Competing against eight other students for roles in a Broadway musical, Communication senior Sean Carroll and Communication sophomore Katherine Palardy will perform on CBS News’ “The Early Show” next week.
The six-day series “My Broadway Debut” will air from May 29 to June 5. The students from Northwestern and from four other colleges and universities will perform once during the week, and viewers will vote online during the weekend. On June 5, the winning man and woman will come back to the show and receive walk-on Broadway roles.
Carroll will perform May 30 and Palardy will perform May 31.
Carroll and Palardy auditioned with other NU students, including most of the musical theater department, at Norris University Center on May 8. They received calls from CBS about a week ago, Carroll said.
The contestants were assigned songs to perform by CBS. Carroll will sing either “Razzle Dazzle” or “All I Care About” from “Chicago.” He said he hopes the songs will appeal to the audience because the movie was popular.
Palardy’s song is from “The Wedding Singer,” a musical-theater version of the movie. She said she will portray the character played by Drew Barrymore.
The other students are from Wagner College (Staten Island, N.Y.), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), University of Arizona (Tucson) and Florida State University (Tallahassee). Palardy said she looked up some of her competitors on Facebook.com, though she’s trying not to focus on the competition.
“It’s hard not to want to judge the other performers,” Palardy said. “I’m trying to avoid looking them up and seeing what they’ve done.”
Both NU students have been practicing for the performance. Carroll said he practices for about an hour each day. Palardy’s musical is so new that CBS had to get the sheet music directly from the Broadway producers. She said she practices by writing out the lines of the song, leaving space in between. She fills in that space with notes about what the character might be feeling.
Both Carroll and Palardy said they had been performing in musical theater since eighth grade. They both are involved in theater and music groups on campus. Palardy is a member of the Titanic Players, an improvisational comedy group. She said she is interested in combining musical theater and improv. Improv has helped her learn to explore and to understand the characters she plays, she said.
Carroll is a member of the a cappella group Thunk. Performing on “The Early Show” requires that he miss some of the last rehearsals for the group’s upcoming show.
Palardy said she will miss final assignments because, in the School of Communication, they are often due during Reading Week. Her professors are flexible because they are in the theater department and recognize that this is an important opportunity, she said.
Right now she’s more stressed about shopping, she said.
“I’m most worried about what to wear,” Palardy said, “Honestly, I’m so bad with clothes.”
Carroll said he doesn’t get nervous before performances.
“If I start freaking out about it, it’ll make the whole process unenjoyable,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s just another audition – it just happens to be on national television.”
Reach Diana Samuels at [email protected].
