Hello singers and teachers! Spring is full swing and the annual CS Convention & Vocal Competition is quickly approaching—this year in Chicago, May 23-26. The convention is packed full of masterclasses, and I immediately sprinted over from Crossover Corner when I was asked to do a two-part profile on one of the featured presenters—Broadway’s Telly Leung. Telly is a multi-faceted, multi-genre performer, director and producer who more than lives up the “Breakout power” Newsday has used to describe him. Telly is also a dear friend and colleague with whom I shared many students for many years through the college preparatory firm Musical Theater College Auditions (MTCA). Before reading any further, here’s a spoiler—Telly is just as open, charismatic, caring, and engaging as one who’s seen him on Glee or flying around as Aladdin on a Broadway-powered magic carpet would hope he is.
Our conversation was wide-ranging yet moored to the topic of working with students. In part one of this two-part profile on Leung, we’ll focus on Telly’s most recent work with students, with an eye toward how he hopes to engage with singers at the convention later this month. But first, a little bit more on NYC born and raised Telly Leung.
Over the past two decades, Telly and his vibrant presence onstage, onscreen and on cast albums continually reveals his role as a gateway performer. And by gateway, I’m referring to the musical, VHS tape, Netflix streamer “gateway” that frequently functions as a point of entry for so many of us into the world of Broadway and musical theater.
To begin, I invite Telly to set the scene:
“I’m at CMU [Carnegie Mellon University] directing Titanic, which is really exciting and fun. I graduated here 23 years ago. So it’s super fun 20 years later to be the alum that comes back and directs a show.
“And it’s been very full circle and very rewarding to be here and working with the students, and it’s been really great and fulfilling artistically. [It’s] everything that really excites me right now, which is
- working with the next generation of artists, and
- directing, which I want to say it’s a new skill, but I’ve been now doing it for five years in a lot of university and training settings, and it’s been really fun.
“Directing is such a massive task that I always learn something new doing it. So, the conversation that I get to have collaborating with designers and a music director and a choreographer is something I never really got as an actor. To come back to your alma mater and keep learning 23 years later is great.”
Telly began his directing career during COVID, helming a four-camera streaming production of Godspell at the University of Michigan in 2021. Classical singers, their teachers, and opera workshop directors can certainly relate!
“I think that through constraint—whether that’s a physical constraint like with COVID or a time constraint, like we only have two days to put up the show—I always find that it fosters really good creativity. There’s something about that pressure cooker of ‘we have limited money’ or ‘we have limited resources, or we have limited space’ or ‘we have limited time’ that makes you go, ‘okay, let’s get resourceful.’ It forces you to get very creative. And I work well in that too.”
I ask Telly to share a bit about his early experiences as a voice student:
“Well first of all, it’s interesting. Titanic came out in 1997 on Broadway. That’s right around the time that I started taking voice lessons. I was in high school, and I had this wonderful voice teacher. His name is Thomas Shepard. I found his number in the back of Backstage Magazine, and I started taking lessons with him. I remember when I started with him—when I was 16 years old, maybe 15—and all I told him was that, ‘I want to do Broadway.’ And he’s like, ‘well, I know you want to do Broadway, but here’s an art song; and here is ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ and here’s ‘Che gelida manina.’ And we’re not expecting you to sing at the Met—because I know that that’s not what you want to do—but we’re going to use certain phrases of these to strengthen your voice—to understand your instrument.’
Telly furthers with formative counsel from his first voice teacher, Thomas Shepherd and their work together in the mid-late 1990s:
“And he even said, look at shows like Titanic right now. Specifically, look at people like Victoria Clark, who can sing as she does as Alice Beane in Titanic and give you the high C at the end of the opening number. But she’s also played Adelaide in Guys and Dolls—that sort of versatility is what’s going to get you working on Broadway. Somebody like Victoria Clark, somebody like Michael Cerveris, you know, who’s able to sing in both styles—[it’s] that understanding of your instrument that comes from a more classical vocal training.”
We chat a bit about the common expectation of memorization prior to rehearsal in the opera world, and how that compares to his work with the student singers in Titanic at CMU.
“I actually am hoping that they stay flexible—that they know their material, certainly, but that they’re able to also make adjustments and changes according to what we come up within the room. And I think that is very different than the classical world. I’ve certainly done symphony gigs where I am expected to come in knowing all of my material, having coached it myself. There is no rehearsal. You get one orchestra rehearsal, maybe the night before, and then the next day you do it with the orchestra.
With theater culture, we love rehearsal. We love the exploration of rehearsal. So as a director, I want my actors to know the material well enough and certainly come in with ideas, because I can’t pretend to have all the good ideas in the room…what does this actor bring to this room? What ideas does this singer bring in the room? And what do I bring in the room? And, hopefully, in the time that we’ve rehearsed this thing together, we would have made something together through this collaboration that would not have been possible had these two artistic people not come together in this space, which is very different, I know, from how world of classical music operates.
I’m also in a collegiate setting where the goals are educational. I want table work, and I want ample rehearsal time and I want movement exploration and scene exploration.”
Our conversation moves to the singers at the upcoming convention, and I ask Telly what he working on with them in Chicago.
“Yes, it’s something that I am working on here [at CMU]—especially at the collegiate level too—with my students. As a student, we spend hours and hours and hours in voice and speech class, a movement class and voice lessons. And sometimes when we get to the work, it is very easy show you all of that hard work that I’ve done because I’ve been in voice lessons, learned this note and I’ve learned how to sing it, and I’ve learned the approach to it.”
“And what I offer as a theater person and as a director—and also as a performer myself—is [knowing] at what point do we let go of that work and trust that the technique is all there for us, and think about what the story is that we’re telling. And trust the fact that we’ve spent so many hours in a vocal studio that I don’t have to worry about that note anymore—that it’s somewhere in my vocal muscle memory and that I can call on it. The letting go of the technique and the letting go of the work is actually what I would love to see if we can find in it class… And it’s the hardest thing in the world to go. But it’s also really exciting when it happens.”
Be on the lookout for part-two of our profile on Telly Leung for his insights on Broadway vocal writing and reflections from his work with living composers Stephen Sondheim and Stephen Schwartz, as well as his experience preparing the role built for him in Broadway’s Allegiance.
