October 2011

Heloooo!!! I’m chillin in Utica, NY right now watchin my roommate cut one of the other actors’ hair. This is our first day off since opening night and it is GLORIOUS. We got to the hotel today at 4pm and we don’t have to do a damn thing the rest of the day and I couldn’t be happier.

This first week has been wild and exhausting and our stage manager told us yesterday that she’s impressed with our stamina and patience… and we needed it. Day ONE at Penn State, they lost the orchestra’s music, so thanks to our amazing crew team, they ran out and printed new scores for the band like 3 hours before the show. Day TWO, our bus broke down on the side of the road and we had to wait for a new bus to pick us up for an hour in the middle of nowhere, and then upon reaching the theatre in York, we came to find that our sound engineer was in the hospital with a weird stomach virus!!! Other than that, we’ve had to continue to be flexible. We’re in a different theatre every day and the acoustics are different, the stages are different sizes, and the houses so far have been anywhere from like 500 to 4000 seat houses. Last night in West Point at the Eisenhower Theatre at the Army Academy, it was packed and I was told it was like a 3500 seat house. The craziest thing we’ve had to get accustomed to thus far tho, was in Indiana, PA at IUP, the stage was a full 6 feet less wide than our usual stage. The dances got preeeetty tight, and I definitely took a kick to the gut in the opening that I don’t think any one saw, so that’s good.

Everyone’s heading out to dinner right now, so I gotta run, but if I think of anything else interesting I’ll post it later!!

P.S., the fans of the show have been awesome thus far, everyone is so supportive… and it’s been amazing having so many friends and family come out to see me, it’s truly a blessing to have this much support in my career!!!

Love, Kyle

Alright… I was so exhausted after last weekend, I didn’t even want to reflect on the awesomeness that was the last week of rehearsal. Quick Recap – As it always happens in show biz, the show must go on, and we were all super sad that about 3 hours before our first full preview run with a Clemson audience, one of our main dancers and the production staff decided that he should heal his extremely sore knee and save it for the actual tour. He’s a big guy and always has a really strong attitude about him, but we could all see how bummed he was that he was going to have to sit out the first two full runs with an audience (but everything’s ok, he saw his doctor this week, and he’s cleared to put his dancing shoes back on!!). The even more amazing part about this story, is that the male dance swing in our show is AWESOME!!!.. He had literally only been taking notes and practicing dance steps on his own (what the swings are supposed to do) and he had everything down so well that after only 3 hours of preparation he KILLED both shows we did last weekend. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen – these dancers are just amazing… one day, maaaybe I’ll be a quarter as good as them, after I take a few years of classes hahaha… yyyyyeeeeaaa, not gonna happen, I’ll just keep training my voice 🙂

Continue reading

I have literally been anxious in anticipation of writing this next story for you guys… Yesterday I had the greatest, most confusing, most exhausting, and most inspiring moment of my life thus far. I hit a new milestone in my development as an actor, and with that triumph comes the next level of challenges and the next era of growth.

Continue reading

So I’m sitting in my hotel room on dinner break from our tech rehearsals watching Aaron Rodgers slash the Broncos to death, and I am exhausted, haha. Since we got to Clemson, South Carolina on thursday night we have been in rehearsal 11 hours a day…. Our set is AMAZING!!! It’s the most intricate set I’ve ever been on and the attention to detail is spectacular. Everything down to a real fake ATM machine in the bodega, actual hair products in the salon, it’s crazy… We have about three more days of tedious step by step movement to get the lighting program set, and then we have our first preview performance for a small audience on Clemson’s campus on friday night. It’s just ridiculous that we’ve gone from meeting each other to legitimately show ready in only 3 and a half weeks, and if you get to see the show, you’ll see just how ridiculous an accomplishment that is, since this show is very detailed. But I can tell you that it’s starting to get to everyone as right now I’m the only person awake in my room, with 4 people passed out throughout the room hahaha… Time for me to go grab an Emergen-C and head back to the theatre, everyone is getting the sniffles around here, which is nooooo bueno for me, I have to control notes at the upper end of my register and being sick would make that quiiiiite difficult… P.S. way to blow the game Cowboys… ugh…

Love, Kyle