With a skill set ranging from theater performance, playwriting, and voice coaching to sound design and carpentry, Allison Spann keeps busy and finds work but is in constant search of a place to show off her talents, get seen by powers that be, and move to the next rung of her career.
That place usually begins with the backyard of her Brooklyn apartment, where she stages readings and tries out new material and song arrangements to friends she also cooks for. The next stop is often Princeton, where Spann, who grew up in nearby Cranbury and was educated at Princeton High School and Princeton University, from which she graduated summa cum laude in 2020, has appeared in shows and concerts in every venue from the Lewis Center and Richardson Auditorium to a creative home at the Princeton Summer Theater. At the latter she has appeared in shows, pre-and post-pandemic, the last one being a 2022 production of “The Great Gatsby,” which contained a surprise.
Daisy Buchanan, the focal character Spann played with a touch of Tennessee Williams informing F. Scott Fitzgerald, sang. Beautifully and intelligently. So beautifully that I, reviewing the production, wrote I would love to see Allison Spann in a full cabaret.
That day has arrived. Spann’s self-written cabaret show, “Voice Lessons,” comes to Princeton Summer Theater and its home at the on-campus Hamilton Murray Theater for three performances — 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, August 1 and 2, and 8 p.m. on Sunday, August 3 — the first two following immediately after PST’s production of “Frankenstein” finishes its bows.
“The second ‘Frankenstein’s’ cast is off the stage, my music director, Vince DiMura, and I will launch into a set of jazz standards meant to entice the ‘Frankenstein’ audience to stay and partake of ‘Voice Lessons,’” Spann said during a rambling two-hour telephone conversation covering myriad subjects from her Brooklyn backyard where time and mosquitoes eventually ended our talk.
Spann nominates herself a “diva,” who has put hard work and study, a lot of it in Princeton, to cultivating her voice. Not only is she into the vocal mechanics that add to the through-line of her show, but she is a performer who embraces all eras and genres of music.
“Voice Lessons” will begin with jazz but flow into opera, Bizet no less, and theater music, and songs from the Great American Songbook. It fits Spann’s clearly expressed attitude that music allows for vast, eclectic choices and doesn’t have to defined by what might be popular at a time.
From Spann’s outlook, a singer or performer should not be limited to one mode or period of music. The history of composing, including Spann’s own works, encompasses an amazing variety of forms, styles, sounds, rhythms, and songs. Why not enjoy them all, learn them all, perform them all? Why can’t someone sing a canon that includes Poulenc, Stevie Wonder, and Jule Styne?
Spann says “Voice Lessons” is meant as a showcase of all of her abilities, including her knowledge of theater sound. Spann wants to tour “Voice Lessons.” She wants to have it seen by the increasingly fewer movers and shakers who might take it to New York and change her status from gifted able-bodied seaman to a star who displays her broad view of performance, not to mention her experience, education, hard work, and creatively to a wide.
The ambition is not blind or unfounded. From her days at a Princeton high school and later Princeton University, where she was in a jazz band, studied choral work at Westminster, and performed in “Candide” and other shows, Spann has been training her herself to entertain on the level she says will be seen in “Voice Lessons.”
Heck, as a believer that one person can do what another person can do, she can even build/design a set and take care of sound and lighting.
Spann says she also wants “Voice Lessons” to open her audience’s eyes to the possibilities of the world. She hopes they will get a sense of how people are all connected and have a stake in each other.
The songlist for “Voice Lesson” proves Spann acts on her beliefs. It includes the jazz set, a “ringer” to hold the “Frankenstein” audience while others follow in, and moves into Micaela’s great aria from Bizet’s “Carmen,” “Je dis que rien ne m’epouvante” (I tell you I’m afraid of nothing), Wonder’s “Superstition, into Charli xcx’s “Party for You,” and Kander and Ebb’s “Maybe This Time” from “Cabaret” among others.
“I want to entertain while displaying my vocal mechanics and range of expression,” Spann says. “My taste and choices go into many directions. I don’t see why music or a show has confine itself to one thing or one kind of song. My voice can go anywhere, Why not let it?”
There’s that diva again.
Now to get it seen by the right people.
“I’m daunted by the current attitude in New York City that only those already known or who happen to be nepo kids can find an agency and move to the next level.
“I can’t worry about givens like that. My job is to continue to hone my talents and get myself seen and appreciated. I have to do the work. If the entry isn’t welcoming, I have to make myself welcome. That’s why ‘Voice Lessons’ is so varied. That’s why I learned sound design and other technical skills, so I can make myself useful anywhere in live theater.
“Being able to do a lot keeps me working, but I came to a point where I knew I wanted to perform and primarily perform live. Entertaining an audience by singing and acting is the role I want most. Realizing that, it’s up to me to put that in the forefront and make something happen in that direction.”
That doesn’t mean Spann is idle regarding other pursuits. She is active among her friends as an interior designer — “I’m good at fitting a lot into the small apartments that are all over New York,” she notes.
She is also a playwright, composer, and producer. She and one-time Princeton Summer Theater director and manager Maeli Goren have written a play based on Quran Barry’s novel “We Ride Upon Sticks.” It is set in the town where the 17th century Salem witch trials took place but tells a story about a girls’ field hockey team playing a tournament there in 1989, before, Spann says, “there was the language we have today to describe situations and feelings people may have. I think we counted 13 percent of the words available today were not used in 1989.”
The hockey team has a winning streak, and rather than credit skills, rivals suspect some magic involved with the victories. Also, the young women on the team are learning about their identities and about labels and definitions others may impose that cannot accurately denote the person being defined.
Spann and Goren have done a reading in the same Brooklyn backyard where the mosquitoes became pesky.
“So much is going on,” Spann says, “but my priority is to fix my career and set it in the direction I want it to go.
“That’s why ‘Voice Lessons’ is being recorded in Princeton. I relish the relationship with my audience, and I want that to be part of what producers see when I distribute footage of the show to them.
“Performing live and capturing the joy in that is far better, I think, than going into the sterile atmosphere of a studio and taping the show there. Besides all being more spontaneous, it shows the value of collaboration.”
Spann likes working with others. Among her achievements is putting together a 2021 summer series, just as the pandemic was reverting to a more normal existence, that featured a ’40s-style big band.
There is no end of what is on Spann’s mind and in her consciousness. That’s why the two hours on the telephone flew by with time being no object. “Voice Lessons” is a distillation of how she wants audiences to see her as a complete entertainer. It sounds a ride worth looking forward to. (And not on sticks …)
Voice Lessons, a cabaret by and with Allison Spann, runs 10 p.m. August 1 and 2 and 8 p.m. August 3 at the Princeton Summer Theater in the Hamilton Murray Theater on Princeton’s campus. General admission is $15 ($17.09 with taxes and fees). www.princetonsummertheater.org.
Allison Spann is pictured at far right portraying Daisy Buchanan in Princeton Summer Theater’s 2022 production of ‘The Great Gatsby.’,
