OFA Has Faith In Her Lessons

Last Tuesday, Tony award winner Faith Prince brought both her celebrated vivacity and a healthy dose of sound advice to Harvard devotees of music and theater. The most recent in the “Learning from Performers” series given by the Office For the Arts (OFA), Prince and accompanist Alex Rybeck shared the floor with seven Harvard undergraduate musicians, transforming the rather austere Lowell Lecture Hall into a forum that was at once a cabaret and a seminar.

The focus of the event was clearly Faith herself, both because of her impressive litany of credentials (among them multiple Tony nominations, a Tony award for her portrayal of Miss Adelaide in the 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls, Outer Critics Circle awards, and Drama Desk awards) and a certain intuitive stage presence even when she’s not ostensibly performing. The flame-haired, pouty-lipped actress presided over the roughly 40 audience members in discussions on both specific musical interpretations and general lessons on artistry, performance, and success.

Despite a glowing introduction from OFA program manager Tom Lee, who praised Prince’s “belting voice of honeyed brass” and “pitch-perfect rendering of that great American art form [of musical theater],” the actual music of the afternoon was provided almost exclusively by the undergraduate performers. Tom P. Lowe ’05, Alvin E. Hough Jr. ’07, Jojo S. Karlin ’05, Michael C. Mitnick ’06, Amy M. Zelcer ’07, Allison C. Smith ’06, and Jennifer L. Brown ’07 all took turns performing for Prince, Rybeck, and the rest of the audience, taking time between songs to ask their own questions of the visiting artists.

Lowe set the stage for an engaging, impassioned series of student performances, singing “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from Les Miserables. His vocal stretches from frenzied cry to scarcely audible whisper succeeded in both Prince’s tenets of “gleaning as much information as you possibly can from the actual lyric” while still “mak[ing] a role your own.”

The majority of students, on the other hand, matched Prince’s penchant for the comic with their own interpretations of numbers from lighter shows such as She Loves Me and Carousel. Karlin sang a particularly effervescent aria on the joys of vanilla ice cream and the tribulations of love, while other performers continually had the audience chuckling over pre-teen melodrama and starry-eyed romance, even as they marveled over performers’ vocal power.

According to Prince, the students’ comedic selections took a particular kind of courage: tragedy is “a lot simpler” from a performance perspective, she argues. “To make somebody laugh is a lot more complex.”

Prince’s sole performance was a peculiar and touching rendition of “Something Wonderful” from The King and I, sung through the character of Adelaide in Guys and Dolls. Her genre-warping interpretation, which combined the fatalistic romanticism of Lady Thiang with Adelaide’s silliness, had launched her to celebrity status over a decade ago by landing her the part of Adelaide in Guys and Dolls’ acclaimed Broadway revival.

This tendency to defy strictures of rigid artistic interpretation lies at the core of Prince’s performance philosophy. “I throw spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks,” she said of finding a suitable technique for a new character. Later she added, “If people don’t ‘get’ you, kindly move them out of the way and keep going…Life’s too serious to be serious.”

Rybeck, an accomplished pianist and songwriter in his own right, agreed with the necessity for both artistic passion and daring, offering as advice a line from T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”: “Teach us to care and not to care.”

On the subject of pop music, Rybeck noted an increasing trend of pop-theater hybrid shows à la Mamma Mia or Movin’ Out, counseling students to become savvy in this new crossover style. Prince insisted that such changes were only evolutions in a perennially relevant art form, saying that musical theater was still “part of our American heritage.”

“Theater songs take the character from one emotional place to another,” she explained, as opposed to their more emotionally static pop counterparts. “A pop lyric is not written to be acted.” But with the birth of hybrid musicals attempting just that, Rybeck rejoined, “a new technique is being born right now on Broadway.”

Despite these forays into more industry-specific critiques, Prince and Rybeck spent much of the lecture discussing issues of art and self-expression relevant to virtually any creative endeavor. According to Rybeck, “Every human being has a unique need to self-express…that is either encouraged or discouraged.”

He then added, “We do not value arts enough in this country,” blaming in particular the Bush administration for cutbacks in public school arts funding.

If art is necessary to life, Rybeck argued, the converse is true as well: life experience feeds one’s art. After sophomore Amy Zelcer performed the song “Stud,” accompanied by the song’s composer, junior Michael Mitnick, Rybeck told Mitnick, “your whole life is preparation for songwriting.”

In both art and “real life,” Prince emphasized, “all you can do is believe in yourself and know your craft.”

He later added, “Be happy—I think that really helps.”

“I’m not one of those people that thinks you have to be trained from the time you’re three,” Prince noted. “I didn’t see a Broadway show until I was twenty-two.” Creativity, she believes, is not simply a question of nature-versus-nurture, but a combination of talent, determination, and opportunity. “I think you have the capacity within you. Sometimes you’re just not aware of that capacity.”