Entertainment

Column: Meet the voice coach who's become a 'spiritual guru' to Hollywood's biggest stars

Published

3 hours ago

November 18, 2024

Column: Meet the voice coach who's become a 'spiritual guru' to Hollywood's biggest stars

A secret center of the musical theater universe lies almost 3,000 miles from Broadway in a modestly grand house in Toluca Lake. On a late summer day, the home’s most striking feature was the figure of a white standard French poodle. Visible through one of the windows flanking the front door, she sat so still that she might have been mistaken for a statue, like the lion-dogs that guard the entrance to a Shinto shrine.

If musical theater had a canine sentinel, it might well be a standard French poodle. But no. When the door opened, the dog, Belle, sniffed politely before trotting deeper into the house, neon-green-painted nails flashing, to pause briefly beside her owner: Eric Vetro, perhaps the leading vocal teacher and trainer of bold-faced names on stage and screen, including several of the leads in the upcoming film adaptation of “Wicked.”

Ariana Grande, who plays Galinda, has spoken often and at length about how long and how rigorously she worked on raising her pitch and honing her voice before auditioning for her dream role — and Vetro is the man who coached her.

Just as he coached Jonathan Bailey for his role as Fieyro. Just as he worked with Jeremy Allen White for his performance as Bruce Springsteen in the upcoming “Deliver Me From Nowhere” and Timothée Chalamet for “Willy Wonka” and the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown.” And Renée Zellweger for her Oscar-winning performance as Judy Garland in “Judy.” And Lea Michele for “Funny Girl,” Austin Butler for “Elvis,” Josh Gad for “The Book of Mormon” and “Frozen,” Emily Blunt for “Into the Woods” and “Mary Poppins Returns,” Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling for “La La Land” and Halle Bailey and Melissa McCarthy for “The Little Mermaid.”

The list goes on and on and on. It also includes plenty of equally well-known recording artists, such as John Legend, Shawn Mendes, Katy Perry and Pink. Indeed, if a famous actor or singer refers to the work they’ve done with a vocal coach, there’s a very good chance they are talking about Vetro. Invariably in very glowing terms.

“Even though my range has always been high soprano,” Grande says via email, “Galinda requires a very different technique, and has a very different sound than the one I use to sing my pop music. Her voice is classical and operatic, and I had the honor of working on that every day together with Eric in preparation. [He] would paint Belle’s nails pink and green and put little pink ribbons in her hair to send me off before each audition or callback,” she adds. “Not only is he the best at what he does but he is truly the most thoughtful and kindest man in the world.”

Dressed, on this day, in black Prada jacket and shoes, which match his meticulously groomed short beard and hair, Vetro, 68, is an arresting figure, with a ready and dazzlingly white smile and the slender, expressive hands of a piano player. That’s how he got into music, initially — he’s played piano since he was 5. A voice major at New York University, he worked in cabaret for many years, learning, he says, the valuable lesson of listening, both to what a person’s voice can do, and also to what it should do.

Voice coach Eric Vetro gives a lesson at his home this summer.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

“So many young girls can belt it out and they get known for having a big voice. But that cheats them. You have to listen carefully and adjust, get them to understand that some voices are more beautiful when they’re not bigger.”

His work as a musician, teacher and adviser led him to L.A., where, he says, “I kept meeting people and getting coaching jobs. If you throw yourself into it 100 percent, you’re going to get noticed.”

In the beginning, most of his clients were outside the entertainment industry: nurses, waiters, people who just wanted to sing better. Then he got hired by Craig Zaden and Neil Marin to work on the 1999 remake of “Annie,” which led to “Chicago,” “Hairspray” and “Hairspray Live.” He began working with Bette Midler during her Vegas residency, Hugh Jackman on “Boy From Oz” and Grande, who began working with Vetro when she was 23. “Once you get going,” Vetro says, “it just snowballs. Now I don’t work with ‘regular’ people at all.”

