Why We Sing: What Music Means to Character and Audience

Description

Date: April 23 & April 30 (2-Part Class)
Time: 3-4:30pm ET
Instructor: Sam Carner
Cost: $99 ($79 for Academy Members)

Revolutionize your understanding of the role songs play in musicals and how you can make them work for your storytelling!

In a musical, which moments need to sing? Which thoughts and emotions deserve to be sung? Why do some songs that sound like great ideas just not work? What do we think characters hear when they sing to each other?

With 30 years of experience as a musical theater creator, Sam Carner will help you find answers to these crucial, but largely unexplored questions. Take a deep dive into how musical theater songs really communicate and why. This two-session investigation of the workings of song in musicals will help you select song moments in your shows, ask yourself better questions about moments you have written, and help you conceive more layered, specific, and impactful musical theater moments.

Sam Carner, winner of the $100,000 Kleban Prize, the Richard Rodgers Award, and more, is musical theater writer and educator based in New York City. Alongside various commissions and optioned projects in development, his musical ISLAND SONG has had over 50 productions internationally, and his musical UNLOCK’D has played Off-Broadway and around the US. Sam has been on faculty at Yale University, NYU, and Temple University’s Musical Theater Collaboration MFA and has served as a guest artist at dozens of colleges and universities around North America and the UK. Sam founded and currently runs the MT Writers Collective out of the Dramatists Guild in New York.