Various Posts

It has been announced that one of the latest pop divas is going to be doing Cinderella on Broadway. Carly Rae Jepson will take over from Laura Osnes in the leading role on Broadway. She isn’t a “legit” singer, even though the part was written for one who was. This is the direction of the future. No point in lamenting what used to be.

For the many thousands of young people who graduate every year with a degree in voice from a university offering training in “classical” vocal music, there is less and less work. Having a degree in applied voice prepares you for — who knows? There are so many ifs. If at university you have been well trained, if you have a great voice, if you can act, if you have done music theater rep the way music theater rep is currently being performed, if you have confidence, if you have a “look”, if you can get seen and heard, if you can “move well” or dance, and if you are lucky enough to get cast in anything at all, you could get started in New York as a performer, but, of course, you could come here and face the thousands of others who want the same jobs you do and get nowhere in a hurry. There are very very few classical jobs and with the demise of NY City Opera, there is almost no way to stay alive here in New York being only a classical vocalist unless you are very unusual or have family money on which to live.

Yes, people get work every day on and Off Broadway, Off/Off Broadway, on tours, in regional theater and in other venues like private parties, and many of these jobs pay. A few pay very well. There are also “showcases” that don’t pay and people find ways to produce themselves in shows of various kinds every day. Some succeed. There are far fewer openings for opera companies, orchestral gigs (usually through AGMA) and for paying church and synagogue jobs. Not too many opera singers are free-lancing at corporate parties.

If the educational system that produces singers is geared to “classical” training, and the job market is geared to various kinds of commercial styles, it only makes it harder for a new vocalist, arriving in NYC looking to be  a paid professional singer to get launched. The first kind of job they typically land is restaurant work.

Arriving in NYC without the ability to “cross over” makes it nearly impossible to succeed as a singer unless you are an emerging Pavarotti or Fleming. Most newbees last two, possibly three, years and then give up and go home or go back to school to learn new skills in a different profession. Some become directors — others try play writing.

No one, however, comes here with good solid pop chops and finds that the only way to get work is to have “classical” training and sound more “legit”. The legit sound is going away as fast as an ice cream cone melting on an August day in Times Square. While some shows or casting directors do want a “legit” sound, if you take a look at the emerging trend (Carly Rae Jepson coming in as Cinderella, Carrie Underwood as Maria in TSOM), you will see that the old is really old and that the new is here to stay. Maybe that’s fine, maybe not. That isn’t the point. You have to see the writing on the wall and get used to the new. It’s not going to turn around and be “like it was”.

The world of opera is trying very hard not to fall apart. This has been so for quite some time but it seems that things have escalated and with the demise of NYCO, it can be seen by everyone that there is no great rush to restore this company or any other that might take its place. The Met survives in its own insular universe due to the constant influx of money from the one percenters who donate because it is the thing to do to be socially correct and, what else are they going to do with their corporate made dollars anyway? There aren’t too many places left in the USA where the very wealthy can be obviously generous and congratulated for it outside of the two Mets and a few other major arts organizations.

Opera houses in Italy are closing all over the place, even in houses that have been around for a very long time. Take a look: http://www.newsweek.com/end-italian-opera-will-they-wait-fat-lady-sing-225175

Surely, someone is going to wake up one day and realize that the way to keep opera going is to bring in electronic music and rock composers and let them have a chance to develop rock operas that will pull in all sorts of young audiences. No, you won’t hear opera sung the way it has been, but the form would continue and the world would adapt accordingly. Forcing things to stay the same when they are clamoring to change only makes things worse.

Opera has been dominated for decades now by nonsensical Euro-trash productions of older works that pay no attention to the music or the story as written by composer/librettist and by new music which is often complex or difficult for the average opera goer to appreciate. In fact, much of what is written sounds the same from one composer to the next. Most of the “big” composers are men and most of them refuse to write using older traditional harmonies or compose melodies that are easily sung by singers and therefore remembered by audiences. Combine that with absurd takes by directors on the plots and by the designers who create outrageous sets and costumes and you have a recipe for continuing disaster. Do the people running things take notice? Not in any way. Do the audiences stay away? In droves.

