![]() I didn't get to play a lot of older characters. I got cast as the Newsboy in Working, I got cast as the child in Philadelphia Story. ![]() I did a lot of theater in college, but my music took off more than my theater took off. I was a dancer, I took every acting class, I did all the school plays, I studied theater in New York City and in London. People typically know you as a singer-songwriter so may not know you have this theatrical side. Tell me about your personal theater background. We just really wanted to be a part of that community and to try to give back. We decided to raise money for the Actors Fund because there are so many out of work actors and people behind the scenes who we're friends with. ![]() As we started writing the plays, we realized we really wanted to give back to our community as well. I think we all respectfully worked together to challenge and support the group to tell the stories – and to make sure that there was thematic coherence connecting through the pandemic. We hit a lot of different experiences that ranged from the mundane and the humorous to really serious heavy topics like the murder of George Floyd and anti-Asian racism. What are some of the topics the pieces touch on? So we have 10 mini-musicals that all take place between the lockdown in March and the election. We tried for a few months to have meetings about what the story would be, and little by little we realized the best thing to do was let people tell their individual stories and make that a longer piece – kind of like the musical Working. #Lisa loeb tv#There were some people who you recognize from TV and theater and are more well-known, but it was exciting that there were people who helped write the plays and act and write the music who maybe haven't done this for a while – people who are doctors and executives who it was just in their heart. ![]() Let's write a show!Įverybody said, "I want to be a part of this." From the very beginning, we decided everybody should be involved who wanted to be involved. I kept thinking to myself, Let's not just talk about musical theater. There were people who were excited to see each other, people who were scared, people who were concerned about how they were going to do theater now, how they were going to work with their students. As we went around the pages and pages of faces on Zoom, I realized, between their ebullient musical theater personalities, they talked about everything in their life. Brian Herrera – who's now a theater professor at Princeton – asked everybody to go around and tell everyone your name, what year you graduated, your favorite musical theater memory, and what you're doing now. It was the musical-theater reunion that happened in August, which started everything. Is it true that the idea for Together Apart came together during a Brown alumni reunion? This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It's a very important skill as a performer," says Loeb proudly. And lest you think this hefty undertaking precluded other quarantine projects, guess again. "I'm excited to be back doing musical theater and helping other people tell their stories," she says. Together Apart is in the middle of a two-week run on Broadway on Demand, with proceeds benefiting the Actors Fund – but Loeb's theatrical work will surely continue from here. Each one chronicles a different experience of the pandemic, becoming part of the larger pastiche in a way that Loeb compares to the musical Working. ![]() She ended up spearheading the development of Together Apart – a collection of 10 seven-minute mini-musicals, all unfolding in Zoom meetings. As one who self-identifies as "goal-oriented" and constantly juggles several independent projects at once, the Zoom exchange naturally gave Loeb a new creative idea. That part of Loeb's history, however, was pulled to the surface in August 2020 during a virtual musical-theater reunion for Brown University alumni (Loeb graduated in 1990). "I just don't bring that necessarily into my life as a singer-songwriter." "I take tap dance classes, and jazz, and musical theater classes," she says, describing the socially distant and masked tap lessons she's been doing in her backyard during quarantine. But Loeb's creative arsenal does not begin and end with a guitar and a microphone. Lisa Loeb's sensitive acoustic sound was made famous by her 1994 hit "Stay (I Missed You)," featured in the film Reality Bites. ![]()
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