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So, I never really had a great relationship to the most recent film adaptations of popular broadway musicals. The two exceptions were the Chicago film (2002) starring the fabulous Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones as the murderous duo, and The Producers (2005) starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, and directed by Susan Stroman, all from the original […]

The post Movie Musicals, and the Dream Cast You’ll Likely Disagree With, but Maybe Not appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

Go to your local music store (or to Amazon.com and light a mournful candle for Colony Records as a silent tear rolls down your cheek) and check out the sheet music section. Overwhelming, right? So many options, and no idea where to begin! Lucky for you, you can find there the musical theatre anthology books, […]

The post 10 Songs for Altos Who Don’t Belt appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

As promised in my previous NMT belting post, there’s a lot more to belting than can be said in one post. In that previous post, we discussed that belting has to come at the appropriate time in a song. To become #NMTfamous, though, belting cannot be thought of separately from mixing. You probably already know […]

The post #NMTVotW: Belting, part 2 appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

Gather around everyone, it’s story time!  Well, story song time.  A little while back, my good friend Hannah Ehrenberg wrote a fabulous post on story songs, and I’ve been thinking about them ever since.  One of my favorites is a song by Jeff Blumenkrantz called “My Heart Was Set on You.”  Sutton Foster sings this […]

The post Lyric Lens: “My Heart Was Set on You” by Jeff Blumenkrantz appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

Romantic duets are fun. So are comic duets. What could be better, then, than a comedic romantic duet? From “All Or Nuthin’” to “Take Me Or Leave Me,” musical theatre has thrived on this type of song. Adam Gwon’s duet “Fine” from Ordinary Days is a welcome addition to the canon. Ordinary Days focuses on […]

The post SONG SPOTLIGHT: Fine appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

I’m not a dancer.  I move kind of like Elaine Benes, thumbs and all.  And for readers too young to get that reference, I hate you.  But my mom is a choreographer and teacher upstate, and I spent my childhood with probably an unusual attention (for a musician) to the movement and dance component of […]

The post Music to Punctuate Movement appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

For the next couple of installments of Versions, I’m hitting you guys with a Kerrigan-Lowdermilk two-fer!  First up is a song that I (gasp!) didn’t actually like until much later.  In the early developmental stages of The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown, the show in which the song is featured, “Freedom” had already seen many […]

The post Versions, Vol. 4: “Freedom” by Kerrigan-Lowdermilk appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

Here is a fact about me: back when I was making my first forays into pop music, I would not download a song on iTunes unless I googled its lyrics first. (Yeah, my music library was cast-albums-only for a looooong time.) Although now many aspects of a song contribute to whether or not I want […]

The post Top 10 NMT Songs for Storytellers appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

I say Part 1 because belting is something that is so integral to new musical theatre and won’t be fully explained in just one post. In this week’s belting lesson, I’m going to start with the assumption that you have been properly trained on how to belt healthfully and know how to belt. This post […]

The post #NMTVotW: Belting, part 1 appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

I explain in the very first #NMTvotw post about how there are people who become famous by putting themselves out there on the internet. And one person I look to for this in that post is Alexander Sage Oyen. ASO got his big break by posting a video on Scott Alan’s I’m a Star contest, […]

The post #NMTVotW: What Started It All appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

While I could go on and on about the wonderful intricacies of a Kerrigan-Lowdermilk’s music, I could just as easily launch into a whole verbal thesis on a Scott Alan piece.  For now, I’ll spare you the book report and simply put it this way: his music has the ability to melt this cold, dead […]

The post VERSIONS, VOL 3: “Kiss the Air” by Scott Alan appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

For this installment of Lyric Lens, I knew I wanted to examine the way that Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk capture the voices of children in their writing.  Of course, there are many great songs for kid characters in their show Henry and Mudge. The one most people probably know best is “My Party Dress,” […]

The post Lyric Lens: “I’m Sorry” by Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

There is always talk of the icons of musical theatre, particularly dealing with the writers. These are the ones we constantly refer to, the ones we worship as the gods of creating what American musical theatre is now, generally those who came to prominence during what is regarded as Broadway’s “Golden Age,” from “Show Boat” […]

The post The Fabulous Jeanine Tesori appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

First and foremost, I want to point out our #NMTvotw: This is Kelsey Mielle singing Sixteen Bars by Peter Mills. Kelsey sings beautifully and follows all of our current #NMTvotw tips. However, the song she’s singing brings me to my current tip: how to do a 16 bar cut. 16 bar cuts need to be […]

The post #NMTVotW: The Audition appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

This week, I thought it best to go from my first ever brush with NMT, Kerrigan-Lowdermilk — to my latest obsession, Kooman & Dimond.  Comprised of Michael Kooman (music) and Christopher Dimond (lyrics), the two met while at school at Carnegie Mellon University and have since then collaborated on various projects, one of which being their […]

The post Versions, Vol. 2: “The Temp and the Receptionist” by Kooman and Dimond appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

Musical theatre is unique in that it’s all about a story, and telling that story in a way that only music can provide. However, some musical theatre songs are more story-based than others, requiring a delicate act of talk-singing in order to become that storyteller in a way that really clicks with the audience. A […]

The post #NMTVotW: Tell Me a Story appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.