Angela C. Howell
Interview Highlights
You learn from everything. If you don’t learn something from a play, we haven’t done our jobs.
Having other people who believe in you and root for you helps you believe in yourself.
We need to open more doors for women and others who have not had privilege in theatrical spaces.
Always keep growing.
Find Angela Online:
Website: https://www.angelachowell.com/
Angela’s Current and Upcoming Work:
“It's good to be at peace with yourself. And it’s good to be at peace with the world. That’s when you bloom.”
Bio
Angela C. Howell (she/her) wears many hats on a regular basis—musician, actress, vocalist, composer, writer, conductor, teacher, director, and producer. Angela has been very fortunate to meld her multiple skills into a profession in New York City.
Angela has sung all over the United States and most of Europe, performing as a vocalist with many varied groups. Angela was a featured soloist for the celebrity benefit at Town Hall honoring those who died on 9/11 (9/11 Remembered). Angela appeared at Lincoln Center in many ASCAP finalist readings including Beauty & the Beast (Bob Beverage & Paul Nahay), Bronx Primitive (Milton Schaefer), and Big Red Sun (Georgia Stitt & John Jiler), which she later also performed at the York Theatre. As a Musical Director, Angela has worked everywhere from the Yale Summer Series (for gifted youth), the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (during their stay in NYC) and Westchester Broadway Dinner Theatre (on multiple productions) to North Carolina Theatre and Circle in the Square Theatre School. Recent directing favorites include Lucky Stiff (West End Theatre, NYC), Peter Pan (Riverdale Summerstage Series), all stage shows for Howell’nHopkins, and her concerts in the Plainfield Coffee-house Series. Angela has released seven albums as produced by The GoodStuff Company and appears on a wealth of other international recordings as a vocalist and musician. Six originals off of Angela’s Daffodils album are featured in a full-length film titled “The Beginning of the End” (a finalist in the 2004 Independent Film Festival hosted at Madison Square Garden in NYC). An Original Christmas features two new songs she co-wrote with Bob McDonald. Angela thoroughly enjoyed co-directing the video for their smash single SNAP ME A SELFIE, SANTA. In 2021 she released Camille 101, whose first single, There’s Nothin’ I Don’t Love went to number 8 on the Adult Contemporary Charts.
Angela heads two production companies (Better For It and Howell Productions), which have produced original plays, multiple genre writing competitions, and numerous developmental works. She first became interested in writing and producing when she was afforded the opportunity to participate in the 1988 GLCA (Great Lakes Council of the Arts) program in New York City. Coming from a small town in Ohio, it was quite an honor to be chosen to assist the esteemed Ira Weitzman at Playwrights Horizons. While working as Ira’s resident assistant, she was then asked to also assist Andre Bishop, the Artistic Director (who presently heads Lincoln Center). At Playwrights she saw firsthand how much effort was needed to assist up-and-coming talent, create a quality product, and just how rewarding that process could be. In addition to her daily resident duties, Angela acted as a script reader, assistant musical director (to Henry Aronson on Superbia by Jonathan Larsen), assistant director (to Daniel Sullivan on The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein) and part-time assistant to the business manager. She wore many hats back then, too!
Meet Angela
Amy: We are here with fabulous multi-hyphenate Angela Howell! Angela, please introduce yourself, share your pronouns, and tell us about the roles that you play in theatrical spaces and otherwise.
Angela: Thanks for having me! My name's Angela Howell, I am a she, and I am currently working at Tuacahn Center for the Arts in Utah doing a production of Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story. This is my seventh time doing the show. I'm in it and I’m music directing it. I have a small production company, and we produce benefit concerts in December and other works throughout the year. I also direct, I’ve been very blessed to be asked to direct and musical direct. And when I'm not on that side of the table, I am hired to sing and dance and use the acting chops. I love writing things, composing and arranging. I've also had a recording career for the last 25 years. I’m very blessed.
Hayley: Wow! Angela, how did you come to the field and your creative work?