Now he works on movies, theatrical shows, musical tours, brought in by directors, producers and musical directors to work with performers with a variety of experience levels and demands — singers, like Grande, moving into musical acting roles; actors, like Blunt, in their first singing roles; artists on tour, and performers who are looking to grow their voice or achieve a specific sound.

For actors like Butler, White, Zellweger and Chalamet, who need to channel a well-known voice the first step is being aware of the voice they have.

“We start with voice lessons so they understand their own voice,” Vetro says. “Then we start with the realm of another voice. It might be pronunciation, or where they take their breaths or the accent. We start vocalizing in character — I asked Renee, ‘What would Judy think of this exercise?’”

The goal is to capture the essence of the person, he says. “You don’t want it to be an impersonation.”

Vetro says he has only turned one client away — a well-known model who had been offered a role on Broadway. “He was very good-looking, charming. And then he opened his mouth. I said, ‘If this were a movie, maybe, but for you to sing on Broadway is never going to happen.’ His girlfriend called me later to thank me.”

Thanks to a recently released BBC Maestro series, however, “regular people” can get the Vetro treatment. He is filming it on this particular summer day, on which his home is filled not just with two pianos and multiple keyboards, but also lights, cameras and sound equipment.

For about 30 minutes, he works with longtime students, singer-songwriter Heidi Webster and singer-actor David Burnham. Burnham, who played “Wicked’s” Fiyero on Broadway, started working with Vetro after he was cast in a Universal Studios theme park show. “Eric realigned my voice,” he says. “I have recordings of him doing lessons that I use before every Broadway show.”

Voice coach Eric Vetro gives a lesson to Heidi Webster, center, and David Burnham, right.

“Lessons” include singing scales with one’s hands in the air, dropping on the high note, or bending forward and being pulled up by the ascension of notes.

“We’re like athletes,” Burnham says. “Runners don’t race without warming up.”

There’s also a lot of breathing exercises — the famous “hee hee heeee,” jaw-dropping, face-wagging, arm-waving and humming through a straw, sometimes into a cup of water.

“It’s amazing what you can do with a straw,” says Jonathan Bailey via email. “I thought we elevated it two levels when instead of using a cup of water we used champagne flutes, which I just thought was the height of sophistication. He always had a naughty twinkle in his eye and we laughed and laughed and laughed.”

In preparation for “Wicked,” Bailey began working with Vetro, often over Zoom, while still filming “Fellow Travelers.”

“A real challenge for me was that I was filming in Canada and London and going back and forth. With ‘Fellow Travelers,’ I’d do 21-hour days where I’d either have to shout or sometimes I’d have to smoke,” he says. “[Eric] sees you at all different moments of the day and in all different levels of excitability. It’s amazing, you start in your sort of home setting with him and build such a kinship and make such a friendship that he becomes sort of a spiritual guru.”

Vetro’s love of his clients and craft is palpable. The walls of his studio are papered with photographs of his students (and their various awards), and the fondness with which he speaks of them appears to be boundless and utterly sincere; he radiates positive energy. He needs to — being the entertainment industry’s go-to vocal coach is not a 9-to-5 gig. Vetro works pretty much round the clock, often consulting in several time zones. After filming the BBC piece and doing this interview, he will work with one student in Australia at 5 and another, in London, at 11.

Friends tell him he needs to take a vacation once in a while, he says, but he has no interest. There’s always, as they say, another opening, another show.

“I just love it so much,” he says. “It does not feel like work. I’d rather do this than anything.”

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: 'Red One' – Catholic Review

Published

2 hours ago

November 18, 2024

Press Room

Movie Review: 'Red One' – Catholic Review

NEW YORK (OSV News) – Why not make a Christmas-themed action flick starring Dwayne Johnson as Kris Kringle’s chief bodyguard? The answer to that question is revealed in “Red One” (Amazon MGM).

The attempt to put Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) in the middle of a lot of frenetic brawling and then wrap the whole thing up with a climactic sleigh chase leads to a hopelessly unbalanced tone in this ill-conceived holiday offering. Despite a conversion story for one of the main characters, moreover, this is far too hard-edged a production to be in any way family-friendly.

