The person playing the lead is going to have experienced performing that role onstage and is (hopefully) used to the pressure that comes with such a pivotal role, whereas the random person who, for some bizarre reason, memorizes the whole script only knows the lines, and doesn't have that experience of actually performing them. At that point, I thought, OK, that pretty much guarantees that the hackneyed plot twist of the mean & popular girl who plays the female lead getting sick and the main character taking her place and doing an even better job than the mean & popular girl is going to happen. At one point in the book, where Charlie and Nicole (she's Charlie's best friend) are running lines together, Charlie reveals to Nicole that she has somehow memorized all the lines in the play.

Oh, and here's an example of the predictable part.

Getting a part in the chorus is great, especially when one completely fails in their audition (I, too, have messed up my auditions before). Charlie seems to make a big deal out of stuff that isn't so bad. I noticed one typo, which isn't a huge issue, but I felt that the writing style itself overly dramatized small events.

It has been a few days since I've read it, and I've read many books since then, so I am a bit fuzzy on the details. I usually like the Candy Apple books, even though they're typically extremely predictable and don't always have the best writing (with the exception of the 'Accidentally' series by Lisa Papademetriou), but Drama Queen reaches new depths of predictability and not-so-great writing.

Drama Queen by Lara Bergen