Q&A: Seussical Mayzie La Bird Tryout Tips

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Photos of characters playing Mayzie La Bird from Seussical the Musical. Click for full size.

Received this question about the character Mayzie La Bird from Seussical:

I’m trying out for MAYZIE LA BIRD and i was wondering what song i should sing? and what vocal range does she need?

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In Seussical the Musical, Mayzie La Bird is the antagonist and well experienced city girl. She’s the “Bette Midler” of Seussical. She’s brassy and street smart. Her counterpart is Gertrude, the innocent ingenue and protagonist.

For an audition song for the part of Mayzie, I would suggest something brassy and/or big traditional broadway. A song that says “Here I am!”. Look for any songs Bette Midler or Liza Minelli would have done. “Cabaret” would be a great song.

We had a great Mayzie for our production, Ashely Henning. She sings great traditional Broadway. After doing Mayzie she had leads in “Little Women” and “Evita”, to give you an idea of the character. Mayzie could be played by a wide range of ages – but she does have a baby, so take that into account. Younger actresses might go for Gertrude, or if you have a powerful bluesy voice you could tryout for the Purple Kangaroo (a very fun role).

Mayzie’s songs in Seussical the Musical are what I would call “Torch Songs”, and usually played by a mature voice (18 years and older).

Hope you have fun. Seussical was a very fun musical to perform. Musicians that have worked with me count it as one of their favorites. In fact I recently received an email from a cello player who says it’s bar they use to judge the fun of all other musical productions.

Auditioning for a musical is one of the hardest processes to endure. The more you do, the better you’ll get at it. The first couple auditions might be (read “probably will be”) bad experiences and embarrassing, just keep doing it if you want parts.

Mazy Suessical Muiscal Mazee Mayzee Soosical Seusical

Cirque Macao 2008

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Cirque du Soleil will see its first resident show in Asia debut at The Venetian® Macao-Resort-Hotel next summer.

This brand new 90-minute mega-production brings together 75 high-calibre artists from all four corners of the globe. Presented in one of the most impressive theatres ever created by Cirque du Soleil, the show will immerse its 1,800 spectators in an unforgettable experience.

Keep your eyes and ears open, the adventure will soon commence …

(“Macao” is also spelled as “Macau”. Show is on the Cotai Strip between the islands of Macau and Taipa.)

Visit http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/World/en/au/shows/macau2008.asp

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Visit the Sands Venetian Macau website at http://www.venetianmacao.com

How to Create an MMORPG

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“It’s an MMORPG you R-TARD!”

*Note* After writing this I found a great resource for beginners to read about the basic resources and skills needed to create an original MMORPG. It may be more than you expected. You can find the article here:

http://www.devmaster.net/articles/building-mmorpg/

How to create an MMORPG (Massive multi-player online role playing game). I don’t know, but the idea interests me. The underground geek culture has slowly hit the mainstream. Pro gamers and hacks aren’t the only ones playing now, or the only ones interested in creating games.

In the audio world I love how I can sit on a program like ProTools and tweek things in detail for hours on end. The Torque Game Builder gives that same kind of flexibility for graphics and interactive coding. I’ve read that successful games have started with very small development teams (as small as TWO!). I can also imagine that everyone and their brother is checking this stuff out to make their own new original RPG or interactive game.

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GarageGames.com has the Torque Game Builder code available at a very reasonable price, especially for indie game developers. Content packs are also available to use as-is or as templates for creating new art, lighting, landscapes, animations and objects for your new game.

Would appreciate anyone who’s interested in this to drop a note here and give your insight. Thanks!

Press Release on Torque

Own the engine that started the revolution. The ground-breaking engine behind Tribes continues to evolve and remains unparalleled. And we supply the Source Code to prove it. Torque was built by pros and is used by pros. Vivendi, NC Soft, and even NASA have developed projects using TGE. Use the same technology as the big boys for just $150.TGE is a complete proven package for a wide range of applications, with flexible and controllable in-engine animation, world, terrain, and GUI solutions, as well as award-winning TorqueNet networking. CodeOnce in TorqueScript or C++, then run your game on PC, OSX, XBox360 or bring your game into other Torque products, such as TGEA. This is not an SDK.

