This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Alan Seales: Welcome to The Theatre Podcast. Intimate, personal conversations with the industry's biggest names. I'm your host, Alan Seales, and we have a special voiceover master with us for this episode, Debra Sperling. She wears her emotions on her sleeve. She is so real, so authentic, and one of the most enjoyable conversations I have had, I guess most honest conversations I've had with anybody in a really long time. She's had an unusually successful career as a voiceover artist, which I think speaks to who she is, and she just brings her full self to every single audition, and it works. I have signed up for her voiceover class. I am looking forward to it so much because, A, I haven't taken a class in a really long time, but B, of course, voiceovers is like that mecca that people just don't know how to break into or how to get good at.

So, learning from the best, I am really, really excited. Please find me online on Instagram and Twitter at Theatre Underscore Podcast. Leave a rating and a review wherever you are listening now, and everybody, please enjoy this episode with Debra Sperling.

[1:21] Alan Seales: You are familiar with today's guest, and you probably have never realized it. You've heard her voice probably everywhere you've looked. You really have. She's been the voice of Cascade and Pampers and Johnson & Johnson and Kellogg's Weight Watchers, the Oxygen Network, Discovery, VH1, Charmin, Citibank, and just so many more. And she's an avid teacher and coach on top of everything else that we are about to talk about. Such a lovely voiceover artist, something that we don't often get to talk about on this podcast. So, I'm super excited to welcome Debra Sperling. Welcome to the podcast.

[1:54] Debra Sperling: Hi. Hey, Alan. Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

[1:58] Alan Seales: I need to just, the audiophile in me needs to geek out on how clear and crisp your voice is right now. There's been so many interviews over the podcast here, the platform we use to record. And it's people, you know, like with their AirPods and whatnot, and no microphone at all in giant rooms. And you have this wonderful, wonderful studio with this wonderful mic. And I appreciate it so much. I was debating before we went on which mic to put, which mic to use, but I think I made the right choice from your comment.

[2:30] Debra Sperling: Oh, you sound amazing. You sound amazing.

[2:36] Alan Seales: Yeah. So, you make your living doing voiceovers, and not many people can say that.

[2:39] Debra Sperling: I do.

[2:43] Alan Seales: You are very, very fortunate and...

[2:43] Debra Sperling: And very, very grateful.

[2:48] Alan Seales: I rattled off all of this stuff at the beginning, and I stopped because otherwise we'd be here all day listing off all of your accomplishments. And I love the world of voiceovers, and it's still so nebulous to me. So hopefully, for myself and for people listening, I want to get into sort of best practices. And I guess, well, let's start at the beginning. Were you originally wanting to be a performer of any type, an actress, TV, movie, theater?

[3:15] Debra Sperling: Yeah. I mean, I'm a voiceover. I make my living as a voiceover artist. And that to me is an actor and I use the microphone. But my whole life, yeah, I went to the High School of Performing Arts and studied theater, like the FAME School in Manhattan. And then I went to the University of Buffalo and I got a BA in theater. And I studied for a semester at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. I have a master's degree in MFA in acting from Case Western Reserve. Yeah, I've been an actor since, I mean, I feel like I was born this way. I was born with this. Yeah, voiceovers. Unfortunately, I feel that in our country, you can't make the kind of living that you can make in other countries when you want to go into straight theater, especially Shakespeare. So that was definitely disheartening.

[4:25] Debra Sperling: When you are in London, I don't know if you've ever been, but when you're in London, it's crazy. People go to the theater the way we go to the movies. Like when I first went, I was all dressed up and our classmates, we walk in and there are people literally like sitting on the set and they're in jeans and they're eating ice cream. And I was so disgusted until I had to wrap my head around, they do this three times a week. Like this isn't a special occasion that they're going to see Ian McKellen as Yaga, which is what we were, you know, this is just something that they do. So yeah. And voiceovers, I've been doing this for a very long time, for 26 years. And in the beginning, it wasn't something, my agent sent me out on an audition.

I didn't really even know what voiceovers were because they weren't very commonly talked about because celebrities did not do any voiceovers unless it was overseas. It's the Bill Murray movie with Scarlett Johansson about, oh gosh, Brain Freeze, Lost in Translation.

[5:39] Debra Sperling: Okay. Okay. I know everyone out there is thinking, Lost in Translation. That couldn't be made today because everybody is not just even doing voiceovers, they're doing on camera commercials and it's totally fine or accepted now. But that world was kind of a very small, small little world at the time. And I came in, my agent thought I had an interesting voice. And I was really fortunate to book the second thing that I auditioned for. And I think a lot of it is absolutely my acting training. And I think also having the confidence that I booked that second thing to just feel like, okay, I'm good at this. And I think that confidence is such an important thing. And it's one of the things I talk about when I'm teaching and coaching, that feeling of knowing that you on a microphone is enough, bringing you, bringing yourself and not feeling like you have to just push and do something crazy or have that insecurity that you're not enough is something that's hard to get to.

And I really do think, when I go back and think about it, I think the fact that I was fortunate enough to book the second job really gave me that confidence to go forward. And I wonder if my career path would be the same if that hadn't happened and it had been months until I booked something. It's funny, I never really thought about it as much as I'm thinking about it right now, but I really bet it would not have been the same.

