Let's get singin'!

Yay, back to blogging after a couple of weeks' pause. I've got some awesome blog posts on the making – I don't know if bloggers usually spend days and days typing and fussing over their posts, but I do. However, something great and unexpected happened today, well worth a quick post before I get those other ones ready!

 Don't you just love postmen (or women) when they come to your door with a package for you that you've been anxiously expecting for weeks? Well, today around midday I got a package all the way from the States! What was especially wonderful about this event was that I'd been tracking the package via Amazon and I was under the impression that it was still stuck in Virginia, customs delay or something. But here they are now: Be A Broadway Star! board game and The Teen's Musical Theatre Collection: Young Women's Edition, some wonderful sheet music!




As board games and musical theatre are two of my most favourite things, it was only natural that one day I started wondering if there was a musical-themed board game out there somewhere. Amazingly, Google gave me a very straightforward answer when I asked for "Broadway board game": it led me to Be A Broadway Star!, by Broadway producer Ken Davenport and BroadwaySpace.com.

In the game, you're pretending to be an aspiring Broadway star and as you roll the dice and move your piece you have to do things like buy a new makeup kit, pay your agent and publicist and audition for roles. If you audition successfully, you earn some nice bucks and you can even win Tony Awards! The goals are to reach the Broadway Hall of Fame and to gain as many fans as possible – the amount of fans is indicated in Fan Cards, each worth 25, 50 or 100 fans. Getting cast in shows gets you more fans, but if you do something bad like yell at a child actor, you lose fans. All you can do is throw the dice and see what your landing space says.

There are two especially fun things in the game. First of all, when you audition (by taking an Audition Card which tells you which show and role you auditioned for), you get an extra turn if you can sing two lines from the show in question.

But sadly, sometimes your audition fails and you don't get the part. I would never ever get this specific "cut" card in real life:

Another element of fun are the "Make or Break" challenges. When you land on a "Make or Break" space, you have to pull a card and perform the challenge, such as:

Actually, this challenge would be an easy one for me. By the time I graduated from high school (or whatever the heck this Finnish system would be called in English) I'd become such a Shakespeare nerd I put the beginning of the "All the world's a stage" speech into my grad party invitations. But most of these challenges are NOT going to be easy – like "Perform two Bob Fosse dance moves"...

The box is really long and thin. See how I can't fit it properly into my bookshelf with my other board games!



This game sounds like loads of fun, especially with a bigger group (up to six) of musical-minded friends! I'm going to do a test round tomorrow with a friend whom I'll call Em here, and then I'll try to round up a couple of more friends who might like this so we can have a proper supercalifragilisticexpialidocious game night. You'll be sure to hear about it in this blog if and when it happens!

Alright, item two of the package: great sheet music for women from musical theatre! Well, there's a couple of Disney songs as well (such as Beauty and the Beast and God Help the Outcasts), which is a bit weird as I wouldn't call Disney movies musical theatre, but I don't mind at all because I love most Disney tunes to pieces. The songs from actual musicals include some of my absolute favourites, such as Memory (Cats), On My Own (Les Mis), There Are Worse Things I Could Do (Grease) and Wouldn't It Be Loverly (My Fair Lady). Then there are plenty of tunes which I've never heard and I can't wait to get to know them! The music is presented in the regular sheet music fashion: melody and piano accompaniment. But with the unknown tunes, it's especially great to have the accompaniment CD which plays piano accompaniments to each song, with the melody as well.

Here's some of the songs listed on the back cover:


See how wonderfully chunky it is (I'm holding it between my fingers)! 33 songs!
I think I'll be spending even more time singing show tunes from now on. Thank goodness I have good thick walls in my apartment...