How Jasmin Singer Got Fully Off Book for a Massive Leading Role - Before the First Rehearsal
Joyce Hshieh
March 5, 2026
Case Study: Jasmin Singer | Role: Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow
Watch the full interview above, or read the case study below.
TL;DR
Jasmin Singer was cast as Judy Garland in the full-length play End of the Rainbow — one of the most demanding leading roles in contemporary theatre
She started working with me two months before rehearsals began
By the time she walked into her first rehearsal, she was fully off book
Here's exactly how we did it
When actress Jasmin Singer was cast as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow by Peter Quilter, she knew immediately she was in over her head in the best possible way.
The role is a monster.
Judy Garland is on stage for virtually the entire play, carrying monologue after monologue, twelve songs, countless costume changes, and a level of physical and emotional intensity that most actors never encounter in a single role. The character is drunk, unraveling, performing, grieving, and hilarious, sometimes all at once.
Jasmin is an experienced actress. She knew what she was getting into. And she knew she needed help.
She reached out before rehearsals even started.
The Challenge
The biggest obstacle with a role like this isn't just the volume of lines, it's the complexity.
End of the Rainbow is full of moments where Judy says the same thing four different ways. Where a single word choice carries enormous emotional weight. Where the physical demands are so intense that fumbling for lines simply isn't an option.
As Jasmin put it:
"There was no way I would be able to really get into the character while still being on book."
She was right. That's exactly why we started working together two months before rehearsals began.
By the time she walked into her first rehearsal, she was fully off book.
The Process
Stage 1: Making the Script Memorization-Friendly
Before our first coaching session, I took the script and reformatted it entirely.
The original had long, dense paragraphs — the kind that make your eyes glaze over before you've started. I went through every scene and broke it into beats, giving each beat a name. I took every substantial speech and broke it into individual phrases, one per line.
I also built a drag-and-drop tracker board with all ten scenes mapped across columns: not started, barely memorized, somewhat memorized, mostly memorized, and off book.
The effect was immediate. As Jasmin described it:
"Psychologically, something shifts. The process of memorizing a two-sentence paragraph is so much easier to wrap my head around than a nineteen-sentence paragraph."
The tracker gave her something equally valuable: clarity. With a role this size, it's easy to feel like you're drowning. The board made progress visible and concrete.
Like running five miles and realizing you've already done one. Then two.
Stage 2: Getting on Your Feet Early
This is the piece of advice that often gets resistance from actors.
The instinct is to want to feel "ready" before standing up and doing the scene. To have the lines more locked in first. But that instinct is backwards.
Getting on your feet doesn't just help with memorization — it makes memorization faster. When your body is involved, lines become physical and fully alive. And when you're physically doing a scene, the logic of the scene becomes clearer, which makes retention easier.
For Judy Garland specifically, this was non-negotiable. Judy is crawling on the floor, being carried, falling down sobbing, running across the stage. There was no version of memorizing this role from a recliner.
Jasmin used props to make this work on Zoom:
Two teddy bears stood in for her co-stars Mickey and Anthony
A microphone stand appeared for the concert scenes
When talking to Mickey and Anthony she would physically interact with them.
It sounds silly. It worked brilliantly.
"There's no way of embodying the physicality and separating that process from memorizing lines. You can white-knuckle it. We've all read a script so many times we memorized it. But it's so much harder, and it does not serve the actor."
Stage 3: Active Recall and Daily Practice
Between our sessions, Jasmin practiced daily using a technique called active recall.
She'd read through the memorization-friendly script, then test herself on it — pulling lines from memory, guessing if unsure, checking against the text, and correcting herself. She was getting to around 80-90% memorized on her own.
Our sessions then focused on the remaining 10-20%: the hard stuff. Word-for-word precision.
We also worked with micro-deadlines. Rather than thinking about the whole play, Jasmin focused on one goal at a time: get the second half of this scene by Thursday. Small targets, steady progress.
