New Resource for Choosing Repertoire!!

Last week, I added yet another item to my list of things-to-spend-money-on-so-that-all-our-lives-can-be-better!

This resource is MusicalTheaterSongs.com and offers thousands of songs from 1850 to the present day (with the purchase of a subscription - and my NATS membership gets me 50% off of the annual subscription price).

For example - are you looking for a song for an audition for a girl under 13, written between 2010-2016? Just plug those things into the search engine, and voila! Thirty-five songs come up. Click on one of them to find out - let's look at this obscure one:

It's short (1 page?); it has an octave range; it's not too difficult to play; and it's pretty obscure. In fact, it's only available if you subscribe to contemporarymusicaltheatre.com (sigh, another one to check out), which you find if you go to the "find the sheet music" link.

AND you can create a song list of songs that you're saving. Right now, I have one saved for a project I'm going to propose for a conference next year for musical theater songs for women of a ... ahem... certain age.

This is offering so many possibilities! I can't tell you how excited I am. But I'll show you:

HIMYM Barney GIF from Himym GIFs

Spring Forward!

UGH, it's Daylight Savings Time. I hate the transitions both in and out of DST. I feel like I gain nothing in the fall because I wake up too early, and I definitely feel the loss of the hour in the spring. (Spring? It's spring?)

But I do like the idea of "spring forward." Of finding some new things to do and thinking outside the box.

For example, at my church job today, I decided that I was going to put the emphasis on all the prepositions in the hymns and responses. At first, it was a source of amusement (which pretty much sums up how I approach almost anything new), and then I realized it was a way to be really aware of the words I was saying. Too often, responses are on autopilot, and so are hymns (if you're just singing the melody to something you've known for years). But if you put the emphasis on a different word, you have to think about all the words before and after it.

"And also with you."
"Our Father, who art in Heaven."
"Make you to shine like the sun."

I did something like that recently in a cabaret performance of the song, "As if we never said goodbye" from Sunset Boulevard. I have always sung the lyric, "Has there ever been a moment?" with the emphasis on "ever." But in my last performance, it just felt right to put it on "been."

Now, I realize that emphasis is kind of Chandler Bing-esque, but it felt right to me in that moment. It seemed like it made all the other words in the line even more important.

There's an acting game to take a phrase and change the emphasis to get a different point across:

"I didn't say she stole my money."
"I didn't say she stole my money."
"I didn't say she stole my money."
"I didn't say she stole my money."
"I didn't say she stole my money."
"I didn't say she stole my money."
"I didn't say she stole my money."

How would you interpret each of this lines with the different emphasis? Which one might be defensive? Sad? Evasive?

How could you apply this to a song you're working on? Or a song you've known for years? How would it change the interpretation? What works? What doesn't?

Try this and see what happens. And remember....

Cabaret as Personal Musical Theater

I was looking through my past blogs to see if I've defined cabaret before and couldn't find anything.

This past Friday, I was thrilled to reunite with Ryan Cappleman to perform a revised version of my first cabaret, "Oh! To Be a Movie Star!" at Germano's in Little Italy (the revision includes the addition of the exclamation point after "Oh!" where there had previously been a comma). We had a terrific turnout, unlike the performances that Ryan and I did back in Milwaukee, and it was extremely well-received. It's nearly a week later and I'm still re-living moments that I felt went particularly well and not moments that went badly (this never happens).

There was one friend who had planned to come but didn't because he said he had a hard time getting his fiancée to go to concerts on Friday night, which is their date night. I was surprised that he said that, because he's a musician and actor as well. He thought that the performance was going to be something along the lines of a recital, rather than - well, what it was.

So I've done some more musings on exactly what cabaret is. And the title of this article is from something that was said to me by Amanda McBroom at a cabaret workshop I attended in Brookfield, Wisconsin, when she was asked to define cabaret. She thought a bit and said, "Cabaret is personal musical theater." It's taking pieces that mean something to you and developing a narrative from those pieces. It might be that you have a theme in mind, or it might be that a theme comes from the pieces you've selected.

In the case of this week's show, my theme was movies and movie stars, and the songs I chose reflected that. And more important, what movies have meant in my own life.

Another definition that I came up with was that creating a cabaret was like writing a script for a jukebox musical. A jukebox musical is a bunch of songs by one artist or composer around which an often-lame script is written. Now, I generally hate that genre. My own personal idea of hell would be sitting through endless productions of Rock of Ages, Jersey Boys, and Pump Boys and Dinettes. But a cabaret is picking songs - perhaps by the same composer, perhaps based on a theme or an era - and putting them together with a narrative of some kind.

However, in a musical, there's a full cast of characters. In cabaret, all the characters are played by a single performer (or a small group of performers) who might have some specific lines that she wants to say to introduce a song, but the songs are the script. They are what tell the story, through the singer's interpretation.

In Oh! To Be a Movie Star!, Ryan and I told stories of wanna-be actors, both from a humorous and a tragic perspective, of fans who admire and obsess over the object of their affection, of up-and-coming stars and those fading into obscurity. It wasn't a single narrative following one person from beginning to end. That's a different kind of show. And maybe it's one I'll do someday.

All I can say right now is that cabaret continues to be one of the most rewarding and creative outlets I have as an artist these days. It's not the only outlet, which it was in Milwaukee (and why not having an audience was so demoralizing to me), but it's the one that makes me feel the most like myself. It's personal. It's musical. And it's theater.

"A creative adult is the child who survived."

Two blogs in one day!

Last night I did a cabaret show at Germano's Piattini in Little Italy - "The Not Here Cabaret" with Michael Tan. This was a reprise of a show we did at Spotlighters in June. It went, very, very well. I felt so at home in the format, with the audience, and with the music I'd selected.

This morning I saw this posted on Facebook:

89-Year-Old Japanese Grandma Discovers Photography, Can’t Stop Taking Hilarious Self-Portraits Now - Japan Inside

One of the comments I read (and I know, you're not supposed to read the comments) was: "A creative adult is the child who survived."

That's how I feel about doing cabaret. Creative. Fulfilled. Happy.

Oh, and I made a tidy little sum doing it last night, which was even better. #MakingMoneyAsASingerFTW (do hashtags work in blogs)?