Screenshot from Torque Tutorial

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Switching from VBulletin to PHPBB?

Ever heard of someone switching from VBulletin back to PhpBB? I was surfing and came across an article about someone who switched to VBulletin with the VBSEO mod and was used as a poster boy for how much money he was making on it. Then I visit his blog and see a subsequent post about him wanting to switch back to PHPBB. He likes the new template engine on PHPBB 3.0 Olympus.

Here’s the blog post:

http://skeymedia.com/tag/phpbb/

Here’s the article from VBSEO about how great VBulletin and VBSEO are:

VBSEO Rags to Riches Story

Leave you a little confused? I have a lot of PHPBB forums and was looking at options for a major upgrade at the end of the year. I’m still running PHPBB 2.22 (2.0.22). What are your thoughts?

Bioshock uses Unreal gaming engine

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Bioshock uses the Unreal gaming engine from Unreal Technology. From what I’ve read it’s a $350,000 investment for the engine, so not really an option for the indie gamer like the more inexpensive Torque engine from GarageGames.

Excerpt from full article at: http://www.unrealtechnology.com/case-studies.php?ref=bioshock 

In addition to the hard work and dedication that the team put into the game, Chey credits Unreal Engine 3 in helping create this original adventure game—a game that has been called a masterpiece by game critics and gamers, alike.

“For BioShock, the advantage of us working with an existing engine allowed us to get started prototyping art and gameplay without waiting to get basic renderer, editor and other functions on the line,” said Chey. “With Unreal’s mature technology we benefited a lot from the work Epic did to get the engine running on Xbox 360.”

Ken Levine, the creative director of BioShock, wanted to find some place where the player could be cut off from the rest of the world, so he came up with the notion of an underwater city. The architectural influences from the game came from New York, specifically, Rockefeller Center.

“It was there that the visual concepts of Rapture began to form,” said Chey. “Ken and his wife and spent a day at Rockefeller Center with cheap cameras bought at the gift shop, photographing every lighting fixture, door knob, and Diego Rivera mural they could find. They followed that up by going to the Empire State Building, which hosts the inspiration for the ‘wall coins’ you find in the lighthouse sequence.”

In addition to the art deco architecture of New York City, the team was influenced by a variety of media when creating the world of Rapture and the story of BioShock. Chey said the largest literary influences were “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand, “The Shining” by Stephen King and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. The music of Bernard Hermann and movies like “Fight Club” and “Logan’s Run” also helped formulate ideas and themes for the story.

The Rescuing Hug

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This is a picture from an article called “The Rescuing Hug.” The article details the first week of life of a set of twins. Apparently, each were in their respective incubators, and one was not expected to live. A hospital nurse fought against hospital rules and placed the babies in one incubator. When they were placed together the healthier of the two threw an arm over her sister in a endearing embrace. The smaller baby’s heart rate stabilized and her temperature rose to normal.

Above excerpt from: http://www.snopes.com/glurge/hug.asp 

I get weary of feel-good stories that aren’t true. They bug me. Why send a made up one when there’s plenty of real material out there. So when I received this in my email, my first automatic response was to go to Snopes (a website that debunks urban myths).

Much to my surprise, Snopes lists this story as true. I also didn’t find a debunk on urbanlegends.com – What a nice surprise! So you can enjoy the story, be warmed by it, and know that it’s now cheezy internet fodder.

Snopes said of the story:

“As glurgirific as it must sound, this is actually a true story.” 

Game Creation Software Makers

List of video game software to create original role playing, first person shooter and MMORPG games. Put together your own team of artists to build a the newest online interactive video game from scratch. Want to know how to design your own video game for a massive multiplayer online role playing game? Here’s a start. Also visit GarageGames.com

3D Game Makers

DarkBASIC

Make a game with DarkBASIC, it has become one of the more
popular choices of game design programs for both beginners
and the more advanced hobby game programmers out there.

DarkBASIC Pro

The more advanced option of DarkBASIC. If you have the extra
cash this is just as a good option as DarkBASIC, or even better
in many ways.

