Sparks from the Fire

Many of my favorite humans have been teachers.  When I look back on my life, pre-Watchfire Music, the people pinnacles were often the teachers, on one level or another, who came through my life and left some precious knowledge or life-lessons behind.

They weren’t always the easiest experiences in life, but were certainly the most rewarding.  Some of these include the obvious and some are a bit surprising now that I think on it.

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Working as a composer and sometimes stage director in the theater all these years has given me the opportunity (or perhaps plight) to witness nearly 20,000 auditions. Simon Cowell has nothing on me.  )

Every spring, in fact, I teach the auditioning course at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater here in NYC, our country’s foremost professional acting school started by the late, great Sanford Meisner. I’ve done this for over 20 years now and do a 3 hour lecture followed by 4 days of auditions and critiques for the second year students.

At the end of the whole experience I always try to end on a high note by telling the story of the best audition, out of the nearly 20,000, that I ever saw.

This distinction belongs to Broadway star, Betty Buckley. Betty is perhaps best known around the country for the 1977-81 TV dramedy Eight is Enough, but in New York she is treasured as one of our great leading ladies on the Broadway stage over the last 30 years starring in, among others, Pippin, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Sunset Boulevard, Triumph of Love and Cats, where she originated the role of Grizabella, singing the song “Memory” to perfection and winning the Tony Award. (more…)

Sanford Meisner was a chain smoker.  He would light the next from the first and so on.  He saved on matches, but it killed him in the end.  Later in life cancer took his larynx.  He spoke through a hole in his throat with the swallow and burp method.  They outfitted him with a neck mic and speaker so he could continue to teach.  He then continued to smoke through the hole in his throat.  That was Sandy – obstinate and determined to do it his way.  A man of strong will.

Meisner's Acting Class

Nobody ever held a cigarette like Sandy.  It was his life prop.  It reflected in multifarious ways his mood, his personality, his joie de vivre.  Sometimes it was an exclamation point, sometimes a pointer, sometimes a sword.  It’s hard to think of this man without cigarette in hand, smoke curling around him.

For me as a teacher or director, one of his greatest teachings was to never show an actor what result you want by performing the moment for him or never give the actor a line reading (speak the line the way you want it read).  You must help the actors discover the meanings and moments for themselves, not do the work for them so that then they copy you.  Only as a total last resort should you ever give a line reading or act the moment for them and when you reach that moment, you can consider yourself a failure as a director.  Though often tempting, I have tried to follow this bit of wisdom always.  Actors always respect me for it.  It puts them in charge of their own character development.

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Part 1

Later on in life I was permitted by the great master to call him Sandy, but in the beginning it was Mr. Meisner, definitely Mister Meisner. He was one of the three most influential men in my life and I suppose that if I were forced to rank the three, he’d be number one. He was my teacher.

He taught me the craft of acting and along the way he taught me more about writing music, more about how to perceive and analyze human behavior and how I ticked as a human being than any other person.  When you studied with Sandy, you learned acting, but mostly, you learned about life.

Sanford Meisner was born in Brooklyn, New York City, the oldest of four children of Hermann Meisner, a furrier, and Bertha Knoepfler, Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from Hungary.

As a child he found release in playing the family piano, and eventually attended the Damrosch Institute of Music (now the Juilliard School) where he studied to become a concert pianist.

When the Great Depression hit, Meisner’s father pulled him out of music school to help in the family business in New York City’s Garment District.

Meisner would later recall that the only way he could endure days spent lugging bolts of fabric was to entertain himself by replaying, in his mind, all the classical piano pieces he had studied in music school. Meisner believed this experience helped him develop an acute sense of sound, akin to perfect pitch.

Later, as an acting teacher, he would often evaluate his students’ scene work with his eyes closed (and his head dramatically buried in his hands). This trick was only partly for effect; the habit, he explained, actually helped him to listen more closely to his students’ work, and to pinpoint the true and false moments in their acting.

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