Although I have been into music for most all of my life, never in a million years did I think I would one day get to sing on Broadway. My first vocal coach would be amazed, my second likely staggered. Based on the excellent movie of the same name, the show was the musical ‘Once’ and the house was sold out.
‘Music will open doors for you’ was a mantra wrought upon me as a kid mainly by various well-meaning relatives by way of encouragement. Like many kids, I wanted to play a musical instrument and started piano lessons. However also like many kids, I didn’t want to practice anywhere nearly enough to make much progress. In spite of that dubious beginning, music has indeed opened many doors for me largely because as I reached my teens, I found I wanted to sing a lot more than I wanted to play the piano. As it turned out I was fortunate to develop a natural singing voice as I went through puberty the gift thereof being blind luck on the physiological front. That said, in order to progress anywhere beyond the bathtub performance level, I can confirm that vocal training requires just as much commitment, coaching and practice as the piano or any other instrument.
Born in Yorkshire England, as they say into modest working class circumstances, it wasn’t until in my mid-twenties that I was able to make good on a life changing goal determined when I was about fifteen. At that time a relative of a friend of mine, having moved from the UK to Vancouver, Canada, sent her a subscription to a particularly well illustrated monthly geographical magazine, Beautiful British Columbia. I read them, admired the mountain and oceanic photographs and was hooked. I was, even at fifteen if not earlier, already determined to escape Britain and it’s class system. What better way to do so than immigrating to Canada, settling quite literally in beautiful BC and becoming a Canadian citizen. Once I had succeeded in making the move, I marveled almost from the get-go and still do, at the work and play opportunities open to all and sundry in my newfound, egalitarian nirvana. I was initially and still am fifty plus years later, like a kid in a candy store engaging in this activity, engaging in that, many of them not even reasonably available to the average person in ‘Blighty’ * due to said class system or caste if you will not to put too fine a point on it.
It took more than a few years after settling in Vancouver, but I eventually found the time to take weekly singing lessons hoping to improve and broaden the established if limited vocal capabilities side of my musical interests. This to augment my modest (best case) piano, guitar, banjo-ukulele, and harmonica ‘skills’. It took a while but my first vocal coach succeeded (by sitting on my stomach – I am not making this up!) in getting me to sing correctly using the diaphragm along with the lungs instead of just the latter. What a difference. Over time and after many lessons I went from being a common or garden amateur pop and jazz crooner to an acceptably half decent amateur tenor singer, give or take. I joined a choir — a Welsh choir.
I am in fact a quarter Welsh, also a quarter Irish and half Anglo something or other. However, one does not have to be Welsh to join Vancouver’s Welsh Choir which I was to join quite by accident. A Welsh girlfriend of mine wanted to join it. Would I accompany her to the audition she asked? Why not said I given I knew the Welsh choir had their own pub! I could drink beer while I waited. Other than the existence of a private pub, I knew nothing about the Vancouver Welsh choir. Neither it turned out did she. She went into the audition and came out about thirty-seconds later. Like the majority of Welsh choirs but by no means all, the Vancouver one is a male voice choir she had discovered. Would I like to audition the director somewhat over eagerly asked me? This with an element of excitement in his voice having noticed I was male and still breathing. He had no idea whether I could sing or not! Certainly I answered without hesitation albeit impulsively.
I had just recently sang some solos with a local theatre group North Vancouver Community Players without being booed off the stage so I was full of confidence. Another male was booked for and ready to be auditioned so my friend and I retreated to the bar. The barman having witnessed the gender shemozzle asked me what voice I was. Tenor I replied trying not to be smug and/or aloof. Then in his wonderful lilting strongly Welsh accented voice he said “if you’re a bloody tenor, especially a top tenor (first tenor) they will treat you like bloody royalty”.
Quite soon I was called in for the audition. I passed and was indeed initiated into the choir as a first tenor. The barman had it right. I was a “bloody first tenor” and yes, they did treat me like ‘bloody royalty’. I sang in the Vancouver Welsh Men’s Choir (T1T2B1B2) ** for about three years, an ‘accidental’ chorister so to speak.
Whilst still singing with the Welsh choir and content doing so, I had a phone call one day from a friend of mine. Had I seen an advertisement in the paper for singers from local choirs to temporarily and without audition augment the SATB *** Vancouver Bach Choir? This for two performances of the Verdi opera Aida being staged in a large capacity Vancouver sports stadium, BC Place. (Capacity 50,000 plus). No I replied I had not but I would check it out.
It always amazes me that happenstance, blind luck call it what you will, can sometimes lead to the realisation of goals and dreams long cherished and often also long since given up as unattainable. That phone call for me was such an event. It was to change my life and its trajectory from that moment on. Music was about to open many more doors for me than neither I nor my well-meaning relatives would have ever dreamed of. For the performances of Verdi’s opera Aida, the one hundred or so member VBC choir, having been retained by a traveling Italian opera company, needed to augment their numbers considerably. This was to be grand opera on a sports arena scale with an audience of about 35,000 each of two nights. The stage would be about five times the normal size found in a typical large theatre. The conductor and producer would be Italian maestro Gioseppe Raffa. *** See his web site at www.https://operama.net/maestro-giuseppe-raffa/ for a lot of interesting and compelling information on him.
