Acting the Song: Student Companion Ebook
By Tracey Moore and Allison Bergman
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About this ebook
Teachers using Acting the Song will find this ebook companion indispensable, and students will come to class more prepared, ready to work, and more open to learning.
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Acting the Song - Tracey Moore
INTRODUCTION
THE CRAFT
You’ll often hear teachers or directors talk about musical theatre as a craft. What does that mean?
To craft something means to make something. For example, people who craft cabinets use wood, screws and nails, and glass. So, what, in musical theatre, are you making? And what is your wood, glass, and metal?
In musical theatre, you are given a lot of raw materials right off the bat. You’re given words in the form of lyrics or dialogue, and in a song you’ve got notes, rhythms, and accompaniment. But someone else made all that.
The composer crafted the notes—out of eighty-eight available keys on a piano, for example, he or she composed
a melody and decided on harmonies and tempo. And out of millions of words in all different languages (and even some made-up ones like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious), the lyricist picked the ones that she or he felt the characters might say, in the order they might say them.
Your job is to take the material off of the page and make it alive; to make the audience believe that something (a story, a moment, an event) is happening right in front of their eyes. To do that, you have to make something more of it than just notes and words.
The course of study laid out in the book Acting the Song is designed to teach you how to be a craftsperson in the musical theatre. How to take the notes and lyrics you’ve been given and make something more of them. To do this, you are going to use the theatrical version of wood and metal: your body, your voice, your sense of humor and intelligence, your imagination, and your life so far. Those are your tools for this craft.
As an actor in the musical theatre, what you make are choices. You make choices about action, and desire, and movement, and relationship, and breath. Those choices come together to make a character and to enact behavior. Your character performs in scenes with other characters and together you all make conflict and love and conversation and song, and a story gets told.
CHOICES
In Acting the Song, choices aren’t labeled good
or bad.
There are simply choices that work, and choices that aren’t as effective. There are strong choices, and less-strong choices. There are also risky, quirky, traditional, bold, and safe choices. As the creative artist, you get to decide what kinds of choices you want to make, but first, you’ve gotta go to the edge.
It may feel uncomfortable.
In this method, you will be asked to work outside of your comfort zone. You’ll be asked to explore ridiculous, intimate, crazy, painful, and silly choices. It won’t always be easy. It may not be where you want to live, in the long term or in every role. But you have to experience what it feels like. Going all the way to the edge will make you a better artist because it will make you do things you don’t normally do. And that will give you more options for choices.
In this method, sometimes you’ll be using your own life experience; sometimes you’ll need to do some research. Sometimes you’ll fly on the wings of imagination, and sometimes you’ll need to look at an actual map. If you are someone with a rich and varied personal life, you’ll have lots you can bring to a song: a knowledge of Mandarin Chinese might be helpful, and so might a talent for tennis or jumping rope. Even stuff you might think has no worth—a nightmare, or a handful of dirt, or a tendency to worry—can be useful. You’ll see.
HOW IT WORKS: TRAINING A MUSICAL THEATRE ARTIST
The training of a musical theatre artist happens in two parts.
1. Homework/preparation
2. Brave, openhearted play
Homework/Preparation
The first part is the homework. That’s the stuff you do before you get up to sing: learning the notes, the words, understanding the accompaniment, and, of course, memorizing the song. What makes Acting the Song different is that you will also need to complete three Worksheets for each song before you get up to sing.
This ebook contains links to all the Worksheets you will need. It also contains examples of Worksheets that actual, former students wrote. Although the names have been changed, the contents of the Worksheets have not. These students have shown a lot of courage in putting their feelings, dreams, and lives out there. They did it to help you. Try to be as brave as they were.
There are all different kinds of Worksheets. The recommendation is that you do three Worksheets for each song. Try several different ones to see what you like. Not every Worksheet will be a keeper, but some will really blow your mind. You should experiment to see which Worksheets prepare you to do your best work. However: You should complete The First Two Acting Questions Worksheet every time you get up to sing. This Acting Questions Worksheet asks you to make some choices about who you are singing to and what you want. Those two decisions are central to your work as an actor.
Brave, Openhearted Play
The second part of being a musical theatre craftsperson is what happens when you get up to sing.
If you are hoping this class will give you a chance to show your teacher and classmates your star quality,
your beautiful singing voice,
and that you know how to sell a song,
you need to reconsider your expectations.
In our view, the best musical theatre contains vulnerability, sensitivity, authenticity, and responsiveness to others. Yes, Elphaba belts her face off, but she is also revealing her heart’s desires. So, be gentle with yourself and with your classmates. Remain open and available to possible magic and leave ego and self-criticism at home. Be courageous and willing and play as hard as you can. You’re going to need to take some chances and to risk looking silly, bad, or dumb. When you were learning to walk, you fell down sometimes, right? Occasionally it hurt? Sometimes you cried? Same thing here.
This is all easier said than done. To be this kind of performer requires that we work on ourselves all the time—not just in class—and try to be as authentic, truthful, and loving as we can be. Some students say that they need to protect their hearts because they’ve had them broken, and they don’t feel they can risk going through that again. But this work is all about risk. Closing yourself off to experiences is not going to make you a good actor. Live your life to the fullest. Then you’ll really have something to sing about.
So, yes, get excited about taking a musical theatre class—but not because it’s an opportunity to show off. See this for the chance it will be to deepen your work, grow your abilities, and become a better performer when it’s your time to be on stage. For now, let this be an incubator for you; a laboratory, a safe space, or a cocoon for you to grow in. It will be that for your classmates too. Learn from their achievements, their challenges, and their willingness to risk. Watch closely when others are working because your lessons do not stop when you stop singing.
Criticism, Critique, and Change
After you get up to sing in class, the teacher will need to give you some feedback. That’s how this process works. Our students struggle with this. After all, who likes criticism? Nobody. And it’s hard not to take it personally. The key to everything is how you feel about change.
If you look at the definitions of the words, criticism is all about fault and disapproval. Critique is about analysis and evaluation. Those are different things. But, when we’re on the receiving end, both criticism and critique feel the same if we don’t want to change.
When we are in the mindset of desiring change, then critique seems like help. We’re glad to hear it and we’re grateful to the person who gives it to us. If we’re not in the mood for change, everything feels like judgment and everything sounds like, You are terrible, you should give up.
In that mood, feedback can be perceived as an attack, which could make us get defensive.
If you’re in a mindset to change, then a teacher’s critique should feel like help. And although it is you, the artist, who is doing the work, and it’s your voice, your mind, and your body through which the work passes on its way to the audience, try to separate your feelings about the work from your feelings about