After St. Nick is kidnapped, Johnson’s Callum Drift and his team trace the breach of North Pole security that enabled the abduction to gifted but mercenary internet hacker Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans). Since cynical Jack has, since childhood, denied the very existence of the Jolly One, however, it soon becomes clear that, for all his moral shortcomings, he was acting inadvertently.

Belatedly realizing what a catastrophe he’s helped bring about, Jack agrees to help Callum and his boss, Zoe (Lucy Liu), catch the real culprit. But straight-arrow Callum has taken an instant dislike to this shady scoundrel, and only agrees to team with him under orders from Zoe. So the newly-minted odd couple take up the chase.

Clues eventually lead them to one of Santa’s long-standing adversaries, a shape-shifting witch called Gryla (Kiernan Shipka). With Santa neutralized, she plans to ruin the impending holiday by punishing every person on his naughty list. Needless to say, that means a host of potential victims around the world.

The mayhem Gryla’s nefarious plot unleashes remains thoroughly stylized throughout and the values put forward in an almost preachy way by Chris Morgan’s script are respectable from a Judeo-Christian perspective. Thus Gryla is about retribution, but Santa, who sees the inner child in even the most wayward grown-up, is about mercy and forbearance.

As for Jack, isn’t it high time he worked on being a better father to his mildly misbehaving son, Dylan (Wesley Kimmel)? The lad’s mom, Olivia (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) — to whom, we learn, Jack was never married — certainly thinks so.

All well and good. Yet, cinematically, director Jake Kasdan never finds his footing. Nor does it seem likely that he ever could have, since early scenes alternately set in Aruba and at the site of Santa’s captivity may have viewers of a certain age imagining the effect of Father Christmas wandering into an episode of “Miami Vice.”

To put it another way, Dasher and Dashiell Hammett simply do not mix.

Additionally, “Red One” is a good reminder that not every Yuletide movie is geared toward youngsters. In this case, the screenplay’s vulgar vocabulary, while certainly not excessive by Hollywood standards, does flag the proceedings as strictly off-limits for kids.

The film contains considerable bloodless violence, fleeting partial nudity, references to a character’s out-of-wedlock birth, about a dozen instances each of mild swearing and crude language, at least one rough term and a couple of crass expressions. The OSV News classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

Movie Review: Eastwood’s made a creaky court case built around “Juror #2”

Published

9 hours ago

November 18, 2024

Press Room

Movie Review: Eastwood’s made a creaky court case built around “Juror #2”

Maybe the answer to “Why did Warner Brothers barely release Clint Eastwood’s ‘final film?” was that it’s just not very good.

“Juror # 2” is competently cast, acted, shot and put together. But the script is melodramatic to the point of “hackneyed,” with a couple of unintentional laughs thrown in for good measure. I caught at least one continuity error, and that is about the only thing that really held my attention the rest of the way through this eye-roller of a Clint curtain call.

Others can grade great grandpa on the curve, but about the best you can say about this “Matlock” melodrama is that it’s not “Cry Macho,” even if it’s not any better than that the worst of the “final films” that preceded it.

Nicholas Hoult stars as a recovering alcoholic and expectant father who finds himself on a Savannah murder trial jury in which he has a very important important piece of evidence about the crime which the accused is seemingly certain to have commited.

Juror number two is pretty sure he himself did it.

Seeing as how another juror turns out to be a retired cop, you have to wonder if the “real” killer will get away with it. And you ponder the competence of the prosecuting attorney, running for DA (Toni Collette) and the public defender (Chris Messina) during voir dire (jury questioning and selection).

But that’s kind of the point. Eastwood’s conjured-up a condemnation of America’s justice system, and in his most Clint touch of all, leaves the rush-to-judgement “their only suspect” cops out of the equation altogether. Yeah Clint, prosecutorial misconduct along the Georgia coast always has a local policing element. Or didn’t you hear?

Jurors bicker over a verdict with the two Black jurors (Cedric Yarbrough and Adienne C. Moore) the quickest to vote “guilty” to get out of there and go home. The others, urged on by Justin (Hoult), start teasing-out other possible solutions to the mystery, and break the judge’s strict orders to not attempt their “own investigation.”