It is not so that making something different for different’s sake is a sign of creativity. It is not so that changing something because you can is always an improvement. It is not so putting “your spin” on a great work or art shows that you are brilliant. It is not so that re-constructing something to make it “more relevant” actually makes it more relevant. It is not so that audiences have to be pandered to in order to “understand” things. It is not so that writing music based on “old” ideas of harmony and melody relegates it to being sentimental (in a bad way) or of lesser  quality. It is not so that people can’t tell the difference between what they like and what they don’t, even if they can’t explain why.

Once, quite some number of years ago, I had occasion to speak briefly to Dame Joan Sutherland, and she said that she and “Richard” hoped that they were entertaining to the people in the high balcony seats, as those people had paid a great deal of money to see the performances and both she and Richard wanted the audience members to “have a good time”. If one of the world’s greatest vocal artists and her husband, a fine conductor, could have that attitude, why don’t the people who commission, write, produce and direct operas think this way too?

The mindset of those who continue to defend these policies is rigid. Most average people do not relate to the music of today’s most well-known and respected composers. Opera companies, however, continue to fund music that people do not like to hear and productions they don’t want to see, even though that behavior is self-destructive. It is absolutely the case that this continues unchallenged  as policy throughout the world but that questioning this status quo is also completely and vehemently opposed. The idea is that any kind of modern art, no matter how senseless, outlandish, grotesque or bizarre cannot be criticized lest one seem unsophisticated, pedestrian or banal. The thought that there are artistic expressions which are tasteless or even offensive seems to be as outmoded as a pair of spats.

Yes, some of the latest material of all sorts is wonderful, creative and innovative but much of it is not and no one who makes decisions seems much able to discern the difference. I do wonder, if Beverly Sills, a singer, could come back and have her say about what people get to see and hear if things might improve overall. There are very few women and even fewer vocalists making important choices at a high administrative levels in opera and that’s not good for anyone. And, with the new productions of living composers — if one of their operas fails to garner either critical or public acclaim, no problem, just ask that same composer to try again with another new work. Now, there’s a sensible response!

No one can say what “art” is. No one can define what creativity is. True. But common sense says that if people like something they will gravitate towards it and not the other way around. If composers wrote music that people really wanted to hear and allowed singers to sing in a way that brought out the beauty of singing, and if directors and designers created sets and costumes that people could relate to, people might actually attend these kinds of performances. Is this hard to understand? It wouldn’t hurt companies like the Met to put up a survey on its website with questions like: What kind of music would you prefer to hear? What kind of productions would you prefer to attend? What things turn you off? Why would you avoid coming to see one of our productions? They might be surprised to discover that the audiences who loved the great works of the past are not so enamored of what they are seeing and hearing, both in mainstream (old) operas and in new works not previously done or done infrequently. They might be surprised to learn that even sophisticated, wealthy and musically educated audiences would like to hear melodies and harmonies that were, yes, entertaining.

And, just to look at things another way — there have to be hundreds of operas written and performed over the last 100 years in various opera houses worldwide that have been done less than fifty times in total. Some of them were successful, but they have still become invisible. If you want an audience to like something, that something has to stay around long enough for people to have a chance to become very familiar with it. Some of the works mounted by living composers might have gained a following had audiences been given a chance to see them multiples times, for years running. That, sadly, seems never to be the case. What audiences get instead is the next new work that will also get a dozen performances and then, joining its fellows, simply disappear. This is what happens with movies. They either set box office records on the first two weekends or they disappear. That wasn’t always true. In times past, the sleepers often took a while to develop a following.  With new operas that possibility doesn’t even exist.

