Four Celebrities You Probably Didn’t Know Have Master’s Or Doctorate Degrees

Image source: nba.com

In show business, rarely will you find an actor, singer, or athlete who has completed a bachelor’s degree. The brightest stars are typically college dropouts who chose to sacrifice college in exchange for a temporary opportunity to get famous. The scenario is very common and is highly understandable. However, some stars have actually made it well in showbiz while not completely abandoning their studies. Some of them even completed a Ph.D., which is the highest level of education that can be received in a field of study.

Mayim Bialik. A mainstay of the popular sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” the actress plays the role of Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler, a neuroscientist. In real life, Bialik is indeed a Ph.D. holder in neuroscience. She attended UCLA, although both Harvard and Yale also accepted her. Her dissertation was about the investigation of hypothalamic activity in patients with Prader-Willi syndrome.

James Franco. The actor is famous for his diverse filmography and intriguing intelligence, but not everyone knows that he actually places very high priority on education. He is currently finishing his Ph.D. in English at the prestigious Yale University. He received his MFA from Columbia in 2010.

Image source: online-phd-programs.org

Shaquille O’Neal. When the NBA drafted the four-time NBA champion, he left Louisiana State University to pursue his dream of becoming a professional basketball player. His parents objected to the idea, but O’Neal promised to return to school as soon as he got the chance. And so he did! He graduated in 2012 with a Ph.D. in education from Barry University.

Brian May. The lead guitarist and songwriter for the world-renowned rock band Queen graduated from Imperial College with a BSC Honors degree major in mathematics and physics. He then continued to study at Imperial College for his Ph.D. and graduated in 2008.

While I see myself acting for the rest of my life, I still plan to advance my education and expand my career opportunities. My name is Louis P. Habash. Follow me on Twitter for more acting updates.

How Les Miserables the Musical Changed Theatre

Image Source: The Telegraph

Les Miserables has changed the way musicals are written and received. The musical first opened in London on October 8, 1985 and quickly became popular, becoming the second longest-running musical in the world and fifth longest-running show in Broadway history. The collaboration between Schonberg and Boublil immediately struck a chord among theater fans and further popularized the Victor Hugo classic.

The musical revolutionized public reception of theatre shows. Before it came out, many musicals tackled lighter topics. Love was an obvious subject, but plays were focused on its more romantic side – the darker aspects only hinted at or briefly touched. Les Miserables, which translates to The Miserable People, blatantly challenged this concept; not only dwelling on topics such as prostitution and death but making these themes the foreground of a story. Despite being set during the 19th century, the core topics were universal. Actors were challenged to tap into their more sensitive sides and were encouraged to display their emotional ranges.

The play was also considerably long. The entire musical would run for more than two hours. This translated to more than 120 minutes of intense emotion. During its first runs in London, initial reviews were conflicting. Many people simply did not know how to react to it.

Image Source: Wikimedia

Eventually the musical’s popularity grew and more people clamored for more musicals on more realistic topics. Theater playwrights were all too willing to accept the challenge. This has led to many beautiful and raw musicals being produced since then.

But there is power still in the original. Les Miserables still remains one of the most popular musicals to date and continues to draw crowds from many countries.

My name is Louis P. Habash, an aspiring actor with a passion for musical theater. From Les Miserables to The Book of Mormon, I live, breathe, and eat musicals. Learn more about my passion by liking my Facebook page.

Enter Self Center Stage

Developing an entirely different persona from oneself and having the chops to make that new personality believable is extremely difficult. A lot of people turn to actors for an escape from their normal lives, but the magic happening on the stage or screen is no easily produced feat. Actors must study rigorously while practicing their trade whenever possible, and in time (hopefully) finding their own unique voice in a form of artistry teeming with participants.

Image source: Lamda.org.uk

There are various techniques one can utilize when it comes to acting, and different players choose different approaches depending on which is most comfortable or those they may have studied. Classical acting is based on a series of systems developed by Constantin Stanislavski. In Stanislavski’s method, actors look within themselves to find inner emotions or feelings they can relate to the character they are portraying. They try to get into the mindset of the character and use their own experiences to interpret how the character might react to certain circumstances.

