It's almost showtime!

Preparing for the Heart & Soul cabaret-style revue has been a great experience, and makes me wonder how people did things like this before the Internet age. Our pianist has a jam-packed schedule, but we three singers have been able to rehearse sans live accompaniment thanks to CDs I made by downloading all our songs by different performers via iTunes, and then transposing them to the keys we selected via some free software I downloaded called Vocal Remover, which is meant primarily to remove voice tracks from recordings (I've never been able to get this function to work), but also lets you change the pitch and the tempo of selected works. With the aid of this CD, we have been able to rehearse the entire show consistently over the past few weeks, working out blocking for our group numbers and practicing the brief dialogue between certain songs. Next week--the week before the show--we have three rehearsals scheduled with the accompanist. We've been able to honor her schedule as well as get our kinks worked out well in advance of showtime. And now I am really looking forward to hearing how we sound with the piano accompanying us rather than Ray Bolger, Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Robert Morse, Megan Mullaley and all those lovable toughs from the original cast of Guys and Dolls.