Learning to be my own Cheerleader

Elie Kupperman

August 1, 2018

---

There is a distinct moment in my childhood when I knew I wanted to be a professional musical theater performer. I was 9 years old, watching my local, off-Broadway, professional theater company’s show of Annie. My next-door neighbor, Camille, was one of the orphans in the show, and it was a huge deal when she landed the role. She was 14 at the time and she had a killer voice. She had taken regular trips from Davis (our hometown) to New York to audition for child roles in Broadway shows since she was 8. Camille always got really close to getting a job; sometimes, it would be between just her and one other girl, but she never landed the role. This was her first professional musical theater job. She was absolutely amazing.

At that point in time, I was a hardcore gymnast. I did some dance on the side, but I took the most pride in my flips and tricks I did at the gym. It was my “thing”. While I watched Camille shine in Annie, I knew that I should be happy for her. But I wasn’t. I was jealous. Watching all the kids belt their hearts out and look out into the spotlights, I was mesmerized. I watched their eyes shimmer and face mold into the exact emotion they were acting out. I got chills as these kids dedicated themselves to the stage and the moment. I immediately had a gut feeling that the stage was where I was meant to be. At one point in the show one of the little orphan girls did a line of tumbling, something I did every day in the gym. After that I was convinced that I needed to look into this musical theater thing. At the end of the show I told my mom that it looked like soooo much fun, and I wanted to try out next year. Little did I know, I was getting myself into a much more complicated world than I thought.

My mom, dad, and older sister were always horrible singers, along with 100% of my extended family. We were the anti-musical family. But I sang around the house sometimes and my parents told me I was pretty good. They always made me sing happy birthday alone at family birthday celebrations because I was the only one who could remotely hold a tune until my youngest sister was born 9 years later and proved to be a better singer than I was. After the show, my mom talked to Camille’s mom (a loving, over-the-top, full-fledged theater mom, whose son is now a famous TV actor who shall remain nameless), who told her all the things I needed to start doing in order to be able to get into a show of the same caliber as Annie.

Camille intimidated me. She was short and cute with sparkling eyes and the most adorable dimpled smile—the perfect musical theater child candidate. Her voice was indescribably beautiful. It was rich and milky, but also light and zingy. Every note she sang was perfect and made everyone in the room get chills. She could also act well. Really well. Broadway call-back well.

My mom told me that if I wanted to make it, I needed to take acting and voice classes on top of my 5 day a week commitment to my gymnastics team. I was stressed about the time commitment and terrified that I wouldn’t be good enough. I started to doubt that gut feeling I had in the audience, and I began to think it wasn’t meant to be. I still sang around the house and dreamed of stepping on the stage myself, but never imagined that it would be a reality for me. However, my mom looked into voice lessons and had me try out for the top voice teacher in my area. I was nervous in the audition and the sliver of sound that came out of my mouth shook, giving away my nerves. Not surprisingly, I was waitlisted. I was discouraged, embarrassed, and figured I should let my dream go.

A year passed, I quit gymnastics, and a new round of auditions were coming up. I had made it through one nerve-racking lesson with my voice teacher. Quitting gym had been a really big decision for me. I decided right before I was supposed to move up to a more competitive level, and if I’m going to be honest, it was because I was scared. I had broken my foot, hand, wrist, and several fingers and toes in my years on the team and couldn’t imagine what kind of damage more competition would bring to my 10-year-old body. So, I diverted my attention to dance, and dove into training at the Sacramento Ballet Academy. I liked it enough, and it was still an opportunity for me to be on stage.

Essentially, I put my musical theater dreams aside. There were a million reasons circling in my head as to why I shouldn’t go for it. All the other theater kids trying for professional theater had been taking acting classes and voice lessons since they were 5. They knew all the fancy terms and had glamorous headshots. I was too far behind to catch up.

Auditions that year were for Oliver Twist the musical. Again, my mom encouraged me to try out, “just for fun”, and although I initially resisted, I reluctantly agreed to try. I pretended that it wasn’t a big deal, and that I didn’t care what happened, and that I was just doing it for fun. But I did care. A lot. It’s hard to describe, but there was this pull inside of me that begged to perform. It begged me to be on stage and in the lights, and not as a prima ballerina. It yelled at me that this is what I was meant to do.

My head didn’t like theater as much as my heart did. I got really nervous. In the car ride there, I couldn’t stop shaking. I had a tea in the car but wouldn’t pick it up because I was embarrassed about my shaking hands and didn’t want my mom to know how much the audition mattered to me. The thought of me stepping onto the stage made my face burn hot red. I wore the wrong outfit. I had the wrong headshot, and I sang the wrong song. My face was a chili pepper and almost no sound came out when I tried to sing. I didn’t get a part in the show.

Again, I was sad and embarrassed to be rejected, but not really surprised. I felt hopeless that I would never be as good as these child superstars: shiny, bright and rehearsed, producing booming beautiful sounds at every audition they went to, and able to act out any role. I knew I had enough talent, I just lacked so much confidence that when I was put under the pressure of an audition, none of my talent shone through that stiff wall of nerves and insecurity. So I pouted for a few days. But my Jewish mother didn’t allow it for long. She told me in her loving and passionate way that if I really wanted this I would have to fight for it and sacrifice for it. She said she believed in me and that I could be good enough in time with a lot of hard work; your classic, cliché, parent pep talk. And so I decided to commit, and my parents laid the groundwork for my opportunity to work hard and try to succeed in the theater world, a world of 95% rejection and 5% success rates.