People will pay to hear music they like, they will stay in line for 48 hours in the rain and cold to buy tickets for their favorite artists. They will pay scalpers for tickets, and they will see the same show multiple times. What they want to hear, however, is not what they get in an opera house. If the people in the opera houses could tap into the market that pop/rock music has, they could build new opera houses and hire new artists every year. The gap between these two worlds is growing wider day by day, just as the economic gap is growing between the 1% and the 99. It doesn’t have to be, however, that this is the only way. A really dynamic individual in the right place could turn things on their head. I don’t see that happening in the current scenario.

So, the quick, short path to keeping the form alive is to go to electronic music written by rock composers, or jazz composers and let the vocal values go, too. Let opera as we now know it become a smaller, elite form for very small audiences who will pay a premium and go out of their way to see their favorites performed by an equally small pool of artists. If that doesn’t happen, something else equally drastic has to instead. If you doubt me, go back up and click on the link and read that article about opera in Italy again.

If the body is a hologram (and it is), then working with any part of it changes every part of it, whether that change is perceived or not. Of course, that idea can be expanded to include the universe, and certainly the globe. If any part of it is unhealthy, we all suffer for that.

Does it matter if you work to make someone really emotionally comfortable  making any and all kinds of vocal sound or you get comfortable after you make the sounds because you get used to them? No. Can we begin with work on the voice before we do other things? Yes. Do we start some other place? Maybe. Like everything else, it depends on where we are going.

Much depends on what kind of singing you do. If you only know the voice through speech, even if that speech is excellent, you don’t have the same experience as someone who knows the voice through singing.  Professional level singing requires more control over the voiced sound than speech. All singers can speak but not all speakers can sing. Said another way, singing includes speech but you can’t reverse that statement. While sophisticated, controlled speech,  is very demanding and takes work to perfect, the randomness of expression allows for greater freedom than singing in terms of “correctness” and therefore, less precision as well.

Singing mostly asks for some kind of vibrato. Singing can be up to three times broader in terms of range and four times as loud and typically, in terms of duration, a sung phrase lasts longer than a spoken phrase. Breaths and pitches have to be done deliberately rather than  at random, and pronunciation is often clearer in singing. Further, intonation accuracy isn’t something a speaker ever has to worry about and it is a significant concern of singers. Register change is also almost non-existant as a concern in speech but a very important part of successful singing.

A balanced sound allows for the greatest amount of responsiveness in the vocal mechanism. What is a balanced sound? One in which there are two registers, seamlessly connected through the area where the register converge, and one in which all vowel sounds are as naturally produced as possible, and which allows the sounds to be louder, softer, “brighter” or “darker” and consonants to be articulated without fuss. It also allows breathing to happen with very little effort, provided the body posture allows for that.

Acting is NOT a substitute for vocal skill. Being a really excellent actor who speaks very well does not automatically set you up to do the things that singing requires. The idea that you can “commit” to a choice that will propel you enough to “sing authentically” is faulty. It is only through singing training, aimed at musical goals, that singing can be coupled with vocal efficiency, stamina, demand, and style. And if you do not know the difference between musical vocal function for its own sake and free dynamic speech, you shouldn’t be teaching singing. What brings out the uniqueness and the humanity of a voice is a combination of all these things and it matters, quite a bit actually, that all people who deal with voice understand these differences.

No matter what you work on, at some point you will need to work on the path to the end product you desire. Practicing Shakespeare will not prepare you for a play by Harold Pinter. Singing Un Bel Di will not prepare you to sing Cherokee. Singing Joanie Mitchell’s River will not prepare you to sing An Die Musik. You can be as emotionally free and as willing as possible to use your voice in any and all manner of sounds, and have great connection to your breath and body. You can be very clear about what you want to communicate through music and lyrics, but none of this will prepare you to deliver the end product you seek on its own. Only working on that end product to get what you want out of it will take you there. Don’t confuse these things or you will get lost.

If you are interested in inter-discipinary interchange, please come to the symposium at Oberlin at the end of January. Many minds sharing many ideas can only be a good thing.

