Mary Setrakian admits to being a little nervous the first time she gave a private voice lesson. There she was in a stranger's apartment, working at someone else's piano, while the student's husband sat listening. It didn't help her nerves that the eavesdropper was Tom Cruise, the student was Nicole Kidman, and the apartment—and the piano—belonged to Sting. “Okay, it was a little surreal,” she says.
Yet for Setrakian, '80, a Broadway veteran who also has performed in operas and concerts from Fresno to Milan, it was a perfectly real beginning to a second career that has earned her a reputation as voice teacher to the stars. After a month of lessons, Kidman landed her Golden Globe Award-winning and Oscar-nominated singing role in Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge. Setrakian has since added names like Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Juliette Binoche, Milla Jovovich and Mandy Moore to her student roster. She serves as the voice coach to cast members of the Broadway and national touring companies of Disney's Aida and The Lion King. And she makes just as much time for actors and singers who are starting out.
Originally from Marin County, Setrakian says music always made sense to her, crediting her father for the passion—“he was always singing”—and playing flute in her high school orchestra. Sitting in the pit during a performance of Guys and Dolls, she realized that she would much rather be on the stage.
But when it came time to carry on another family tradition—her parents and older brothers all attended Stanford—she figured she would keep her options open. “I got to Stanford, and I thought maybe there was something else I'd like to study,” she remembers. “But I just went right for music and theatre.” By the end of freshman year, she had joined the Ram's Head Theatrical Society, picked up the piccolo in the LSJUMB, and auditioned for all the choirs and the University chorale, where she encountered lifelong musical influences in professors Marie Gibson and William Ramsey.
“She has one of the most beautiful personalities of anyone I have met,” says Ramsey, Stanford's director of choral activities from 1975 to 1993. Almost three decades later, he remembers the Puccini aria Setrakian delivered to a packed house at Dinkelspiel Auditorium. “Her performance of O mio babbino caro was just stunning—it spellbound the audience. I knew that she would go on to do really good things, and she has done extremely good things.”
After Stanford, Setrakian earned her master's in voice from the New England Conservatory and sang with the Boston Opera Company. A role in a summer-stock show in Maine “changed everything,” convincing her to move to New York to follow the Broadway dream. Within a week, she had made the chorus of the Light Opera of Manhattan. Just like that, she was a professional musical performer—albeit at $35 a week.
Still, she felt that something was missing—a link between her singing and her acting. A friend recommended acting teacher Susan Batson, and Setrakian soon knew she had found the person who could help her realize her potential. The admiration was mutual. “Mary to me is phenomenal,” Batson says. “[She] simply is dangerous by the mere virtue of maturity of her talent. It is unassailable and boundless in its generosity.”
With Batson's coaching and months of perseverance, Setrakian landed her first national tour as a swing in Les Misérables, understudying 12 different roles. National productions of Evita and The Phantom of the Opera followed, and she made her Broadway debut in a Hello, Dolly! revival with Carol Channing.
Humbly, Setrakian explains that her teaching career emerged through “connections.” Batson referred Kidman, at the time one of her acting students. Broadway music director Todd Ellison, a conductor Setrakian met on her first summer-stock show, sent cast members her way. Bob Gustafson, Setrakian's director during her Les Misérables tour, directed Aida—which led to the long-standing relationship with Disney.
None of this, though, would have happened without Setrakian's gift for showing performers how to use what they've got. Sometimes that's giving a talented understudy the technique to step into a role eight times a week—“I can diagnose where the holes are, where the tension is, what they need,” she says. Sometimes it's helping an actor, famous or fresh-faced, who has never sung before.
Although on certain days Setrakian is working with Sierra Boggess, star of The Little Mermaid on Broadway, she is just as thrilled for Sara Andreas, a student who recently won her first major job. She's cast in the national tour of Legally Blonde—which means she and Setrakian have even more work ahead of them. “Now we have to keep her voice and skills in shape. In one scene, she has to be jumping rope the entire time while singing!”
In addition to private lessons, Setrakian teaches weekly group sessions in New York for actors of all experience levels. Several times a year, she travels to Italy (thanks to another connection through a former student), where she conducts intensive three- and five-day courses in Rome and Milan. Last summer, she expanded her reach to Moscow. While abroad, she fits in her own concert and cabaret performances and even spent an evening training all the finalists from Italy's version of American Idol.
Setrakian says her passion, and her teaching philosophy, is rooted in this connection between acting and singing. While technique is crucial, she focuses extensively on the emotional side of the mechanical act, on drawing in experience and personal associations to one's singing. “When a talented actor connects to a character, it can be better than the trained singer; it can line up the pitches,” she explains. “If you tell the person, 'Think about the note,' they won't get it. But if you can get the person to 'send the story,' to drop into the emotional life of the character, it suddenly all lines up. Singing is not just making pretty sounds with your voice.”
Because her philosophy can seem hard to summarize (only while lying flat on the ground during a sample lesson/therapy session did this non-musically inclined writer begin to understand), Setrakian is writing an entire book—part memoir, part manual—on her theory of singing, acting and teaching.
Meanwhile, she continues to perform her one-woman salons around the country and in Europe, each an eclectic evening of songs from Broadway, pop, opera and, more recently, her Armenian heritage. And with Broadway auditions and callbacks scheduled between classes, she certainly has no intention of giving up her first career. “There's that saying, 'Those who can't do, teach'—so I always tell my students to come to my performances and watch me walk the walk,” she says. “Watch me sing the song.”
