Broadway Teacher’s Workshop

“ On Your Feet”

“ On Your Feet” is the classic rags to riches story of Gloria and Emilio Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine.  The story takes Gloria from a child in Miami singing with her guitar, entertaining her Abuela as she helps out the family, to her meteoric rise to musical fame with the help, management and of course, love, of her partner and manager Emilio Estefan.  One of the first scenes hits every emotional chord: her father is in Vietnam and is listening to a tape she has sent him in his barracks.  If you are a parent, you are aching for his longing for her, and his pride of her talent.  

The conflict is clear and realistic from the beginning.  How will the band make it on the American pop scene?  Is their music too Latin?  Is their music becoming too American for the Latin market?  At a key moment, Emilio says to their manager, “Look at this face.  This is the face of America now.”  The second conflict is also a part of her real story.  She had an accident that almost destroyed her career, and took her many months to recover.  There is great triumph in her final return, and the salsa dancing, flashy costumes and upbeat, popular Estefan songs bring us to emotional heights and depths that I did not expect from this show.  

Ana Villafane plays the role of Gloria Estefan, in her Broadway debut show.  It is uncanny how much she looks and sounds like Gloria Estefan.  In the post-production talkback she told us how she has worked on this.  Gloria Estefan spoke with her and shared a few of her performing secrets before shows, which Ana did.  She said Gloria’s  voice is naturally like Ana’s in her lower register, although she says she is a soprano, and Gloria is an alto.  It is clear she has learned Gloria’s way of moving, as this adds to the character she has created in the show.  She is clearly a first class actress, appropriating Gloria’s whole persona.  

Ektor Rivera, who plays Emilio, is charismatic on stage, has great chemistry with his Gloria, and moves beautifully.  His smoky voice is tender and shows great delicacy in the ballads.  He shows strength when it is needed in the moments he has to push Gloria to recover from her accident.  The scene in the hospital with Gloria’s mother is a turning point in the show.  Up to this point, there is mostly fast-moving staging, heart-stopping Latin dancing, a humorous tryst with the love declaration of the Estefans, and all of a sudden we are alone in a room with Gloria unconscious in the bed, and Emilio and Gloria’s mother facing unspoken resentment.  Timing of the lines, facial expressions, and then the final duet all contribute to an arresting portrayal of love, hope, and fear bringing two people together at a moment of crisis.

In the post-show discussion we learned that the show’s direction evolved drastically from the Chicago pre-Broadway version.  In the original version, it begins with the bus accident, and goes back in time from there.  The director believed, and rightly so, that this became too confusing for the audience, and this new version is streamlined, clear and very easy to follow.  There are scenes that are perhaps too cliche.  For example, when Gloria begins the scene not able to dance, and six minutes later, she dances like a professional?  A little pat.  At the beginning of the show, Gloria and Emilio are arguing before she goes on stage.  This appears trite and unrealistic.  It is obvious that it is a foreshadowing of the bus accident later on: Emilio is trying to get Gloria to take the bus to visit someone, and she is trying to convince him that she is too exhausted to travel.  The lines are trite, but moreover the acting is stilted in this scene.  The love scene between Gloria and Emilio in the bodega is also trite, obvious and not developed at all.  It is simply a vehicle for the next song.  

The director is clearly a dancer, as most of the direction is about preparation for the dancing, or dancing itself.  The dancing and the band carries the show.  It was a great decision to have the band on-stage for most of the show.  It is tight and joyous,  and a wonderful tribute to Miami Sound Machine, which was innovative and destroying ethnic barriers at the time.  It reminds us of what the show is about.  The director has every song show us the beauty and intensity of salsa, bachata, with the costumes to go with it.  He directs Gloria’s best songs with the band playing with her, and getting the audience clapping and wanting to get up and dance along with them.  He directs the conga song at the bar mitzvah to go into the audience and with a little boy flying around on-stage and then jumping into the audience as well.  You are not only mesmerized by the music and dancing, you become immersed in it and a part of it.  

