Muhlenberg alumni perform fundraiser for Senior Showcase

On Sat., Jan. 28, current students and alumni gathered in the Red Door in Seegers Union to attend the Muhlenberg Theater Association (MTA) Alumni Fundraiser Cabaret.

The show was intended to help raise money for the upcoming Senior Showcase in New York City, which will take place during spring break. “The theatre department seniors, so declared majors, who want to participate (it is not mandatory) spend Spring Break in New York doing workshops at Actors Connection,” explained Erin Tiffany ’17. “Actors Connection is an educational and networking studio for professional actors. Leading up to this, we have workshops here on campus with a New York vocal coach (Bryan Wade) and casting director (Brette Goldstein) to work on our material.” Each performer who attends the event gets two minutes on stage, either with a one-minute song followed by a one-minute monologue, or a two-minute scene with a partner, at the final showcase the last night in New York.

The group of alumni who participated in the event were contacted through the “Fishbowl Collective,” the online MTA alumni network. “Members of the seniorclass, the class of 2017, reached out to me over the summer,” said Dana Iannuzzi ’03, an active member of the Fishbowl Collective and one of the principle organizers of the event, “and we were talking about fundraising for the senior showcase, and I had helped out with the showcase for the class of 2016…we discussed a couple of options and things that they could do, and I’ve been doing our alumni cabaret in New York for the last two years, and I said, ‘Well, if you were interested, I’m sure I could get people who have done the showcase to come down and [first of all] talk to you about the showcase itself, and also for us to do a concert to help you guys raise money,’ and that’s how all of this happened.”

The event started at 8 p.m., and a lot of the show was centered around the idea that college can be scary, and it is hard to know what to do upon graduating. Over a dozen alumni performed songs from across the musical theatre spectrum. The show featured songs such as “What Do You Do with a BA in English?” from the musical Avenue Q, “Out There” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and “My Heart is Split” from Our First Mistake. The songs were a mixture of comedic numbers and more serious pieces, and the show ended with every alumni joining together onstage, singing Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” The finale was meant to assure the senior MTA class that they always have friends in the alumni network who were happy to help them make their way through life after college and in the performing arts.

“I know that we do an alumni concert every summer, we’re hoping to bring that to campus next year for alumni weekend,” Iannuzzi said. “Every member of the Collective is doing creative things here and there… Facebook has been a great tool for us to use to let each other know what’s going on, and we are able to use each other for work, bounce ideas off one another, so it’s a living and breathing thing.”

The event was successful, and was the first of several more to come to help raise money. “We will also be holding a faculty cabaret in the coming weeks (date to be finalized), a Broadway spin class, and an anti-showcase (Mar. 1) where people can see us do ridiculous stuff and hit us in the face with pie for a donation.” Tiffany said.

"I loved being part of the MTA [while I was here] because it was such a family, in a lot of ways, and some of my closest friends are members of the MTA,” said Iannuzzi. “It has created a really great alumni group— I still speak to people who were seniors when I was a freshman, and I speak to people who [came] 10, 15 years after me, so it’s been a really great organization to be an alumni of.”