If you are thinking of attending, don’t wait to sign up. The hotel rooms reserved at a special rate will only be available till December 31. Come join us for a fabulous time, and encourage your colleagues to do so as well. We are all there to learn and to grow, and this can only be fun and very valuable. For further information about registration, please go to:  new.oberlin.edu/events-activities/vocal-symposium/registration.dot

Singing teachers forget that in the music industry, very few people care about vocal categories. Outside of classical music, and it could be argued that it is true there in some cases as well, the only criteria are: how well do you sing and how captivating are you when you do? The vocal categories that teachers fret about (soprano, dramatic soprano, lyrico spinto, light lyric, soubrette, coloratura, etc. etc.) and the music that goes with them (from Pre-Baroque to Modern) matter not so much in the real world where people have careers as singers as it does in the minds of those who teach. There are a great many examples of people who do not fit into any traditional box in terms of a specific vocal category and have done very well anyway.

The one place where things are unique and where it can matter is on Broadway. There, and only there, in some casting notices, it still states: must belt to X pitch, must mix to X pitch, must sing “legit” to X pitch. Whether or not you use or understand these terms, they have not disappeared and the expectation that the vocalist knows the difference between them in terms of the sounds requested, is a given. If you can’t distinguish between a belt and a mix-belt, or a mix-belt and head register, you could get into trouble, singing music that isn’t meant for the sound you are using without even knowing that’s what you are doing. If you are making a recording, you can do anything you want, but if you are auditioning for a role on Broadway and they want a belter, you had better be one. Elphaba is never going to be a “legit” role, so if you are a classically trained mezzo who can wail away on the high pitch but it’s not a belty sound, please stay home. They don’t want you on Broadway.

In this one realm, vocal classification really matters………except now, obviously, not so much. With Deborah Voigt singing a “legit-ish” Annie Oakley and Carrie Underwood singing a belty Maria, even Broadway isn’t so sure of what it wants in a vocalist. Maybe one of these days anyone will be able to sing any song in any style and any vocal quality and not have it matter. That would make life easier for many folks. The audiences, for the most part, don’t really care since they don’t know the difference.

If you are a female who has been singing Carmen maybe you could do a decent Aldonza, or not. Nothing is guaranteed. If you are a good Aldonza, however, you probably won’t be able to do Carmen, even if you have a good strong and comfortable voice. There are too many vocal production differences. But if we throw those differences out the window, are we are surely headed there, then who knows? If a rock singer can go to the Met and get hired in La Boheme (ask Michael Bolton about that) or if a legit soprano can make a rock record and appear with her rock band at Madison Square Garden (ask Renee Fleming about that), then everything is equal and everyone can sing whatever, however they want. If that’s not true, yet, then some of us still have to know the difference, know what makes that difference, and know what’s involved in getting there.

Just some food for thought.

 

Ohio State University has announced that it will be presenting a special Voice Forum on April 4-5. One of the topics listed is “Vocal Pedagogy of Commercial Styles”. How about that?

When I started my course at Shenandoah, Contemporary Commercial Music (CCM) as a genre was not yet recognized anywhere else. There was no formal course taught as a part of a recognized university master’s or doctoral program. We were the first to put forth the idea that this was not only valid training but necessary training. Subsequently, other schools have started master’s programs in music theater or offered seminars in training specifically aimed at vocal production that is not classically based. The term CCM is used widely now without issue.

Contemporary Commercial Music is finally being seen as a separate, worthy and viable alternative to classical music. People are beginning to realize that classical training (whatever that is) does not automatically set you up to sing anything, sometimes not even classical repertoire. Most of the people who say “I can sing anything” mean “I can sing anything classical”, but sometimes they can’t do that either, they just think they can. Those people are the most likely ones to say, “All you need is classical vocal training and you can sing anything.” If only that were true!

