Who are our artistic influences? How do the performances and the performers we witness in our youth help to form and inform us as artists? Host Shawn Stengel takes a look back. He ponders the influences in his life before he became a professional. How do all these concerts and shows and singers and actors stick in my mind? How did they shape me for a career I couldn’t even envision having? Or did they? In any case, it’s fun to reminisce about the many memorable moments I’ve been luck to have as an audience member.
Who had the biggest impact on me as a performer? Nordica Thabes or Beverly Sills? James Glenn or James Earl Jones? Lena Horne or Mikhail Baryshnikov? Harvey Fierstein or Stockard Channing? They’re all stuck in my little brain somewhere. Still.
My SEO tracker says I haven’t typed in enough words, so I’ll keep going. Through the years, I’ve been fortunate to attend a lot of amazing performances. I also performed with a lot of different ensembles and theatre groups, but this podcast is about the shows I witnessed, not performed. And I’ve done a LOT of performances during my lifetime. But early on, it never occurred to me that someday, I would be a professional musician, and still, the concerts and plays I saw over the first 25 years of my life are still with me. Some for their greatness, some for the opposite. I’m fascinated in how this all adds up to be MY personality as an artist. I don’t claim to know how/if/why this happened, but at least some of these moments that live in my DNA have oozed out of me in some transformed fashion. How powerful are ‘the Arts’ that, once experienced, they can last our whole lifetime? More important than we’ll ever know!