The most tained juror of all consults his AA sponsor (Kiefer Sutherland) who conveniently turns out to be another attorney. And the advice that counselor counsels is jaw-dropping, more dramatically convenient than real world ethical.

Coincidences like that abound as our guilty juror flashes back to that fateful night and tries to head off A) sending an innocent man to prison and B) to void letting suspicion fall on him as he attempts that.

Eastwood serves up a politically correct jury — white, Black, Asian, young, old, etc. — passing judgment on a case so convoluted and a screenplay so contorted that even the aspiring DA starts doing her own investigating. Because again, the COPS are left out of this altogether.

The strangers in the jury room leap into instant “old man” and “stoner” insults, this coming after the second or third reference to “this flawed process” and “imperfect it may be” in court. The worst thing anyone calls the DA is “a politician.” That’s the depth of the messaging here.

Further complicating our suspect juror’s attack of conscience and rationalizations about the other suspect being “a bad dude” is his “problem pregnancy” wife (Zoey Deutch) who needs him by her side once he’s saved the innocent man and covered his own tracks from within the jury room.

I was willing to go along with some of this as Eastwood goes through the motions of presenting the jury selection and the trial. He can’t reinvent the genre, so he doesn’t try.

But the picture isn’t playing and there’s little suspense and even less logic you start taking note of the abrupt shifts in the not-quite-caricatured characters and the plot. You hear a juror accuse another of changing his or her tune from what he said “just the other day” on the FIRST day of deliberations.

And you take comfort in Collette, Yarbrough, Simmons, Deutch and Sutherland, the stand-outs from the cast, as you pity those who aren’t as compelling as they might have been were they working for anybody other than “One Take Clint.”

Rating: PG-13, violent images, profanity

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Chris Messina,
Cedric Yarbrough, J.K. Simmons, Leslie Bibb, Adrienne C. Moore, Kiefer Sutherland and Zoey Deutch.

Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood, scripted by Jonathan A. Abrams. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:54

About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine

Entertainment

Tyson-Paul fight on Netflix watched by 60 million households despite technical glitches

Published

10 hours ago

November 18, 2024

Press Room

Tyson-Paul fight on Netflix watched by 60 million households despite technical glitches

Netflix looked for the silver lining in the technically flawed live stream of the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight on Friday.

The Los Gatos, Calif.-based streaming giant said 60 million households watched the bout between Paul, a fighter who has established his fame through YouTube, and Tyson, the 58-year-old former heavyweight champion. The figure is more than 20% of its 283 million subscribers worldwide.

Paul, 27, won a unanimous decision in the eight-round fight at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. But the fight was far from a pugilistic masterpiece.

Tyson came out aggressively in the first two rounds but was nearly immobile through the second half. By the end of the fight, Paul appeared to be holding back his attacks.

Nearly 50 million households also watched the co-main event where women’s lightweight champion Katie Taylor won a decision over Amanda Serrano. Netflix said the bout is likely to be the most-watched professional women’s sporting event in U.S. history.

Despite the huge audiences, Netflix’s first ever sanctioned boxing event was a less than ideal viewing experience as consumers went to social media to complain about losing the feed and buffering.

“I would pay $89.99 to not have to watch this on Netflix,” Femi Abebefe, a host on the BetQL radio network, wrote on X. “The buffering is so amateur, my goodness.”

Downdetector, which tracks internet outages, received thousands of reports on Friday that people were having problems streaming Netflix.

After the fight, Netflix was even trolled by the X account for Comcast’s streaming service Peacock with a post that read: “So how was everyone’s night? :)” Peacock has successfully live-streamed NFL games and the Olympics.

A Netflix representative had no comment on the technical issues.

Netflix has another major live streaming event scheduled on Christmas when the streamer plans to carry two NFL games.

Netflix is moving into live events that can capture mass audiences as a means to attract advertisers. The company’s ad-supported tier is seen as a route to increase revenue as subscriber growth slows.