The Chekhov Technique derives from Michael Chekhov, a student of Stanislavski. Transformation is made by the actor through impulse, imagination, and a combination of internal and external gesture to try and portray the character.

Method acting is most often attributed to Lee Strasberg and/or members of the legendary Theatre Group. This technique draws upon numerous others, allowing the performer to better hone in on the thoughts and actions of the character and produce more lifelike performances.

Image source: Plonkytalk.com

Closely related to Method, the Meisner technique requires that the actor focus totally on the other actor as if they are real right at that moment. This close interaction allows the two to bounce reactions off of one another as if each response is more tangible and believable to the audience.

Acting in and of itself is a feat of truly extraordinary artistry that can be approached in innumerable ways. Each performance has its own unique whirlwind of opportunities, and each performer can approach their scenes from as many directions as they see fit. The most important thing is that the audience, above all else, stops noticing scenes and become immersed in the experience. This is when you know someone on that stage or screen has done their homework.

Preparing to Don your Acting Mask

So the moment has come when the role you’ve been desperately trying to land is finally sitting right in your lap. After what feels like countless auditions, readings and re-readings, and screen tests, you’ve been given the green light! So what now? What should you be doing to nail this role and turn such an opportunity into the launching pad you have always waited for? Firstly, you need to buckle down and learn as much as you can about this character, because the only way you are going to make a truly unforgettable impression on the audience is through a complete transformation that overshadows you, the actor, and gives way to your newly developed persona.

You must get into the head of this character. Where are they from, where are they now, and where are they going? How does this affect the decisions they make in everyday life? What do they want, and at what lengths will they go to get it (however extreme)? You want to get to the barebones of this person, so learn his/her family background, age, social status, upbringing, sexuality, fears, and how fine of a line separates their desires from their needs.

Many actors go through months of preparation prior to taking on a new role. Some go above and beyond to ensure the transformation is so convincing you forget you are watching an interpretation: You are 100% invested in this character, consumed with wanting to know how they impact the overall story.

Getting into the belly of the beast, so to speak, will get you closer to better understanding the psyche that influences any character’s actions. If you are portraying a cop, for instance, talk to a real-life police officer about what the public assumes and what actually entails trying to protect them. Going out and having real-life experiences described to you by surgeons, janitors, teachers, auto mechanics, mayors, drug addicts, social workers, and even criminals is invaluable information when trying to better understand worlds we have no comprehension of.

No matter the role, if you can pick the brain of someone who can relate to the eccentricities of your character and the uniqueness behind such unfamiliar waters, you are a privileged fly-on-the-wall with knowledge and insight your audience trusts is authentic. And not you the actor: You, the character.

The ability to adapt to new values, morals, interests, wants, and needs foreign as ever to your own personal constitution is no easy task, but the life of a chameleon demands such adaptability, and once the craft is mastered who knows what reflection awaits you once it’s no longer work but sheer passion running the show.

Enrollment to Superstardom: America’s Top Acting Schools

Although I am an alumnus of Boston University School of Theatre (and proud of it!), I cannot deny the fact that there are also other equally excellent schools for aspiring actors. First-rate programs and brilliant mentors set these institutions apart. In addition, they have produced some of the most acclaimed actors in history (I hope to join the brood, someday).

 Image source: bu.edu

Boston University School of Theatre

Of course, I’m bias. But seriously, Boston University School of Theatre is an incredibly magnificent training ground for future acting geniuses. I am not claiming that I am already one, but I certainly learned a lot from my alma mater. It is a conservatory with a laid back yet passionate approach to the craft. You are given a broad range of acting techniques (called the “toolbox approach”) to master and apply whatever you have learned in a creative and fun environment.

State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase College

The U.S. News & World Report has listed SUNY Purchase among the best public schools in 2011. Its Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in acting program is top-notch, offering instruction in movement, speech and voice, dramatic literature, and theater history. It designs busy schedules to keep students active with classes and rehearsals from dawn to dusk (or even later).

