...a very strange reaction

Growing up I was an “inside” kid. I didn’t like sports. Tennis, football and basketball were where my brothers excelled.  I excelled in academics. I preferred drawing, reading or watching TV to going outside and getting dirty. I mean why get dirty? You’d just have to get clean again right?

At school I hated gym and abhorred swim class. So it seems natural that I was drawn to the Arts. And hence the Drama Club.

Unlike many drama clubs across the nation our high school did four full musical productions every year. They ranged from Two Gentlemen of Verona to Jesus Christ Superstar. The later was the first musical I would ever be in.

Jesus Christ Superstar, is as you may have guessed, about the last days of Jesus and his twelve disciples. For a high school to mount this show was a huge undertaking. First the Drama club had to get permission to do the show. Secondly they had to get enough high school guys to be in it. The production calls for at about 20 males, many of whom need to have excellent singing voices and acting ability.

I could neither sing nor act. Lucky for me I was guy number 18. I was in. Guy roles number 19 and 20 were played by girls. Little did I know what was in store.

Every day we would have to run directly from our last class to the auditorium for rehearsals. We’d sit down and jump right into learning music. Then jump up and learn choreography and blocking for the music. We did this every school night until almost 11pm. Then home to do our homework, sleep and jump up the next morning to do it all again.

Because our productions were entirely student run, from stage management to light board operator to set builder, on the weekends there was no rest. We were required to do stage crew. There would be no more watching Saturday morning cartoons and reading for me. No more being a heady intellectual. I had to lift things and hammer things and saw things.

During the school year I was a busy bee.

When school was out for summer there wasn’t much to do. I would ride my bike to a friend’s house and we’d hang out. We'd watch TV, play a game and generally complain about being bored. So when I heard about the opportunity to audition for a summer youth theatre program, I jump at the chance.

Every summer the town I grew up in would try to provide activities for people. It was aptly named “The Experience”. There were art shows, ethnic festivals, and tons of crafts. During the Experience there was a musical theatre youth group who did performances. They were called “The Experience Players”.

The Experience Players were run by my high school Drama Club director John Eckler. The company auditioned in April and began rehearsing shortly after the last high school musical closed. During the summer the players would perform a half hour to 45 minutes of musical theatre singing and dancing. There were two sometimes three shows a day. The performances took place in a concrete amphitheater outside the convention center and in a grassy area in one of the state parks nearby.

I wanted to be an Experience Player so badly. Only the best of the area got picked. I had to learn a song to sing, solo. I had to be prepared to learn a dance and do some acting improvisation. All of which I started working on as soon as the auditions were announced.

However I couldn’t sing. Everyone told me I couldn’t sing so I knew it to be true.

I couldn’t act either. I mean I had never done it so how could I do it?

I did have natural dancing ability though. I couldn’t pick up fast (still can’t) but I could do the steps and look like I was having fun at the same time. This is something guys from my area weren’t very proficient at. They could sing like birds and dance Ballet like the best, but musical theatre dancing was a concept that eluded them.

Musical Theatre guys who could dance were needed for the Experience Players. And again I was in.

The Experience Players was part of a state wide arts program. We were connected to the festival scene throughout New York State. Every August the troupe would set out on a tour of the state. We’d leave our home town and drive around in a recreational vehicle, with our camping bags and costumes. For two weeks we‘d travel throughout the state sleeping in host homes, in recreation centers, gyms and camping sites.

We’d stay in most places for a day maybe two. We’d do our performance on stages, in grassy areas, in parking lots, malls, on marble staircases and in county jails.  Then we’d hop back into the RV and drive off to our next destination to repeat the whole process.

I was lucky enough to have done this every summer of high school, including the summer before going to college.

In college opportunities expanded. In addition to the theatre singing and theory classes, I now had a half hour voice lesson every week.  Every week I would come in and the teacher would do a 15 or 20 minute warm up. We’d then work on repertoire for the final ten minutes. Here I could learn to sing.

We had jazz and tap and ballet classes. They were taught at a studio off campus. So we’d have to carpool it down into the town. Some of those classes were at 8 am so we’d literally roll out of bed and pile into a car like circus clowns. We’d get to class change and begin class: the warm up, then center work, then across the floor. Afterwards we’d squeeze our sweaty bodies back into the cars and drive back to the university for our next class.

Sophomore year the class load was so full that we would go from 8am until 4pm without a break. We’d then have a half an hour before the next class started which went until seven. Then we’d go straight into rehearsals. We'd jump in and learn songs, choreography and blocking. Just like high school.

The university schedule was no big deal to me. After high school I was used to it. The running around jumping right from one thing to another was old hat. Through all of it I was learning, especially singing. I wasn’t making leaps and bounds of progress in honing my skills though. I wouldn’t understand why for several years.

After graduating from University I did Miss Saigon in Germany for three years. Then I went directly to do Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat also in Germany. Both had original creative teams and all the original choreography, which was fun and exciting. This made Joseph... like a two hour aerobics class, especially with the dreaded “mega mix”.

The mega mix was the final number of "Joseph..." It basically recapped the entire show from start to finish in 10 minutes, complete with full on singing and dancing. To help get through the mega mix and the show itself, I was taking ballet and jazz classes that were being taught by other cast members. I was also taking voice lessons from Michael Mills, the boyfriend of the Artistic director. Dance classes were free. The voice lessons we had to pay for and boy did I get my money’s worth.

