I am in the process of completely revamping my website and moving it to this platform. Sneak peek:
As a result, I probably won’t be writing much for the next couple of weeks, but I did want you to know that I’m here and what’s coming up.
- After the success of Richard Carsey’s masterclass last week, I’ve decided to make this a part of the studio going forward. I am looking at doing masterclasses on Thursday evenings, at least until my church job starts back up (which I don’t anticipate happening until at least after Thanksgiving or 2021, depending on what happens with COVID-19 going forward (wear your masks).
- Right now I have arranged for Amanda Kaiser, a teacher and performer in Las Vegas, to do a 90 minute workshop/masterclass called Self-Tape Success. She will spend 30 minutes doing a presentation on equipment and logistics for a successful self-tape. After that, four singers will sing for 10 minutes each, and she will evaluate their lighting, sound quality, choice of attire (not fashion policing, just determining how it works on camera!), song selection, and other elements of their presentation. Performers will also have the option of receiving an asynchronous evaluation of an actual self-tape if submitted to her within two weeks of the masterclass. The cost is TBD (I’ll figure that out later this week).
- I have also invited Lissa deGuzman to return, specifically to work on pop music for the musical theater singer’s audition book. Not sure when this would be.
- A former student of mine, Matt Bender, recently received his MFA in acting and is now available to do monologue coaching. We’re supposed to talk this week about figuring out some kind of project we can do together.
- I’ve also spoken to my friend Sorab Wadia, with whom I went to Peabody, about doing something. He is currently based in India, so this would probably have to be a weekend day time (I don’t know what our time difference is). Sorab was a pianist when I knew him and was dabbling in opera, but wound up becoming an actor and has performed in national tours (Ali Hakim, Oklahoma), a one-man show of the book The Kite Runner, in regional theater (Bend it like Beckham The Musical), as Hussein al-Mansour in Jihad! The Musical at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and in London’s West End (I am not making that up), and off-Broadway as Raj Dhawan in Bunty Berman Presents…., which I saw in NYC and I will never forgot his head popping out of that papier-mâché elephant’s butt.
Other things I’m planning to get going are regular studio classes where we can sing for each other, online for now, in person later.
I want to do more with asynchronous lessons as well, utilizing the Marco Polo app.
I also want to teach a musical theater history/repertoire class, where we focus on a specific period of time, the style requirements for that period, and everyone gets to sing something from that era. I’d like to start with the 1920s-1930s (Tin Pan Alley), move into Golden Age (1940s-1960s), early contemporary (1970s-1990s), and then current contemporary (2000s-present), so basically 100 years of American Musical Theater (although we will include pieces by other composers that are traditionally done in the US). I’d like to do that once a month, probably on Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoons. These would be open to studio members and non-studio members.
But first, I need to go work on the website. Talk to you next week!