GLBasic

Wish to create your own video games that have high quality
on your own with little time to waste creating a game engine,
a 3D framework or network components, then GLBasic could be
a good choice.
Lawmaker Game Engine

The Lawmaker Game Engine is a powerful and robust 3D game engine
tailored for novice and advanced game designers. The 3D game
engine and tools provide a complete development solution for
current and next generation games.

The 3D Gamemaker

With the 3D Game maker you can make your own game in seconds.
You don’t have to know any programming to make games
with The 3D Gamemaker.

Game Maker

Game Maker is a gamer design program that allows you to make
your own computer games without having to learn any programming.

3D Game
Engine Torque Game Engine SDK

The Torque Game Engine (TGE) is for the more advanced game
designers. The 3d game engine features multi-player network
code, state of the art skeletal animation, seamless indoor/outdoor
rendering engines, drag-and-drop GUI creation, a C-like scripting
language and a built in world editor.

Gamespace 3D

3D game programming with gameSpace can deliver stunning results.
No longer are eye photorealistic 3D graphics limited to the
domain of large game and film studios.

3D GameStudio

3D GameStudio is a very popular game design software amongst
independent game developers. Many successful games have been
published using game engines that were created using 3D GameStudio.
3D
Adventure Studio

3D Adventure Studio is an Adventure game maker for making
adventure games in style of Gabriel Knight 3.

2D Game Makers

Game Editor

Game Editor is a game design software that lets you design games
with little or no programming or technical knowledge.

RPG Game Makers

RPG Toolkit

RPG Toolkit is a very powerful editor and game engine that lets
you create your own RPG game.
Explorations
RPG Game Engine

Explorations RPG Game Engine is a powerful role playing game
engine that lets your make your own RPG game.

RPG Maker 95

RPG Maker 95 is a program created by ASCII in 1997, allowing
the creation of RPG. You can do drawings, music, dialogues,
maps and more.

RPG Maker 2000

RPG Maker 2000 is designed to create console-type RPG games.
The results will look very much look like and old SNES game.

RPG Maker 2003

Based on the very popular RPG maker 2000, RPG maker 2003 lets
you make your own RPG games.

RPG Maker XP

With the new RPG Maker XP, you can make even better RPGs than
with RPG maker 2000 and 2003!
RPGds

RPGds is a RPG game creator and has a single primary purpose:
to allow you to create your own RPGs.

Sphere : 2D RPG Engine

Sphere is a 2D RPG engine, in development since 1997. It allows
you even if you don’t have much programming experience
make a RPG game like Final Fantasy VI or Phantasy Star.

Hephaestus

Hephaestus is a construction kit for making computer role playing
games (often called an “RPG maker”). The scripting
is done in the Java programming language and it also features
a map editor.

IRE Role Playing Game Engine

IRE is an attempt to create a cross-platform computer role-playing-game
engine similar to Ultima 6.

Fighting Game Makers

Fighter Maker 95

Fighter Maker 95 as one could guess from the title lets you
make your own fighting game.

MUGEN

MUGEN is a very popular 2d game maker for making your own fighting
game. You can make your own character and supply them to the
game or you can download some of the thousands of characters
other people have made from one the many MUGEN fan sites.

Adventure Game Makers

Adventure Game Studio

With the Adventure Game Studio you can create your own 2d
point-and-click adventure games, much like the old Sierra
and Lucasarts games.

Inform – Interactive Fiction Game Engine

Inform is a text adventure game maker and consists of a compiler
and a library of standard rules written in the Inform language:
you will need both of these to get anything done.

ITADS

TADS is a set of programming tools specially designed for
writing adventure games.

ADRIFT Generator

ADRIFT Generator is a program that allows you to create your
own Text Adventures. It is written for Windows 95/98/NT/2K/ME/XP.

Aiee!

Aiee! allows you to create and play interactive text adventures,
or “interactive fiction”.

GameScroll

GameScroll is a program for playing and writing interactive
fiction games like.

Game Assets

Royalty Free Music, Sound Effects and Stock Footage

Preview and download high-quality original music, sounds and stock footage for use in your projects at Productiontrax.

Other Tools and Software

Video Game Design Pro

Video Game Design Pro is an industry-specific software solution which features
tools and functionality exclusively for the use of the creation, management,
and implementation of video game design documentation.