Getting Butts in Seats

As many of you know, I'm doing a concert in Los Angeles this weekend. (Here's the info.) I've done tons of these concerts over the years, mostly in New York, and this one coming up isn't really all that different from the ones I've done in the past. Except it's totally different. As a result of having done these events so often in New York, I have a list of NY actors who know my songs and I've been able to call on them over and over again to do the songs they know at event after event. (Thanks, Keith.) I have musicians in NY who know the tunes and have played them before, so we tend to have "brush-up" rehearsals in preparation for a concert. I have a trusty fan-base there, too, and I know the theater community well-enough to gauge how many tickets I might be able to sell for a Saturday night concert instead of a Monday night concert, for example.

But here in LA, everything's different. Most of my singers are learning songs specifically for this event, so we're meeting as often as possible for coachings and rehearsals. They want to be really secure in their lyrics and I want to be sure they're getting the gist of what I intended the songs to be. I'm burning CDs of my tunes for the band. They've got their work cut out for them, too, learning all that new material. We have a three-hour rehearsal on Friday and then a sound-check on Saturday and that's it. Some of their charts are really well-notated and the parts are beautifully copied, and other charts just look like chicken scratch because I scribbled them out the night before some big deadline and never went back to make them look beautiful. (Note to self: go back and make everything look beautiful.)

The big difference now is that the CD exists. I've never had that before -- where I can say to the band, "just listen to track eight and you'll hear how it goes." It's amazing the short-hand that CD provides. And it's really, really exciting.

I haven't really been tracking the sales of the CD yet. I'll get a statement somewhere down the line that tells me how many albums I've sold (how many from iTunes, how many from other sources, etc.) but I haven't seen it yet. For now I'm really just relying on the Amazon sales rank and the posts you guys are leaving on this website and on Amazon and iTunes and Facebook and MySpace... Okay, I'm just a little bit obsessed, but the whole idea of putting your music out in the world and knowing that people are listening to it in their cars and on their iPods and in their dorm rooms still kind of wigs me out. I know I've got my absolute favorite albums in the world and I've certainly never sent emails to those artists (Billy Preston? Blossom Dearie? The Indigo Girls? Janacek?) and told them how often I enjoy listening to their music. Still, how much do you think Janacek would have liked to have gotten a "Way to go, dude!" email from me?

Anyway, all this to say that the obsessive part of me wants the tickets sales to be good for Saturday night and knows it's going to be a truly fantastic evening. And the LA newbie doesn't yet know exactly how to get in touch with her local fanbase and guarantee that their butts will be in the seats. Fingers crossed.

ANNOUNCING THE GYM

Los Angeles-based Music Director Georgia Stitt and Director Michael Jaeger announce THE GYM, a musical theater class for working musical theater actors in Los Angeles.

Check out our website here.

Six weeks. Tuesday nights. 7-10 pm. July 3, 10, 17, 24, 31 and August 7. Location TBA.

After five successful years of classes in New York, THE GYM is heading west. In 2002 Director/Choreographer John Ruocco and Musical Director/Composer Georgia Stitt founded THE GYM as an alternative to traditional acting classes and coachings in response to the very real need expressed to them by friends and colleagues in the performing arts.

John and Georgia realized there was a whole category of actors — professionals with credits and experience — who simply needed a non-pressured, supportive and driven work-space (which also provided feedback and discussion) in which to practice their craft. They quickly learned that this forum was also extremely appealing and beneficial for young professionals at the beginning of their careers. The combination of seasoned actors and emerging artists created a dynamic and creative environment offering great perspective and support.

Using their experience as private coaches and educators, John and Georgia created a model that allowed the participant to design his own course of study or to choose her own point of concentration. The class structure is very simple. Each session meets once a week for three hours. Each of the eight participants is assigned twenty minutes a night and may opt to work on anything he or she chooses-- new material, existing repertoire, audition pieces and monologues, musical theater sides, solo performances, or burgeoning cabaret acts. Students have used class to develop or revamp audition books for musical theater and to prepare for graduate school auditions. Performers have used the forum to help them make the often difficult transition from Ingénue to Leading Lady or Leading Man to Character Actor. Opera singers have explored Pop Songs while Vocal Stylists have started telling stories. The possibilities are limitless and each session confirms the opportunity and value of THE GYM concept.

