Photo: Walter McBride
Earlier this month, it was announced that Louderman will take on the starring role of Regina George in the Broadway-bound musical adaptation of Mean Girls. Today the talented actress shares her excitement over the new Nick Jr. series and explains to Broadway World why she might know a thing or two about mean girls!
Sunny Day looks so adorable and it's exciting to see all the Broadway talent who will lend their voices to it.
I know, it's so much fun! We're having a blast. And I feel so lucky to be working on a project that speaks to young kids, it feels really good.
How did you get involved with the project?
Well I auditioned, I have a voiceover agent just like I have a theater agent, and I think that Paula, our producer, saw me in Peter Pan Live and thought I was right for the part. So that really helped me out a little bit because with these voiceover auditions they don't see you, they don't get to meet you, they just hear your voice - until the callback of course, then they meet you in person.
What are some of the differences between doing voiceover work and live theater?
Well with the series, I will often ask them to play back the recording of my voice from an earlier episode because you can lose sight of it. Sometimes we'll take three weeks off between recordings, so you have to reacquaint yourself a little bit with the character, and that can take a little bit of time. Luckily they have patience with us! So that's really different from doing a show every single night where you can go on auto-pilot as far as your character's voice. And it's also so much fun to be able to go in comfy clothes, you don't have to spend a half hour putting on make-up, you just go and record, and you can have fun as an actor and deliver five different takes of the same line and they get to just pick whichever one they want. Whereas on stage, you have to really do the same thing.
Nick Jr.'s Sunny Day
How did you come up with the voice for Blair?
Well they did give me a character breakdown. Blair has a very Type-A personality, she's also 9 or 10 years old, so right there I knew I should pitch my voice as high as it could go. I gave her a very crisp pronunciation and a very pointed sound, just off of that little description. Whereas you'll notice Sunny has a little bit more of the rasp and Rox is a little more tomboy, cool-sounding. And you also know that the three of them have to sound very different from each other since they're the main characters. So I hope that my experience has helped me come up with the right voice for her.
Are you actually in the studio alongside Lilla [Crawford] as you're recording?
Well we started off that way. And it was nice for us, especially since we're used to working that way, bouncing things off of each other. But now, since we're a year and a half in, we just go in on our own time because we're all on different schedules, we're all super busy, you know someone may have final rehearsal or be out of town, it just gets a little hard to get everyone in the room together. But as I said, it was really helpful at the beginning to be there with Lilla.
Sunny Day stars Lilla Crawford, Taylor Louderman, Elan Luz Rivera.
What do you think are some of the important messages that the show teaches to kids?
Well I think we focus a lot on leadership. One of the lines which we repeat in almost every episode is, "never say never!" So there are a lot of important messages in there. And then we're also super resourceful with our hair tools often saving the day, and that really encourages innovative thinking, which I believe is super important for kids these days. Each episode really has it's own special message. So for example, in the first episode, my character and Rox get stuck together and we have to figure out how to get unstuck. And we get very frustrated and we lose our patience, but we figure it out with the help of Sunny and the hair tools and our friends around town. So it's just a super-sweet show and each episode we all get excited. We do table reads for many of the episodes, especially when we have a new character, and we just always have so much fun, there's so much giggling and lots of 'awww' and it's very exciting.
What were some of your favorite animated shows growing up?
Oh that's a great question. I watched 'Rug Rats' and 'Spongebob' because my dad liked 'Spongebob' too, so I loved having that on. Oh, and I liked 'Doug', do you remember 'Doug'? [breaks into music from the show] They were all great, right?
Absolutely!
Read Broadway World's fantastic interview with Taylor Louderman here on broadwayworld.com!
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