It is not unlike the idea that if you study ballet you are ready for any other kind of dance. A serious dancer will tell you that some ballet dancers never learn to be good at any other form, depending. There are dancers on Broadway who may or may not have had decades of ballet training, but all of them have jazz and modern and many also have tap, and if they don’t get it at home or at school, they get it here in New York City because they find out they need it. Ballet by itself has as much to do with tap as belting has to do with opera arias.

If you are interested in voice science, vocal pedagogy or vocal health, I encourage you to attend Ohio State University’s Voice Forum in April. Please contact Dr. Scott McCoy there at: VoiceLab@osu.edu.

On January 31, February 1 and 2, a break-through symposium is happening at Oberlin College Conservatory, once of the nation’s premier classical training colleges. During this three-day event the medical experts from the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic will join Oberlin faculty and me as we look at “new things” classical singers are being asked to do in modern music and the impact they may have on vocal health.

We all know that our highly celebrated modern classical composers like John Adams, Philip Glass, Niko Muhly, Thomas Ades, Osvaldo Golijov, Meredith Monk and others write for singers but do not necessary follow tradition classical parameters when doing so. There are other composers, from the mid-20th century such as John Cage, who have written for the voice in ways that ask vocalists to do unusual things. In fact, there are successful vocalists whose entire careers are based on doing that. People like Joan LaBarbara, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Rinde Eckert and Theo Bleckman sing way “outside the box”. How do young singers address this kind of music or these pieces? What are healthy parameters? What kind of function do these sounds ask for? Is “breath support” and “forward placement” enough? If so, in what way? If it isn’t, what should substitute?

From the standpoint of combining vocal function and vocal health and putting them together as partners to solve the needs of 21st century music, you have to have a deep understanding of the human instrument. All the muscles that are involved in posture, in inhalation, in exhalation, and in phonation including everything from the collarbone up, matter. If we don’t know what they do and how they work, it is nearly impossible to determine whether or not any sound is healthy. If you don’t know how to make the sound correctly, the music suffers and so do your vocal folds.

The doctors from the Cleveland Clinic will be doing “live scoping” of the vocalists, and we will investigate how the vocal exercises change or don’t change what goes on in the throat. To our knowledge, this has never been done in a public event before. We will discuss the full range of parameters from science to “spirit”, in that we will look at what allows us to be good sound-makers and what allows us to be transcendant artists at the same time. There will be a classical master class and a recital by an Oberlin faculty member (Timothy LeFebvre) and I will be lecturing and working with students throughout the three days. We end with a panel discussion of these very important present moment topics.

I ask you to come, to tell your friends to come and to help me by posting this information wherever it might be seen by teachers of singing, students who sing classical repertoire and by speech language pathologists and otolaryngologists who would benefit from coming. The registration information can be obtained by contacting anna.hoffman@oberlin.edu or calling 440-775-8044. I would love to see you there.

You have to wonder why the wrong people are cast in major roles on in musicals. It isn’t new and it has always raised eyebrows but doesn’t go away.

On Broadway, Sarah Jessica Parker (famous and powerful person of diminutive stature) played Winnifred the Woebegone in Once Upon A Mattress. This role was written for the young Carol Burnett. It asks for someone who is gawky, awkward, homely and just generally not very appealing. Ms. Burnett was known for being funny and although not unattractive, she was certainly not a cover girl. So, what sense did it make when the petite and glamorous  SJP (who later became famous for her role on SITC) played this part? It killed the inherent funniness of having Winnifred being the lost cause that she was and made the ending pointless. Of course someone that delicate would feel a pea under 20 mattresses! It didn’t have a long run.

