Hi there. My name is Margaret, and I love musical theatre lyrics. Like, really love them. I love to listen to them, read them, write them, and through it all, to break them down into tiny little pieces and analyze what I love about them. Like any good lyric enthusiast, when I headed out for […]
The post Looking Closely at Lyrics, or “God is in the Details” appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
When I saw [title of show] at the very end of its run at the Vineyard Theater, so many moments resonated with me – come on, who did not cry during “A Way Back To Then”? But one particular section had me laugh-cringing – “Change It, Don’t Change It” – just that simple refrain distilled […]
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I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but a little while ago, NBC did a live version of The Sound Of Music. As it aired (and after), there was much brouhaha about how people criticized the…well…everything about it. Apparently Carrie Underwood (who played Maria) responded by opining that “mean people need Jesus.” Now I […]
The post Haters Gonna Hate…Or Are They? appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
I know we’ve talked about acting before, either via #NMTvotw or other posts on the Green Room. But I think it’s something that outside of the Green Room gets passed up a lot (we won’t even go into how infrequently dancing is talked about). In general, singing and acting should never be separate things. A […]
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If you happened to read my bio, you would know I have musical theatre training and experience writing about social issues. What my bio doesn’t tell you outright is that I look nothing like a Disney Princess. I do not wear a sample size. I am not a coloratura soprano. Also, sadly, I was never […]
The post The Girls on the Go: Female Character Roles and Society appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this series talking about the Golden Age Musical’s influence on our NMT writers. I’ve also touched upon stand-alone songs before, but that particular song was still very much in the classical musical theatre mold. Drew Gasparini’s “Valley High,” on the other hand, is influenced by a different musical […]
The post SONG SPOTLIGHT: Valley High appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
London’s West End was once the home of new British musicals, and thanks to business driven individuals such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh these iconic shows were exported around the world at an alarming rate. The 1980s saw a boom for original musicals in the West End, and as society was enjoying the […]
The post What’s in a Name? The Passport to Success in the Commercial West End appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
As I sit trying to think of what to write next, I’m listening to Philip Glass’s opera theatre piece In the Penal Colony, after the Kafka story by the same name (really great, I highly suggest it). I find myself thinking of the difference between opera and what is generally perceived as straight up musical […]
The post The Art of the Opera-Beast appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
“A novel is only a place of storage – of all the meaningful things that a novelist isn’t able to use in his life.” ~John Irving I came across this quote this week near the end of The World According to Garp, a truly amazing John Irving novel that I somehow didn’t read in high […]
The post A Reason To Write appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Once you’ve perfected that art of acting, singing, and dancing, you need to know the most important part of theatre, and that’s making it your own. We are all so unique that we all interpret the world differently, and it’s our job as actors and writers to make sure those unique things get out into […]
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This piece originally appeared at Breaking Character, the online magazine of Samuel French, Inc. In honor of the one-year anniversary of Sandy Hook tomorrow, Brad Alexander is republishing it here. Whenever a news story moves me to want to express something, the little voice in my head inevitably asks, “Who are you to document this major event, […]
The post The Little Voice appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Like probably most of you reading this post, I watched The Sound Of Music Live a week ago today. Since then, I feel like I’ve read more articles responding to the audience’s response – via social media, of course, with even DiGiorno Pizza playing along – than responding to the performance itself. It’s that meta-commentary that […]
The post How We All Watched The Sound Of Music #Together appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Recently there was an article in the New Yorker about Google’s quest to build a self-driving car. In it, Charles Smart, an M.I.T. professor, describes the process of figuring out how to get a dirt bike to drive itself, which involved more than six hundred failed test runs. He recalls a colleague of his telling […]
The post This Is Robotics appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Musical theatre writers, by and large, are musical theatre nerds first, whose natural proclivities have led them to their craft. They know their Alan Menken and their Cole Porter, and they may not remember all the words to the national anthem, but they could recite the lyrics to “Getting Married Today” in their sleep. But […]
The post I Wish I’d Written That appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.
Customer service is always an interesting field to work in. You never know quite what will happen on any given day. Some days it may be a warzone, and others it may be quiet on that western front. And giving customer service online is no exception to that. I honestly can never know what to […]
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I’m sure all of you are great actors – you have to be to go into this business (yay triple threat!). But can you act while you’re singing? It’s a lot harder to do two things at once (multi-tasking is not actually a thing), so there are special rules involved when you’re acting and singing […]
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