December 14, 2024

I am so lucky that I get to teach a musical theatre performance class every few years. There are easily enough students interested to offer it every year, but not enough resources in the Music Department, alas. It is always a treat in any case. For the Fall semester I had a class of five women and five men, many Triangle Club members, some my personal students some not. After the competitive auditions last spring, I thought it was a strong group, but as we got into the first few weeks of the syllabus, I realized that they had a lot to learn, both in terms of the 20^th century repertoire and many basic skills. Fortunately, they were all open to trying new things and investigating the unfamiliar songs by Irving Berlin, Kurt Weil, Jerome Kern, Porter and Gershwin. Yikes, it is hard for me to believe that they don’t know these composers, or legendary performers like Fred Astair and Ethel Merman, but they were game to dive in and they loved what they found. The chemistry of the class was also very supportive, and the students brought in fun duets in many combinations of voices. We had one student pianist in the class and were fortunate to have the fantastic pro pianist Vince di Mura playing for every class as well. Vince brought a wealth of experience and great flexibility to the work with the students. After Fall Break all the students started making real progress and each class saw one show stopping performance after another. As they got into the more recent rep that they knew, their performances became even better, supported by all the new tools they were honing and the increased confidence they were building from singing in class each week. The final performance in December was fantastic, and though hard to believe, perhaps this bunch of performers were even stronger than the last time I taught the class. I think all the students had a great time and I had too many wonderful tunes swirling in my head all night and day!