Here’s another one. Bernadette Peters as Mama Rose in Gypsy. Everyone was thinking, “What?” Bernadette is just about the size of SJP — 90 pounds soaking wet. She is no more a big bruising truck driver than the woman in the moon. Even though her performance was excellent, her voice just didn’t have the power in it to do the role justice. Ethel Merman was a truck driver in both voice and body. Rose suited her. Patty Lupone, although not much bigger than Ms. Peters in height, and about the same age, is bigger boned and has a much more powerful presence overall. When she played Rose, it fit. Both Peters (Lazara) and Lupone are Italian and both are excellent Broadway stars with a lot of experience, but Bernadette as Rose alongside Patty as Rose — no comparison.

And what about Marc Kudisch as the gigolo Jeff Moss in the revival of Bells Are Ringing? Mr. Kudisch is also a fine Broadway actor/singer with many credits to his name but he is more like Carl-Magnus in A Little Night Music than Jeff Moss, a drinking, schmoozing skirt chaser. Dean Martin played the role in the movie. You just couldn’t believe that the straight-laced Mr. Kudisch was a boorish lout. In this revival, with Faith Prince in the title role of Ella Peterson, the show was directed to be more like Ibsen than a musical comedy. It didn’t have a long run either.

I saw Rosie ODonnell as Rizzo in Grease. I’m serious. Rizzo. She was, as you can image, quite awful. But there she was anyway. She didn’t dance, she just stood there and moved her arms! No kidding. What gall!

I saw Melanie Griffiths in Chicago. She didn’t dance but they taught her to move her feet and wave her hands. You could see that she was thrilled. “Look, Ma, I’m DANCIN’!” The performance, acting wise, was good, but OMG, her dancing in this show that has DANCERS, was so bad. People, Bob Fosse choreography! He must have been doing back flips in his grave.

I’ve already written about Deborah Voigt as Annie Oakley (groan) and Carrie Underwood (a different kind of groan) as Maria. It’s too bad someone didn’t think to reverse these two in their respective musical debuts. A true belter as Annie and a real soprano as Maria would have made sense. Instead, what we got was two women who are rich and powerful doing roles they wanted to do because they could. (……….)

As long as show business is controlled by investors who make their money in real estate, oil, mining, and other corporate endeavors, and as long as most of these people invest because of the thrill it gives them, even though they know they could lose all their money along the way, and as long as they know absolutely nothing about any of the performing arts, we will have decisions made that are not about art at all but about either money or politics or both. When you have people making decisions based on “what will make the most money” instead of “what will have the greatest artistic truth” you can’t have good results. That doesn’t mean, however, that the audience knows the difference or cares. Most people who are watching “popular culture” entertainment are bombarded by violence of the most extreme kind, and they not only like it, they love it. Live shows are drenched in loud flashy everything, and electronic help of all kinds is available to make even the most banal performer look and sound “great”. Audiences eat it up like candy, oblivious to the lack of any real value in the product and the people who want to make money, mostly do.

This isn’t new, as I said, and it isn’t going to go away, so there is nothing to do about it except see it for what it is. Who knows, maybe one day, music education in public schools will come back, music will be seen as a necessity instead of a disposable waste of time, and things will turn around. In the meantime, however, those of us old enough to have been around the block and seen a few things still know and care and can still point out the old standards. They may be disappearing, but as long as we are still around, they ain’t dead yet.

Many of you will have watched last evening’s Sound of Music on NBC starring Carrie Underwood, Stephen Moyer, Audra McDonald and Laura Benanti.

Regardless of how you feel about the movie with Julie Andrews or the original play with Mary Martin, this production was a big deal, drawing 18 million viewers, making NBC very very happy. It matters not a bit how the production was perceived by the critics, as the only thing NBC was looking to discover was “who would watch”. Given these numbers it will be considered a “smash hit” by the TV Execs and that’s all they care about.

The artistic quality, of course, is something very different to discuss and it can be argued both ways – that it was an artistic achievement of quality or that it was artistically a disaster of rather big proportions. There were plenty of both of these opinions on the blog-o-sphere. Carrie Underwood is a very good belter, but she can only belt. No one seemed to care much about that, but I certainly did.

