Seth Rudetsky's Head Vs. Chest 101...

I'm not entirely sure I agree with his assessment here, because though Andrea McArdle is using her chest voice, she does mix some head voice in on the higher register. If she didn't it would come out really thick and forced as when you TRULY use your chest voice your vocal chords stay thickened and closer together. Pure head tone the cricothyroid muscle comes in to play, stretching the vocal chords, thinning them and separating them. That is how she gets that resonate tone at the top of the song! Either way, it gets the idea across.

Fred Astaire - "Say It With Firecrackers"

I am on a dance kick as of late, so here is one of my favorite numbers from Holiday Inn (1942) with some insight into Fred Astaire's thought process behind it. It took him 3 days of rehearsals. At the end his shoes were auctioned off to support the Naval Relief Society, fetching $116,000. I cannot write this any better than he could, so here is a paragraph from Astaire's Steps in Time autobiography.

"I had a solo dance that paid off for me. The firecracker number, in which I threw torpedoes to explode in a rhythmic conglomeration with my feet, took an awful lot of planning and rehearsing. I also had the stage wired to set off what looked like strings of firecrackers with visible flashes as I stepped in certain spots. It was a great satisfaction, that dance, being able to explode things expressing emphasis on beats here and there. Sometimes you want to bang your feet down so hard in a tap dance that you get shin-bucked or stone-bruised. In this one I had a completely satisfactory outlet with those dynamic noises"

Singin' In The Rain

This is just one of those clips you need to see. It is currently raining milk on Gene Kelly so the "rain" would show up on film. Poor guy!

Humor, without the Vulgarity - Make 'Em Laugh

"Make 'em Laugh" is from Singing in the Rain which was a 1952 musical film before it was a musical (1985- Gershwin Theater-367 performances) . I have no idea how Donald O'Connor survived doing the staging for this number. It is incredible. I think the character Cosmo was trying to get across that you can do many great things; be an amazing dancer, a great Shakespearean actor, do incredibly difficult things for people, but sometimes people just need to laugh. Life cannot always be serious. Cosmo illustrates this for a great deal of time, doing simple things, doing the exact thing you think he is going to do, and then having the complete opposite thing you expect happen to him. Sometimes entertaining is not about the seriousness or the story line. Sometimes entertaining people is moving them to laughter at the time they really need it. And sometimes you realize the general population does not want serious - it wants instant gratification. Either way, Cosmo is saying "Go out and have fun doing it!"

Family Tree - Cute and not well known!

Julie Andrews, Gene Kelly, and a whole lot of fun

A Thought About Song Preparation

I was recently reading an article on Christiane Noll - a question and answer type of article. Christiane is one of those artists that gets every bit of life out of the song. Many times, like she did in Ragtime, she finds different angles or bits of the song that people formerly blew over. In the article, which I now can't find, she talked about how she separated out the preparation. There is the music, the ebb and flow, the music line, and the technical work behind that. Most singers at her level do not have to work at that because they have fined tuned their instrument to the point where it will naturally do what it should. She looks at the text - the whole and the individual, and then takes the text out of the music. She said something to the affect that her next step of preparation was to tell the whole story without the lyrics - to do it only through the music and her acting. And that is how she gets the performance she gets! Amazing! She's also hysterical!