Laurie Beechman: A Songwriter's Favorite Singer

This week, writer/composer David Rackoff looks at the amazing Laurie Beechman, and what makes her voice and storytelling so special. If you don't know who she is yet... you're welcome. And if you know, well, then you know. She shone on stage in "Annie", "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," Cats", "Les Misérables", in solo cabaret shows, and on recordings. She had one of the most powerful belts of all time. And she could break your heart with her thoughtful tender soft notes. Songwriters from David Friedman to Andrew Lloyd Webber (not to mention your host, David Rackoff) consider Laurie Beechman to be a singular talent.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Nothing Like Broadway podcast.
I am writer-composer David Rackoff of the upcoming Off-Broadway musical Nothing Like Broadway
this is the podcast where we usually will pick a song from musical theater and then pick it apart to find out how it works.
Lately we've also been doing mini episodes where we talk about things like rhyming and the perfect scan.
And I normally don't highlight performers. I'm not like a vocal analyzer kind of podcast.
There's lots of people who do that really, really well.
But I'm making one exception this one time for somebody who is maybe my favorite singer of all time and who is not super well known.
But I think she's kind of having a little bit of a resurgence now.
And her name is Laurie Beechman.
If you know her, you're probably like, well, obviously she's awesome.
But if you don't, I'm going to introduce you to Laurie Beechman.
You are welcome.
So basically I'm going to treat this as if I were hanging out with a friend and Laurie Beechman's name came up and they were like, who's that?
I'm like, okay, here's a glass of wine. Sit down. Let me show you.
Anyone who ever loved could look at me. I know that I love you.
Anyone who ever dreamed could look at me. I know I dream of you.
Knowing I love you.
So Laurie Beaechman for me is kind of the most exciting voice singer performer.
Her voice really speaks to me in a way that, you know, very few other voices do.
She was a Broadway performer and a nightclub performer in the 80s and 90s.
She very sadly passed away at the age of 44 in 1998.
But she very much lives on through recordings and YouTube videos.
So if she is somebody who you are interested in, you can find out a lot more of this documentary.
There are some really great interviews online.
And there is the Laurie Beechman project, which you can find.
Look Laurie Beechman up on Facebook.
You can look her up on YouTube and on Instagram.
And there are some people, particularly Gary Olsen, who are doing an amazing job at keeping her legacy alive.
And he is putting out, you know, new material from Laurie that I had never heard weekly, which is very exciting.
So I was just trying to think about like what are the qualities of her voice that speak to me so much?
First of all, she's an alto, which, you know, you don't really see that much.
Like, you know, it's usually everything is like super high mixing these days.
You know, very light voices.
She has a very big, heavy, it's a very rich voice.
Like it fills the space.
She also has a gorgeous head voice.
She's known as a powerful belter.
Like if you ask people who casually know her, oh, she's like big belter, Laurie Beechman.
But she also really has this beautiful softness to her voice.
And because she has this low booming rich place, but she also has crazy high notes and everything in between.
Like she is somebody who every part of her voice can be like her sweet spot.
Everybody has like their best note.
All of her notes are her best note.
And so she can sing all sorts of different songs and really make them sound like her own.
And also you're not waiting for the big high note with her.
Like she has amazing big high notes.
But the journey along the way is just as rich and exciting and interesting.
Just from a purely technical vocal standpoint,
all of the lows and the mids and the highs and the head voices and the big belts and the super high belts and the delicate soft notes.
She has more colors to paint with vocally than just about anybody.
And then in addition to the technical parts of her voice that I love so much,
she really makes every song her own.
She's a really good storyteller.
It seems unfussy and extremely thoughtful the way she is telling the story of each song.
But when appropriate, you do get this big booming,
bigger than almost anyone's huge, gorgeous voice.
She had a lot of success on Broadway, but also in nightclubs.
And so she's really good at telling an intimate story or singing a really intimate song on recording.
That just sounds like she's just talking right to you.
But then when it comes time for the bigger notes,
all of a sudden she can, you know, fill every nook of the space in a huge theater.
So let me tell you a little bit personally about how I sort of encountered first Laurie Beechman.
So as a kid, I had the original cast album of Annie.
And there's one part on it, if you are familiar with the original cast album of Annie,
that just like makes your spine go straight.
And that is the NYC solo portion.
It's like the star to be is the name of the character.
And so Laurie Beechman was in the ensemble of Annie,
but then she had this one really big feature that is just really, really spectacular.
I will play that for you right now.
Just got here this morning, three books to make one me.
NYC, I give you fair warning, I'll be there in lights, I'll be.
And so as a kid, I would just like rewind that part.
And like that was the best part of the album.
It was there and I didn't know her name, you know, I don't know what it is,
but this one person who is in this one part of this one song,
who's not even a major character, was the part that really just like made the
hairs in the back of my neck stand up.
And then I heard the Joseph album, the original Broadway cast album of Joseph,
and she plays the narrator in that.
That's where I really was just like, oh my god, this person is amazing.
And you can hear how she is going from the sort of intimate storytelling we were talking about.
And then all of a sudden it swoops up into a high note.
And it is just so attention grabbing and you just, you could want nothing more from
a storyteller.
And like Joseph album is not my favorite album in the world,
but it is like the Laurie Beechman show.
I had the vinyl of that.
And so I just like lift the needle up and just put it to the Laurie Beechman parts
because they were so exciting.
I'll play you a little bit of Laurie Beechman opening the show.
We all dream lot.
Some are lucky.
Some are not.
But if you think it, want to dream it, then it's real.
You are what you feel.
But all that I say can be told another way.
In the story of a boy whose dreams came.