Image source: hollywoodreporter.com

American Conservatory Theater (San Francisco, California)

Although it is essentially an actual theater, Tony Award-winning American Conservatory Theater has served as an important academic and artistic venue for actors for more than half a century. The conservatory offers a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program to a limited number of students who pass its stringent admission process each year.

As a stage actor, I feel honored to be educated in one of the country’s top acting schools. My education has been a crucial part of my career and probably one of the main reasons I can now read 'Louis P. Habash' in the posters of major stage productions. Connect with me on LinkedIn for more of my credentials.

Sound Check: How Actors Can Take Care of Their Throat and Voice

Impressive acting is not just about clear-cut body movements but is also about noteworthy vocal interpretations of lines. Powerfully uniting both is the factor that would engage the audience. The voice being one of the bases of an actor’s success is the primary reason care must be provided to avoid damaging it.

Actors are like singers, in a way, because their voice is one of their most prized possessions. One of the common problems faced by both artists is the abnormal straining of their voice due to its overuse. This may lead to acquiring nodule or small bumps on the throat.

 Image source: Autismafter16.com

Livescience.com notes that millions of Americans suffer from some type of voice disorder. To keep the voice in A-okay, experts suggest the following tips:

1) Rest. As with all things, too much of something is bad. Yelling, screaming, or frequent use of voice may lead to the throat’s dryness and exhaustion. Actors must take a cue from what they feel in their throat as to when to take a break. Usually, hoarseness of the voice occurs when people give their throat a rough time.

2) Hydrate. Water keeps the vocal chords lubricated, thus, drinking water and avoiding alcohol and caffeine help in keeping the voice in shape.

3) Exercise. The vocal chords, much like the rest of the body, needs proper training. Backstage.com shared 10 vocal exercises to maintain a healthy throat, such as creaky doors, wherein the person imitates the sound of a creaky door or a rusty gate opening, and doing so with very little air. Another exercise is the “Ngs,” where the person would produce sound with just the letters ng, which is a good exercise for backpressure.

 Image source: Livestrong.com

4) Avoid smoking. Smoke, even secondhand, may irritate the vocal chords.

5) Relax. Actors must be wary of how they use their voice. Speaking or singing in a less strenuous manner, despite the required pitch, is highly recommended.

Louis P. Habash gives budding stage actors tips on how to make it in the industry. If you want to read more of his tips, follow him on Facebook.

REPOST: Watch Noah Galloway perform 1970s jazz routine with Sharna Burgess on 'Dancing with the Stars'

Did you watch ABC Dancing With The Stars tonight's episode? Noah Galloway and his professional dancer Sharna Burgess danced a 70s Jazz routine. Watch their performance here:

Noah Galloway and Sharna Burgess rehearse a jazz routine for Week Seven of "Dancing with the Stars." | Image Source: al.com/entertainment

Alabama's Noah Galloway and his partner, Sharna Burgess, performed a jazz routine tonight on "Dancing with the Stars." 

The episode, themed as "Eras Night," asked the remaining teams to use time periods as their inspirations, from the 1920s to the future. Galloway and Burgess, known as #TeamShway, chose the 1970s as their decade, along with costumes that evoked "American Hustle" and "Scarface."

Judges for the ABC reality series -- Len Goodman, Carrie Ann Inaba, Bruno Tonioli and Julianne Hough -- gave Galloway and Burgess a combined score of 36 out of 40 points.

On last week's episode, #TeamShway earned 29 out of 40 points, placing near the bottom of the pack. Seven duos remain on "Dancing" during Week Seven, as the celebs and dance pros move into the last few weeks of the competition.

Galloway and Burgess also participated in a head-to-head dance-off with another couple, trying to to earn points. They won the dance-off, vying against Robert Herjavec and Kym Johnson, and added two points to their score. Final total for #TeamShway: 38/40.

