One last Pride & Prejudice post, some small news and a slight digression

It always makes me so sad to leave the world of Jane Austen. You have no idea how tempted I am to pick up Pride & Prejudice and simply start reading it all over again. Now the only Jane books I haven't read this year are Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. And I'm barely halfway through the year! I'm going to have to break my rule of not reading the same books twice in one year, methinks.

But let me blog Pride & Prejudice once more before I move on. And once more, I will connect it to The Sound of Music.

There are many scary things about playing a lead role, not the least of which is: the looooove scenes. ;) (Particularly when you have younger siblings in the room) Personally, I think the relationship of Maria and Captain Von Trapp is not quite so important as Maria's relationship with the family as a whole, but it is still very important. So I was talking it over with my voice teacher. She was saying to me, "The thing about this relationship is that it really snuck up on Maria. She always thought of the Captain one way - and then suddenly, here she is, thinking of him in an entirely different way."

Oh, I couldn't help myself. I pulled my beautiful, hardbound book out of my purse and waved it around. "Pride & Prejudice!" I said.

"Oh! Yes!" said my voice teacher. "Yes, perfect example! Mr. Darcy is actually a really good correspondent for the Captain." We talked about how the specifics of the stories and the characters involved are very different of course, but there is still that common theme of being surprised by finding out who someone really is, and of being surprised by love.

And inwardly I was just saying, "Yesssssss." It was great that I could even find a way to fit Pride & Prejudice into a conversation with my teacher - even better that we could draw parallels from Lizzy & Darcy to the love story I'm portraying right now.

(And I'm going to go on a tangent right now and say this: We were watching the Cathy Rigby recording of Peter Pan the musical on YouTube, and it made me smile that the audience cheered every time Peter flew through the Darling's window. It made me think - I hear that there were a lot of screams and cheers in the theaters when Robert Pattinson showed up onscreen as Edward in Twilight. And it got me thinking - why don't we do the same for Mr. Darcy? And once I began to wonder this, I remembered that there have been several stage versions of Pride & Prejudice, some of them musicals. See this website: http://www.prideandprejudice-themusical.com/music.html and this one: http://www.prideandprejudicebroadway.com/) I think the perfect Pride & Prejudice musical would all come down to this: when Darcy enters the ballroom at Meryton, he would have to freeze for a full minute while every female in the audience clapped her hands raw and cheered her throat hoarse. Darcy has been a sort of icon long before Edward Cullen and Peter Pan were around. I think he deserves nothing less. Three cheers for Mr. Darcy! )

And on another note, take a look at the About The Musical page on the second P&P link. Are not the song names too perfect for words? It's like some kind of joke - "My Reasons For Marrying." "My Poor Nerves!" "I Can't Resist A Redcoat!")

Now that all that is out of the way, some other news of interest:

Full run-through of Sound of Music last night = much more encouraging than our last run through! The energy level was higher, and everything is just generally coming together. I'm nervous for the shows - but I'm also incredibly excited!

And rehearsals have started for Taming of the Shrew. I really don't want to talk about that right now, though. I feel like crying every time I think that I have rehearsals for both this show and Sound of Music every day (give or take a day or two) until... July? Pray for me. It's not that it's not going to be fun. It's just going to be really really hard... and exhausting... Even without "Shrew," my schedule would be pretty hectic - throw in another show that opens only a few days after the first, and it's basically insanity. Please please please don't ask how the heck I'm going to do it. I have to do it. So I'll find a way.