goes on, and we're looking further ahead even as we work on songs for September's concert dates. (Dare I say it... even the C Word was mentioned this evening. The one with jingle bells on.) Cue a lot of intense concentration faces around the room as we sang through tonight's pieces - in between bouts of absolute chaos, of course.
We opened up the rehearsal with "Light" (Next to Normal), and its tricky harmonies. Turns out that some chorus members have previously resorted to sneaky tricks to avoid certain notes (utterly scandalous!), but with a bit of prodding from a long-suffering and very patient Katy, we pushed through. "That was phenomenal!" said our dear MD, and we'll definitely take that compliment.
Next up, another returning piece: "The Ballad of Jane Doe" from Ride the Cyclone. It's an... unusual concept for a musical, I think you'll agree. But this number is brilliant, and it takes a talented soloist to pull it off - major props to our previous solo star on this one. This time, though, we're doing it with a twist: instead of Jane Doe, we've got a John Doe, and this is a theme that's going to run through our September concert dates. Before we can really let him loose on the whole thing, we have to refresh ourselves on those slide-y, fall-y, mood-setting harmonies that make up the chorus part. A group of adults making Doppler Effect noises just because we can? Entirely normal around here, I assure you.
"Suddenly Seymour" (Little Shop of Horrors) is one that we've been silly-singing our way through for the last couple of weeks, but this was the week we have to get serious with it. Sigh. But honestly, when we've got soloists like our duet team for this number, it isn't a big hardship to switch our focus to getting the chorus part down. Welcome back, explosive cheering moments!
Bah da doot do bah do wah bah dah blah blah blah... I'm not going to lie: when we open a piece to find a page of that sort of thing, we all fall to pieces. It's either Minions or Teletubbies. Words are hard, folks. Do those kind of noises even count as words? Whatever they are, "Jeepers Creepers" (Going Places) is full of them, and we all know by now that 'wordy stuff' is the one part of this chorus thing where we can safely (whispering this bit...) ignore KTB.
(Writer ducks to avoid metaphorical flying objects.)
If we can absolutely nail "We Go Together" in the way that we do, it should logically follow that we can do this, but somehow 'doo doot bah dah wahs' are different from 'sha-na-na-na-na-nas'. It's a work in progress, OK? That being said, we got to the last surprise section and unanimously decided "NEIGH" to that.
On to our last song of the evening: "One Day More" (Les Misérables), and yes, dear reader, I do have a text replacement shortcut set up for typing that entire title complete with the accented é. Solo parts for this are still To Be Determined, but for the benefit of our new members and those who've slept since we last did this, we worked through the chorus parts and then had what will likely be one of our last free-for-all sing-throughs of this number for quite some time.
No doubt by the time we return to MTC in August, there will have been more musical machinations afoot. Let's not do that thing where we count how many rehearsals are left until the September concert dates...
Oops...
Written by Aeryn Isherwood
