Beth Anne Cole
About Me
BETH ANNE COLE
began her performing life at the age of fifteen, singing on CBC Radio and network Television. Throughout her career, she continued to work at CBC, notably in a twenty-two-year stint on “Mr. Dressup”, as writer and performer on CBC Radio’s “Morningside”, in dramatic roles in radio and television, and appearances on “Sesame Street”, for which she also wrote songs.
Early on she became interested in acting and trained at the Stratford Festival in Canada and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) in England. While in England she starred in a seminal run of “The Fantasticks” at the Hampstead Theatre Club, and in regional theatres such as the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, Surrey. When she returned to Canada she played leading theatre roles across the country: At Neptune Theatre in Halifax, National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Winnipeg’s Rainbow Stage, and at Factory Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, Tarragon Theatre, and Royal Alexandra Theatre, all in Toronto. She also spent four seasons at The Shaw Festival where she played the title role in “Rosemarie”, and Margot in “The Desert Song”, among other roles.
BETH ANNE has established a distinguished career as a concert artist, songwriter and recording artist. She sang at the Shaw Festival, Glenn Gould Theatre in Toronto, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Boston Conservatory, Scottsdale, Arizona and scores of other venues large and small. She has recorded three CDs. When she moved to New York in 1997 she continued to perform her original work and created, with the actor Alvin Epstein, a cabaret show entitled “Kurt Weill: Songs Degenerate and Otherwise” to rave reviews. Together they received the” Best cabaret show, New England Critics’ Award” for the Kurt Weill show.
After almost nine years in New York, where she also taught speech and performance at Michael Howard Studios, and Circle - in - the- Square Theatre School, Beth Anne returned to Toronto where she now resides. Her artistic activities now include visual art, poetry, and composition, and she continues to tour and perform. Her new recording of original songs and poems, "Perhaps the Gods of Love" is a compelling work of contemporary art-song.
Walk Into the morning/ Remember kisses and passing trains/ The air dense with birdsong
(from the opening song of the album "Perhaps the Gods of Love")
Launching New CD
Press Release
Multi-talented artist Beth Anne Cole releases her third album, Perhaps the Gods of Love, on Friday, May 29, 2020.
Best known for her stage-work at prestigious theatres throughout Canada, the U.S. and the UK – as well as for her concerts and her long-time featured role on CBC’s Mr. Dressup – Cole is a major singing and acting talent. Her new thirteen-song album, with an added French version of the title track, weaves an eclectic tapestry of remarkably diverse cultural threads. A mix of Québec chanson, Japanese poetry, Yiddish folksong, and classical concert music, the album will be available on all major platforms on May 29.
Pending the end of the COVID-19 crisis, there’s also a tentative album launch and concert, scheduled for October 25, 2020, at the Tranzac Club in Toronto. For more information please visit www.bethannecole.com.
Cole is backed by an artful ensemble of piano, clarinet, bass, viola, accordion, and flute. An actor, painter, poet, and singer-songwriter, she expresses herself starkly and strikingly at the centre of every song. She dares at times to start her songs a cappella or with Celtic-tinged drones – and her voice is often paralleled by the clarinet or piano, which perfectly complement the album’s tone. Theatrical in style, these are poignant songs of loss, abandonment, aging, and death, all tempered by the transformative power of love.
"Beth Anne Cole is a songwriter’s dream and a theatregoer’s nirvana. " Toronto Sun
The Songs
Walk Into the Morning is adapted from Cole’s ten-page poem ‘Song for a Wading Bird’. It contrasts a bird-like clarinet with a tremulous viola. The effect is a meditation on the separation of wheat from chaff, of good from not-good. It’s a mantra on the refrain, “Your love your life your death your art”.
Sailor is a song of longing for a relationship with depth and recognition. It is liltingly performed by a six-piece chamber ensemble, highlighted by a flute that moves from misty textures to warm brown tones.
La Fille de l’Île (The Girl of the Island) features a rolling piano that echoes the sound of the waves. In a style that recalls Piaf, Cole’s voice swells and subsides in this Félix Leclerc portrait of loneliness and abandonment.
La Fille de la Marée (The Girl of the Tide) portrays the same woman as in the previous song – yet now she is older and wiser, having found strength in her own poetry and music, rather than in her former lover’s embrace. The song follows a tidal rhythm as she tenderly sings moutons blancs, mouton noirs to the waves – and in fact moutons blancs, white sheep, can also mean the whitecaps of the waves.