The panels worked really well as scene designs.  The panels slide back and forth across the stage, but are not full sets.  They only take up a third of the stage, and are sometimes showing two places at once.  This design element gave the show flexibility with all the places it needed to go: Vietnam, Cuba, Miami, New York.  It also allowed for the quieter interior moments: in the hospital, with Gloria’s physical therapy, in the kitchen with her mother, in her father’s bedroom.  There are beautiful, colorful designs projected onto these panels, which correspond beautifully to the swirling skirts and flashy dancing by Sergio Trujillo.  They also show great contrast between the big performance numbers with Gloria and the band, and the intimate family portraits, like the scene where Gloria speaks of her love of Emilio and her father is in bed, unable to respond.  

Finally, I never bought an album of Gloria Estefan’s music, but I knew every single song that was sung in the show.  Why is that?  We learn from the show that the Estefans did everything they could to get their songs played on the radio.  I have always listened to a great deal of radio and now I understand so much better why I always loved their songs.   The contrast between the flashiness of the choreography and the intimate portrayal of a young woman declaring her independence from her overprotective mother is poignant, exciting and heart-wrenching.  The immigrant success story is slightly glossed over but the message is emphasized through the spectacular Latin dancing and the awesome rhythmic soundscapes of the band on stage.  For a jukebox musical, this one does everything you would want it to do:  Immerse you in the culture of the music, teach you about the singers and songwriters, and remind you of the importance of family and how they support you through it all.

Acting and Interpreting a Song- BTW

Broadway Teacher’s Workshop

Acting/Interpreting Song

Susan Frank

http://www.peterflynndirector.com/about/

Peter Flynn has had a long career working with actors and singers interpreting songs.  I appreciated the fact that he did not stand and lecture to the group.  He brought four singer/actors, and an accompanist to demonstrate his techniques.  He brought a duet to be interpreted by two seasoned performers and a duet to be interpreted by two young student performers.  When I saw them waiting for him to introduce them, it brought me right back to my time in graduate school when I was studying opera, and we would attend workshops for interpreting song.  I remember how nervous I used to be when it was my turn to perform, and how wonderful it was to work with someone like Peter Flynn, who had a wealth of knowledge and experience, but who created a safe space in the room for experimentation.  

The first duet was from “City of Angels” and called “The Tennis Song”.  I was interested that Peter Flynn did not give us the score of the song, he gave us the book with the stage directions in it.  He explained that he writes in stage directions just in case the performers have no idea what to do in a certain place.  It would have been more helpful for me to have the musical score for the songs as my focus is always the music and how it relates to the action and moving the story forward.  Again, this comes from my background in opera, so it was a slightly different take on interpretation of song.  These artistic pieces we are talking about are called “musicals” for a reason.  They are not called “plays with songs”, because the music is instrumental in carrying the emotion and pathos of the story.  

The singers sang the song twice, and Flynn did not give them very much direction the first time.  He told them where to stand at the beginning, but then let them see where the song would go.  The song plays many jokes on tennis being a metaphor for sex.  I found the song dated and sexist, and the singers were not always on pitch or even all that committed to the piece.  Flynn was completely in the moment, and invested in sharing his work with us, but this couple was disappointing and stilted.  It was early in the day, so they might not have been warmed up, but that was what I was thinking about throughout this section of the workshop.  Flynn shared that it would be a collaboration about specificity and authenticity, but in my mind, for these two performers, there was nothing authentic about this duet, or their portrayal of it, it was just tawdry and uncomfortable.  

The second piece, on the other hand, was from “The Fantasticks”.  The song that these young performers sang was “Soon it’s gonna Rain”.  They were singing a song about two people who are only fifteen, and they were quite young, only in their early twenties.  Again, Flynn allowed them to sing the song together and interpret it first their own way.  It was sweet, they were committed and poignant in their portrayal, but not polished.  

