Hello, May!

It's been a little while since I've posted. Mostly I've been up to my eyeballs in work, wedding planning, and moving! (GULP).

Yes, I've decided to give up the little house that I love and move home with my parents until the wedding so I can save some money for Jason and I to start with.

One of the things I've been working on is our wedding website and finalizing all of the details:

www.theknot.com/ourwedding/ErinFarrell&Jason Speer

Other than that, I've been working a ton (both on ALL SHOOK UP and substitute teaching), cleaning and getting ready to pack up and move out.

Last night, when I was working at Starlight, our Xpress group continued working on their new material from Chicago (Xpress is sort of difficult to explain, but they do performances around the area, and this year their season is comprised of material from 4 musicals...) Aside from the fact that they almost made me go stark raving mad (that happens sometimes...), I was smacked in the face with a story from last summer and twelve years back, one that I wanted to share.

When I was fifteen, and had to work on my high school musical as part of Advanced Dance, I was privileged to do some of the choreography, along with my best friend Solange, and our teammate, Connie. As a thank you at the end of the musical, the high school bought us tickets to the national tour of CHICAGO, which had just started it's revival run on Broadway. I'm pretty confident that they didn't know the content of CHICAGO when they sent us, but I thank God they didn't because I just LOVED IT. If you read one of my older posts, you will know that this is when my life began to change.

Fast forward 11 years to last summer, when I was leading a study abroad for World Learning in the UK. We had limited funds to see a show on the West End, and the only one that had tickets we could afford and enough seats for all twelve of us was CHICAGO. This was not the show that my group wanted to see. In fact they all wanted to see just about anything else. But still, we went. It was the same revival production of CHICAGO that I had seen all those years ago in Los Angeles, with the exact same staging and the Fosse choreography. I was mesmerized, all over again. What I realized when I saw it was just how influential that single production had been in my career as a director and choreographer. Everything about the bare bones style that I prefer to stage shows in, everything about the speed of the storytelling, everything about the use of the stage, orchestra and audience reflects how I choose to work today. I was dumbfounded because I had truly never realized how influenced I had been by that single production.

I have seen so many incredible shows since then (shows that may truly have been "better") and have taken away many amazing moments and ideas, but NONE has hit me so personally as CHICAGO. So, thank you Mrs. Vorhis and West High School for sending me to see that production. I cannot express what it did for me.