Open Forum

My high school is very small (90 kids right now) and only two years old. Last year 7-8 students came out to perform Twelfth NIght and AntigoneX by Paula Cizmar (highly recommended!), and this year 15 students are performing in Almost, Maine. Very exciting! Next year we'll be doing our first musical (still not sure which one yet), so in February-April I'm getting them ready by teaching a Musical Theater Performance class, focusing on vocal work, acting while singing, dancing, and an overview of American musical theater history. At the end of this class we'll have a showcase of solos, duets, and choral work from musicals; I'm going to call it A Night Out on Broadway. 

Here's my most super basic question (and you'll see that, though I love musicals, I'm a complete musical theater teaching newbie!). How do I go about choosing the solos, duets, and choral work?? What resources do I mine? Yup. Embarrassingly basic! 

There's a helpful post here on where to get sheet music; do you have other suggestions?

Do you personally use any books you love for musical theater history? What about books for "how to teach musical theater"??

Do you have a syllabus for a similar course you could share? I'd love to see ideas for how to go about teaching a class like this.

Thank you!!


------------------------------
Arden Thomas
Teaching Artist, Theater
Sequoyah High School
Pasadena CA
------------------------------

It depends on if you have an accompanist to help you out (or if you play piano yourself). Personally, I didn't. So every song that I chose needed to have an accompaniment track readily available. Andrew Byrne, for instance, has posted free piano accompaniment tracks for almost all of the songs in the Singers Musical Theatre Anthology series online. (You can also probably find sheet music for most of these songs available online for free. They represent a wide cross-section of musical theatre history, from Golden Age classics to contemporary pop-rock works.) You can find more information on tracking down (no pun intended) accompaniment tracks here.

------------------------------
Victoria Chatfield
Executive Director
National Theatre for Student Artists
www.nationalstudenttheatre.org
vchatfield@nationalstudenttheatre.org
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-31-2017 12:02
From: Arden Thomas
Subject: super basic questions for musical theater selections

My high school is very small (90 kids right now) and only two years old. Last year 7-8 students came out to perform Twelfth NIght and AntigoneX by Paula Cizmar (highly recommended!), and this year 15 students are performing in Almost, Maine. Very exciting! Next year we'll be doing our first musical (still not sure which one yet), so in February-April I'm getting them ready by teaching a Musical Theater Performance class, focusing on vocal work, acting while singing, dancing, and an overview of American musical theater history. At the end of this class we'll have a showcase of solos, duets, and choral work from musicals; I'm going to call it A Night Out on Broadway.

Here's my most super basic question (and you'll see that, though I love musicals, I'm a complete musical theater teaching newbie!). How do I go about choosing the solos, duets, and choral work?? What resources do I mine? Yup. Embarrassingly basic!

There's a helpful post here on where to get sheet music; do you have other suggestions?

Do you personally use any books you love for musical theater history? What about books for "how to teach musical theater"??

Do you have a syllabus for a similar course you could share? I'd love to see ideas for how to go about teaching a class like this.

Thank you!!


------------------------------
Arden Thomas
Teaching Artist, Theater
Sequoyah High School
Pasadena CA
------------------------------

I would strongly recommend a book called Acting the Song by Allison Bergman and Tracey Moore.  They actually have a series of three books.  I've used bits of all of them. 

Also Acting Through Song by Paul Harvard.  Used parts of that as well.


------------------------------
Holly Thompson
Worthington OH
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-31-2017 12:02
From: Arden Thomas
Subject: super basic questions for musical theater selections

My high school is very small (90 kids right now) and only two years old. Last year 7-8 students came out to perform Twelfth NIght and AntigoneX by Paula Cizmar (highly recommended!), and this year 15 students are performing in Almost, Maine. Very exciting! Next year we'll be doing our first musical (still not sure which one yet), so in February-April I'm getting them ready by teaching a Musical Theater Performance class, focusing on vocal work, acting while singing, dancing, and an overview of American musical theater history. At the end of this class we'll have a showcase of solos, duets, and choral work from musicals; I'm going to call it A Night Out on Broadway.

Here's my most super basic question (and you'll see that, though I love musicals, I'm a complete musical theater teaching newbie!). How do I go about choosing the solos, duets, and choral work?? What resources do I mine? Yup. Embarrassingly basic!

