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This essay is a letter to my younger self, a reflection of where I was when I started the journey into being a professional musical theatre performer, and of those lessons I can now identify from my past experiences. It offers a glimpse into some of the ups and downs of my performing life as well as some advice for any students considering this path.

Voice casting has always been challenging in the multimedia industry. Recent research shows that voice casting can be done with the help of speaker recognition methods. In this paper, the first dataset for dubbing from English to Persian (Farsi) is introduced named E2PCast, English to Persian voice casting dataset. The E2PCast dataset includes audio segments from 30 movie characters (15 females and 15 males) in Persian and English. Approximately, the dataset contains a total of 2.5 h of audio in Persian and English languages (5 h and 17 min in total). In addition to explaining the description of data collection, this paper reports the results of tests performed on the dataset. The experiments and their evaluations include the automatic voice casting benchmark system and speaker identification tests to check characters’ overall identity distribution in the dataset. Based on the benchmark results, the overall test accuracy of the Siamese neural network method on the dataset is 63.52%. Also, the average accuracy of the 5-fold cross-validation test (without common identity in the train and development data) is equal to 52.58%. The E2PCast dataset will be available for free for educational purposes only.

Khalil reviews The Stage Media Company LTD, available at www.youtube.com/@thestage; BBC Teach, available at www.youtube.com/@bbcteach and Horrible Histories (BBC), available at www.youtube.com/@HorribleHistoriesOfficial.

In a video interview with Journal of Singing Associate Editor Melissa Treinkman on May 19, 2023, musical theatre performer Nadina Hassan discussed her career and her experience playing Regina George in the first national tour of Mean Girls . She described what it felt like to be a role model for young performers of color, revealed the challenges of life on tour, and expressed her appreciation for her singing teachers. A QR code is included at the end of the article which contains the link to the recorded interview with Nadina Hassan, posted on the NATS YouTube channel.

This article responds to the use of “casting couch” in the defense of Harvey Weinstein during his New York trial for rape and sexual assault in 2020. It traces the emergence of “casting couch” in the early-to-mid-twentieth century as a means of naming, but not acknowledging, sexual exploitation and violence in proximity to casting practices. The “casting couch” cliché invokes genre-scenes which depict sexual exploitation and violence, particularly towards actresses, as pornographic, melodramatic, and farcical, framing it as a source of pleasure for an audience. I compare the conventions of “casting couch” to first-hand accounts by women working in the performing arts in the UK in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. My sources are drawn from interviews and life writing, comprising Dodie Smith’s autobiography, a collection of recorded interviews with music hall performers conducted by Martha Vicinus, and several biographies of performers by Stephen Bourne. I analyse how gender, class, and racialization interact in these accounts and their framing. I analyse these sources in relation to genre, drawing particularly on Lauren Berlant’s concept of “genre as defense.” While Weinstein’s lawyers utilized the genre-scenes of “casting couch” to defend a sexual predator against the consequences of his actions, the various women discussed here deployed them in more complex ways. “Casting couch” was a means to give sexual exploitation discursive presence, even while limiting that presence. By gesturing towards a joke, and invoking melodramatic tropes, the “casting couch” cliché sometimes defended women against the violence and inequality contained in the stories they were telling.

NATS member Edrie Means Weekly has been a pedagogue and performing artist of both opera and musical theatre for over 35 years. In this article, Edrie discusses the audition process at the Kennedy City and in New York City resulting in her being cast as a standby for five Broadway stars in the 2011 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies starring Bernadette Peters. Four of the five roles have large solo songs including the iconic songs “Broadway Baby” and “I’m Still Here”. The four songs were each written in a different musical style ranging from classical to full out traditional belt. As a vocal pedagogue, she discusses the styles of each song and the Vocal Stylisms or effects she added for emotion and expression to enhance the style. Edrie also includes one of her own vocal exercises she developed for herself back in the late 1980s to create laryngeal flexibility as she performed professionally in opera and musical theatre. She includes a couple of stretches useful for singers and dancers which were provided by Follies Broadway choreographer Warren Carlyle. Edrie talks about track cards and being a swing and discusses her preparation to build stamina to sing and dance a seven-minute tap song. Edrie Means Weekly’s article provides advice for those preparing for singing multiple styles in one show.