Angela: My father was a budding recording artist in the sixties. But he got drafted into Vietnam and met my mom and started having a family. I grew up in the middle of nowhere - what they call “the Switzerland of Ohio”, in the mountains. Dad would go work a day job and then come home and practice at night. We thought that every dad had a chest full of original songs. The six of us kids thought that it was normal for everybody to pick up instruments. We played music together and he wrote songs…so that sort of started it. I got my first paid singing gig at ten and then found theatre at 14 and was tapped on the shoulder by someone who saw a spark of talent in me. That led me into the trajectory of getting an opera degree simultaneously with an acting degree, and then a master’s in acting and doing Shakespeare. So that’s how it all evolved into this hodgepodge of a lot of different skill sets.
I had this recording career along with my acting career, and my agent would ask me, “Why would you waste time on the recording stuff?” And I would say, “‘Cause they keep hiring me”. It was seen as a negative split. They wanted me to turn those opportunities down and just act…but eventually it all merged when I got Buddy because it utilized all of my different skills. They needed a strong actor who could make jokes that people actually laugh at, who also could play at least two songs on piano. By the time I did the Broadway tour, they had me playing lead piano for the whole thing. Now there are plenty of other shows that have been created with this niche. It's rare to meet musicians who play multiple instruments that also are strong actors.
Amy: Angela, you’ve talked about what you're working on creatively right now. Is there anything else exciting that’s coming up?
Angela: I'm playing the Black Swamp Festival. This is my second year in a row to do that one. It's a music and arts festival. So there's 300–400 art vendors. They get about 20,000 people that come to this, and they have some major music headliners. In fact, Cedric Burnside was the guy after us the last time. He won the Grammy for blues last year. It’s awesome.
Angela’s Creative Mission
Amy: Angela, could you tell us a little bit about your creative mission?
Angela: Mm, well, SURVIVE since we went through a pandemic. The pandemic was a good test. You know, it was “Chirp chirp” for two years.
I was doing Buddy, ironically, one of the seven times, when I got the news that my mom was terminal. I was gonna quit the show to go home and be with her. And she said, “Buck up, I don't want you to sit there and watch me wither away. You are on the planet for a purpose.” Things like that have happened my entire life.
During the pandemic, I agreed to work for a few weeks at a local performing arts high school in Connecticut called ACT. They asked me to sub for the head of their theatre. I love those kids. It's not the same as being in a Broadway show or working in a 3,000 seat house. I’m always getting called back to performing. The minute Broadway opened, I got call, call, call, call, call, call. And I thought, okay, well this is, again, another sign. So I was booked up literally. Turned two of them down while still teaching to honor my commitment.
But the experience factors into my revised creative mission. You learn from everything. What I didn’t realize before doing this job is that our industry is very cutthroat, or it can be. We are told things regularly that to other people would be a major criticism but to us is just a direction. So in a high school (where you're not allowed to tell the person that they're never gonna be cast as this or that), it is very foreign to the professional side of the business.
I went into theatre to help people. There’s always a deus ex machina in a great play. If you don't learn something from the play, we haven't done our jobs. So how do you put that into motion and live your life that way? The human part of you has to keep fighting to be good amidst the chaos of the field that's very competitive. I don't wanna be competitive except with myself. And frankly, that’s how you keep succeeding, because once you've put in the work, once you've gotten to certain levels, you just get the calls as opposed to struggling to get in the room at chorus calls.
It's good to be at peace with yourself. And it’s good to be at peace with the world. That’s when you bloom. When you’re good people, I honestly think that people wanna work with you.
Experiences of Womanhood and Mentorship
Hayley: Angela, let’s talk about womanhood. How does that fit into your identity?
Angela: As a musical director, as a conductor, as a director, being a girl versus a boy…can sometimes be diminutive. You have to prove yourself a little bit more than a guy would, especially in a rock or a blues environment. And these are my two specialties, other than jazz, and all three of them are very male-dominated. I always considered myself a human who happened to have the structure of a girl.
Amy: Angela, have you had influential mentors in your career?
Angela: I've had a number of them. I came from a very poor family. If you're going to church and people at church are volunteering to buy you boots for the winter, that tells you what you don't have. So going into a field where you either have to have money or a family that knows what it was – none of my family had ever done theatre. Apart from my parents, Dr. and Mrs. Mann were the primary people that were my musical mentors when I was younger. Dr. Mann was the head of the music department for Heidelberg University where I ended up going. He and his wife were influential in convincing me to audition.
