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Shawna van Omme will be late for class this September. Please excuse her. The second-year student of performing arts at Sheridan College will be missing the first ten days of class playing Prissy Andrews, a student at Avonlea School in the Charlottetown Festival mainstage production of Anne of Green Gables-The Musical. (At least one of her Sheridan instructors from last year, Charlottetown Festival artistic director Duncan McIntosh, is likely to provide an explanation.)
In addition to playing Prissy, in Shawna's first year as a full-fledged member of the Festival company, she is also playing in The Happy Prince and understudying the roles of "all the Ladies of Avonlea-except Mrs. Blewett." Shawna is not new to the Festival, though. As a member of the Young Company last summer, she also understudied roles in Anne and, in fact, performed in thirty-eight of eighty performances of Anne on the mainstage.
Before that, Shawna was an avid fan of the Charlottetown Festival, seeing Anne since she was a kid, first seeing her brother perform as one of the children of Avonlea, and more recently, attending performances with the keen eye of a young performer, a student of voice and dance, and a hopeful one-day part of the Festival company.
Shawna has been performing since she was three years old-when she was mostly "running around pretending to be a bird or a butterfly," she giggles. She sang in church and children's choirs, took singing and piano lessons, and trained and performed with the Island Dance Academy and Dance Umbrella. She also pounced on every opportunity to perform in community theatre productions such as Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol, Babes in Toyland, and various Gilbert and Sullivan productions. These led to Island-based professional opportunities, such as playing one of the Buchta dancers in Don Messer's Violin at the Harbourfront Jubilee Theatre in Summerside.
She's grateful to her teachers, and she's grateful that she continued to take piano lessons. Although she does much singing and dancing, piano remains an important skill to have: "That way, you can accompany people and teach yourself songs." She encourages other would-be performers on the Island to keep up piano lessons and to take a few dance classes, too-anything to provide more flexibility, physically and professionally.
Despite training and experience, Shawna's Toronto audition this season for the Charlottetown Festival was intimidating. "The room was totally full of people. All around, you could hear these amazing singers… Then to read in the paper that over one thousand auditioned-and only thirty-five selected!"
At nineteen, Shawna is one of the youngest performers in the Festival company. That leaves a lot of career ahead of her, which is fortunate since she says she wants to "do every musical." She'd also "love to do tours," to combine her love of performing with her love of travel. To accomplish her goals, she plans to "keep improving and developing as a performer." When she gets back to Sheridan, that will mean intensive classes (last year alone, she took about seventeen classes), and she will be preparing for tough critiques in dance and acting.
Meanwhile, playing Prissy is excellent professional experience, and, the role is forgiving! "Prissy is innocent-so innocent! She's the oldest person in the class, but she's not all together. She's a little bit flaky," Shawna confides. One Saturday, in a big entrance with Mr. Phillips (played by Wade Lynch), their three-legged-race leg tie was too loose, and they fell backwards onto the stage. "There was a real feeling of `oops', but it was not too bad to recover from it." Shawna says. Shawna hopes that it will be the only trip-up in her performing career for the next while.
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