If you’ve had your life together since day one, and don’t have any idea what it’s like to wonder who you’re supposed to be or what you’re supposed to do in the world, you may want to ignore this post.
The rest of us will want to make a point of being present in the luxurious Sunoco Performance Theatre at Harrisburg’s Whitaker Center when the Capital Area School for the Arts presents Pippin, the debut musical from the creator of Wicked and Godspell.
Actually, I probably should say the rest of you will want to make a point to be there. I already have a confirmed seat for all four performances: on the piano bench with the rest of the band. (I’m musical director and principal keyboardist for the production.)
At this point it’s customary for me to launch into a directorial testimonial of sorts, attempting to capture the magic of live theatre with a well-crafted list of superlatives in the hope that you’ll be motivated to give up a few hours on a weekend to spend time with talented high-schoolers. But I think they can sell themselves better than I can do the job, even in a rinky lil’ iSight video through a tiny laptop microphone. Here’s Drew Patti as Pippin and the rest of the company singing “Morning Glow” in rehearsal the other day:
Seating is general admission, and all seats are $12, available in advance at casamusicals.com. Will you join us?
It’s time! It’s time! Everyone’s favorite annual evening of music, merriment, and mmmmwine is back, in a special new January time slot! Stuart Landon is back in his element, presenting the best of Broadway and beyond, and this year he’s joined by area favorites Alexis Dow Campbell, Kara Miller, and (of course) me at the piano. (He says he might even make let me sing again this year!)
Purchase your tickets in advance for just 18 bucks each at the Open Stage website. And if you’re a Facebooker, check out the event page and let us know you’ll be coming!
It sounds like a Harry Potter spell, doesn’t it? It’s not, but it can have a magical effect on the demeanor of a beginning singer. So many of the most common challenges for singers are simply matters of acoustics: the physics of how sound bounces around (or doesn’t) on its way out of your face. Because singing isn’t much more complicated in our conscious minds than “say ah,” it’s easy to forget that the human vocal system is basically a big fleshy oboe, with two reeds (vocal folds) buzzing against each other and the sound modified by the properties of the tube it passes through.
The levator veli palatini (henceforth, LVP) is the muscle that raises the soft palate, that squishy part at the back of the roof of your mouth. Evolutionarily the LVP has kept us alive by preventing food and drink from going up our noses when we swallow. (Handy, eh?) But singers use it to create a larger resonant space for sound. It’s the soft palate that makes the difference between a Kermit the Frog (low) and a Sam Eagle (raised). And more importantly, because raising the soft palate actually creates more space in the “instrument,” there are notes we can’t sing (easily or pleasantly, at least) with a lowered palate, that “magically” become available to us when the palate is raised.
Yesterday at our first vocal rehearsal for Pippin, I talked the cast through a few simple vocal warm-ups designed (among other things) to get the soft palate raised. A few of our cast are primarily dancers who’ve never had voice training, so the effect was something new to them—and the amazement and delight on their faces made me smile.
One tiny muscle. I wonder how often we feel like some challenge is completely (and shamefully) out of our reach, when all it would take is a small change to discover we’d had the potential there all along? I wonder what wisdom we could open ourselves to that would make that challenge entirely, delightfully, doable?
It’s November 27—the day after Thanksgiving! And you know what that means: Peter, Hook, and the Darlings opens at Open Stage of Harrisburg tonight!*
An original adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, this meta-theatrical event will break new ground at Open Stage. Sword fights, pirate ships, and of course flying will make this a wonderful outing for audiences of all ages.
I’m sound designer and music director for the production, so the accompaniments, incidental music, and anything you hear during the show that doesn’t come out of the actors will have my fingerprints on it. (I probably could find a less-misinterpretable way to say that, couldn’t I?)
PH&D has its own page up in my Projects menu (which is a great way to see what’s coming up in my professional life), and you can see there or on my Performance Calendar (another great way to see what’s coming up in my professional life) that the show runs from tonight through December 13.