His wife, Margaret, was my music teacher in high school. I’d already done professional stuff for singing, and then suddenly I'm singing in Italian – I'd never heard an opera, you know – so I'm singing in Italian and winning these competitions. She would drive me to all the competitions. They just saw the talent in me and just wanted to nurture it. Then when I got into Heidelberg, I basically got a full-ride scholarship.
And we would tour with the choir. I couldn't afford what they required for you to have as spending cash for the trips. So Margaret would tell me there was a fund, but the fund was just them. I never knew that. They would pay to make sure that I was allowed to go on these adventures where I had won the scholarship but couldn’t afford the two meals you have to do on your own. That's a rare thing. Talk about someone who believes in you.
And then I did my first van tour. While I was on the road, my storage unit burned down. So all I had was my suitcase full of road clothes. My church, Manhattan Church of Christ, took a collection to replace my dance shoes, makeup, etc., and help me survive. They said, “You can't stop. You're here all the way from Ohio.” And then the Storrs Road Church of Christ in Connecticut, they got me my replacement headshots so I could go to an audition. So all these people rooting you on to keep doing what they believe you're gifted at, whether you have doubts or not…It's a rather remarkable thing. It starts to sink in. So it was never really for me as much as it was like, I can't disappoint this whole church full of people. I enjoy performing. Don't get me wrong, but you gotta do it for that too.
Thoughts on Privilege and How to Improve the Theatre Industry
Hayley: Angela, if you could make one change to this industry, what would it be?
Angela: Open the door for more women, that's for sure. Especially in conducting and orchestrations and that kind of stuff, it's very limited for women.
Amy: Let's talk about that a little bit. I'd love to hear how you feel being a woman has been helpful to you and what barriers you've come up against or have seen others come up against.
Angela: There's a lot of them that are subtle. Until you do them a bunch of times, you wonder what the cause is, as opposed to the direct, very visible cause. As a heterosexual female who would go into a chorus call – it's opened significantly in the last 10 years, compared to before – but you were pigeonholed as either the slut, the crazy, or the young love. These were your options. And we were told, “Don't think too hard. We just want you to walk across this way.” Pivot, bevel. Don't think too hard, ‘cause we don't want questions that we're not prepared to answer. So I run into that, cause I'm a thinker. Always have been.
I had jobs that I turned down because people were trying to have an affair with me rather than cast me in the show. I never took any of those jobs and told them all no…but I know a lot of people that did not choose that route. And then they had an even shorter career thereafter, or they became jaded about the industry. The choices that you make along the way greatly affect your future success and what people think of you going forward. But it’s very hard for a girl straight out of college. Maybe this is her last 200 bucks and she's gonna do whatever that director wants. You know? The environment is difficult.
Having come from a background where I fought to earn every little bit that I got, I'm not great with entitlement. Or I should say I'm not satisfied in the environment when someone's handed something. Just because you're rich and you can afford the Ivy League school doesn't mean that you should be the only one allowed to go. If you didn’t go to one of those schools, you’ve got an extra eight or nine years of pavement to pound, because those opportunities were not afforded to you.
Hayley: Right, if you're given that advantage of having money or privilege in other ways, you are starting further ahead and everyone else has to work three or four times as hard to get to the place where you started from.
Amy: Privilege leads to privilege. You go to the Ivy League school and then you can tap into the Ivy league network and you have all these people helping you get ahead.
Angela: I can give you a concrete example in my own case. I'd already been in the Great Lakes Council of the Arts. They sent me to Manhattan. Two people from the Midwest get to go for theatre…and I'm working at Playwrights Horizons with Andre Bishop and Ira Weitzman. They chose me as their assistant. And I'm in meetings and working on The Heidi Chronicles –
Amy: We haven't talked about The Heidi Chronicles, and we need to.
Angela: Oh, I loved Wendy [Wasserstein]. Wendy was one of the most wonderful humans on the planet. I love Daniel Sullivan too. The gig that they were grooming me for was for the workshop upstairs – they did one musical upstairs and one musical downstairs. The upstairs musical was with the person who had won the Richard Rodgers award that year – Jonathan Larson. We didn't know what was gonna happen to him after. I was the assistant musical director with Henry Aronson on Superbia. That was my first gig in Manhattan!
Hayley: Angela, shut up!
Amy: Angela is the quietest legend ever.
