Read your notes, take your notes, and apply your notes.
Of course.
But don’t read only your notes.
Read and listen to your fellow actors’ notes as well. Then give them the set-ups, reactions, and responses that will help make them successful in applying and fixing their notes.
Posted notes are for everyone.
The more slides, the more video, the more pre-recorded announcements—the more quickly your audience will become disengaged.
Yes, pre-recorded elements help maintain control of the final product. But don’t buy into the myth that pre-recorded equals prepared. Real preparedness—effective preparedness—is a willingness and readiness to go live.
The audience signed up and showed up for “live”. Whenever possible, however possible, go live.
Does working in entertainment and having a job in show business look like fun and something you’d like to try?
Great! We’d love to have you!
Just beware and be ready. You’ll most often be going up against people who have always wanted to do this and have worked their whole lives to become qualified for the opportunity to be onstage and get paid for it.
No one is telling you not to try.
Please do! Try!
But if you’re only willing to try once or twice and your preparation looks more like dabbling, this profession may not be for you.
When things go wrong in other shows at other venues, often the cast or crew will say to me, “I bet stuff like this never happens at Disney.”
The thing is, things go wrong on stages everywhere. Props fail. Quick changes are missed. Scenery malfunctions. It happens.
And it happens at Disney every day.
Every. Day.
Maybe the difference is, and the not so snappy answer is, that we have a whole bunch of plans and contingencies for when things go wrong. And when they go wrong, which they will, we don’t point them out and continuously refer back to the broken element for the audience to see and be reminded.
Do these things happen at Disney?
Yes.
It’s the response and reaction, however, that might be what’s different.
When performing for your fellow cast becomes of higher value than working together to perform for your audience
…the end is near.
The trick of a good magic trick is not a trick at all, but rather the result of study, practice, rehearsal, and perfecting the gimmick in a way that goes unnoticed. Once one has seen how the trick is accomplished, the illusion loses its luster.
Actually, this is true of all performance. The hard part—the study, the practice, the rehearsal, the perfecting, the part that makes the entertaining impressive—should go unnoticed.
Once we’ve learned and perfected how it’s done, it should be easy. But to our audience, it should be magic.
Only one person gets to originate a role.
For the rest of us, it will always be of more value to seek out and experience another’s take on a shared role than to avoid it.
There’s intrinsic value in watching someone else do what you do—in seeing what other options and intents are available—in keeping a running list of ideas you’d like to use and make your own, as well as bits you want to make sure never to do.
To dig in one’s feet and to bury one’s head and say: “I don’t want to be influenced by anyone else’s performance. My show is my show and my show alone.” Well, to me, this way of thinking is not actually artistic. It’s misguided and unwise.
