![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
djgray“
“I feel really strong and really grateful that I’m not limping into the home stretch,” she tells Backstage. “I feel like we’re at the last stage of a marathon and I have a runner’s high right now.”
Goldsberry is also thankful that in her two years of originating the role of Alexander Hamilton’s sister-in-law, she’s maintained vocal health. “Sleep is the apple a day, really, for singers,” she says. As a mother of two young children, Goldsberry has learned to survive eight draining shows a week by resting whenever she can. “I have to be able to take a nap. That’s a lifesaver for me. As long as it’s early enough in the day that I can wake my voice up, sleep is divine.
“And you just have to know your body,” she advises. “I learned if I eat pizza too late at night, I might have a problem with my throat! Know what you can do—it might not be the same thing someone else can get away with.”
That philosophy certainly helped Goldsberry book “Hamilton” in the first place. Although the initial casting breakdown for Angelica—“Nicki Minaj meets Desiree Armfeldt from ‘A Little Night Music’ ”—gave her pause (“I’m a huge fan of hers, but she has a very specific bravado that was different than what I was going to walk in the room with,” she laughs), hearing the character’s showstopping number made everything clear; Goldsberry knew how to deliver “Satisfied” in the audition room.
“Any kind of reservations or questions didn’t really matter, just having heard that music,” she remembers. “I didn’t go in because I thought I was going to get the job as much as I just wanted to meet those guys.” Only an hour after performing “Satisfied” for creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, director Thomas Kail, and the rest of the team—“a really welcoming, awesome group of geniuses”—Goldsberry was invited to do the workshop.
“That number in particular, even outside of the show, will be studied,” she says of “Satisfied.” “It’s such a perfect construction for musical theater in terms of storytelling, in terms of identifying and defining a character so succinctly and so beautifully.” The ballad, which stops and rewinds the story to reveal the inner workings of Angelica choosing her sister’s happiness over her own, boasts some of the quickest rap verses in the musical. How does an actor prepare for that?
“I’ve written a couple raps in my day, in my own music career that people don’t know a lot about,” Goldsberry says with a smile. But the real preparation came from her foundation of classical training. “One hundred percent, all your Shakespeare training serves you in the work in musical theater today,” she says. “Specifically in modern musical theater, our soliloquies, and now what we call rap. It’s the reason it’s so easy to learn, because it’s verse, it’s rhyme! It just sticks in the soul very easily.”
In fact, she adds, “Satisfied” is a Shakespearean soliloquy, a direct address in which Angelica takes off her mask for the audience. “It is stream of consciousness, but the consciousness of a brilliant woman who can make a million decisions in an instant. So time really has to stop for the audience, for anybody, to show you how fast this woman thinks.”
”
-
Renée Elise Goldsberry on How to Audition for ‘Hamilton’ (Backstage.com)
& what she thinks about what comes next…
(via thefederalistfreestyle)
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2b5MxUO
via IFTTT
“I feel really strong and really grateful that I’m not limping into the home stretch,” she tells Backstage. “I feel like we’re at the last stage of a marathon and I have a runner’s high right now.”
Goldsberry is also thankful that in her two years of originating the role of Alexander Hamilton’s sister-in-law, she’s maintained vocal health. “Sleep is the apple a day, really, for singers,” she says. As a mother of two young children, Goldsberry has learned to survive eight draining shows a week by resting whenever she can. “I have to be able to take a nap. That’s a lifesaver for me. As long as it’s early enough in the day that I can wake my voice up, sleep is divine.
“And you just have to know your body,” she advises. “I learned if I eat pizza too late at night, I might have a problem with my throat! Know what you can do—it might not be the same thing someone else can get away with.”
That philosophy certainly helped Goldsberry book “Hamilton” in the first place. Although the initial casting breakdown for Angelica—“Nicki Minaj meets Desiree Armfeldt from ‘A Little Night Music’ ”—gave her pause (“I’m a huge fan of hers, but she has a very specific bravado that was different than what I was going to walk in the room with,” she laughs), hearing the character’s showstopping number made everything clear; Goldsberry knew how to deliver “Satisfied” in the audition room.
“Any kind of reservations or questions didn’t really matter, just having heard that music,” she remembers. “I didn’t go in because I thought I was going to get the job as much as I just wanted to meet those guys.” Only an hour after performing “Satisfied” for creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, director Thomas Kail, and the rest of the team—“a really welcoming, awesome group of geniuses”—Goldsberry was invited to do the workshop.
“That number in particular, even outside of the show, will be studied,” she says of “Satisfied.” “It’s such a perfect construction for musical theater in terms of storytelling, in terms of identifying and defining a character so succinctly and so beautifully.” The ballad, which stops and rewinds the story to reveal the inner workings of Angelica choosing her sister’s happiness over her own, boasts some of the quickest rap verses in the musical. How does an actor prepare for that?
“I’ve written a couple raps in my day, in my own music career that people don’t know a lot about,” Goldsberry says with a smile. But the real preparation came from her foundation of classical training. “One hundred percent, all your Shakespeare training serves you in the work in musical theater today,” she says. “Specifically in modern musical theater, our soliloquies, and now what we call rap. It’s the reason it’s so easy to learn, because it’s verse, it’s rhyme! It just sticks in the soul very easily.”
In fact, she adds, “Satisfied” is a Shakespearean soliloquy, a direct address in which Angelica takes off her mask for the audience. “It is stream of consciousness, but the consciousness of a brilliant woman who can make a million decisions in an instant. So time really has to stop for the audience, for anybody, to show you how fast this woman thinks.”
”
-
Renée Elise Goldsberry on How to Audition for ‘Hamilton’ (Backstage.com)
& what she thinks about what comes next…
(via thefederalistfreestyle)
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2b5MxUO
via IFTTT