Angela: At the same time I was doing that internship, Bob Beverage who was an alma mater at Heidelberg won an ASCAP award that year and they were doing his show at Lincoln Center. It was Beauty and the Beast – before the Disney Beauty and the Beast came out. So Bob and his collaborator Paul Nahay had me sing for Beauty on the recording. So I went and did that gig. Dean Helen at NYU saw it and said we’d better have her at NYU. And I was debating getting my master’s.
So then during my last semester of undergrad, I was interviewing at NYU. Dean Helen got me in and said we can get her a scholarship. I did the URTAs [University Resident Theater Association auditions], and I got down to the last round of auditions in Manhattan. A bunch of universities come and try to scout you. But I still thought, “I'm going to NYU,” because I could see that NYU students were always at the top of the pile in auditions.
And then came the deus ex machina. Even though I was offered a full-ride scholarship (tuition waiver) at NYU, they would not let me get a job of any kind during the program to pay for my housing. So I tried to borrow as much as I could, whatever you could get per year from student loans and stuff. But the maximum at the time for grad school was $7,000 a year. You can't live in Manhattan even in ‘89 for $7,000 a year. So because I didn't have a wealthy donor or someone to hand me the difference and they would not let me work, I had to tell them that I couldn't come because there was no way I was ever gonna survive.
Instead I went to UConn, and I loved going to UConn. They had a wonderful program, straight up Shakespeare, Greeks, you know, George Bernard Shaw. It fit me well. And I learned a ton about acting and I loved that. But years later, I still felt the difference. In audition lines, you could rattle off the schools, and they were those Ivy league schools. Manhattan can be a little clique-y on that front. I would still break through and get jobs, but if I'm in a line and it's me or Bebe Neuwirth, who are they gonna pick?
Theatre can be an industry for rich kids who can survive it. They're very blessed that mom and dad are paying for everything when they don't have shows, and other people get stuck in that day job or whatever they're doing to survive. There's a gap there.
You realize after having done it a long time that it’s a big factor. But I never would have met my husband, the dreamy, wonderful, six-foot-two love of my life if I hadn't gone to UConn. So your trajectory is what it is.
Balancing Creative Work
Amy: Angela, can you talk a bit about how you balance your creative work?
Angela: My mom’s passing led me to a side career that I never dreamed I was gonna have. I looked around, submitted resumes, wanting to find a summer gig with kids - and luckily I found the Riverdale Rising Stars in the Bronx. Shawn Renfro, who was new there at the time, asked me to come in for an interview. He asked me, “Why in the world do you want this gig?” I said, “I'm hoping to help. I've had clients of all kinds all throughout my career, and if I can do something creative with kids I will be in a better headspace.” I just needed something like that, because kids don’t judge and if you’re doing it well, they are gonna know.
So the summer that I started working there, there was a girl who was by far the most talented but she had never had a lead before. They wanted me to double-cast the role. And I said no. I can hear what she's got. She just doesn't know how to use it. So I said, “Tell her mother that I'll give her discounted prices on voice lessons if she wants help. And if she's willing to take a few, I'm happy to help her.”
Afterwards, she starts booking all these leads. And many parents in Riverdale wanted me to give their kids lessons. That’s when I realized what I'd been teaching and developing as a technique for adults all this time also translated well to children. Because how the voice works is fascinating to me! So now I get the call for every little star and their cousin that's trying to get to Broadway.
And these kids have booked. That was 2012. In the last 10 years, I've not had one kid that didn't get into the Fame school [LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts]. I've had three or four that have gotten into Yale. I have one on a full ride at Berklee in Boston. So this is my side gig, and I love it because kids are like sponges. They'll just do what you tell them, because they want to do it. If they have a spark of talent, I'm very good at taking that talent and shepherding it.
Final Thoughts
Amy: Angela, what are you most proud of in your life?
Angela: I'm one heck of a gardener. I was trained by a lot of people that were my family in that place where nobody exists and it's 45 minutes to the supermarket. I like touching dirt. I like touching people. I've never said this before, but it's not bad. And frankly, I’m just growing. I like growing in my field of employment. I love maneuvering through things that are tricky. I hope that people think I'm a decent person and that I'm using my talents for the benefit of more than just me.
Amy: Great answer. I love that.
Hayley: A beautiful metaphor.
Amy: Thank you so much for being with us, Angela.
