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Preparing a trendy audition song seems a logical choice to many. The piece may have universal appeal, and a sense of it being "safe" material. Many actors fail to see that though this may be "popular" to perform in front of their peers, directors might have a slightly different take. Directors are looking for unique & creative individuals, and having "fresh" audition songs can separate you out from all the others. As an actor, you also show the ability to stretch yourself and take a risk on something that no-one else is doing.

"René Magritte must have had mornings like that. Think of the painting he made in 1935. The painting is called "La Clef des songes" (The Interpretation of Dreams). It is a painting of a board with four panels. The board is like an old school primer, used to teach children the names of things. There is a horse, a clock, a pitcher, and a valise. Under the objects are words. The horse is labeled "the door." The clock is labeled "the wind." The pitcher is labeled "the bird." And the valise is labeled "the valise." Why are three objects mislabeled, while one object is correctly labeled? Maybe it is like our confused morning at the market. We felt odd not because the fruits were labeled incorrectly, but because the relationship of signs suddenly struck us as utterly arbitrary even when everything had been labeled correctly. Likewise, when we see the three incorrectly labeled objects in "La Clef des songes," we begin to distrust even the correct labeling of the valise. What does the word "valise" have to do with the picture of the valise, and what does the picture really have to do with the actual thing? When we represent reality in words or pictures, do we come closer to that reality, or push it further away?"

Here are two videos that I've probably watched a couple dozen times each. They're both of the title song from the current Broadway production of Anything Goes.

Highlighted by songs in which women celebrate the murder of wayward men and a lawyer demonstrates the art of manipulating the media, musicals don't get much more cynical than Chicago. A ripped-from-the-headlines jazz-age play by Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins turned into a 1975 musical by songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb in collaboration with Bob Fosse, Chicago enjoyed an initial run of qualified success, overshadowed by the crowd-pleasing A Chorus Line. It makes perfect sense, however, that it found a second audience on Broadway in the 1990s