On the massive stage would be a huge replica of an Egyptian pyramid along with a 15 metre high sphinx. (A mythical creature with the head of a human, the body of a lion and the wings of a falcon.) For the ‘triumphal march’ midway through the opera, the sphinx would split into two halves and out would come, elephants, horses, donkeys, perhaps a tiger or two, camels, llamas, carriages, armies, slaves, you name it. They would parade slowly across the stage and exit via the centre aisle of the ground floor audience seats.
With a large orchestra pit built into the set to accommodate the full Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, assembling on the outsize stage a significantly enlarged VBC was a must. The producer would take en masse and with no audition, experienced choristers currently singing with symphonic, church, ethnic, gospel, you name it choirs. I made the phone call about ten seconds after I had finished the call with my friend.
We did the two shows and sold out 35,000 seats each night both shows generating huge audience acclaim. The Vancouver Welsh Men’s is a first class and very accomplished male voice choir. Such choirs are most often accompanied by solo piano only. The male voice only repertoire typically has few requirements for orchestral accompaniment. On the other hand the mixed gender voiced Vancouver Bach Choir mostly performs with a full symphony orchestra most often the Vancouver Symphony orchestra.
After performing Aida I was hooked on the mixed voice choir plus symphony orchestra format. I applied for and passed an audition with the VBC with which I then sang for the next twenty-seven years! Over that period, in addition to Vancouver and it’s local environs, some of those doors that were to open for me subsequent to the two Aida performances in Vancouver and later three in Japan’s downtown Tokyo dome, were all manner of choral works in various venues in England (London, Oxford, Birmingham) and within Canada in Toronto, Calgary Edmonton and Vancouver Island.
Tokyo we were soon to to learn, would be the next port of call so to speak for Maestro Raffa’s traveling Aida extravaganza. Anticipating he would have little luck quickly training a Japanese SATB choir to memorize and sing Aida in Italian, he flew the Bach choir and BC Ballet over, installed us in a four star downtown hotel and provided us all with US $100 a day for the ten days we were there, this simply to buy food — and we needed most of it! We sold out three performances the total attendance being close to an astounding 200,000! Tokyo was the first time I performed with the Vancouver Bach Choir as a member thereof. Had it not been for the phone call from my friend about the Vancouver advertisement, none of the above would have happened. For me it was happenstance gone mad on a par with winning a big lottery.
What has any of the above to do with the musical Once, New York and Broadway? I am not nor was I ever remotely qualified to be a legitimate Broadway singer except perhaps in my dreams. My wife is from New York. When visiting we take in at least one Broadway show. Having watched the movie version of the musical ‘Once’ and loved it, discovering it had been made into a Broadway show we bought tickets. We like to arrive early for live theatre to take in the expectant atmosphere and perhaps indulge in a pre-show drink. As we found our seats a public address voice drew attention to the stage. In addition to that in the foyer, a bar was set up on-stage we were told. Just walk on-stage to buy drinks if you wish.
Neither of us felt like a drink. However, as a long time thespian, I love the pre-show ambience and excitement of live theatre. What better place than the stage to soak up and enjoy it along with the bright house lights and the infectious and compelling curtain anticipation always extant. I went on stage and managed to resist the temptation to join the lineup at the bar. The full house audience was still slowly filing in so there was no rush to return to one’s seat. I hadn’t been there very long when to my astonishment, what turned out to be the entire cast suddenly came literally running on stage, many of them with some kind of folk instrument in hand. The setting for the opening was an Irish pub. They started singing and playing. Quickly, or so I thought, we on stage audience members would be told to head to our seats and fast. Instead we were cued to sing by the stage manager who had been on stage all along masquerading as a bar customer.
The cast, many of whom doubling as the orchestra, did about a fifteen minute set of Irish pub music which included Black Velvet Band one of my favourites. I knew the words to it and many of the other songs they did and so sang out, nay belted them out with more than a little gusto. For sure this had to be my one shot at singing on Broadway. I was going to make the most of it. I thought I had died and gone to vocalist’s heaven. With the audience stragglers finally almost settled in and the set ended, we were then cued by the stage manager to return to our seats as quickly as we could. It was a wonderful show which we greatly enjoyed and I had made both my Broadway debut, sort of, and no doubt my Broadway finale. Should there be another production calling for audience members to sing on a Broadway stage however, alright ANY stage, I will be available!
And finally from a happenstance at work again scenario, having left the Vancouver Bach Choir after twenty-seven years to pursue primarily my solo performer interests, whilst singing Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (a favorite of mine) as a ringer for the VBC about a year ago I was approached by a lady also singing as a ringer. She mainly sang with Chorisma, a vocal jazz SATB ensemble of about twenty very experienced choristers. Would I consider joining them? Is the Pope Catholic? I jumped at the chance. We sing mostly the classic ‘Great American Song Book’ repertoire scored for SATB. She didn’t have to ask me twice.
Postscript:
Do please take a look at www.chorisma.bandcamp.com. There you will find and available for free download, nine recordings we have made during Covid 19 to date. We record our parts separately a cappella **** at home prior to the resulting tracks being mixed and instrumentation added by one of our three professional independent hires. (A piano accompanist, a conductor and a back-up conductor). The finished releases amaze me. At least Covid was good for something.
* an informal and typically affectionate term for Britain or England.
* * Choral male singers are either first or second tenor or first or second bass (T1T2B1B2)
*** Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass.
**** Without instrumental accompaniment.