A Note From Our Crusty Old Founder: Talent Isn’t Everything. Love your art!
Photo cred: Pablo
Grab a group of kids and sit them in a circle and ask them
if they have any hidden talents no one else knows about and you'll get a
good 30-60 minutes of hilarity of tongues up nostrils, alphabets
burped on command, elbows licked, and bodies twisted into pretzel shapes. I have done this in acting camps with
kids. I always wondered how they had discovered these odd skills.
The answer was obvious; boredom. We like to be entertained.
Music and acting skills are entirely different. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has a
natural ability to share. A certain
demeanor, strong voice, a nice physique, or sense of humor. We also all have passively-learned talents like sense of timing, the ability to listen, humility, natural movement and
posture, etc. The rest of the "talents" we
have, we work for. We listen, practice, and
learn first on our own and, when we are ready, we look for validation from
family, friends teachers, directors, etc.
For 36 years, I performed in productions, exclusively for
school or community theaters. In high
school, where there were limited male singers, my natural ability to match pitch
and sing in a tenor range landed me leading roles. I thought it was my talent. But when I auditioned for a college-community
production, I didn’t have the same success. I was cast as ensemble. I had
some natural ability, but there were others with years of practice and experience underneath their belts, and they
were chosen to play the key roles that I thought I had earned. I turned down the ensemble role thinking I had paid my dues and should be slotted for a certain caliber role.
I held a
grudge for three years over my apparent miscasting, and when I finally came
back to the same theater, older but no wiser, I was cast as a romantic
lead. I showed them! Right?!
About that, I recently found the VHS recording of that late
1980’s show. I dusted off an old player
from our attic and popped in the tape to show my daughter how great her dad was
on stage. She watched in utter amazement
as her 20-year-old dad danced, sang, and acted on the big stage. And then she laughed. She laughed a hearty belly laugh, one where you
can’t catch your breath and there are aftershocks of giggles.
I shouldn’t have watched the tape. I was much more talented in my memory. But it got me to thinking; I was clearly not
as talented as some of the other actors performing on stage that day. Why was I cast in this role?
I am still friends with the director from that show. Recently,
I asked him what he remembered from that year. He told me this was the year the college production was relocated to
West De Pere High School. Their own campus arts center was undergoing
renovations and, actually, this was year two
of the displacement. The prior year, the
show was in the old Vic Theater in downtown Green Bay. (The Vic was a Vaudeville
Era stage and the theater had non-working air conditioning). The summer was so
uncomfortable that when faced with a second year out of their home, most of the
talented actors and actresses who frequented the top roles for the theater
decided a break would be good. I got my
role because the regular talent was on break. I was the last man standing. The next summer, I was cast ensemble in Music
Man and the following year, I did not make the cast for Into the Woods.
I didn’t do any other musicals for 19 years. During that time, I stayed active in
community performances and through various gigs. I had a few good ones, but mostly, it was a bunch of ensemble work.
In 2007, I got a phone call from the
college-community theater where it all began to fill in for a cameo
role in Evita. The role was short, sweet,
and right in my wheelhouse. I got one iconic
song (a stand and sing it), two prominent scenes with the leads, had to do no dancing, and
I got my own bow. In 2010, I was called
again to fill in for a cast dropout in Forever Plaid.
My next audition wasn’t until 2013 for
Les Misérables. I was 45 years old,
looked 45, but was cast to play a 25-year-old because of my ability to
sing. That was really the first role I
received where my preparation outweighed other factors. To illustrate that point, I was offered the
role contingent on losing 30 pounds before opening. I lost 15 and girdled the other 15 back into
my frame with compression undergarments and Voilà! Svelt and 25.
As I look over my history of 135+ stage performances, which includes a dozen
more as a producer, director and technical advisor, I now see that I wasn’t always the
most talented musician or actor, but often, I was the one who showed up. I was a Yeoman. I did good, hard, and valuable work to improve
every time I took the stage. Eventually,
I earned that slotting I sought as a teenager. It only took me 30+ years to come full circle.
-Tim Olejniczak
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