My first Performance! Chapter 5

Now here I am backstage, waiting to go on stage in front of an audience for the first time in my life. The irony of being in a play before I had ever seen a live performance of a play crossed my mind. There was a musician playing the intro to the play on a piano and at that moment I felt proud. There were friends of mine in the audience that knew me all my life and were not to shy to let me know that they thought this acting thing was just a whim and eventually I would come back to the real world. But the guy playing the piano was great and it instilled in me some confidence.
Well, I was able to get thru it without any major screw ups. The one thing I came away from it was not to push for laughs from the audience. I had some funny lines and would punch them out, pleading for laughs from the audience.. I got them but they were polite laughs, not the spontaneous bursts that a good actor gets..I would rather get no response than laughs from an audience that has mercy on me. In looking back, the best I did was the very first audition where I wasn't trying to be funny but truthful to the character. That honesty and simplicity was what made it funny in the first place. After that first time it was no longer spontaneous. I was playing for results instead of just portraying the character..But for my first time in front of a real audience I did ok. Still didn't sing though but basically mouthed the songs that were song with the whole cast.
I was totally hooked on acting, I had overcome my first experience with stage fright and by the last performance, I was having fun on stage.
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