PROFESSOR DOM
The students know the steps and they know the music. They’re rehearsing with their teacher, who’s keeping an eye on choreography and blocking, musical phrasing, student voice and pitch, and the overall feeling of the performances. They call him Dom.
“Stop! How far are we from ‘position one’?” he asks the performers. “Pretty far!” they yell.
“We’ll use these four bars as ‘traveling music’ to get back to position one,” Dom says. “We’re gonna speed through it one more time.”
“Dom treated us
like we were already
on Broadway.
That prepared me for my
professional career.”
When Amendum began teaching at UNCG in 2015 on a part-time basis, he wasn’t sure how it would go. “I could have come down here from New York for a couple of years and then said, ‘Oh, this isn’t for me,’” Amendum explains. That didn’t happen.
As DiPiazza says, “He’s gone full-circle now. He started out in the Brown Building as a student, had a career on Broadway, and came back as faculty in the University where it all started.”
And to see him work with his freshmen in the 120-seat black-box performance space, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Sprinkle Theatre was on Broadway.
“In my work as a music director and music supervisor, I don’t enter the room differently whether it’s a bunch of undergraduates getting their BFA degrees or whether it’s Cynthia Erivo,” he says. Erivo is the Grammy- and Tony Award-winning star playing Elphaba. “The work is not different. That’s something I feel really passionate about.”
Amendum’s class is rehearsing cabaret projects. It’s a demanding and intimate kind of performance that matches the feeling of the program: prestigious and defined by seeing its students as three-dimensional individuals with meaningful stories.
“Dom puts so much focus on each of his students. He wants us to be ourselves because what makes us interesting as artists is that we’re all different as people,” says Macasero.
Finding what Dom calls “access to excellence” is no accident. It’s how the program is designed, he says.
“In most programs, you’re not going have a class with the coordinator of the program until you’re a junior or senior.”
His students have multiple courses with him. He also can give them tips about the industry. “He helps us make our book of audition songs, and we do mock auditions,” says Pandey. “He has spent so long behind the audition table on Broadway and on films, he was able to really tell us what the industry is looking for.”
As hard as they are working, the students are also having fun. There is still room for their ideas, their reactions, their spirits. Amendum creates that feeling on purpose.
“The best projects I’ve been involved in are the projects where everyone has room to bring their own creativity and collaboration into the space. From the lighting and scenic designer to the arranger and music supervisor and orchestrator,” he says.
The group begins rehearsing a number from “Avenue Q,” rewritten to be a funny take on student life at UNCG. It should have the energy of a Sesame Street tune. “We all need to be playing with that tone,” Dom tells the cast. “It’s not serious – don’t sing it like it’s Sondheim.”
The students go back to position one to run through it again. Rehearsal continues.
Working with first-year BFA students in Sprinkle Theatre.
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