In 2007, there was a little Irish film called Once that starred Glen Hansard from the band The Frames and musician Markéta Irglová. If you never saw it, you might remember when it won the academy award for best song the next year. Glen and Marketa talked about the importance of dreaming big and taking chances and making art.
Three years later, Once was being adapted for the stage and there was an actress named Cristin Milioti. Cristin is now a celebrated Broadway actress, she played “The Mother” in How I Met Your Mother, and stars in a new NBC show that starts up in a couple weeks. But back in February 2011, she was auditioning for the stage version of Once and she wanted the part of the female lead, who is simply named “Girl” in the show. But there was a huge problem. “Girl” is a piano player, a highly skilled one who is supposed to have played since she was little. And Cristin was not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx8yLvb0gZM
Cristin played a smaller role in an early reading of the play. But as Once moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to be workshopped, she was given a shot at “Girl.”
"The director still kept fighting for me," Cristin said, "even though I wasn’t a name and couldn’t really play. And so I had to learn 2 songs in 10 days: I had to learn a classical piece and I had to learn the song that she plays by herself ‘The Hill.’ And I had to play them as written with the sheet music and I didn’t know how. Which was like a huge problem."
Within a year, Cristin went from sitting at a piano 7 hours a day meticulously learning to play these two songs, to performing the role of “Girl” at the workshop in Massachusetts, and then at the New York Theater Workshop, and then finally on Broadway, eight times a week in front of thousands of people.
By the time she left the show, she had performed the role over 500 times and was featured on the cast album, which went on to win a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album in 2013.
