Shoshana Greenberg

Friday night, October 12, the choir I sing in, Essential Voices USA, sang in the New York Pops concert, Some Enchanted Evening: The Music of Rodgers and Hammerstein, with soloists Kelli O’Hara, Paulo Szot, and Aaron Lazar. The experience was wonderful and a bit surreal. The following day I watched the film The Sound of Music with my four-year-old babysitting charge and wondered if I really sang those songs on the stage of Carnegie Hall the night before. Here are ten takeaways from this experience:

1. The prologue to The Sound of Music film is a beautiful piece of music. I never really listen to it because when it’s playing I’m distracted by Salzburg and the Alps. Listening to it without the visuals allowed me to really hear the shimmering music.

2. Whenever you can, sit near a harpist. I had that opportunity once before in the first row at the Met for Lucia di Lammermoor (which has an exquisite harp solo), and Friday night I was close enough to the harpist to watch her pluck the strings and hear her part.

3. Speaking of individual instrumental parts, I was behind the clarinetist and could clearly hear all his parts. As a former violist, it was great to be so close to an orchestra again. In the audience it’s difficult to pick out the parts–you hear the whole–but sitting where we were it was easier to focus on different parts.

4. Funny line I never much thought of: “There are no books like a dame.” from “There is Nothing Like a Dame” from South Pacific.
Nope, there aren’t.

5. “This Nearly Was Mine.” I know I’ve heard this song before, but sometimes it takes a few times to really understand how beautiful something is.
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Just last week I was talking with a few musical theater writers, and the topic of “people to watch” and “people you should know” list came up. I said that those list make me want to quit musical theater. Today, I woke up to an article on Playbill’s website titled, “PLAYBILL PICKS: The Contemporary Musical Theatre Songwriters You Should Know, Part One.”

I’m not angry about the specific people on this list (or, really, any list). Some of them are friends, and all of them are talented and work hard. I do, however, object to the fact that we must have these lists at all because they create a clubhouse mentality, with Playbill.com in this case deciding who’s in the club. It also doesn’t help matters that for Playbill, the clubhouse is entirely white men.

It’s a shame Playbill could not be more creative not only with this list but with their features. “People you should know” lists, with their insular nature, are only detrimental to theater artists and the theater community. So many exciting and diverse musical theater writers are out there trying to be seen and heard, and I wish these news outlets would work to tear down walls, not construct them.

A song of mine (with composer Jeffrey Dennis Smith) is in this concert tonight. The song, “My Name is Mildred Loving,” has only been performed one other time, so I’m looking forward to seeing/hearing it performed again. The song is inspired by this article from The New York Times Magazine in December of 2008 about the life of Mildred Loving.