In the five years since THE GYM began, over 200 people have participated in either classes or workshops. THE GYM is a living class experience that grows and changes with each performer. GYM Alumni are a vital and active part of the class and community and often have gone on to accomplish extraordinary things.

Whether you are trying out new material, coaching old favorites or pushing your own limits, there’s always something to work on at THE GYM.

For more information, please visit our website. See you at the GYM!

Georgia

The Promise of Light

In addition to the musical theater tunes that probably led you to this site, there is, it turns out, other music of mine out in the world. When I was in high school I sang in my church choir. I had been the piano accompanist for various church choirs since I was fourteen, and I grew to be the accompanist at times for the chorus at my school, and ultimately for the All-State (Tennessee) choir festival, the TN Gay Men's Chorus, and the Rye (NY) Country Day School choir on their international tours of Japan and Italy. I have been breathing choral music, especially sacred pieces, since I was a kid. Once I got to college I really didn't have time to commit to being in a choir, and I found I missed it. I'm an okay singer on my own, but I'm great in an alto section.

I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually start writing choral music, even though my main focus turned long ago to writing for the musical theater. Of course, there are huge amounts of choral writing in the work I do for the theater, and a basic understanding of the human voice is key in both disciplines. I have always said what interests me most as a writer is figuring out how to use music and text to convey an emotion or tell a story, and the abilities to do that exist in both fields.

I discovered the poet Christina Rossetti when I was a sophomore at Vanderbilt, and I loved her poems so much. She was so passionate, so soulful. She captured such a sense of longing and emptiness, yet managed to celebrate her spirituality, too. I set her poem "Echo" for women's chorus that year in school and asked a bunch of my female voice-major friends to form a chorus to sing it on a recital for me. I didn't realize at the time how hard it was, and even though in my ear it's melodic and significant, the music I wrote at that point in my life doesn't really bear any resemblance to the music I write now. I think in college we often write things that are difficult just because we feel we have something to prove.

A few years later I came back to Ms. Rossetti and I set another poem of hers, "A Better Resurrection." My friend and colleague Reverend Jay Wegman, who was at the time serving at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, said if I finished it he would program it, and I believe we premiered it on my 30th birthday in that most gorgeous space in New York City. Last year Walton Music published the sheet music and my career as a choral music composer was launched. You can hear a recording of the piece here.

Walton Music has just released their 2007-2008 catalog and included in their offering is a new choral piece I wrote with lyricist Len Schiff (a collaborator of mine from NYU grad school days). The piece is called "The Promise Of Light" and it was our attempt (after many tries) to write something secular and yet still reverent about the December holiday season. Here are Len's beautiful lyrics, and you can hear a recording of the piece here.

AUGUST WAS YOUR SWEETEST MONTH,
BEAUTIFUL AND BRIGHT;
SEPTEMBER BURNED,
OCTOBER TURNED
INTO NOVEMBER'S NIGHT.
SO YOU WRAP YOURSELF IN WOOL AND DOWN
AND DECEMBER DONS HER MIDNIGHT GOWN
WITH A SNOWY CAPE AND A STARRY CROWN
AND YOU SETTLE IN FOR WINTER.

WINTER'S HEART IS COLD AND DARK,
BITTER AND SEVERE,
BUT WHEN THE SHROUDS
OF SNOW AND CLOUDS
DEPART, THE MOON IS NEAR.
AND YOUR FACE IS WASHED IN SILVER BEAMS,
THE SIDEWALKS SHINE LIKE FROZEN STREAMS
AND THE STREETLAMPS GLOW, AND THE CITY DREAMS...

SO BLOW WIND
AND FALL THE SNOW
YOU WILL WALK INTO THE NIGHT.
YOU'LL SPREAD YOUR ARMS
AND TIP YOUR FACE
TOWARDS THE GRACE AND THE PROMISE
OF LIGHT.

LONELY AS A PILGRIM
IN A COUNTRY FAR FROM HOME
LOOKING FOR SALVATION
IN A TOWN OF STEEL AND CHROME,
YOU NEED INDIGO AND VIOLET SKIES,
YOU NEED POOLS OF MOONLIGHT IN YOUR EYES
FOR THE SUN TO SET; FOR YOUR SOUL TO RISE.

AND SO YOU CLIMB
ON STREAMS OF FREEZING AIR
OVER TREES, OVER BUILDINGS
OVER CARE...