I hope you’ll swing on over to the Open Stage of Harrisburg website, where you can read more about the show and order tickets online—though of course I’m happy to answer questions about the project too! Drop me a line if you like.
*No, I don’t live under a rock. I’m aware there’s some other big traditional thing happening today, but I don’t subscribe to such nonsense.
I think they’ve discontinued the mug, but you can still get the poster.
“Always remember that you are unique,” says the coffee mug I used to carry around the college music building, “…just like everybody else.”
One of the things I love most about teaching is the way it reminds me (on my best days, of course) that, while we all may speak different languages and connect most readily with different metaphors and envy different role models, we all really are more alike than we are different. While in the course of a week I may see a couple dozen individual students—and to be sure, those couple dozen lessons often look very different from one another in goal, approach, and result—at their heart, all of those students struggle with what I think are three universal goals among artists. Every one of them struggles to:
overcome their own self-doubt,
claim and develop their incipient strength, and
demonstrate that they are individuals with unique voices, who find value in existing art but also have something to contribute to art and its longevity.
Callbacks are this week for CASA‘s next musical (Pippin—see the project page for details!), so the past several days have been full of the now-familiar mini-life-lesson scenario that I find auditions so often to be, at least in the educational settings where I’ve been privileged to serve. That scenario looks something like this:
Potential cast member (PCM) nervously enters audition room. Coughs a little just to be sure we know s/he’s fighting the same congestion we’ve heard in the other 23 PCMs we’ve seen today, what with it being November and all. PCM also exhibits at least one (but usually several) of the following:
shallow breathing
trembling extremities
pallid complexion and lips
wobbly ankles caused by the brand-new but ill-fitting shoes PCM hopes will distract from any performance weaknesses
“apologiarrhea”: the (usually situational) tendency to every response to a comment, observation, or question with “I’m sorry”
Music Director (i.e., me) greets PCM, asks for charts, ascertains start/stop points, tempo, and cue, and begins to play. PCM stumbles through fervent but terrified rendition, finishing with a “thank you” that sounds more like another “I’m sorry.”
In the “real world,”* where the point of an audition is to find the best actron to plug into the role to maximize the production’s first-week return on investment, this is where the audition process usually stops, at least for the PCM. They slink back to the second half of their split-shift at the diner, promising themselves that next time they’ll have found the right shoes, or the weather won’t be messing with their allergies so much, or the pianist won’t be quite so hard to follow.
But when I cast a show in an educational setting, I get to move past the self-doubt and the desperate attempts at feat-of-strength performances, and look for the individual behind the sweaty palms and the straining neck muscles. I get to ask “What do you love about the song you just sang?” and “What about this particular role really speaks to you?” and “If you could play any role on stage, who would it be?” That’s where I start to learn what this voice has to say to the world—and if I phrase the questions carefully enough, the PCM starts to learn how this role could be a vessel for their own artistry, not just another “gig.” This, in other words, is where the snowflake starts to stand out from the rest of the storm.
That’s a really, really important part of the audition process for me—the reminder to the PCM of their own value as an artist. But I think the most important part of the process comes later, after the cast list goes up. And the ones who gain the most from the process are the ones whose names don’t show up on that list, at least not where they’d hoped they’d be.
On the “Co-Curricular Resources” page of my site there’s a link to Dr. Noa Kageyama’s blog, “The Bulletproof Musician,” which is one of the few “must-read” subscriptions in my RSS reader. Today’s post on that blog really digs into the value of those “failed” auditions, and how achieving the goals we thought we wanted isn’t always the best thing for us as artists (or human beings, frankly).
In a nutshell, “succeeding” at an audition—getting the role we wanted—may be a great ego boost, but it does less to help us improve for future opportunities than our “failed” auditions do. (And in fact, chances are good that we won’t do as well at our “dream role” as we hoped we would, which can end up being a downer in the long run if we’re not careful.)
So does this mean artists are doomed to lives of pessimism and self-doubt? Only if they do it wrong. If you ask me, “perfect” art is far less inspiring and empowering than the more common kind. That latter kind—art that’s about “flaws”—is, I believe, a very good thing for the world.
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