Belting as a vocal quality is loud, especially above A440. This quality arises out of powerful energy associated with passion, drama, declaration, and intensity. It can also be frightened or angry. It isn’t generally associated with tenderness, refinement, dignity, old-fashioned femininity, intimacy or purity. Hmmmmm.

We are enured to loud singing. It no longer represents “human” qualities, it represents loud singing for its own sake, as an end it itself. It no longer has any qualities associated with it, although “in real life” those qualities still exist, and it doesn’t carry any impact insofar as the volume because everything is controlled by the engineers. If the sound is loud, it can be softened, and if its soft, they can make it louder.

What the technical people cannot do is make the vocal quality be different. Only the vocalist can do that. There were a few times last night when Ms. Underwood sang in what would have had to have been called a head register quality so it theoretically exists, but she did not use it where it would have been expected. Instead, Maria became a belty little thing, brassy and bold like a cowgirl from Oklahoma mostly sans the accent.

The people who surrounded her, especially Ms. McDonald and Ms Benanti, who can sing in ANY vocal quality, were far superior in both acting and singing to Ms. Underwood, but sadly, they are nowhere near as popular or well known. Even Ms. McDonald, who has been on TV, is mostly known only to Broadway audiences/fans. An artist of her calibre, or of Ms. Benanti’s, standing alongside a newcomer who is making her debut in front of 18 million people, live, has to be both secure and kind hearted. They made Ms. Underwood look bad simply by being so experienced and professional. No one cared. Mr. Moyer was there, too, and he was OK, his singing was acceptable. The music he sings doesn’t ask for much, but he sounded the way many of them typically do. No obvious changes. (How about Michael Bolton as von Trapp?)

Mark my words, we have heard the very last of “legit” sounds for all Marias to come, particularly in a big, serious production. This TV show will change Maria forever into a belty role and the show will go on, in both forms perhaps (TV version and live theatrical show) to find new fans. The lack of appreciation in the general public for a well trained voice will continue to decline overall due to the lack of music education in school. Audiences just don’t know the difference. In fact, in ALL of the reviews and comments, absolutely no one mentioned this belting difference. It was of no importance to anyone, and that is a loss.

Maria wasn’t a washer-woman. She was not Ado Annie. She was sweet, naive and perhaps innocent. She was devout enough to want to enter a convent where her belting would have stuck out like a sore thumb.  Oops. Not important, not anymore. Too bad. Why was this ignored, aside from the above reasons?

Go back and take a look at what I wrote here two summers ago about “Annie Get Your Gun” at Glimmerglass, starring opera diva Deborah Voigt. Equally bad casting in reverse. Ms. Underwood would have made a fabulous Annie Oakley and maybe Ms. Voigt might have been a decent (if slightly older) Maria. She was able to get her voice to be lighter, but she just couldn’t belt and Annie was written for the quintessential belter, Ethel Merman. A country bumpkin in buckskins. Made sense that she was singing in that sound.

Quite some time ago, Donna Murphy played Anna in the last revival on Broadway of “The King and I” with Lou Diamond Phillips. Her acting was wonderful but her singing was beyond dreadful. (She has gotten better). She talk-belted her way through the entire role a quarter tone flat. It was truly awful. Again, Mrs. Anna was made to sound like a washer-woman. Given that she was a highly educated, dignified school teacher in that period of time, she would have sounded very different than someone from the lower social classes. Mr. Rodgers knew that and wrote music for the role which was expected to sound cultured and refined.

It kills the character to use the wrong vocal quality, but the people involved don’t care or don’t know (which is worse to contemplate). Why, actually, would they change a well-known role such that it makes it hard to accept the actor’s choices, no matter how strong they are?

It’s called PROFITS. It’s called “prime audience segment” (18 to 49 year olds). It’s called the Sound of Money. Ka-ching.

I know quite a few people in New York City who came here to become successful professional singers and who, after long years of striving, did not actually accomplish that goal. Some of them left the city, some of them became other things (mostly therapists or teachers), some of them kept trying, off and on, in smaller ways, to sing here and there, mostly for free.