Flynn then began to ask them questions.  Why did you do this?  How old are you?  What is the story?  What is your ultimate goal?  What do you want?  He was insistent if he thought the students were evading the questions.  He got them to find their way in a true, emotionally generous and authentic way.  She is fifteen, she wants him to hold her, she wants him to protect her from all the ills of the world.  He wants her to allow him to kiss her.  This was about proximity, which is a huge element in stage direction and in singing, a complicated but essential dichotomy.  It reminded me how important it is when I am directing a song to ask leading questions, that push the performer to move organically, not from the outside.  Flynn kept coming back to authenticity and specificity, which stayed with me, and will stay with me from now on in my stage directing.  

When the young performers sang the duet the second time, I cried.  They were so much more committed, their tone was better, the young man sang with much more conviction.  The transformation was almost immediate.  Her expressions and hand gestures became motivated completely from within, and when they came together at the end, it was perfectly awkward, as two fifteen year-olds in love would be.  This experience made me realize how important it is to ask questions, to allow experimentation, and to support my young performers in their quest for their own interpretation of a character.  Less is more:  Flynn only needed this duet to drive home how to create an emotional moment in an authentic, collaborative fashion.  

Broadway Teacher's Workshop Day 2 #1

Broadway Teacher’s Workshop- Day #2

Choreography for Everyone

Susan Frank

Patrick O’Neill is the associate choreographer for “School of Rock” on Broadway.  I took this class for a couple of reasons, one of which is that I work with middle school students each year on a musical, and my role is to do the music and the choreography for the show.  I have been fortunate to have many students who have had many years of experience in dance sign up to be in my shows, but occasionally there are students who know nothing and are very shy about movement.  What do you do with these students, and how do you make them feel like they can be successful in the dance numbers as well?  

Patrick talked about the structure of a song, and how that can help you create choreography.  He called it the “sonic architecture” of a piece.  He wanted us to get back to the actual music of a piece, that says so much about how to frame the choreography for it.  For example, “A Very Unusual Way” from “Nine” tells the story of one of Fellini’s mistresses who is trying to break up with him, but is obviously very ambivalent about it.  Patrick  asked us, “Does anyone know anything about C# minor?”  I immediately raised my hand and explained that it is a sad key, that has a lot of sharps, and that also has a lot of complications in it.  The person who sings the song will have some intense emotions and profound revelations possibly.  

He explained that you wouldn’t necessarily choreograph a slow song like this, but it is a good example of how to look at the sonic architecture of the song.  He was impressed, it turns out, by how much I knew about music, so I answered the question about the “suspension” which is when a leading tone leads into the tonic note, and also shows great emotion.  The bridge, which only happens once, has g#major and f#minor, that goes back and forth, and this shows her ambivalence about letting go of this relationship.  The song ends on a final chord, and it is a Major chord, the only major chord progression in the whole piece. This finally shows that she has come to a resolution about the relationship.  

The next piece he discussed with us was “Slap that Bass” from “Crazy for You”.  He said you can create a road map by looking at the musical structure, and by defining the purpose of what you are trying to accomplish with the dance.  He had people get up and help him create this dance to show the importance of never forgetting that you are continuing to tell the story with the dance.  This was incredibly helpful, because when you look at a five minute song, you can become completely overwhelmed by it.  Thoughts go through your head like, “How will I find steps for this entire song?”  Patrick’s idea is that you can use up a great deal of the song if you listen to the music and create a mood with simple hand gestures, or just a way of moving across the stage, or facial expressions that go with the words.  

The last piece he worked on was the dream ballet from “Oklahoma”.  He did this because it is incredibly long, and full of sections of the piece that you should pay attention to to help you create choreography that all ability levels can remember and follow.  The other point is that it is also refreshing for the audience not to have to look at serious dancing throughout all the long musical numbers.  It was really helpful to be reminded to go back to the sonic architecture of the music.  

Even with a music degree, I sometimes forget the importance of keeping in touch with the musical structure to create the dance.  I think about the lyrics too much, and the dancing becomes forced and over-wrought.  It was extremely helpful that Patrick noticed me as an expert, used my knowledge to help the whole class, and in return helped me get back to my own roots as a classical singer and pianist.  At the beginning of the second day, I had just begun to feel slightly out of place in the workshop, and with this class, it made me feel rejuvenated and gave me renewed encouragement about using my own expertise to create choreography.  