Before I had come to Germany I was studying with a famous voice teacher from L. A. He was known for helping people increase their vocal range. At the time I was struggling to sing an F above middle C, a true baritone. I was tired of all the tenors getting preferential treatment because they could hit a high C. I heard musical directors and choreographers say to guys during rehearsals after they’d screw something up “Oh don’t worry about it. You can hit a high C”.

This infuriated me. I couldn’t hit a high C. I was four notes away, but surely I could get closer than an F. For those of you who may not sing or play an instrument the notes that I’m talking about go in this sequence with each letter representing a note and each note getting higher as you move left to right:

middle C D E F G A B C D E F (where I was singing) G A B high C (where the tenors were singing).

I increased my range to a G with lessons from L. A. guy and practice on my own with his tapes. I gained one whole step up. When I was cast in Miss Saigon I took his tapes to Germany with me to continue the work. I hoped lessons with Michael Mills at “Joseph...” would accentuate and compliment that foundation.

Michael’s lessons were much like lessons at University. I’d come in and we’d warm my voice up. However, unlike school I now had an hour long lesson. More time was spent on actually warming up. Then we’d work on some piece of music to add to my repertoire.

The same old same old. And still no high C.

Michael was a very popular teacher so his schedule was full. Once the only free time he had to teach a lesson was between shows on a two show day. So after doing two hours of aerobics and singing my heart out (I played “Judah”, who sings “Benjamin Calypso”) I went to my voice lesson. We warmed up quickly and then went on to singing a song I had been working on.

At the end of my lesson he invited his next student, who was also in the show, to come in and listen to me sing. When I had finished the other actor complimented me as did Michael.

“You sound great.”

“Thanks.”

“Why don’t you sing like that in the show?”

I quickly made up some excuse about being in character and blah blah blah. But that wasn’t it. I had no idea what was different.

Through later conversations Michael came upon the fact that I didn’t warm up before my voice lessons. I relied on warming up with him during the lesson. When I walked in I wasn’t ready to sing. He told me that having my voice ready from the second I entered the room meant we could make quicker progress not only to singing a song, but in stretching my range.

This was a new concept for me. Up until this point I had spent most of my theatrical life running from a day job to lessons, or from academic class to rehearsal, or going from an RV to performance. I never warmed up for auditions, vocal or dance much less lessons. There was no time. I just jumped in head first and prayed for the grace of God.

I was young and resilient. I could sing and dance anywhere. It didn’t matter that I didn’t warm up. Nothing ever phased me. Singing in a barn? No problem. Dancing in the rain? Sure. In high school we even tap danced on concrete. Consistently. I’ve had no consequences from that (as of yet knock wood).

I did warm up before performing though. In non-equity companies, and some companies outside of the U.S., there is usually some sort of physical and vocal warm up at call time. These vocal and physical warm ups before a show are group warm ups. Group warm ups of this kind don’t address much in terms of individual needs. And they sure don’t help stretch your range.

I had gotten through a physically demanding show like “Joseph...” because I was going to dance class before the performances. I had been a little boy who drew and read books. I didn’t have any knowledge of what it took to do physical activity. I was a little boy with a boundless imagination. I didn’t know what it took to maintain physical activity. Thinking can be exhausting but not like manual labor, that muscle aching, drenched with sweat exhaustion. And that's what "Joseph..." was.

Unbeknownst to me I was using the classes to physically warm up before hitting the stage. But I wasn’t doing the same for my voice. And it was suffering. It wasn’t breaking down like the bodies of those dancers in the “Joseph...” who weren’t going to class or warming up but it wasn’t growing or progressing either. Singing a high C was just not in the cards for me.

No one had ever suggested warming up before a voice class.  After this revelation Michael also deduced that I had outgrown my L. A. guy warm up tape. Together we made two new tapes, one when I wasn’t feeling well vocally and the other when my voice was healthy.  I used one or the other of these two tapes before every lesson with Michael. Slowly but surely my vocal range started to move.

Today I consistently sing a high B flat. That’s two and a half steps above an F, where I started and a mere step away from a high C where I need to be. If you remember that scale I showed earlier it now looks like this:

middle C D E F G A B C D E F (where I was singing)  G (where L. A. guy helped me get to) A B flat (where I sing consistently now) B high C 

Can I sing without warming up? Sure. Anyone can. But it won’t put a performer at the peak of his or her ability for that day. I know that first hand. I lived it. Now I can hear and feel the difference in my singing when I haven’t warmed up enough.

 “Practice makes perfect”. The thing I missed was that you have to be ready to practice before you can ever hope to come close to perfection. For high voiced male musical theatre singers a consistent healthy high C is perfection. My high C’s are happening in lessons and are becoming more and more common place.

This increase in my range is possible because I am physically built for it, coupled with a smart caring teacher. Michael Mills nurtured me and my voice. He told me to always warm up before doing any kind of singing. Now I’m vocally warming up before every show, before every audition and before every voice lesson. Sometimes I warm up just for fun.

And I still use the tapes he made for me.

I can now vocalize to a D flat. A high freaking D flat. That’s half a step above a high C. And all I keep thinking while I'm warming up is...

“...Higher baby. Get higher baby. Get higher baby and don’t ever come down!”

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