Galloway, 33, an Army vet from Alabaster, lost part of his two left limbs in 2005 after a bomb blast in Iraq. But that didn't stop him from moving on with his life, rallying to become a personal trainer, long-distance runner, motivational speaker and cover guy for Men's Heath magazine.

Performing on "Dancing with the Stars" is his latest challenge, and one that Galloway has tackled with grit, grace and gumption.

We'll follow with a full recap of #TeamShway's latest appearance on the show. For now, watch their jazz performance in the video clip below.

Video Source: al.com

These are just a few of the most notable jazz styles around as the music is constantly changing. For more information on jazz and its evolution, subscribe to Lou S. Habash's blog.

REPOST: Why Isn’t Jazz More Popular?

Jazz music is beautiful and many fans of the genre wonder why not more people share this opinion.  This Slate article features a reason for jazz' declining popularity based off an answer posted in Quora.

 

Jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove performs in 2012 in Prague. | Image Source: slate.com

This question originally appeared on Quora, the best answer to any question. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Answer by Mills Baker, studied and played music:

Many of these answers are excellent; I think they largely suffice to explain why jazz isn't more popular. But I think one controversial dynamic has gone unmentioned: race. Because this question is not really about the absolute popularity of jazz—after all, why isn't classical music more popular? or polka?—but about its declining popularity.

So why is jazz not as popular as it once was? I think it's mostly due to hip-hop's rise as the preferred authenticity-signaling genre for many white listeners.

Jazz has always fared well among musicians and people who like to attend closely to creative expression, formal innovation, complex musical structures, improvisational heroics, and the like. But for a significant part of the 20^th century, jazz was also a popular way for whites to express enthusiasm and support for blacks and black culture, and to distinguish themselves from other whites. Someone commented: I know I should like jazz because it's cool and important …

I believe he is implicitly referring to this era of American (and European and even Japanese) history: when cool audiences partially appreciated jazz because of its signifying power, because it indicated that they were "hip," "authentic," and enamored with a genre that put black creative expression on par with that of any tradition in art history. There are both good and bad sides to this, but the point is that loving jazz was (and sometimes is) shorthand for a certain kind of political-cultural position.

The political context cannot be overlooked. From the Harlem Renaissance to the time of the Beats, jazz meant more than music for many audiences, and literature and movies from the era are hagiographical toward jazz artists not solely because they were geniuses—although that of course helped!—but because many people liked associating themselves with the aura of the scene: cool cats, counter-culture, Miles Davis walking off the stage as a real artist, etc. In the 1950s, liking jazz made you part of an elect group with appealingly progressive tastes and interests.

To reduce this to a simple series of steps:

1. Jazz is an awesome, original genre of highly sophisticated music developed in the United States.
2. Critics and influencers in culture centers like New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, and so on recognize its import and love it both as art and—through the 1940s and much of the '50s—as entertainment. There is also a political element to this, in some cases.
3. Larger crowds love the entertainment but also love doing what critics and culture leaders love doing; they perceive "going to the jazz club" as a cool, sophisticated thing to do, and love the experience on many levels. For many in the crowd, the political angle is even more important than it was for critics.
4. Jazz evolves, remains an artist's art, continually seeks to challenge audiences, problematizing the happy enjoyment of the many even as it pleases some number of the few. Jazz becomes decreasingly accessible; danceable jazz vanishes (for leading artists, anyway) and discordant, atonal, arhythmic, or otherwise experimental sounds become more common.
5. Jazz reaches a pinnacle of intellectualism, scandal and tragedy (including widespread drug abuse), deconstructed sounds and experimental albums—perhaps in the 1970s—just before hip-hop arrives in the 1980s.

By the time hip-hop arrives, jazz is fatally old: It's something one's parents listened to. And now there is a new means by which youth can indicate that they are different from their mothers and fathers and white culture in general, a controversial genre that provides them with some of the racial and class exoticism many seem to seek. Moreover, it has lyrics, and lyrics are always preferable to instrumental music for the masses for perfectly sensible reasons (they understand words, know how to form and use them; they do not have this facility with saxophones or pianos).

