Miranda's musings

I am currently rehearsing for a musical, it’s a fabulous new piece called “Musical of the Year” and I’m having a lot of fun.   It’s my first musical for a while and although I sing regularly in a choir and take dance classes weekly, I haven’t had to sing and dance AT THE SAME TIME for quite a while.   When learning the high octane finale number the other day I couldn’t hear much soprano – partly I realised mid-pirouette, because I wasn’t actually singing.   Apparently my body, much like an old PC, was struggling to run both the “remember new choreography” and “sing correct lyrics in right key” programmes at the same time. Thinking about this later, it struck me that this is what actors have to do quite a lot - multitask.  This is an overused phrase but it is quite apt.  Day job: Unless you are one of the lucky few who have a long contract or are a much sought after actor, most actors have one or several other jobs they have to juggle around auditions and ...

Loneliness.  Not a word that would immediately spring to mind when thinking of actors.  Actors are the collaborators, the ones working with a team of people, the ones in the pub of a fringe theatre, post show, having a riot of a time or the ones on red carpets attending glamorous parties.  They don’t get lonely! I think it’s easier to see how a writer or a painter might feel alone – what they do is primarily a solitary job.  But today in a world increasingly run by technology, which is ironically designed to connect us to people, one can feel more detached than ever.  In reality, this may have always been the case to some extent.  Waiting for your agent to call with news of an audition alone in your flat would be a similar experience in 1976 as it is in 2014 (only now you can distract yourself with an episode of Jeremy Kyle and reflect that actually your life isn’t that bad).  If you have an agent, at least there is someone else out there fighting...