#132: Tend Your Dream

Tuesday 1/7/25

Another one of my goals this year is to get back to auditioning more aggressively. This year I have dealt with some pretty strong anxiety around my singing, since I definitely have a vocal injury that I’m not really mentally in a place to deal with. I also don’t have great health insurance so if anything like a surgery is required, it would have to be out-of-pocket. But the anxiety around my singing right now has definitely lead me to not put myself out there as much as I have in the past.

The auditions I have gone to I’ve made sure that the singing requirements are not as big as I’m used to or perhaps don’t have any signing requirements at all. And the truth is that every audition I went to where I did sing I did well. Now that doesn’t mean that I have made up this vocal injury… There’s for sure something… The laryngologist I went to back in March confirmed this. So I know it’s not in my head and I’m just beating myself up over nothing. But, there certainly is adrenaline and some other things that I’m sure push you through times of uncertainty. Having said that there’s only one or two songs I really feel comfortable going into an audition with on my own at this point. If I have to learn new material for a show that is sort of different… But when I’m going in with my own stuff there’s one or two songs that are sort of my go to at this point.

In order to quell some of this anxiety in the absence of being able to pursue, whatever actually has to happen for me to fix my vocal injury… I need to get back in the habit of checking the boards regularly, I need to be practicing my audition songs, I need to be looking for new material. That’s going to sit comfortably in my voice as it is right now, and perhaps I need to change the keys of some of my other songs.

To be quite honest for a while, I thought that whatever was going on in my voice would be something that might go away with time. That has proven not to be the case. Sometimes I’ll listen to myself talk on TikTok in old videos and be like wow my voice really does sound pretty different and that was only a year ago!

But, even with all this, I can still be putting myself out there more. This year I really wanna get just one good acting job. I don’t care if it’s here in New Jersey or far away… But I just wanna get something that I can really sync my teeth into and we’ll take up a good chunk of my time. Six or eight weeks would be ideal. I’ve got my eyes on some jobs and I’m just waiting for audition information to roll my way. so we’ll see hopefully one of those will shake out!

Even though I didn’t get a job this year, I actually felt quite good about all the auditions and callbacks I had. There’s two for me that seem like “the ones that got away“. One was for a new musical called “Sabbath girl“ which was running off Broadway. I got a callback for the lead which ended up going to a girl who was in Six so I didn’t feel too bad about it. But I loved working on the material. It was so interesting and felt like such a right fit for me. She was a Jersey girl who was an artist. She came from a big Italian family and fell in love with a Jewish man. Honestly, did they write this musical about me lol I got compliments from the team about how well I did and how much they appreciated the work I put in into learning all of the material. Mind you it was a lot of material. It was for full songs… Obviously brand new songs that I hadn’t learned before… and then three or four long sides. I also loved how it was so funny and dry and emotional, all the same time. It was literally everything I love to do in theater. And the singing was interesting, but it never was huge so it really felt like something that was doable for me.

The other audition that I’ve talked about that I didn’t get was playing Mrs. Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol at the Tuacahn amphitheater in Utah. And what was even more sad about that was that I had friends who were in it so I was seeing the videos constantly. Man, I longed for the time where you could audition for a show and never hear about it ever again lol 

But that was another audition where I know it was great. My initial audition was an opening night performance… They were laughing and engaged and talking to me. And then I got a callback for the next day to do exactly what I had already done. Same exact thing… Laughing… Engaged… Asking questions… And literally the director said “well that’s Mrs. Fezziwig!” now I know she meant that I understood the character… Not that I was gonna get the role lol but it was still nice to hear. about 20 minutes later after my audition I was sitting on a bench in the hallway around the corner sending some emails before I got on the bus… It was a Saturday so nobody was there. And the director walked past me to go to the bathroom and stopped and said I did an excellent job. Didn’t have to do that. She could’ve kept walking. she could’ve smiled and went on her way. But she didn’t. She stopped and engaged, and looked me right in the eyes. Even still with all of that reassurance I didn’t actually think I left there getting the show. Thank God I didn’t think that… Because then I probably would’ve been devastated.

All this to say… Even if your voice doesn’t feel 100% you can still deliver on a piece. You can still deliver in the audition room. And that’s how I have to think going into this year. I know that I’m a good audition. I know that I’m strong in the room. I know that I’m going to make interesting choices and be thoughtful in my preparation of material. 

So here I am hyping myself up! We have a long year ahead and while I’m not gonna put a number on how many auditions I wanna go to… I know I need to do better than I did last year. Pity party is over. There’s a new Julie in  town!

Dreams Don’t Die

Julie