FROM SCORE TO STAGE

Have you ever found yourself staring blankly at a musical theatre score, intending to begin analysis, but find yourself at a loss of where to begin? Perhaps you've been cast in this particular role and hope that the music can teach you more about your character. Perhap...

It's no secret that Stephen Schwartz's Wicked is one of the biggest commercial successes on Broadway in recent history. After all, it's been running on the Great White Way for the past fifteen years with no end in sight. And yet, sometimes I think academics can be hard...

There's such a thing as theatre magic. It's what has drawn each of us to the stage. Sometimes it feels like this intangible thing - a sort of wizardry born of imagination and ingenuity and the collective genius of playwrights, composers, actors, designers, and director...

Pastiche. It's a word you've probably come across in your musical studies. But what makes something "pastiche" and how should it be approached by the performer? To put it simply, a pastiche musical is one in which the music is written to imitate an older artist or genr...

Let's take a look at "Twin Soliloquies" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific and "Send in the Clowns" from Sondheim's A Little Night Music. Now, I know what you're thinking. These two songs have absolutely NOTHING in common. One is a duet and the other is...

Father's Day is this weekend, so I figured it would be appropriate to talk about one of Broadway's most notorious fathers: Carousel's Billy Bigelow!  Billy is... well, he's problematic, both as a human being and as a father (let's not forget that he hits both Julie and...

No matter what musical you're working on, the love duet is always a pivotal moment of the show.  In the case of Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years, the love duet is quite literally a pivotal moment as it is the only intersection of the two narratives. F...

What with the recent Broadway revival starring Laura Benanti and Zachary Levi, I feel like She Loves Me is at peak popularity right now.  And with good reason!  The characters are complex, the score is gorgeous, and the book is beautifully structured. (My husband...

Today we’re going to tackle one of my favorite love duets, “You Were Dead, You Know” from Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Candide.  But before we address the piece, we need to acknowledge the source material:  the novella Candide, Voltaire’s 1759 masterpiece.  Above...