Ann Michaels: My name is Ann Michaels,
and I am a performer for a living.
Mostly do musical theater,
but also venture into straight theater as well,
and do a lot of singing and voiceover work.
I am a total geek, and so anytime I get a role,
I think of it as the perfect opportunity
to learn something new.
So, I will read the story, the play,
and find out what I don't know.
Find out about the time period if we're speaking about
people who are real, people who existed in history,
then I will Rain Man that, and learn as much as I can,
and take notes and I refer to it all the time.
If you've got a good dramaturge working on your play,
they will give you a bunch of information as well.
But I try to really know as much as I can about my character
and about the time period in history.
If there are language issues I will study accents.
I have done so many accents in the last few years.
I have done German, Italian, Spanish, French.
So you have to do a lot of homework at the outset.
You also need to learn your lines.
And then when you move into your technical rehearsals
where they start adding the sound,
and the costumes and the lights,
and that's a very slow and tedious process
and you can have 12-hour days.
So you might be there all day
and then well into the night.
Sometimes you're not getting home till one in the morning,
and that technical rehearsal period is usually about a week.
But yeah, after tech rehearsal happens
and we put all the elements together,
you're lucky if you get one solid run-through in
before you have an audience in front of you.
And then hopefully, you'll have some preview audiences
that can see the show for a few days to get used to
if people laugh, if they don't laugh,
or how they're reacting,
and we learn from that and we make changes.
But yeah, once the show is open,
we say "Well, the show is ours now."
And we just do the play that we rehearsed.