Barbara Cook Masterclass

Noticed this story over at nytimes.com. Couple highlights:

"We have to find the courage to take off our emotional clothes." Ms. Cook elaborated on that danger in speaking of the essential fear that crawls around in most performers' hearts, an anxiety that in a curious way may also be a motivating factor in the desire to become a performer: "We feel that we're not enough, that the world doesn't want us."

"The truth of this insight was illustrated before our eyes, and it was a fascinating process to watch. Erin Morley, a soprano with a bright, silvery tone, sang "With You," a flowery ballad from "Pippin." "I don't hear you letting us in," Ms. Cook said, and tried to strip away all the mannerisms Ms. Morley had been trained to use in recital. When she started in on the song again, Ms. Cook stopped her virtually before she started: "I can still see her gathering herself to sing," Ms. Cook said, to the audience, and once again implored Ms. Morley to let her real self into the song, and invite the audience with her. "You don't need to do that," she said, referring to the performing stance Ms. Morley kept donning like a costume. She reiterated her encouraging mantra: "You are enough.""

"When performers first step onstage, they may be looking for validation, for approbation in the form of nourishing applause. But the lesson Ms. Cook came to teach was that artists achieve their peak when they learn to stop proving themselves and simply, to borrow the Shakespearean phrase, let be. It's their humanity we respond to in the end, their ability to strip away the self-consciousness that locks us inside ourselves, and reveal the stuff that really boils in our souls."

I've noticed that so many of the actors I know and have become close to at one time or another are also among the most insecure people I know. I could go all amateur-psychologist and espouse theories about how people become actors in reaction to some perceived lack of attention or love in childhood, and there might be a point there but it isn't really what I wanted to talk about.

There are few things I've encountered that irritate me more than a person with a beautiful voice who doesn't do anything with it. Josh Groban, for example. Technically, he's incredible. But when he sings he's just making noise; there's nothing actually behind it. Then you look at someone like Elaine Stritch, a woman who's voice left her somewhere in the 1970s, and yet, when she sings you don't care because she brings a whole new element to the song; she brings herself, she opens a part of herself to the audience. That's where real musical theater lies, and that's what every great performer in musical theater brings to a production and to a role, no matter how big or how small.