It’s hard to give up a dream. It’s hard to understand how to let go of something you want so badly. It’s like having a strong memory of and desire for your favorite dessert that your mom made when you lived at home but you can’t get anymore – you just can’t get rid of that longing. When you are young and convince yourself that you can “make it”, that you have what it takes to be a success, and you invest in that dream time, money and emotional commitment, you gather a dam of energy in your psyche. In some ways, it’s then harder to give up than to keep going, even if keeping going is murderously difficult.

It takes a whole lot to succeed at anything anywhere but it takes something really special to succeed in the performing arts here in New York City. First of all, there are very few jobs that pay well enough for an individual to make a living. The ones that pay best — daytime soap dramas and Broadway shows — employ a fraction of the people here who are qualified for those jobs. Other things that pay decently, depending, such as TV commercials and radio voiceovers, print work in advertising, and work in touring companies or church jobs are also not particularly abundant. If you are a jazz vocalist, there are few places that pay anything at all even for one gig. There are cruise ship jobs and work in the corporate world of private parties if you play piano or guitar and also sing, or perhaps do karaoke or DJ-ing, but even those are hard to find. In fact, almost everyone who doesn’t quickly “get lucky” or have some connection in show business that will help boost him or her into a higher level of work ends up having to do something else “on the side” to stay alive. Teaching is the most popular alternative because at least it allows you to stay in touch with your heart’s desire, your training and your life experience. It can be rewarding but also very draining. That’s the reality.

The “job jobs” are working in an office like a law firm (they pay decently), working as a cater waiter, tutoring, computer graphics freelancing, dog walking, and perhaps, working as a nanny or in some other place you can fit yourself in. Some jobs offer flexible hours, some are part time. Patching together enough hours in various kinds of employment such that you can survive is a job in itself. It doesn’t leave much time for auditions or classes (which are necessary in order to keep up your skills against the tough competition) or for photos, phones and those other natty little things like clothing, food and shelter. Since the cost of living here is so high, without financial help, it is nearly impossible to sustain this for more than two years without being so burned out that you just fold, even if you are energetic and young. Some people make it to year three, but hardly anyone goes beyond that without outside help or a minimum level of sustained success.

Facing these things after you are here is psychologically trying. After all, people come to New York City to throw down their gauntlet and run the race. No one likes “a quitter”. No one looks up to someone who “throws in the towel”. What does it mean if you didn’t succeed? Does it mean you weren’t good enough? Does it mean you didn’t try hard enough? Does it mean something significant that you were not able to beat out the competition?

Actually, it doesn’t automatically mean any of those things, although any of them could be true, along with others. It means that you get to a point where you want to stop struggling and have a bit of comfort. Most people who are talented are talented in more than one way. Figuring out that you can make a very nice life without being a star on Broadway or a celebrity on reality TV isn’t the end of the world. Not figuring out that you have little chance of real success is a much bigger issue, especially in the long haul, and is in its own way more damaging to avoid.

Sadly, I have known people who never did grapple with this issue in a way that worked for their lives. They hang on, at the fringe, getting a few crumbs here and there, trying to stay with “being an artist” or “being a singer, musician, dancer, choreographer, etc.” long after everyone else has concluded that their dreams are now foolhardy at best. Twenty, thirty, even forty years into the process, they eek out a meager existence rather than admit failure. Some of them also get married and have children and then other people have to join in the suffering. It’s hard to watch.

Hold on to your dreams with all your heart but know that you can revise your dream into another kind of creation when and if the time comes. Understand that who you are isn’t going to be measured by some pre-arranged agreement of external success. Who you are is always the sum of your entire experience and you are never limited if you refuse to accept limits. Recognize that having a good life is not hinged upon “getting somewhere”, it is anchored in being your deepest, most authentic self. No one can give that to you and, absolutely, no one can take it away.