Stage 4: Word-for-Word Accuracy and Precision
This is where actors often struggle most. The temptation is to get the gist and move on. But as Jasmin, who is also a writer, put it:
"The playwright has a job to write the play. The actors have a job to say those words. You don't randomly choose one term of endearment over another."
End of the Rainbow presented a specific memorization challenge: Judy says the same kinds of things over and over, but never exactly the same way.
Multiple versions of "I'm not going back out there." Multiple versions of "come play for me." These are the lines that haunt actors. They blur together. You say the wrong version at the wrong moment and the whole scene falls apart.
Our solution was to treat each version as its own distinct moment in a story arc. For example:
First version: playful, testing the waters
Second version: more insistent, almost childlike
Third version: a desperate plea
Once Jasmin understood the arc, the versions stopped blurring. They became different moments entirely.
We also used image-based mnemonic techniques for lines that just wouldn't stick, turning stubborn lines into vivid, ridiculous, deeply personal mental images:
A Finnish boss helped lock in "I'm finished for tonight"
Jasmin's wife named Moore, shaking dramatically outside under the night sky, locked in "I can't do any more tonight, I'm shaking, look at me."
The sillier the image, the better it works. The brain loves a good absurd visual.
Stage 5: Spaced Repetition for Long-Term Retention
Getting lines memorized is one thing. Keeping them memorized over weeks of rehearsal is another.
Rather than reviewing everything every day (which is exhausting and inefficient), Jasmin used the tracker to schedule when to revisit each scene. Scenes she'd fully locked in didn't need daily attention. She could leave them for several days, freeing up time and energy for new material.
This is the antidote to the habit most actors have of always starting from the beginning.
If you start at scene one every time, you'll know scene one perfectly and scene eight not at all. Spaced repetition distributes your attention strategically so the whole play stays solid.
The Trickiest Scene in the Play
No case study of this role would be complete without the concert scene.
Jasmin called it the trickiest scene she's ever had to memorize in her life. And it was hard for a very specific reason: confusion is built into the scene itself.
Judy is drunk. She's trying to sing Blue Skies but her pianist keeps playing Dancing in the Dark. She's getting tangled in her microphone lead — which she references multiple times, each time slightly differently. Songs and dialogue collide. Chaos reigns.
The challenge of memorizing intentional confusion is that the confusion becomes real. You genuinely can't tell what comes next.
Our solution was to pull the scene apart into separate threads and memorize each one individually:
The microphone lead had its own arc — starting as a minor annoyance, becoming increasingly maddening as Judy gets drunker
The songs interrupted with dialogue had their own logic and structure
Once Jasmin could hold each thread separately, she could weave them back together. The intentional chaos became something she controlled rather than something that controlled her.
When that scene landed as one of the biggest laughs of opening night, Jasmin was genuinely shocked. She'd been so deep in the work that she couldn't see from the outside what she'd actually built.
The Result
Jasmin walked into her first rehearsal fully off book.
As she said, "That pissed off my co-actors so much! They were like, 'Are you serious?!'"
But more importantly, she had something that off-book actors always have and on-book actors never do: freedom.
Freedom to focus on the performance. Freedom to really listen to her scene partners. Freedom to make choices, take risks, and be present in the moment rather than mentally scrambling for the next line.
"The best thing is when it's no longer even in your head. The memorization. When you're just embodying it and the lines are just in you and the scene is almost just happening. That was the place I got to."
She got rave reviews.
What This Process Looks Like for You
Every role is different. Every actor's brain is different.
But the framework we used with Jasmin — script breakdown, tracker, physicality, active recall, word-for-word precision, mnemonic techniques, spaced repetition — is the same framework I bring to every coaching relationship.
If you're facing a big role and the script feels like a mountain, this is exactly the kind of work we'd do together.
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For actors preparing for a larger project — a leading role, a full-length play, an intensive process — a single session is a great place to start. We can talk about what a longer engagement looks like from there.
Jasmin Singer is an actress, author, and radio host at WXXI, the NPR station in Rochester, New York. She also helps people publish books about animal rights. Her first love is the theatre.