Pippin

During the summer after 7th grade I auditioned for the Musical Theater Conservatory at Imagination Stage and was accepted. It started in the fall of 8th grade and we have had classes all that year and all of 9th grade (excluding summer and a short winter break every year) on Monday evenings. The way the program works is for two years we receive instruction and technique for acting and singing with a short sharing at the end of every semester to give parents the opportunity to see what we had learned. I've been with the same group of 15 people for the past four years (although we lost one girl after the first year) and we've all become a close-knit group of people. *For CAP teachers, Zoe J is also in this program with me and Christina is in the freshman class of the program starting this year.

This fall, which is our last semester, we leave the teacher's we've been working with for the past two years and are put in the hands of a professional D.C. director to put on a musical, in our case they have chosen Pippin.

Pippin has three main characters. There's Pippin, a young man looking for total fulfilment in life, who is played by the only boy in our conservatory, Rees. There's also Catherine, the love interest, who is played by Gillian. Finally there is the Leading Player who kind of represents a Hades type character who wants Pippin to essentially sell his soul and join the Leading Player's troupe of actors (all of them are secretly the characters in Pippin's life) in return for a short but spectacular life. This character is played by yours truly. I was really excited to get this role because it's a very fun role and I get a lot of freedom with it. There are five other supporting roles in the play and seven ensemble members. Pippin is a really complicated play once you look deeper than the surface because it's not just about his life (the Leading Player controls everyone in the play but Pippin and tries to drag him into the troupe as well) and that's a hard message to convey to the audience, but I have a lot of confidence in our group.

We have the privelege to work in a field of highly experienced professionals who will just make the play even better. Our director is Jay Brock who is a highly respected director throughout the country. We have a great musical director (Andrew), choreographer (Allison), and stage manager (Megan). On top of those four fantastic people we have behind the scenes people who are creating our costumes and set from scratch. At Imagination Stage we'll be in the smaller theater, the Reeve, but there are still high quality lighting and sound equipment although we'll be having live people play our music.

Overall, it's a really exciting experience and I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to A. Learn from a professional singer and a professional actor for two years, B. Get so close to such an amazing group of people and C. Work with this large number of professionals to create what will be a fantastic performance.

Everyone who can come out December 14th, 15th, and 16th at Imagination Stage to see us!!

Here's a video of Ben Vereen (Leading Player on Broadway) singing my favorite song of the show, Right Track, a duet with Pippin.