Broadway Teacher's Workshop #2- Reflection

I have earned an A in my course as of yesterday, so I am going to continue to share with you the work I did for that class.  It was such a great experience, and I want everyone to know about it! I hope you enjoy these reflections and critiques of Broadway Teacher's Workshop!

Broadway Teacher’s Workshop- Day #1

Second workshop- “On Your Feet”

Susan Frank

Maria Torres is the associate choreographer for the show, “On Your Feet” about Gloria and Emilio Estefan.  This workshop took us through learning a combination for the show.  She then had us experience an audition process the way it happens on Broadway.  Maria has had a wealth of experience dancing and choreographing on Broadway.  She is articulate, quick-witted, she is honest about the world of Broadway dancing.  She had us moving, jumping, feeling, and letting go of our inhibitions right away in this class.  

Maria gave us the historical background for the show.  This was extremely helpful, to know why we were dancing in this part of the show, and what we needed to know to get us right into the flow of the piece.  She created rows for us to dance in, which she had us move through and switch each time, so we would all experience the front row.  She talked to us about the Afro-Cuban style of dancing, which is very different from any other style.  Even before we learned the choreography and dance steps, she had us get a feeling for the style.  She had us feel our lower center of gravity, she had us feel the music, and especially the rhythms, which are the most important part of the music in this case.  

She got us to feel very comfortable in our bodies, and not be embarrassed about our shapes, or our possible limitations.  She spoke about famous choreographers, like Bob Fosse, who would create choreography based upon his limitations as he got older, that is where his inimitable style emerged from!  She smiled at us warmly, and encouraged us to enjoy the movement, more than anything else, which helped us open up and get the most out of the experience.  She shared her own limitations, and her own struggles over the years with her non-traditional dancer’s body.  This also made me feel a sense of acceptance for my own contributions to the class.  

Maria then shared with us the choreography for the audition.  Her technique of teaching the choreography was classic, teaching eight counts at a time.  However, since we had learned  and worked with the style first, before learning the actual steps, this part was easy.  She gave us ample time to practice the steps as groups, and to play with individualizing the choreography.  She wanted us to put our own personal stamp on the steps.  She first taught the steps going straight up and down and back and forth in the room.  This helped us get our bearings, another really good technique.  After that, she had us experience the dance the actual way it would work, on the diagonal.  This is more difficult for finding and maintaining your personal space, but because we first learned the choreography straight back and forth, it was not as difficult as it could have been.  I would use this technique from now on when I teach dances for my middle school musicals.  

Finally, Maria began the cuts the way she would if she were auditioning us for the show.  This might have been incredibly nerve-wracking and anxiety-provoking.  However, Maria gave us so much encouragement, through her smiles, and specific, helpful feedback, that it made the experience very positive and a great learning experience.  She got us to rise up out of ourselves, and truly put every inch of our energy, personality, and emotion into this short piece.  She is not only a great choreographer, but a great teacher.  She noticed what we did well, and reminded us of that, and then helped us to go further with our movements and steps.  

I would use all these techniques in my teaching.  It is so important for students in middle school to feel accepted, and to feel comfortable and supported in their bodies, in their thoughts and feelings.  It is essential that we share with them what they do well, and capitalize on those positive things, to help our students stretch themselves further.  It is essential that we help our students see the challenges that might face them in the real world, as Maria did for us with this audition, but also encourage them at every step, no matter what the level.

I noticed so many very introverted people in this class really open up and throw themselves into the dance by the end of the short class.  This is a tribute to Maria’s teaching: her joy in all shapes and sizes and ages of bodies, her expressive qualities and modeling of the work, her intense encouragement of all our contributions to the class.  Teachers in all disciplines could improve their skills by observing her techniques: Immediate involvement, background information, use of space, encouragement, scrutiny with thoughtful feedback.