Hydrate, Spray, Hydrate, Spray, Pee, Hydrate, Spray

For a singer, the only solution for nerves (and the resultant disease, "cotton mouth") is a humble little thing called "acceptance."

Nerves are nerves. We get anxious or we overthink something and, "wheee!," there they are.

No amount of water from the fountain, a cooler or 10-gallon plastic bottle is going wet your whistle enough to overcome a case of nerves before that callback, meeting with the director or producer, or life-changing performance opportunity.

Truly, the best way to deal with nerves is not to focus on them at all. Don't expend good energy on trying to suppress something very normal. Accept nerves as part of your current condition.

Yeah, some singers go nutty with their water and throat sprays, lozenges, etc., because --at that point/by that time -- it's too late for them to treat the cause and they are now stuck treating the symptom.

How to avoid the cause?

Train your body to lead your voice, not your voice to lead your body.

Train athletically, incorporating your body into your voice, not just leaving your vocal cords to do all the heavy lifting.

Don't think against yourself. Circumvent the mind by first training your spirit into your singing. The use of energy is crucial, whether you want to conquer a stage or a stadium.

Train body, spirit, voice in that order and the mind won't be able to play the naughty tricks we like to play on ourselves.

Like talking ourselves out of our passion for singing, bringing up old wounds, rejections, resentments, criticism, childhood traumas... ferget 'em!

As in a 100 meter dash, when we train our voices athletically, nerves disappear at the sound of the starting pistol (or at the bell tone of our audition song). There can be no nerves, nor any awareness of nerves, when we are only focused on winning the race.

Joe DiPietro, You Bastard!!

Actually, Joe isn't a bastard at all -- far from it.

I just thought that would be a catchy title for a post.

In truth, Joe is an amazing writer, terrifically funny, human and humane, a soft-spoken sports book of knowledge and an all-round very decent kind of fella.

Along with Jimmy Roberts, Joe wrote "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change." A catchy title in and of itself and also a musical that will probably run Off Broadway until the year 2525.

Maybe longer.

Joe also wrote, along with Jimmy Roberts, the Off-Broadway musical "The Thing About Men," which was called "Men" when it made its world premiere at Tim and Buck Busfield's B Street Theatre in Sacramento several years ago. I had the great fortune to play the lead character, Tom Ambrose -- a role I still believe is one of the great men's roles in American musicals.

Seriously.

Tom Ambrose gets to sing and ride a bike, wear a gorilla mask, boxing gloves and a robe, play the ukelele, scheme, scream and plot and ultimately twist the audience into a direction they didn't expect. And he makes people laugh the entire time.

The run was sold out and we got standing ovations every night. True.

I hate having to give a standing ovation, but I sure don't mind getting one.

Just call me "The Happy Hypocrite."

Anyway, Joe is a chronic re-writer and a massive "cutter." He would apologize profusely at giving me rewrites, new pages, new dialogue to learn during the week of opening (and a couple shows after that) -- but I was glad to do it because a) Joe is an inspiration and b) He was making the show better. Nothin' wrong with making a show better.

So where was I going with this?

Oh yeah. I had to turn down the East Coast run of "Men" because my daughter Julia Rose had just been born and it's very difficult feeding a family on $15 a day while performing in small houses in New Jersey and Florida. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I was told I was the second choice for the East Coast tour because a super talented Broadway actor suddenly couldn't get out of his contract to do Joe and Jimmy's show. So, it was, "Uh, Bill, can you leave L.A. in three days and come rehearse with us?" In truth, that didn't bum me out, that was just business, but I still had to turn it down.

Nathalie and I sent Joe a birth announcement. Jimmy, too.

Flash forward seven years.

Julia Rose has turned seven.

Joe has written at least a play a week and a musical a month including the open and closed (sadly enough) Broadway Elvis musical "All Shook Up."

And now the regional theatres are getting ahold of the rights and this breakdown just came out:

Breakdown for
ALL SHOOK UP (Combined EPA/ECC Singers)
Musical Theatre
WestLong Beach, CA
LOA ref WCLO

NATALIE HALLER (20's- 30): a mechanic. A small town girl who dreams of more. Lusts after Chad. Dresses up as ‘Ed’ to get closer. LEAD

CHAD (25-35): a great-lookin', motorcycling, guitar-playing, leather-jacketed roustabout. The "Elvis" character. LEAD

JIM HALLER (mid 40's-50's): Natalie's widowed father. Middle-aged and messy, he still
longs for his wife. SUPPORTING

Last part of the story...

Yes, my wife Nathalie is 20 years younger.

We'll be turning 80 together this November/December.

You're invited.

Especially you, Joe DiPietro!

(and even if all of this is a super strange coincidence, I'm still gonna stick to my story!)