There's a helpful post here on where to get sheet music; do you have other suggestions?

Do you personally use any books you love for musical theater history? What about books for "how to teach musical theater"??

Do you have a syllabus for a similar course you could share? I'd love to see ideas for how to go about teaching a class like this.

Thank you!!


------------------------------
Arden Thomas
Teaching Artist, Theater
Sequoyah High School
Pasadena CA
------------------------------

​Congrats! I ventured out completely blind and directed my first musical eight years ago, and every year since then we have work-shopped a musical. (And thank heavens, I have learned something new every year.) The kids absolutely love musicals, and I love the opportunity to work on so many different elements at one time. I am actually trying to go back to a straight play, but fear I will lose some kids because I have so many who seem to be more invested in the dancing and songs.

We too are a very small school, and I wish I had had the opportunity to do what you are doing with the class, that is a great idea! And it will give you a great opportunity to see what potential you will have for casting the next year. I always have to select musicals based on which characters I actually have available in my limited pool of true vocalists.

We also participate in state Literary competitions where I have to select solos and trio songs for individual competitions in the spring, and so I wanted to share my process for this (although it is a bit amateur),  I look up n musical theatre anthology like those mentioned already, and then I copy and paste the titles and plays into Youtube and watch other high school students or broadway performers perform these songs (this is awesome since my knowledge of musicals was so limited.)  And I will say, after eight years of doing this, I have become quite literate in the musical genre. Seeing someone else perform would always help me in matching songs to my students.  This also gives you something to pass on to students, because they will definitely watch a youtube video before they test out sheet music with an accompanist.

------------------------------
Analiese Hamm
ECHS Drama Director
Statenville GA
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-31-2017 12:02
From: Arden Thomas
Subject: super basic questions for musical theater selections

My high school is very small (90 kids right now) and only two years old. Last year 7-8 students came out to perform Twelfth NIght and AntigoneX by Paula Cizmar (highly recommended!), and this year 15 students are performing in Almost, Maine. Very exciting! Next year we'll be doing our first musical (still not sure which one yet), so in February-April I'm getting them ready by teaching a Musical Theater Performance class, focusing on vocal work, acting while singing, dancing, and an overview of American musical theater history. At the end of this class we'll have a showcase of solos, duets, and choral work from musicals; I'm going to call it A Night Out on Broadway.

Here's my most super basic question (and you'll see that, though I love musicals, I'm a complete musical theater teaching newbie!). How do I go about choosing the solos, duets, and choral work?? What resources do I mine? Yup. Embarrassingly basic!

There's a helpful post here on where to get sheet music; do you have other suggestions?

Do you personally use any books you love for musical theater history? What about books for "how to teach musical theater"??

Do you have a syllabus for a similar course you could share? I'd love to see ideas for how to go about teaching a class like this.

Thank you!!


------------------------------
Arden Thomas
Teaching Artist, Theater
Sequoyah High School
Pasadena CA
------------------------------

Original Message------

My high school is very small (90 kids right now) and only two years old. Last year 7-8 students came out to perform Twelfth NIght and AntigoneX by Paula Cizmar (highly recommended!), and this year 15 students are performing in Almost, Maine. Very exciting! Next year we'll be doing our first musical (still not sure which one yet), so in February-April I'm getting them ready by teaching a Musical Theater Performance class, focusing on vocal work, acting while singing, dancing, and an overview of American musical theater history. At the end of this class we'll have a showcase of solos, duets, and choral work from musicals; I'm going to call it A Night Out on Broadway. 

Here's my most super basic question (and you'll see that, though I love musicals, I'm a complete musical theater teaching newbie!). How do I go about choosing the solos, duets, and choral work?? What resources do I mine? Yup. Embarrassingly basic! 

There's a helpful post here on where to get sheet music; do you have other suggestions?

Do you personally use any books you love for musical theater history? What about books for "how to teach musical theater"??

Do you have a syllabus for a similar course you could share? I'd love to see ideas for how to go about teaching a class like this.

Thank you!!


