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Well, shoot. Here we are. My last show as a Musketeer. As some of you (if anyone reads this) may know, we have just started production on the final show of my Xavier career - RENT. One of my favorite musicals of all time. Holy cowww count your blessings, Nic!

I can't believe we are already at this point. Our last show. Before I get too much further I should explain that all seven of us in the senior class are working on the show. I could not be more excited. We have just wrapped our first week of rehearsals with the full cast and we are about to start our second later today. It already feels like it's flying by.

I decided to write a blog for this show as I was sitting in rehearsal on Friday night. It was the first time my cast sung it through after learning the bare bones of the song "Seasons of Love" - brace yourselves for how corny this is - and we got to the line "let's celebrate/remember a year in the life of friends" and I just lost it. My ASM, Jarrett, and our two ADs, Kyle & Hannah, got a great big laugh out of it. I find myself getting emotional about it just thinking of it right now. This is going to be such a great show to end our school careers on. It's going to be a blast.

A lot of my cast this year, ironically, is made up of first year students. One of our principal cast members, is an alumni from one of my first productions at Xavier. It's the perfect medley of people I love to work with, and I'm so glad my last show will be headed by Stephen, Scot, and Dee Anne. It's really quite an appropriate last show for myself and my classmates, though it's making me feel very old.

We've already made some great memories in the room. I plan to include a lot of them on here, and hopefully track my "process" (now THAT sounds corny) as we work through the show. To start, this is one of the many unique tactics used by our brilliant music director, Scot Buzza. He likes to teach our casts to not be indulgent with their singing, and to learn to stick to the text before putting their own spin on things. In this photo, he is playing the German version of "Seasons of Love" for them on a tiny speaker. The results were quite comical, and I felt like a kindergarten teacher with everyone sitting on the floor.

As you can see, we all got a big kick out of it. I've included the song below.

#XURent #stagemanagement #Xaviertheatre