Stillness Pt. 2

Stillness shouldn't be confused with "low energy."

Having low energy is like driving your car around with the gas tank needle almost on "E." You may or may not have gotten to your destination, but -- guess what? -- the trip was pretty stressful too...

Isn't it amazing how many different ways we can find to take the fun out of performing?

What we really want to do is align our sense of stillness with the focus needed by an Olympic gymnast or weightlifter just prior to competing.

Focus and stillness are required for Olympic tasks. There is a job ahead. Now is the time to pull it all together and do something incredibly special.

In individual sports like gymnastics, weightlifting and singing, wasted motion is inefficient and unsustainable. Wasted motion can also lead to injury.

So, even in a vocal warm-up, moving our heads up and down on every note, flailing our hands and arms about, standing on our toes to hit the high notes, tweaking our heads to the left or right to do something or other; all serve to diffuse our focus of our human, living instrument.

For the athlete/singer it begins internally. To be world class, to gain that gold medal; body, mind and spirit must pull together to perform as a single unit.

If any of those three elements are absent, the best we can hope for is second place.

And whether we're auditioning for musical theatre or doing eight shows a week on Broadway, second place ain't it....!

Stillness

We're at a musical of some sort or other.

It's the "Eleventh Hour" song.

Someone is going to sing something very important.

Some character is going to turn it around for themselves, finally coming to the realization that their approach to life, a relationship or an ideal was fatally flawed and now is the time to make a change.

This a pivotal moment.

Someone is going to "put together the pieces" right before our very eyes.

Watch.

And learn "stillness."

Featured Singer: Julie Johnson

This is Julie's first recording (click widget below). We did it a couple weeks ago as a vocal sample for an audition. She did a really good job. The work speaks for itself.

***

QUICK JULIE FOLLOW-UP OCT. 1

Julie got such positive response from both coasts (including an NY agent) that we're prepping the second half of the demo song (which is even more of an ass kicker...!).

QUICK JULIE FOLLOW-UP OCT. 25

As soon as the World Series is over, Julie's episode of Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares will air on Fox on Wednesday. She plays a waitress -- well, that's her job in real life...and it's a reality show, but people are cursing and fighting on it all the time. It's very watchable. We're addicted.

Does The Song Sing The Singer Or The Singer Sing The Song?

Interesting thing about learning how to sing and making it big and loud and round and warm and high and low and gorgeous and all...is, once we finally acheive that vocal apex, we have a tendency to forget what thrilled us about singing in the first place which, uh, "used to be" that direct, electrical and emotional connection between ourselves and our audience.

It was almost better when we didn't know what we were doing, right?

Now we're so good, we thrill ourselves every time we open our collective mouth.

We basically sing love songs to ourselves.

After all of our vocal working out, we now believe that a perfect voice is the perfect choice.

It's not.

Someone may have a chiseled body defined by years of lifting weights and exercise, but if all they ever do is just stand there pointing out how great their lats, pecs, quads, etc. are, it gets pretty damn dull pretty quick, doesn't it?

So why do we do that same thing as singers?

How many cabarets do we have to sit through with singers affecting emotion through vocal hi-jinks?

How about those musical theatre "actors" who stomp and knit their brow or scrunch up their face to show emotion?

(Yawn.)

We are singers. We sing the songs.

We can't let the songs sing us.

If we "fake it," all of us end up in Performance Hell where it's more important to remember all the words and hit all the high notes. Fun, huh? The real drama on stage ends up being the game of catch-up we play with ourselves.

Not fun. Not dangerous enough.

Definitely not an artistic experience.

A live performance has to be electric.

Every time.

A live performer has to be present.

Consistently.

And a song is an ongoing journey that a singer takes the audience on.

Step by step by step.

Otherwise, the song sings the singer.

And we can't have that, can we?

So what should we do?

1) Have fundamental, great technique;

2) Know our material upside down, inside out, backwards and forwards, fast, slow and in a foreign language if need be;

3) Get on stage, forget about 1 and 2 and focus on who you're singing to and why you need to sing to them. Create the question, create the debate, make it a conversation and let it fly.

The Five Octave Range Myth

Uhm, did I miss something in my college music theory class? If I read one more time that pop star #1 or voice teacher #2 has a five-octave range, I'm gonna start holding protest rallies in front of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

If you're a singer, don't buy into it. It's a publicist's claim for more ink in the Calendar section, not a claim rooted in music reality.

First, claiming five octaves doesn't mean one is a "better" singer.

"Circus freak" comes to mind, but not better.

