When I was a young girl I remember reading a book from the library called How to Audition for the Musical Theater. As many young girls do, I had a dream of being a Broadway star, and so I pored over every page. The advice included: don’t bore the panel with a familiar song; choose something obscure and ideally out-of-print that no one else will sing. Wear something interesting; people will mostly remember you largely by what you wore. And avoid singing the songs of Stephen Sondheim, unless you’re very, very good — the songs themselves are works of genius, the book argued, but they’re full of traps for the under-rehearsed, including unexpected key changes, odd pitch choices, tongue-twisting lyrics, and subtlety of emotion that in the context of a three-minute audition will be difficult to convey. At the time I didn’t know who Stephen Sondheim was, but the book wrote about his songs so reverently and with so many hints at their dangerousness that I decided I had to learn.
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Stephen Sondheim Regrets
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When I was a young girl I remember reading a book from the library called How to Audition for the Musical Theater. As many young girls do, I had a dream of being a Broadway star, and so I pored over every page. The advice included: don’t bore the panel with a familiar song; choose something obscure and ideally out-of-print that no one else will sing. Wear something interesting; people will mostly remember you largely by what you wore. And avoid singing the songs of Stephen Sondheim, unless you’re very, very good — the songs themselves are works of genius, the book argued, but they’re full of traps for the under-rehearsed, including unexpected key changes, odd pitch choices, tongue-twisting lyrics, and subtlety of emotion that in the context of a three-minute audition will be difficult to convey. At the time I didn’t know who Stephen Sondheim was, but the book wrote about his songs so reverently and with so many hints at their dangerousness that I decided I had to learn.