Through the '80s, '90s, and today, hip-hop evolves too, but not like jazz: Rather than growing more introverted and challenging it goes pop (not all of it, of course; challenging and/or deep hip-hop abounds). Now it's possible for suburban whites to broadcast their multiculturalism and to feel connected to a vital, authentic, countercultural scene just by listening to well-produced, four-minute tracks with perfectly intelligible lyrics and familiar references.

So while as many answers have noted jazz remains popular with its core fans, the "cool" of listening to it is now more easily had listening to hip-hop. At least that's my speculative sense. Jazz simply no longer signals cool sophistication.

* * *

A final note: New instrumental music is now overwhelmingly electronic, and electronic music is much easier to begin to make than jazz is; among other things, one can make it alone, with a computer, whereas jazz requires years of practice and training and then assembling a group, a space to play, and then trying to play live. As such, some of the musicianship-oriented listener base has fragmented for noncultural reasons and satisfies itself elsewhere.

Related to this is that jazz was once musically contiguous with the music behind pop. For example: If you loved Frank Sinatra, you were accustomed to the sounds and production methods used by some jazz. Again, that role today is played by electronic music: If you love Kanye West, you are accustomed to the sounds and production methods of electronic music. As such, if you start making music or get into instrumental music, it will probably be electronic. It's easier, more familiar, and is part of the popular music of the day.

I think jazz has been mostly displaced by hip-hop and electronic music. Of course, many jazz musicians and hip-hop and electronic artists defy this observation and make use of one another's genres. But jazz struggles a bit with this, as many jazz audiences do not want to listen to Squarepusher, while many Squarepusher listeners find John Coltrane quite palatable. The reasons why some genres develop formal sclerosis are hard to pin down, but have a lot to do with how repertorial they are.

Learn more about jazz music by following Lou S. Habash on Google+.

REPOST: A List of Common Jazz Instruments

 For those who aren't familiar with jazz but are interested in making music, there are a few instruments you should know how to play. Summer Jazz spotlights the most common jazz instruments in this article below:

Image Source: summerjazz.net

 
If you’re thinking of assembling your own jazz band then here is a list of jazz instruments that you and your future band mates should be able to master in order to create the unique and tantalizing blend of sounds that only jazz music can create.

Piano

It’s definitely the most commonly known and used instrument in jazz, but it’s also the most expensive. It would be nice if you can find a musician who already has his own keyboard or actual baby or grand piano for that matter. But if not, it’s possible that you’ll find a lot of venues with pianos available on site and which you can use during your set.

Saxophone

The saxophone is also one of the most popular jazz instruments because of the unique sound it’s able to produce. Saxophones have a great resemblance to clarinets, which is why most people end up mistaking one for the other. Charlie Parker is one of the best known saxophonists in the world of jazz and if your band’s saxophonist is still in the experimental stage, he’s sure to find inspiration by listening to Parker’s albums.

Clarinet

The clarinet’s body can either be made of metal, wood, ivory, or even plastic. Like other brass instruments, it has a reed connected to its mouthpiece and through which the player blows air and creates music. Benny Goodman is one of jazz’s most popular clarinet players and it would do your band well if you’re to listen to his many famous collaborations and learn from it.

Trumpet

The trumpet is also another popular jazz instrument that belongs to the brass family. In fact, most jazz bands tend to consist of a mix of purely keyboard and brass instruments. Some, however, may feature percussion instruments as well, but this is not as common.

While you may have a hard time finding someone who plays the clarinet or sax, you’ll be happy to know that finding a trumpeter is almost as easy as finding a pianist. After all, trumpets are often part of the lineup of most school marching bands.

Once you have all these instruments ticked off in your to-do list, you just have two more tasks to complete. First, look for a vocalist – jazz instrumentals are all well and good, but there are times when songs sound fairly incomplete without vocal and lyrical accompaniment. And finally, don’t forget to choose a name for your band – one that can hopefully stay with you from the start and all the way to the top!

Lou S. Habash is a jazz dance instructor. Like this Facebook page for more information on all things jazz.