Adventures In Self Producing: Part 1

If you’re a solopreneur, it's a given that you wear many hats. This is my reflection on my history with self-producing.

Performing in one my self-produced shows

Amongst the many public-facing hats I wear - Performer, Producer, Voice Teacher, Vocal Coach - “Producer” is the newest role that I’ve added to my list of titles with which I self-identify.

As I’ve begun to find more ease and alignment in owning this role, I’ve come to realize that it’s something that I’ve been doing for a very long time - far before I knew what it was that a producer did, and that I was in fact doing it.

Back in my undergraduate college music program, I was expected to give a classical junior and senior solo recital, as is typical of this kind of degree program. My junior recital was musically and vocally ambitious (dense Debussy song cycles, anyone?), but programmatically, it wasn’t really anything out of the ordinary. My most “adventurous” moment was, at my teacher’s encouragement, collaborating with another student on a piece with an instrumental obligato (Shepherd on the Rock, if you’re curious).

That summer, I attended a vocal training program at the Crescendo Summer Institute in Hungary that would have a major impact on Future Kim’s creativity and artistry (more on that in another article sometime, perhaps).

However, on the tails of that experience, I had big plans for my senior recital.

First and most important to me was showcasing my acting chops. I imported the staging of an aria I had done in the Opera Scenes workshop at Crescendo that past summer, working with an actor at my school to perform a staged version of Monica’s Waltz from Menotti’s the Medium - complete with handmade sock puppets. (Thanks mom!)

I also performed Leonard Bernstein’s La Bonne Cuisine, which is a quirky musical setting of four recipes from Emile Dumont's 1899 cookbook, "La Bonne Cuisine Française". Bernstein translated the recipes into English and set them to music for voice and piano. I’m not sure what exactly drew me to this set - but as I was listening to music and choosing rep for my recital, I was immediately like, this is obviously going to be a cooking show.

So I staged the song cycle as if Julia Child had a cooking show, complete with a live call-in question from our audience at home (with my very trendy and current flip phone on speaker in the recital hall, thankyouverymuch).The character I created was very much into the “a little wine for the recipe, a little wine for me” model of cooking - so she got more and more drunk as the set progressed. By the end, her madcap franticness matched the pacing of the music as it concluded with the final song, “Rabbit at Top Speed.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know too many people who were staging song cycles as cooking shows for their undergraduate recitals.

I went straight from my undergraduate to my master’s, which consumed all of my time. Pretty much immediately upon graduating, I put together a touring recital series that I brought to local nursing homes and assisted living places, collaborating with my bestie Ellen Allen, my brother Tim Peck, and Daniel Padgett - who I did not know at the time, would become a core collaborative pianist in my world. 🙂

Shortly after that, I booked my own salon concert - putting together a recital to perform in the home of a client who had a gorgeous baby grand piano situated in a bay window overlooking Salem Harbor. The event was ticketed, catered, and awesome.

black and white photo of woman in gown singing in front of a baby grand piano in an intimate room

At this point, I was in a solid groove of creating my own opportunities and promoting and performing my own work.I launched Bella and the Fellas, a trunk show trio.Collaborating with a singing pianist and one other singing actor, we created self-contained trunk shows that - through narration, dialogue, music, and a smattering of props - retold stories from the Golden Age Musical Theater and Operetta canons. We produced 1-2 shows a year, and toured them around multiple venues throughout New England.

Performing with Bella and the Fellas

At this point, I was beginning to understand that I was in fact producing my own performances, and that it was something I was good at and enjoyed. I began to lean into it more.

Stay tuned for Part 2!