| ...that didn’t involve casting a “name” to boost ticket sales was Mazzie in Next to Normal. The score did not sit well in her voice, and her vocal quality was wrong for the style of the score. What’s more (and, surely, Greif or whoever put her in the show bears as much, if not more, of the blame here), it was a dramatically stagnant interpretation; there was nothing active about her characterization. To put it more plainly, I felt like she just cried the whole time. Even when Alice was vocally struggling, she did not resort to playing an emotion. Her Diana was always trying to figure something out. The same is true, though to a less exciting extent, of standbys Jessica Phillips and Pearl Sun. If a sophomore in my college musical theatre class did what Mazzie did, the professor would have stopped the performance midway through. |
