Days 2 & 3 in NYC

Lets see...Sunday Stephanie, Alicia and I went to Stephanie's ward which meets in the same building as the temple in Manhattan. As you can imagine there are a lot of talented people in the ward with all the prestigious music school, Broadway and the met here in NYC. At the end of sacrament meeting a girl sang a version of The First Noel accompanied by a pianist and two violins. It was really good. Steph told me that she is in the cast of the Broadway show Jersey Boys. Wow! I also saw my friends Melissa and Karen from my ward. Melissa has been out here doing auditions like me and Karen has been on vacation. Sunday night we hung out and made chicken fajitas and we invited my friend Ryan who was also in town for auditions to join us. After dinner Ryan and I went and walked around in times square. It was pretty rainy but it was fun to look at all the lights and Broadway signs.

Yesterday I slept in and then got ready for my audition with VA Opera. The audition was at Chelsea Studios at 3:28 pm. I left Stephanie's place around 1:30 pm so that I would have time to take the subway and have time to warm up. Well when I got to the studio it was CRAWLING with people. The studio was on the 6th floor of this tall, old building and there were about 7 rehearsal spaces that were all jammed full of people. Just my luck...there were no practice rooms like they said there would be so I had to warm up in a "secret" bathroom that someone told me about on the 7th floor. Not ideal but better than nothing I guess. Every room had a different company auditioning. Most of them were Broadway way shows. There was a holding room for the Broadway shows and they would take people twenty at a time to line up in the hallway and go one after another and sing sixteen bars of a song for the panel. I think that they were hearing about 40 people an hour. How do you choose from 500 people you hear in one day! I'm glad I was on the opera side of the hallway. There were about five of us lined up at any given time. It wasn't very organized but at least they had a list of audition times posted on the door. We all just asked around to figure out who went when and after waiting for about an hour it was my turn. I sang the German piece I usually start with and then they picked my hard Italian piece. It went pretty well I guess. It wasn't as good as my SLC audition but the circumstances were a LOT different. One funny thing that happened is that there was a group of little girls auditioning for a show and one of them accidentally took my coat (which I borrowed form my friend Jamilyn) thinking her friend dropped it. So after I auditioned I had to go hunt it down and it happened to be in a room with one of the biggest Broadway show writers Jason Robert Brown. CRAZY! At least I got it back. ;o)

After the audition I went back to Stephanie's to change and then I met up with my friend Melissa and we went and hung out in China town and Soho to do some shopping and then had a great Italian dinner in Little Italy. It was pretty cold outside but we had fun. We took a few pictures but they are on Melissa's camera so I'll post them later.