------------------------------
Arden Thomas
Teaching Artist, Theater
Sequoyah High School
Pasadena CA
------------------------------

You received so many good suggestions.  I have taught in a small rural school for years, and I have done several musicals and a few musical revues.  For the revues, I have had students sign up for solos, groups, duos, or dance numbers.  If they had something in mind, I ordered the music for them, and we worked on it together.  Sometimes I pull up Youtube videos of my <g class="gr_ gr_739 gr-alert gr_spell gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim ContextualSpelling multiReplace" id="739" data-gr-id="739">favorite</g> show tunes and show them to students.  When I used to ACTUALLY HAVE a drama class, I showed them several scenes and songs from great musicals!  You and your students will have such fun working on this!

------------------------------
Janette Clark
Drama Teacher
Minneapolis KS
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-31-2017 12:02
From: Arden Thomas
Subject: super basic questions for musical theater selections

My high school is very small (90 kids right now) and only two years old. Last year 7-8 students came out to perform Twelfth NIght and AntigoneX by Paula Cizmar (highly recommended!), and this year 15 students are performing in Almost, Maine. Very exciting! Next year we'll be doing our first musical (still not sure which one yet), so in February-April I'm getting them ready by teaching a Musical Theater Performance class, focusing on vocal work, acting while singing, dancing, and an overview of American musical theater history. At the end of this class we'll have a showcase of solos, duets, and choral work from musicals; I'm going to call it A Night Out on Broadway.

Here's my most super basic question (and you'll see that, though I love musicals, I'm a complete musical theater teaching newbie!). How do I go about choosing the solos, duets, and choral work?? What resources do I mine? Yup. Embarrassingly basic!

There's a helpful post here on where to get sheet music; do you have other suggestions?

Do you personally use any books you love for musical theater history? What about books for "how to teach musical theater"??

Do you have a syllabus for a similar course you could share? I'd love to see ideas for how to go about teaching a class like this.

Thank you!!


------------------------------
Arden Thomas
Teaching Artist, Theater
Sequoyah High School
Pasadena CA
------------------------------

I'd like to make a different type of suggestion for creating your upcoming musical theatre class and Night Out on Broadway: Could you set up an internship process (not for pay) for a local college student to be a musical theatre consultant for your program?  There are such great MT training schools in your area! Someone from UCLA, CSU Northridge, Chapman, USC, for instance, who could spend x hours a week at your school helping to develop musical theatre repertoire and performance techniques with your students?  This could be a win-win situation, with great resources for you and your students, and nothing out-of-pocket for you, and great experience and resume-building items for the intern you select.  Together you and the students and the intern could begin to build a resource bank of songs, websites, backing track resources (who's going to be accompanying your students when they perform?) and so on. 

I'm wondering - will your program have expert voice teaching attached to it?  As a voice teacher, vocal coach, and college performing arts counselor, I can say that there are MANY MANY HS students, usually girls, who tend to sing MT music in all belt sound. That's not great preparation for those who may be hoping to head towards college MT programs and/or a career. 

Speaking of accompaniments, here's an app that could be helpful: http://www.appcompanist.com/

Break a leg!

------------------------------
Amy Goldin, Counselor
COPA Inc.: College Options in the Performing Arts
www.performingartsoptions.com
516-674-6116
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-31-2017 12:02
From: Arden Thomas
Subject: Super basic questions for musical theater selections

My high school is very small (90 kids right now) and only two years old. Last year 7-8 students came out to perform Twelfth NIght and AntigoneX by Paula Cizmar (highly recommended!), and this year 15 students are performing in Almost, Maine. Very exciting! Next year we'll be doing our first musical (still not sure which one yet), so in February-April I'm getting them ready by teaching a Musical Theater Performance class, focusing on vocal work, acting while singing, dancing, and an overview of American musical theater history. At the end of this class we'll have a showcase of solos, duets, and choral work from musicals; I'm going to call it A Night Out on Broadway.

Here's my most super basic question (and you'll see that, though I love musicals, I'm a complete musical theater teaching newbie!). How do I go about choosing the solos, duets, and choral work?? What resources do I mine? Yup. Embarrassingly basic!

There's a helpful post here on where to get sheet music; do you have other suggestions?

Do you personally use any books you love for musical theater history? What about books for "how to teach musical theater"??

Do you have a syllabus for a similar course you could share? I'd love to see ideas for how to go about teaching a class like this.

Thank you!!


------------------------------
Arden Thomas
Teaching Artist, Theater
Sequoyah High School
Pasadena CA
------------------------------