I pestered my voice teacher often and came in for drop-in lessons whenever she let me, until finally she had an opening and I became one of her weekly students. I took acting lessons before my dance classes every week. My dad would take me to local musical theater and Broadway performances and lean over to me during the show to whisper “That’s going to be you someday”. I was a dancer in my pre-professional dance company during the year and went to New York for Broadway training programs during the summers. I stopped auditioning as much and focused on training. My voice blossomed and my voice teacher became one of my closest confidants, like an aunt. My acting got better and I felt okay in my classes.

In the eight years of my training, I landed one professional show as a 14-year-old child in The Music Man. I was delighted to say the least when I got to perform in that show. It fueled my fire even more to follow my dream as an adult, where the competition is only fiercer.

After that show, I spent my next 4 years training, basically. I went on a few “practice” auditions or workshops here and there, but that was it. Those high school years I trained and told myself that my time to audition would come. Sometimes I wonder that if I had had more confidence in my abilities in high school would I have backed away from dance a little and actually tried to join the musical theater community for real? I don’t regret my commitment to my dance company at all. I made some of the best friends of my life, and my director shaped who I am today. But, I do think that I always knew that I didn’t fit seamlessly into the dance world. I was good, but there was a tiny thing missing. A little shift in me. I needed to step a toe to the right, into the musical theater world. When we did a “musical theater style” dance combination (the one time a year it happened) was among the rare times that my strict, slender, 5-foot, ballet teacher who demanded excellence actually told me that I looked good. I spent ages 14-18 in this training limbo, living at my dance studio 30 hours/week, and practicing voice and theater on the side.

After that, I was accepted to Stanford undergrad. I thought about going to a conservatory or a college that would help me develop my confidence as an artist, but for several reasons I decided against it. I had academic interests, too, and I wasn’t ready to let go of them completely. I pledged to continue to train as a triple-threat in theater, dance, and voice (while maintaining academics, community service, and a social life) as best that I possibly could at Stanford, while also studying a scientific/health-related subject, for which I found a passion in high school. At that point, my heart was still fully invested to theater, dancing, and singing, but the voices in my head kept telling me that The Music Man was the farthest I would go. That I was a one-hit-wonder. That it was impossible to keep up training at Stanford, let alone improve.

My first two years of college went by. I declared a Human Biology major with an emphasis in global maternal-child health and a pre-med track. After joining about 7 million dance/music/performance student groups and trying all of the dance classes Stanford has to offer, I lost steam. I kept with my vocal training, doing voice lessons once a week through the music department, but everything else fell by the wayside. My freshman spring I auditioned for a couple professional theaters in the area. I was rejected. Classic. Nothing new for me. Then, sophomore year I slacked even more on my training, just trying to stay afloat with the academic and social rigor of Stanford. That spring (this past spring) my mom emailed me a list of theaters I should audition for in the bay, and I decided to go to them just to see how out of shape I had gotten. I actually felt confident on the first two auditions, and thought there might be a chance. I was rejected from both. I was very reluctant to even go to the third. “What’s the point?” I thought. The audition was over spring break and it was in Oakland, which meant I would have to stay at school past the time all my friends had gone, just to audition for a play I would probably be rejected by. I would have to sacrifice precious days that could be spent at home with family, something rare during college years. I thought about it a lot and decided it wasn’t worth it. I wasn’t going to the audition. I called my mom to tell her my decision.

Of course, my mom didn’t take no for an answer. She lovingly, sweetly, supportively, basically told me that I was going and that was that.

So I went to Oakland and gave it my best, and on the drive back, I was sure I didn’t get the job. My voice slightly cracked on a note, and I was in a place of the room during the dance portion where the directors couldn’t really see me. These may seem like small details, but in an industry as selective as professional theater, they are deal breakers. Even if you perform to the very best of your ability in an audition, it’s likely you won’t get the job, as I learned from my many rejections.

Two weeks later, I got an email with my first adult professional theater contract. I was hired for all three shows of the summer at Woodminster Amphitheater in Oakland.

So, this summer for the first time in my life I am venturing into the world of professional theater. Every night from 7-10 and Saturdays and Sundays from 10am-5pm (or until 11pm on show weekends) I live in the Woodminster Amphitheater: an outdoor theater at the bottom of Joaquin Miller National Park. There is definitely still a long, long, long road to success, to Broadway, but I feel like I’m taking my first step on the right path. I’m blissful.

The takeaway from my experience is that I got lucky to have my mom and dad cheering me on and dragging me, at times, in the right direction. Without them, I probably would have quit trying all together after the first rejection. Not everyone has cheerleaders, and as we get older we start to lose our biggest ones. So I’m learning to become my own cheerleader, to tune out those voices in my head listing the excuses not to do something. I hope that optimism, positivity, and confidence can carry me further and further down that road to success, wherever it may lead.