Acting A Song Poem by gershon hepner

If you cannot sing a song
you may find that you can extract
the meaning if you try to act
the music to which words belong
but cannot quite express without
a second and a third dimension
to which the music draws attention
before the acting makes it sprout.

Inspired by an article by Bruce Weber on Natasha Richardson, who died yesterday following a skiig accident in Quebec. He writes in the NYT on March 19,2009:

Ms. Richardson was an intense and absorbing actress who was unafraid of taking on demanding and emotionally raw roles. Classically trained, she was admired on both sides of the Atlantic for upholding the traditions of one of the great acting families of the modern age. Her grandfather was Sir Michael Redgrave, one of England’s finest tragedians. He passed his gifts, if not always his affection, to his daughters, Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, and his son, Corin Redgrave. The night Vanessa was born, her father was playing Laertes to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet….Ms. Richardson’s Tony Award came in 1998, for best actress in a musical, for her performance as Sally Bowles, the gifted but desperately needy singer in decadent Weimar Berlin who is at the center of “Cabaret.” It was a remarkable award: Ms. Richardson’s strengths did not include singing. But her reinvention of a role that was performed memorably by Liza Minnelli in the film proved that a performer could act a song as well as sing it and make it equally affecting. “Ms. Richardson, you see, isn’t selling the song; she’s selling the character, ” Ben Brantley, writing in The Times, said of her delivery of the title song. “And as she forges ahead with the number, in a defiant, metallic voice, you can hear the promise of the lyrics tarnishing in Sally’s mouth. She’s willing herself to believe in them, and all too clearly losing the battle.”

© 2009 Gershon Hepner 3/19/09