We were meant to sing! Every single one of us has a song within us and our voices – all of our voices- have a unique song within that is like no other song in the Cosmos!
I was, as they say “ sitting down” in a long- running show on Broadway…which is to say, I was committed to staying in this hit show ( Les Mis) for at least a year or two, for various reasons…like the good money for a secure acting job, and having for the first time, the experience of performing in a long run …so there I was , comfortably situated,
creatively challenged, secure in a mostly pleasing way….but…..I
began to be bored.
This worried me.
How to keep the 8-show -a- week routine from making me miserable in Les Mis?
So when a friend , a professor at NYU asked me to teach a class in acting for musical theatre I readily accepted the challenge!
They assigned me a class composed of transfer students from various other NYU studios, some of whom had never sung a note of music, and others who could sing but had never spoken a word of Shakespeare…so i assigned the transfer students the task of downloading music they wanted to sing and also Shakespeare monologs they found intriguing…..i made the singers speak verse and the speakers sing songs they found emotionally pleasing…..the class was a revelation.
But what we all discovered together was that words are as much music as music is music itself…..minds were blown in that initial class and that established a form of teaching that took with me through my years at NYU….make the singers speak and make the speakers sing……i made them push the boundaries and though it drove most of the class bonkers, as each student faced their biggest fears, it ended up that they all grew in immeasurable ways….shakespeare no longer frightened them, but rather it intrigued them to seek out more shakespearean plays and sonnets…and as for singing, one of man’s most terrifying public tasks…well…lets just say i had them all singing and speaking more freely than ever before and i understood that words are music, and music is just another vital form of language.