And then talking about crazy high notes, here's a quick little crazy high note.
Right.
I've never heard another narrator from Joseph who was as compassionate,
but also just exciting vocally, both from the little stuff, the big stuff,
and really telling the story.
So that was what I knew her from.
We went and saw Joseph on Broadway and there was somebody else who replaced her by that point.
And then I went to see cats like maybe six or nine months into its run as a kid.
And it was the original cast except Betty Buckley had just left,
which I was really bummed about because I started to like a little bit be aware of like
who the names of these people are.
And then I was like looking through the program before the show started and was like,
Oh, no, Betty Buckley.
And then said Laurie Beechman.
And I'm like, I don't know who that is.
And then I was like reading her biography and I was like, the narrator and chose and then
in NYC and Annie.
And I was like, wait a minute, the lady was like in my mind,
I don't know, these people just existed during the time that they were on Broadway
and making the original cast album.
And then they just sort of poofed out of existence, I guess is what I thought.
And so I was like, wait a minute, you're telling me that the lady from the Joseph album
and the NYC person is now going to be, you know, a hundred feet away from me singing memory.
What is that going to be like?
And the answer was unbelievable.
Like, she just blew the roof off the place.
It's a really big theater, the Winter Garden.
And I just remember you just, your hair was like being blown back.
She was so powerful, but also just like so good and so cat-like and all that stuff,
but also just like so real and grounded.
And then just she has this really big voice.
And because she is an alto and the role is more of like a mezzo-soprano belter role,
she's really going up.
Like it's real high for her.
And she is just like putting so much power behind it.
And it was really one of the more memorable performances that I've ever seen and that I have never forgotten.
And so then skip forward like 10 years or something.
And I was in college going through like an old record store, like a quirky, you know,
vintagey sort of, you know, like an off the beaten path kind of record or a CD store at that point.
And I saw there was an album, Listen to My Heart, Laurie Beechman.
And I was like, huh, that's weird that there's like two people who have the same name and then I started looking at the songs.
And I'm like, hmm, some of these.
And then I was like, wait a minute, that is the same person.
Because I like take off the cat makeup in my memory.
That's Laurie fucking Beechman from Cats and Joseph and NYC and Annie.
And I was like, I didn't occur to me at that point that like Broadway people could have albums.
So I'm like, so wait, there's no skipping ahead.
There's no skipping over the boring parts of Joseph and just hearing her.
These are just songs that she picked that she is now singing and it's an album of just her.
Yes, please.
And so I bought it and to this day, Listen to My Heart, Laurie Beechman is one of my absolute favorite albums of all time.
The songs on that album range from original songs that were written just for her.
Listen to my voice and it will tell you every word.
To some of the bigger showier Broadway stuff, to these cabaret intimate songs
and the dynamics on that album, like she goes from being so soft to so unbelievably loud.
It really feels like you're right there in a nightclub and she is just pouring her heart and soul
out into this very honest, well-crafted, incredibly thoughtful, but then also
fucking awesome high notes and big notes and low notes.
Like that's another thing that's really exciting about her is she doesn't always end on the high note.
She'll sometimes end on like a big low note.
You know how there's opt ups?
She will sometimes opt down.
Like at the beginning of a phrase, she'll often just jump down an octave just to ground the melody
in this really low note that most people wouldn't have so they don't have that option.
And she was a really big influence on me now that I'm a songwriter, which I was not back then.
There's something about the way that she goes from these really intimate moments to these really
big moments in what sort of a cabaret setting, but they can also take it
even though you're literally in a cabaret setting, all of a sudden within that cabaret
intimate performance, she now transports us as if she were now standing on this huge theater stage
and back and forth.
And so it's really exciting.
It's definitely like the song Nothing Like Broadway from Nothing Like Broadway.
I'm definitely like hearing her voice in my head when I wrote that song and just sort of like thinking,
okay, what are all the different parts of her voice and how she would tell the story of this song
and sing this song and how can I really expand what I would normally be doing in like a cabaret song?
And that is definitely a direct influence of Laurie Beechman and particularly the album Listen to My Heart
because it really has that sort of teeny tiny theater, huge theater.
It's all happening at the same time.
So I would definitely say start with Listen to My Heart, but she also has many other really great
albums. And then also if you look online, there's a lot of really good video of her nightclub act and
of her amazing stage performances, I mean particularly of cats. There's a lot of cats memory stuff out
there, but there's also a lot more good stuff if you dig around a little bit.
So this was me talking to you about Laurie Beechman's music.
If you were interested in Laurie Beechman's music and also finding out what she was like as a human
being, which I sadly never got to meet her, but by all accounts she was just an amazing,
lovely, kind, funny, smart person. Check out the Laurie Beechman project. It's at the Laurie
Beechman on Instagram and then you can just look up Laurie Beechman on Facebook and on YouTube.
Subscribe to those. It's going to look like it's she's a person, Laurie Beechman, but it's the
Laurie Beechman project. People doing this on her behalf. There's also a great documentary
about Laurie Beechman that is on YouTube, I believe. And so I'm just now going to go out. I'm just
going to play you like a little medley of little clips from songs. I'm not going to play whole
songs, but definitely if this strikes your interest at all, you know, find the best headphones you can
and go buy a bunch of her albums and watch a bunch of her videos on YouTube. Yeah, so let's
go listen to some stuff. If you like this podcast, please sign up for our Instagram at Nothing Like
Broadway on Instagram and rate this podcast, please review and rate this podcast on iTunes
or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This has been the Nothing Like Broadway podcast. I am
David Rackoff and let's listen to a little sampling of Laurie Beechman, which will hopefully wet your
appetite to find out more and more about this unbelievably amazing singer.