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Tulsa, OK, United States
This blog is a record of the Senior Class from the University of Tulsa's Musical Theatre Program as we develop a Showcase to perform in New York. For more information, including how to donate, click on 'Who We Are' under the Pages sidebar!

Sunday, April 17, 2011

The Beginning of the End

Hello everyone! My name is Natalie Sullivan, and I am a musical theatre senior at The University of Tulsa. It has been a while since anybody posted on here, so I wanted to update you all because so much has been going on! Since Kirsten has posted, Jonathan has gone to NYC for a callback for the Asian Tour of "Legally Blonde," Kirsten and I went to Boston for the NETC auditions, Courtney attended a casting call for the national tour of "Cats," the advanced rep dance class went to the ACDFA dance convention and performed an original piece choreographed by Chet Walker, and we have all been working hard to put up our final show of the season. This past weekend we opened and closed RENT, our final musical as students at TU. It was a very exciting but emotional weekend to say the very least. We were fortunate enough to team up with a local professional theatre company (Tulsa Project Theatre), so we could perform our show at The Joint which is a very new rock concert venue at the Tulsa Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. We hired in three professional actors to perform the roles of Joanne, Collins, and Angel, however the rest of the cast was made up of TU musical theatre students. Because The Joint serves alcohol at all of their events, students under the age of 21 could not attend, so we held a special performance on Wednesday night where the student understudies of Joanne, Collins, and Angel were able to perform. While this performance was technically an invited dress rehearsal, it ran flawlessly and was a fantastic way to open the show! The three understudies did extremely well, and I could not have been more proud. Wednesday night was also senior night. So immediately after the show ended, our director, Machele, walked up on stage and introduced each of the seniors and handed out flowers. The show officially opened on Thursday night to rave reviews and ran through Saturday. Here is the Tulsa World review of RENT. It wasn't until "Finale B" on Saturday night that it really started to sink in that we are graduating in three weeks! It was extremely sad, but I could not have imagined a better way to relinquish our reign as the TU musical theatre seniors and pass it on to the juniors! However, just because the show is over does not mean we are done! We still have one full week of classes, finals the following week, and then we are off to NYC for the showcase! It's the beginning of the end.