“Acting the Song” Showcase performs “I Feel So Much Spring.”
COLLEGIAN | ANNA BROUSSARD
Finding one’s voice is the best part of working with students, Malcolm Gets, the Tony-nominated Broadway performer and visiting educator, said during the “Acting a Song” performance on Saturday, March 22.
Alongside Tory Matsos lecturer of theatre and dance, Gets taught an extended masterclass culminating in a student performance with seven students in the Theatre 393 Ensemble course.
The performance featured seniors Fiona Mulley, Samuel Jarzab, Ellie Payne, Charlie Cheng, Emily Griffith; junior Kevin Pynes; and sophomore Maggie Saffian. The performance was put together over the course of a week, according to Matsos.
“I created the ‘Acting the Song’ course in particular, because I was inspired by the work that Malcom was doing at the University of Florida,” she said. “He was teaching a musical theater course, and I would go to the final days of that course, and I loved it so much. I had hoped to capture here even a small bit of what that special course seemed to be for the students.”
The performance, accompanied by Kimberly More on the piano, featured students acting out songs from various musicals and concluded with a group rendition of “I Feel So Much Spring” from “A New Brain.” Highlights included Mulley’s “100 Easy Ways to Lose a Man” from “Wonderful Town,” Pynes’ “Soliloquy” from “Carousel,” and Griffith’s “I’m the Greatest Star” from “Funny Girl.”
The group of students, according to Gets, was inspiring to work with.
“They’re great individuals, and then, as a collective, very supportive of each other,” Gets said. “ I admit I bring with me a little bit of a bias when I want to go to smaller cities across the country, because I live in New York, and I think ‘well, what about the talent?’ Where is it? Well, there’s talent everywhere. There really is real talent and imagination, and I feel like my involvement in training programs for theater has been just that, while also helping train and develop people, artists, people who value the arts. So it’s more than just doing a TV show or running a show.”
Mulley said the course helped her and others find their voice in a unique way and gave her hope for pursuing life as a performer.
“I went into the masterclass with a lot of nerves,” Mulley said. “I had this idea that he was gonna be really serious, and it would be a lot of pressure. But what I just loved about taking this workshop with him was the joy and the ease and the playfulness of it all.”
According to Mulley, the class as a whole has been about refining the students perspective on connecting acting and singing, but in an interactive and not just informative way.
“Also it was demystifying, the process, he had this method of asking us how we felt and what we thought,” Mulley said. “After each run through, he would start by asking us what our impressions were. It made us all feel capable.”
For Griffith, the course and Gets has allowed her to understand the famous theater saying from renowned choreographer Ulysses Dove, “nothing to prove, only to share.”
“The course does not focus on the singing itself,” Griffith said. “It focuses on how you are telling the story through the song. Tory always says, ‘You just so happened to be singing,’ so it’s absolutely wonderful.”
Gets and Matsos originally met when they were teaching at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Matsos reached out to Gets, asking him to come to Hillsdale.
“It’s really generous of him to be here and really inspiring,” Matsos said. “It’s come full circle to that time at UF. I love what has been coming up this week.”
Gets taught a similar class at the University of Florida while Matsos and her husband, chairman and professor of theatre Christopher Matsos, worked as his colleagues. Griffith said it made the whole class feel as though they were carrying on a special tradition.
“You pass craft down, and you pass down experiences,” Griffith said. “Getting to work with Malcolm and professor Matsos and having the curriculum passed down to us has been such a gift. It feels like art is an heirloom that we have been handed through this masterclass.”
Pynes said the course impacted his education, and Gets provided a positive environment of study.
“Malcolm gave me a good new perspective. He had a lot of wisdom that he had learned from other people,” Pynes said. “They’re masters for a reason. They tend to be some of the nicest people that you’ll ever need to talk to. They’re doing it because they care. If they are a master traveling to Hillsdale, Michigan, they care about their students a lot.”
Pynes said Malcom’s perspective helped the students to recognize how their theater education was unique and different from other schools that Gets had visited.
“It gets you out of the Hillsdale ecosystem, you get to see the wider world,” Pynes said. “In fact, you get some assurance that the things that you’re learning really are good, and they’re not just in this little bubble.”
According to Pynes, your theater education, whether from Matsos or Gets, is about where you have come from and should orient toward where you will go, which is not always the case in other theater programs.
“They try to make you sound a certain way, but don’t lose the way that you sound,” Pynes said. “Malcolm was very adamant about that, ‘you have what makes you special.’ Dr. Arnn is always talking about character — the thing that’s etched into you — so I get to carry these tattoos and etchings of my tradition with me as I learn these new things as well.”