There have been hundreds of female belters in pop, jazz and Broadway recordings who did groundbreaking work within an 11 or 12-note range. Think (old school) Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee... I never heard anything about those gals having a 40-note/five octave range! My female belters work from a low F (in the traditional alto range) up to a high Ab (about a 16 or 17-note range or two-plus octaves) which is more than plenty for a true pop/Broadway belt song. Elphaba in "Wicked" belts about a two-octave range. Perhaps Stephen Schwartz didn't know what to do with the other three octaves? For us guys, even Luciano Pavarotti in his prime probably had a 20-note range (about two and a half octaves). Sure, I didn't count his falsetto which could have given him maybe another octave -- maybe -- but I guess that, like Stephen Schwartz, Verdi and Puccini didn't know what to do with those two extra octaves either.

Really, composers simply don't write five octave songs.

Burt Bacharach wrote some range-y tunes ("Do You Know The Way To San Jose?" comes to mind), but a five-octave song would have been professional suicide (and think of poor Dionne Warwick!).

No one person could sing the material -- and if one person could, probably only dogs and whales would want to hear it anyway.....

Imagine your favorite karaoke bar then...

The most popular melodies of all time have well under a two-octave range. That's because the public, the untrained singers out there, likes to sing along, too.

The best dancers don't have the biggest feet, nor do the greatest singers have the highest or lowest voices.

In singing performance, it definitely helps to have a solid, flexible range with some excitement or "heat" in the voice complemented, more importantly, by knowing what to do with a lyric -- how to interpret a song.

But great singers don't need to "brag" about their range because, frankly, that's not what made them great singers in the first place.

By the way, from the very bottom to the very top, a four-part choir sings in about a five-octave range.

Material Choices and Common Sense

How many of us have heard the old chestnut, “Don’t sing a song from the show for your audition!” or “Don’t ever sing a composer’s song for the composer in an audition!”?

Let’s take a look at these urban-legend-schools-of-musical-theatre-thought for a moment, shall we?

1. “Don’t Sing A Song From The Show”

Hooboy, this makes no sense whatsoever. Since, reasonably, we don’t know the songs from a new show that has yet to open, we must be talking about revivals; stuff that has been done to death already.

A year or so ago, I saw a listing for “Fiddler On The Roof” on the Equity website where they specifically requested that artists not sing a song from the show for the audition. It was one of those theatre groups that traditionally hires two or four Equity artists for their community musical out in the boonies. I’ll keep the organization’s identity private so as not to embarrass them (*cough, cough* Performance Riverside…). But if it’s a revival…who cares if someone auditions with a song from the show?

Really, how does one cast a legendary role like Tevye by listening to a bunch of old duffers sing “Some Enchanted Evening”?

Thirty-two bars of “If I Were A Rich Man” aren’t good enough?

Should Golde bring in something from Madame Butterfly, perhaps?

Maybe Yente can do something from Rent…that would be really good.

And, beyond that, if, after you have sung your audition with material from another show and you’re asked to stay and read, do they also give you sides from another musical?

“Since we don’t want to hear songs from Fiddler – as we are casting Fiddler – please read this script from Hello Dolly as it has nothing to do with Fiddler either…”

Bottom Line: If you have the character’s song in your back pocket and you’re right for the part in age, range, looks and talent…just sing it. At callbacks, everybody will be singing the same songs anyway!

2. “Don’t Sing A Composer’s Song For The Composer”

Uh huh. And safe to assume here that Stephen Sondheim would rather hear an Andrew Lloyd Webber tune from Phantom instead of something from his own insanely deep catalog of Pulitzer Prize-winning material.

If you have the chops and the courage to show off those chops, then do something the composer wrote. Why play it safe like everyone else? It’s an act of risk and artistic respect and you’ll be remembered for doing it.

Regardless, if you get in their new show, you’re going to end up singing their material anyway…. Show ‘em you can do their stuff now.

Congrats, Andy Dubick!

Not a bad gig for an eighth grader...

Andy just got word that he will be appearing with the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall in New York during the holidays. Dude begins rehearsals the first week of October.

I've known Andy since he was in fifth grade and started training him when he was in sixth.

Great "kid singer." Great kid.

He also recently appeared as a kid (makes sense) in Musical Theatre Guild's "Drood" at the Alex and the Thousand Oaks Big Ass Performance Thing-Whatever.

Again, congrats, Andy!! Have an amazing time in NY and don't forget, you owe me a signed poster!

Welcome!

My voice students and friends now sing on Broadway and in Broadway Road Companies, Animation, Industrials, Theme Parks, Recordings, etc.

This blog is open to all who want to continue working as singers and those who want to get started as working singers. We can meet here as often as you like.

Bottom line, being a working singer is a hustle.

If you want to be a working singer, then you need to sing...constantly. Everywhere and anywhere they'll have you until the demand for you is so high that you have to start turning the free gigs down and only taking the highest paying ones. Hey, we only have so many hours in a week....!

Feel free to comment, challenge, etc. Just keep it honest and direct. Having a sense of humor helps too!

See you soon!