Coming Soon: SAVI in the Classroom An online class for musical theater teachers The SAVI System of Singer-Actor Training is a powerful new pedagogy for training musical theater performers that was developed over forty years working with singing actors in the rehearsal room and the classroom. It is a practical, “savvy” approach to building essential …
Author Archives: Charlie
Intensity makes the 2022 Tonys a night to remember
Here’s my #1 takeaway from the 2022 Tony Awards broadcast: it was Intense! Phew! Exciting musical theater depicts characters in extreme situations, experiencing extreme emotions, and the Tonys turned up the dial to 11 time and again during their most recent awards show. Exhibit A: the performance of Joaquina Kalukongo, who won the Tony for …
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From “great singer” to “great singing actor”
Congratulations to the recently-named semi-finalists of the NATS National Musical Theatre Competition! Earlier this fall, I served as an adjudicator for the first round of that competition, which entailed watching multiple video submissions from nearly 50 of the first-round contestants. Over the course of a dozen dozen videos, I heard an abundance of great singing, …
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Sondheim and SAVI
As they did for so many others in the last half century, the works of Stephen Sondheim defined what the musical theater could be for me. I was seventeen years old when I encountered my first Sondheim musical, Company, with the original cast onstage in the West End of London. For the next forty-nine years, …
“Keep surprising us.”
In a recent New Yorker interview about the making of his film “Tick, Tick… Boom!,” Lin-Manuel Miranda recounts some words of advice he got from Stephen Sondheim. While working on “Hamilton,” Lin says, I would send him what I was working on every few years or so, and he said, “Lin, with hip-hop, ten bars …
New SAVI article in MTEA Journal!
I’ve just returned from the Musical Theater Educators Alliance conference in San Diego, where over a hundred of the best and brightest educators from the field of musical theater spent three exciting days discussing the latest innovations and trends. It was an amazing experience, and if you don’t know about this terrific organization, click here …
A quick look back at 2019
The holidays are here and the year is coming to a close. It’s a time to savor the fruits of the harvest, to celebrate the accomplishments of the past year and do a little crystal ball-gazing into the months ahead. This holiday, there’s an especially rich harvest for me to enjoy thanks to the publication …
“Let’s try something different…”
Until a moment ago, you thought your audition had been going well. You were well-prepared, confident, almost a little cocky. But now, at the sound of these four innocent words, you feel your blood turning to ice water in your veins. “Let’s try something different…” Different? I give you my best shot and you want …
New in Dramatics: sharpening your skills as a singing actor!
Have you seen this article that just dropped in the online edition of Dramatics? “Practice Better, Perform Better” is all about the SAVI way to sharpen your skills as a singing actor. If you (or your students) are striving for peak performance on the musical stage, you’ll find some great ideas here to help you level …
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“Free and easy” – cabaret and jazz singers
The latest New Yorker has a great piece by Michael Schulman about Marilyn Maye, an American chanteuse now celebrating her 91st birthday. Singing in a cabaret or nightclub is a particularly intimate form of musical theater performance, and it requires the singer to have especially strong skills of communication. Schulman describes a master class in …
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