Andrew Lippa comes to Fargo

Brianna Brickweg
Contributing Writer

Fargo has been given the opportunity to see “living art in action” through an artist visiting, what is for him, a strange and distant land.
Andrew Lippa, a Broadway composer/lyricist will be in Fargo on and off until the end of April. Lippa is coming to Fargo at a time in his life when he has achieved something huge: the opening of the musical “The Addams Family,” for which he wrote the music and lyrics. Lippa was nominated for a Tony for Best Original Score for the show.  “It sort of put me in the place of wanting to figure out what I want to do next…in my creative life”, adding that although he already had several projects he began looking for something new to work on.
Lippa wanted to teach a couple classes when he came to Fargo. He talked to Dr. Noone at NDSU, who was familiar with his work, and agreed to let him have a residency at the school.
Lippa will be presenting a Broadway master class on Saturday, January 29 from 1-4:30 PM at the Askanase Auditorium and the “All Lippa Songs” master class on Saturday, April 16 from 1-5 PM at the Walsh Studio Theatre. Lippa will also present a theatrical workshop on March 25 from 1-4:30 PM at the Walsh Studio Theatre, but it is only open to high school and college students. All master classes and workshops are free.
“I love being in an academic environment. I love teaching when I have the time,” Lippa said. Lippa invites all people to the workshops that are open to the public and says they won’t be “dry, academic” experiences. “They’re [workshops] going to be interactive, emotional experiences and they’re [students] going to watch living art in action; people wrestling with ideas and feelings together to try and make something in the present that makes people feel something,” Lippa said.
In his workshops Lippa talks about how students can inhabit what they’re singing about in order to perform at a deeper level. He finds that, often, students look at the music and don’t see the subtext. This brings about shallow performances. “I hope that I can focus that [workshops] in a way that reminds them what they’re doing is nothing close to casual. Young singers tend to be very casual in their approach to singing. Even if a song looks like a ‘happy’ song, in the theatre nothing’s happy in the sense that conflict is what fuels story,” Lippa said, “If they can absorb the conflict hiding around the corner and help express it through the story extraordinarily, the audience will give it [the emotion] to them.”
Lippa is establishing a presence in the department and having a meet and greet with the students to say ‘hello’ and “to let them know that I’m not some creature from the black lagoon.”
“I’m just a person like them who wants to make the world a little bit better by singing songs,” Lippa said. Lippa will be available between classes and have an office at NDSU in order to be open to students so they can get to know him and what it means to live an artistic life.
“The potential [mindset] is,” Lippa said, “they have this image of what Andrew Lippa is or what a person who writes Broadway musicals is or ‘scary New Yorker’ or I’m old or whatever the things are that they may think about me and I really want to dispel that really quickly. I want them to understand that we’re all on a similar continuum; I’m just further along that continuum and I have insights into things that they don’t have yet.”
Lippa will also be performing on February 18 at the Askanase Auditorium at 7:30 PM. Tickets are $15 for adults and $10 for students. He will be playing his own songs, from theatrical properties and singles, as well as telling stories about his experiences. Lippa, whose Web site boasts that he won “Second Place for the Alice B. Deucey Award for All-Around Fifth-Grader (Lost to Cynthia Fink),” tends to be funny. Lippa said that, while the reference to the award is a funny remark, it helped him have tough skin. “Like any artist, you’re encouraged to be and you encourage yourself to be as vulnerable as possible and yet you are thrust into situations where you have to have an overlying armor,” Lippa said. Lippa will be choosing two or three students to perform in his concert. Auditions are being held on January 28 from 5-8 PM at NDSU and are open to students only.
Lippa, who grew up in a suburb of Detroit, says he loves being in Fargo because it’s a different pace from New York City, where he’s lived for 24 years. “It’s proving to be the right choice,” Lippa said. “It reminds me how different life is like out of a city, particularly New York City…I think it [living in a fast-paced city] can cumulatively sort of weigh on you and sort of rev you up in a way. “The pace of life [in Fargo] reminds me of what it was like when I grew up and, in fact, I sort of feel like, in a lot of ways, being here feels like going home.”

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