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Tracey Moore, with Alison Bergman, Acting the Song. Performance Skills for the Musical Theatre. New York: Allworth Press, 2008. Paper, ix, 309 pp., $24.95. ISBN 978-1 -58115-505-1 www.allworth.com
Training programs in music theater are relatively new phenomena, but the number of avenues for instruction, from summer camps to graduate degrees, has increased exponentially in recent years. Acting the Song by Tracey Moore and Alison Bergman is a handbook for those who teach music theater students. The authors' intent was to remedy an approach to singing music theater songs that had not kept pace with regular actor training; often, theater songs remain mired in stock gestures, rather than incorporating methodologies used by today's finest thespians. Moore and Bergman are cognizant that music theater instructors hail from many backgrounds, including-but not limited to-music, theater, and dance. Consequently, they offer a general introduction to the components of music theater work, as well as specific exercises for use in the music theater workshop.
The book is divided into two parts. The first enumerates and describes the elements of music theater: voice, body, and acting. An overview of each discipline includes a brief summary of its lexicon, and resources for suggested reading. The book is not...