SO BLOW WIND
AND FALL THE SNOW
YOU WILL SOAR INTO THE NIGHT
YOU'LL SPREAD YOUR ARMS
AND SET YOUR COURSE
TOWARDS THE SOURCE AND THE PROMISE
OF LIGHT.

If you know of a choir that would enjoy working on this piece, the sheet music is available at sheetmusicplus.com.

City On Fire

A few nights ago I sat in my living room and watched on TV a fire that was ravaging over 800 acres of land less than four miles from my house. Griffith Park was burning, and while I wasn't one of the homes right on the perimeter of the park I could see the smoke billowing over the hills above my neighborhood. The smell in the air was reminiscent of old campfires where you used to sit around and toast marshmallows, and if you were lucky someone had brough a guitar and could actually harmonize with you. Only it was magnified by a thousand percent. And not nearly as pleasant. And there were not s'mores at the end.

I'm being flip, but in that scary evening I felt real panic. I now know that a fire's burning through four miles of city streets is much more difficult than its burning through 800 acres of wild brush. I now understand that, dry though it is in this city right now, the fire would have had to jump a city freeway AND the LA river in order to get to my house. But in the wee small hours of that long night, I was making my list.

You don't know until you've had to make it. But the question is: if you woke up in the middle of the night as someone banged on your door and told you to evacuate because your house was about to catch on fire, what would you take with you?

For, me there were only a few things. Grab the child. Grab the dog. Grab the laptop. In that order. If there's another second, grab the passports and the birth certificates and the marriage license. If there is really time -- an hour or two -- there are pieces of original sheet music. Maybe some spare diapers, some bottles of water. Who knows how long we'll be or where we'll wind up? And, oddly enough, I thought I might need the cell phone charger because people would be trying to call and what if my cell phone died? And then... that was it. I looked around the house and I couldn't think of anything else that we couldn't replace or wouldn't need immediately.

It was a shocking revelation. We are a country that rewards the accumulation of stuff. I can't go on a trip without overstuffing a suitcase and worrying that maybe I've exceeded the baggage weight limit. And yet, when you really get down to it, it's just stuff. Books. CDs. Baby's toys. Exercise gear. Tables. Pots and pans. Clothes.

As midnight rolled around I turned off the TV (reluctantly), locked all the doors and fell asleep in my comfy bed. By morning, the fire was more or less under control and I felt silly that I had been so worried.

It's Not Easy Being Green

Here's the first of many fun facts about me you probably didn't know. I grew up in a solar house. My father is one of those guys who is good with figuring out how things work, and for about four years in the early eighties he built solar houses with his brother. They started this business together long before it was hip to be green. In the fifth grade I did my science fair project on something called "passive solar design" and I explained all these ways that you can build energy efficiency into the architecture of your house. There are really simple things you can do -- like opening the blinds in the morning when the sunlight comes in and closing them at dusk so the day's accumulated warmth stays inside -- that take little effort but actually make a difference. I think I may even have won the science fair that year (which really says more about the lame projects other people did than anything else) and the concepts I outlined in my project have long stuck with me.

I want so much to be a "green" person. I watched "Planet Earth" on the Discovery Channel this week and it blew my mind. It's not an overtly political show like Al Gore's movie was; rather it focuses on observing and documenting the cycles of nature. Well, at least this one episode did. You all have probably seen more of this series than I have. In the first ten minutes of this particular episode there's a scene where a baby caribou gets separated from the mommy caribou and winds up getting eaten by ... what was it? ... a wolf, I think. I was launched into hysterics. Mommies separated from babies? Babies getting eaten by wolves? It's too much to handle. I declared myself a vegetarian (I'm not) and swore to start saving up for a hybrid car. This is a crazy world, people.

I'm not prone to these kinds of exaggerations, really. I tend to be very even. People often tell me that I seem calm, chill, balanced. A few nights later I even ordered a steak. But I can't stop thinking about how little I'm actually doing to preserve what good there is left in the environment. Some comments, you guys -- what do you do?

I said I wanted to include in these blogs some things every week that have caught my attention. So here ya go. A look inside the very distractable mind of Georgia Stitt.

1. GreenDimes. Yes, you have to pay to join, but it's not super expensive and they take you off the mailing lists of all those annoying catalogs that you don't want. Save a tree.

2. Sleeping Beauty Wakes is a show written by my friends in the band Groovelily and it's the most moving, magical thing I've seen in a long time.

3. These are the best slippers in the whole world. Thanks to Barb who gave them to me as a gift a few years ago. Heaven.