After my third year of university and hearing of countless Dinner Theatre stories from Mike Ross I had to check this thing out.
My two good drummer friends, Shawn Doiron and Paul Christian, were auditioning and they begged me to audition also. Being the incredibly non-confident person I was, auditioning for something where I had to sing and act made me naseous; however, somehow I ended up auditioning and to my surprise I got the part.
So off to Summerside for the summer where I played Vince Vain, an egotistical inmate who bossed around his two 'Friends'. I found it so hard to be a bossy asshole but my directors brought it out of me! ;) In the end it was putting a toothpick in my mouth that brought me into the character. I went through a lot of toothpicks that summer.
The music was great. It was an all Motown Music show. Of course I bought a book on Motown bass, dug into the Jamerson style and even found a piece of foam to put under the bridge of my bass to give it that authentic Motown thump.
My second summer I played "Boris" the Russian Spy...and I had the worse Russian accent you've ever heard. I once had a woman straight from Russia in the audience and she challenged my accent saying that she'd know a real Russian Accent because of her origin and then she said a few sentences in Russian, to which I replied "No thanks, I already ate and by the way your accent is terrible"!