![]() “And to make up for that, I then drink a lot of water.’ “Coffee actually dries out the vocal cords,” she says. Generally, three cups a day, an oat milk latte with a bold coffee flavor her idealized dosage of choice.īut unlike finding audience energy, coffee presents a different challenge. “So, while there were fewer visual cues and voices were muffled with masks,” she says, “it felt we’d begin to hear individual reactions, and then their collective reactions, due to maybe more a heightened sense of engagement.”Īhmed’s two-performance days - she again uses the word “beast” - are powered by another energy source: caffeine. “John Lithgow has this amazing quote I absolutely love: ‘Actors are carnivores of silence.’ Instead, Ahmed found another way of dialing in. “The first few weeks were really difficult, the physical communication was cut off it was like, ‘Is this person smiling? I can’t tell.’” ![]() Playing to rows of mask-wearing people hasn’t disrupted this synergy, but the mojo has been altered. “There’s a collective energy, but it’s different each night and, for me, if I’m not performing to that, then I’m really not doing the story justice.” “Then I have a whole switch to measured intonation during ‘Rain’ and then change again for ‘Danced All Night’ in my soprano.Īhmed is the kind of performer who tunes into the live audience at a performance. “Because (at the start) I’m running all over the house, throwing things around, all while belting ‘Just you wait’. ![]() “Let’s leave it that I worked very, very, very hard with my voice teacher.” Shereen Ahmed stars as Eliza Doolittle (on stairs) ain The Lincoln Center Theater Production of Lerner & Loewe’s “My Fair Lady.” (Photo by Joan Marcus)Īsked if any particular song is notably challenging to sing, she broadens and contextualizes the physical and vocal challenges shifting from the various demands in the one-two-three punch of “Just You Wait,” “The Rain in Spain” and “I Could Have Danced All Night.” ![]() “Then,” Ahmed almost snorts in mild disbelief, “you’re to speak in the Queen’s English? Eliza doesn’t set you up for success at all, right? “Eliza is an absolute vocal beast! Every ‘Aaoooww’ she makes, the Cockney uses so much jaw, so much tongue tension and it is vocally placed in a different way than when you’re singing it. Performing one of musical theater’s most revered roles, male or female, took more than a little preparation.Īppropriate for a musical about speech, Ahmed discusses how even the speaking parts of “My Fair Lady” can challenge a singer’s voice. “She’s a great actor and really funny, with that great open quality for musicals.” “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, she has this incredible voice,’” Sher told the Washington Post in 2019. This led to a callback and an audition with veteran director Bartlett Sher. With her only professional show business experience being as a singer of pop hits on cruise ships, she had been in New York for two weeks before going to an open casting for a revival of the legendary musical in late 2017. She graduated from Towson University with a non-performing arts degree. Ahmed’s father is from Egypt, her mother is American and she grew up in a small town in Maryland. She is the first woman of Arab descent to play the lead in that musical on Broadway - and possibly any musical on Broadway. 11, at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. It equally describes the path followed by Shereen Ahmed, the actress who will play Eliza in the 16-performance run of “My Fair Lady” opening Tuesday, Jan. A young woman aspiring to independently change her life for the better and succeed against unlikely cultural odds might be one way to describe the musical theater character Eliza Doolittle.
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