awesomeness? maybe?

I'll confess that I'm still on a bit of a high from last Thursday despite the fact that every time I think of my Thursday schedule, I die a little inside. Maybe it's the fact that I'm running around like a madwoman from Waverly and Broadway to 14th Street and 4th Ave with less than 15 minutes to spare...and then after that class I return to Waverly and Broadway...with less than 15 minutes to spare. Perhaps it's the fact that I simply forgot to schedule lunch or a break for myself on those days or that with the 15 minute power walks included, I have class from 9:30-4:45 and then production meetings after that. Oh well.
But despite the minor elements of Thursday boot camp, life was awesome last Thursday. Yeah, the geek in me is going to come out. Brace yourself, I'm sorry but it's going to happen. So after class and the production meetings Thursday, I attended a master class taught by Philip Quast. In case you don't know who he is, google him...but among other things, he was Javert in the original production of Les Miserables.
For me it's more than just meeting people who I look up to in the theatrically sense. For my friends I think it's a bit different.
After telling some fellow geeks, here are some reactions:
"WHAT THE FUCK seriously?!?!"
"did you throw your underwear at him?!?!?!?! because I would have"
So sorry friends, there was no throwing of underwear, signing of cleavage, or anything of the sort. In fact, I attempt to keep to professionalism and was not particularly tempted to throw off my clothes or anything. Who wants to see that anyway?
But the the class was awesome. I hadn't been expecting his personality to be as light and fun as it was. He threw students around the room to loosen them up, forced them to run around the room with him to get "puffed" for the breathlessness of a song or emotion, picked students up, danced with them (men and women). And when a student seemed to have faltered on who or what to sing his emotions about, Mr. Quast grabs him by the face and places to huge kisses on each of his cheeks and says, "Now you've got something to sing about, hmm? Now sing."
About a half hour into the class, right after a guy had sung, Quast clasped his hands and said, "Well, how about a woman's voice now?"
No sooner does he do that does a woman open the door and in the bitchiest (great vocabulary, I know) voice possible, says, "Whatever activity is going on in this room is over now. Everyone out. $20 are you kidding me? These signs? What do you think you're doing?"
With that a club advisor went outside and one of the board members to talk to her and Quast looks around at us and says, "In a way, that's very bad acting. Coincidental, but very bad acting. I said that I wanted to hear a female voice, but that's not really what I was expecting. It was far too much, too planned, and well...just bad acting."
The matter was sorted quickly. I even went outside to try and call a friend to help get us another room and Quast and my professor thanked me and then the workshop continued on without interruption.
Quast's workshop was based on the idea of letting music or musicality and lyrics guide performance, to take hints from the music itself or to create beat or rhythm where the music does not. I found it strangely coincidental that I had experimented with the very same technique over the summer. To have a professional doing the same thing was a little beyond me.
There was also the benefit of being the only film major in the class when the master class was titled "Screen, Shakespeare, and Song." He would refer to me if I agreed or disagreed with him about cinematography. At one point when someone was singing, he brought his hands in on her face on her last note to signify a close up and on the last dragging note, I clawed my hand and brought it back to signify a crane pull back. Incredibly excited, he pointed to me, clapped his hands and cried, "Exactly! Yes!" and redid my action bolder for the class.
Awesome.
I find it strange just how much he reiterated things that I had already known or felt before personally. There was, of course, the teaching method that I spoke about. But Quast, like myself says he finds musical theatre and film so closely related that it's easy to see how one draws from the other. And Jill studies film for what reason?
Here's a bit of Quast from ala YouTube from his most notable role in Les Miserables.