"She can break your heart when she sings." Boston Globe
Pared down to just clarinet and voice, Komachi is a minimalist reflection on the life – and possible after-life – of the renowned Japanese poet and courtesan Ono no Komachi. It is one of the most striking pieces on the album.
A talented visual artist, as well as an actor and singer-songwriter, Cole painted the image from which the album cover is taken. The painting was inspired by her poem The Book, itself inspired by a dream and now the source of this piece. Simple angelic voices provide a haunting accompaniment.
A sombre remembrance of the Holocaust’s destruction of Warsaw Jewry, Gone the Villages floats on Cole’s voice and an evocative piano and bass. Cole adapted the song from a poem by the Warsaw writer, Antoni Slonimski, and from a Yiddish folksong, Her Nor du Sheyn Meydele (Hear Me My Beautiful Girl).
Amol iz Geven a Mayse (There Was a Story of a King) is sung in Yiddish and sets us in the world of klezmer, with Cole’s vocal mirrored by a buoyant solo clarinet. It’s a lullaby, a particular folksong form called confable, in which a mother makes up the words as she goes along.
Accordionist Tiina Kiik shines in the tango Song for Leonard, as does Tania Gill whose piano lines weave around the accordion in a spirited dance. This unabashed love song to Leonard Cohen finds Cole on a trip to Montreal, visiting the great poet’s old haunts.
A Mozart composition to which Cole penned lyrics – note its kinship with The Magic Flute! – Canoe is a charming piece that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and even features a duck-quack at the end. It also incorporates strains of ‘V’là Bon Vent’, a French folksong about three ducks on a pond.
"Unfailingly transforms the competent into the sublime." Globe and Mail
Moody and atmospheric, Pathway to You is Cole’s new translation for a song by the great Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. Its subject is love – fleeting to be sure, yet eternally redemptive and sweet.
In My Story of Ruth, Cole offers her own version of The Book of Ruth, where instead of Ruth’s becoming the property of her husband Boaz, she and Boaz fall in love and their union begins the line of the House of David.
Continuous, moonlit and fleeting, the title track, Perhaps the Gods of Love, is a lovely voice-and-piano piece, reminiscent of Schubert. It derives from Cole’s five-line poem in the tanka form used by Ono no Komachi. The song’s French version, Les Dieux d’Amour, Peut-Être, ends the album, offering a wish for personal love to ripple outward and enrich the world.
The entire work, with its themes of transience and aging, is deeply hopeful in its choice of characters. Komachi says that “with the snows / the words keep coming.” Sailor sings that “love is a lighthouse searching for you / it’s always been searching for you.” And Perhaps the Gods of Love discovers that “you were here all along.”
Media Contact:
Beverly Kreller
Publicist | SPEAK Music
bev@speak-music.com | 416-922-3620
My Music
Perhaps the Gods of Love
New Release
It's a pleasure to share with you some excerpts from my new CD. If you would like to purchase "Perhaps the Gods of Love" or any of my previous CDs, please contact me at info@bethannecole.com and I will be in touch with costs and shipping information.
These are from my CDs: "Gifts in the Old, Old Ground" and "Song under the Stair".
"This is a sampling of my performance piece, based on the poetry of Ono No Komachi, a Japanese poetess who lived in the ninth century. You'll hear a hybrid - Komachi's poetry and my own, voice-tones and instruments,over a pad of sound and music beautifully composed by Marsha Coffey. It's a poem/meditation , my conversation with Komachi's lif and poetry, with translations by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani."
Teaching
BETH ANNE COLE has been a voice and speech consultant and teacher for twenty-five years. Voice has been the centre of her life and her fascination (the ancient Greeks called the voice “the sound of the soul”) as both teacher and performer, and her unusual breadth of experience in all of the arts informs and inspires her clients. She teaches business professionals in all walks of life, helping them to achieve clear and compelling speech, confidence, personal power and a sense of authenticity. Beth Anne works one-on-one or with small groups of clients; some feel that their voice is too nasal, too high, too low, too breathy ,not powerful enough or overpowering! Or they may feel held back by not being a native English speaker. Beth Anne provides the tools and the warm encouragement to expand all the vocal potential of her clients. VOICE CLIENTS have included the ballerina Natalia Makarova, the former first lady of New York Donna Hanover, and scores of teachers, lawyers and other professionals. Beth Anne is a member of The Voice and Speech Teachers’ Association (VASTA), The Canadian Association of Women Executives and Entrepreneurs (CAWEE), ACTRA, and the Canadian, American and British ACTORS’ EQUITY ASSOCIATIONS. She trained as an actress in England at The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), and as a voice teacher in Toronto and New York. She attended the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatory of Music and is on the faculty of ACT TWO STUDIOS at Ryerson University. She also teaches singing and performance. Beth Anne has performed in theatres in Canada, the U.S. and England. She was a leading player at the Shaw Festival, has written for and performed on ”Sesame Street” and has sung at the Glenn Gould Theatre in Toronto and at Carnegie Hall in New York. She is currently writing her first play, and songs for her third CD. She was “Beth Anne” on CBC Television’s “Mr. Dressup” for over twenty years.
Case Studies
John
“MY VOICE IS NOT AUTHENTIC”
What do I mean when I say “authentic”, and what did John mean when he said that to me? Inside him was a very beautiful, resonant speaking voice, but it was covered over by tension and by his conviction that he had to make his voice lower to be credible, to be manly. When I asked him to raise the pitch of his speaking voice, it felt too high to him but it sounded more, well, authentic, to me. We worked for a month or so on very specific range exercises; I would ask him to take a phrase of poetry and say it in his falsetto. Yes, as if he were on helium. And then to utter the phrase a wee bit lower, and incrementally down and down but quite slowly. He hit a point in his range where the phrase just rang. It was beautiful, and it was a few tones above his adopted or habitual speaking range. To my delight he was thrilled by this because he could feel the vibrations of his own natural voice. John would go in and out of a lovely lilting West Newfoundland accent. I think this compounded the feeling of authentic or not authentic. But one of the features of that Maritime dialect was the tension in the root of the tongue: it was so extreme in his case, the hard “r”s and clipped vowels, that instead of rolling forward and out to the listener, his voice rolled back into his own head! There was a lot of tension in his tongue and jaw, and we worked on that with specific exercises. We met once a week for about nine months. Before long he was dying to sing and from his nervous beginnings he grew into his own natural and lovely singing voice, a kind of Irish tenor emerged, and with this John experienced great joy. He had his voice, all of it, and that gave me a lot of joy, too, and I guess that’s what we both meant by “authentic”. Sometimes you have to search for it. Now, we can’t shut him up! He grew into his own beautiful natural singing voice
Testimonials
“I tend to live in my head and Beth Anne helped me to connect mind and body so my voice could flow freely and greatly improve public speaking in any given circumstance”. - Ana Jiminez, diplomat, United Nations, New York “Give yourself the gift of working with Beth Anne Cole. She will guide you to the truth of your text, the heart of your music and the expression of your unique vision as a vocal artist”. Jeannette LoVetri, Master voice teacher, New York ‘Beth Anne Cole has a rare combination of skills: as an actress, musical performer and composer. She brings all these skills to her teaching”. - Sandra Kazan, speech coach, New York “…gentle but penetrating approach. She has a keen eye and gives me the feedback I need, often with humour and always with compassion and empathy. I am always confident after working with Beth Anne”. - Emma A, Toronto
Press
Actress, Singer, Songwriter
“She has the timing of pure artistry.” - Toronto Star “Beth Anne Cole is a songwriter’s dream and a theatregoer’s nirvana.” - Toronto Sun “Cole can make the emotions contained in the lyrics almost palpable.” – Ottawa Journal “…a latter-day Lucille Ball who shows a remarkable talent for creating chaos out of order.” Maclean’s magazine “She has that marvellous grasp of character which elevates each song into a production of its own.. (she is) totally herself and totally ours.” - Lethbridge Herald “Unfailingly transforms the competent into the sublime.” - Globe and Mail “Cole is inimitable” (in “The Desert Song “, Shaw Festival) “The most expressive eyebrows since Jack Benny” – Toronto Star “A superb singer- actress….incendiary “Pirate Jenny”. – Boston Herald “Beth Anne Cole’s voice is an embrace”. – Anne Michaels, novelist and poet “Her big-as-millstone eyes and her lyrical voice were never more appealing” – Canadian Jewish News “She can break your heart when she sings” – Boston Globe “She can do more with one song than other artists do with a whole play” – Toronto Sun
GET IN TOUCH WITH ME
CONTACT INFORMATION
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
416-362-9866
Media Contact:
Beverly Kreller
Publicist | SPEAK Music
bev@speak-music.com | 416-922-3620