[7:21] Alan Seales: This is an audio only podcast. I'm grinning from ear to ear. I have two questions coming out of this. One you said is, you said someone thought you had an interesting voice. So what makes an interesting voice, right? So that's the first thing. And, oh, now I forgot my second question.

[7:37] Debra Sperling: Well, I want to say something about the interesting voice thing. I believe everybody has an interesting voice. I think the thing that actually gets you the job that gets people interested is bringing your authentic self to the microphone. I think if you line up, especially now where the read that everybody wants is someone really talking. The conversational read is the read that everyone wants on everything now. And I like to think that the aspect of that and bringing myself to the script is what always helped me get the jobs that I've had, being able to bring me. But now it is so important. And what I will tell you is, I believe that if you take, let's say 10 people and you line them up, and you just ask them to say a few words, and you're like, oh, that's a cool voice.

Oh, he's got a cool voice. He has a really interesting voice. And you have them all do an audition. It's not going to be about how the person's voice sounds. That's not going to be what's going to get them the job. It's going to be, do I believe this person is really talking? Do I feel like I'm drawn in listening to them? It's not going to be the raspy sound or the way they speak. I mean, even Morgan Freeman, like, yes, that voice, you could listen to him read the phone book. However, he is so present and available and authentic when he's speaking. But if he wasn't, I don't think it would be as moving, even though he sounds like butter.

[9:23] Alan Seales: That actually leads me to what my second question was. I remembered it. And it was that you're talking about having confidence, bring yourself and know that your voice is good enough, right? Because especially when you can't see somebody, when you're only listening, you start to imagine and you pick up on the little nuances of people's voices. And I tell people all the time when I'm asking for voiceover work from others for various projects, I say just if it's happy, make sure you're smiling, right? You can tell, you can hear if you're not looking at somebody and people are smiling. So the way that people's voices waver, if they're a little unsure about something, like you pick up on all of that in such maybe a conscious way, but mostly I think unconscious, because we as humans are.

[10:12] Debra Sperling: Yes, yes. Yes, you're, yes, because when a human being is actually really talking and connected, you cannot help but lean in and listen. And the crazy thing is the things that you just said about the smile or that quiver in the voice, I would put out there that it is not something that you can fake. I would put out there that people try to do that and pretend to be happy and smiling, pretend to be emotional and make their voice quiver. It's so much more fun, so much easier and so much more creative to actually make a choice. So you're really happy. So you're really there. So you're really in the moment. When I teach, I say, I tell people to stop acting words, stop acting the words, because people don't talk like this and stress words like this when they're speaking.

They don't. When you're really connected, the funny thing is there's not a lot of wavering up and down. There's talking and those nuances that come out when you're really, really speaking to somebody.

[11:22] Alan Seales: Isn't that more about like a kind of dabbling in like Meisner technique where when you're doing lines, you're just repeating it over and over and over again until it becomes so natural that you don't realize you're saying it.

[11:32] Debra Sperling: Yeah. Yeah. Well, an exercise that I teach in my authenticity and voiceover class has a lot to do, not necessarily with Meisner, but a lot to do with getting out of thinking about the words and thinking more about who am I speaking to and what am I doing with these words? What am I trying to affect? How am I using these words to affect the person that I'm speaking to? And the words could literally be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Doesn't matter. It's who am I talking to and what am I using the words to do? And when you're really connected to that, all of a sudden, this freedom happens where you're not thinking about, am I stressing the right word? It's like if I asked you right now, Alan, how do I make you feel when I'm talking to you?

You would probably say, I don't know what you would say, but I tell you what you wouldn't say. You wouldn't say, I don't think Deb stresses the right words in her sentences when she talks. Right? Nobody thinks about that. Nobody thinks about that. But when people do auditions, that's what they start thinking about. Am I stressing the right word? And then all of a sudden you become non-human.

[12:51] Alan Seales: It becomes mechanical at that point. Like you said, it sounds fake. That's the difference, in my opinion, between acting and being. To be a good actor is two big things. One is active listening. I say this all the time in the podcast. It's listen, listen, listen, which in voiceover work, it kind of is not all that important because you can't see. But listening and being. Don't act happy, just be happy. And I know it's not that simple. We're oversimplifying the process.

[13:20] Debra Sperling: It's certainly more fun. And I have to say now for those of you, this is a Broadway podcast. So Stephen McKinley Henderson was one of my very first mentors and my teacher at the University of Buffalo. And so his definition of acting takes Stanislavski's a little bit further. And it is, acting is living truthfully and fully under imaginary circumstances with the intention of revealing or exposing something about the nature of being human. And I love that definition. Because we are human. And I tell people all the time, these conversations happen on voiceover sites on Facebook. There are all kinds of voiceover sites on Facebook. And people talk about being so scared that AI will take over our jobs and AI is getting so great and it really sounds like it's a person. And I'm not worried about AI taking my job.

[14:28] Debra Sperling: Because AI doesn't have a soul. AI doesn't have a real life. And also, what I love to say is you're never competing, even if it's people, you're never competing with anybody else for a role, ever. You're competing with yourself to be the most authentic you you can be. So, you love the process. You enjoy the process. You get to bring a piece of yourself every time you hit record. And whether it's an audition, whether it's a booking, whether you're reading scripts, whatever it is that you're doing, you get to enjoy the process. And that's 99% of your entire life is the process. Not just your life as an artist, doing auditions over and over again, but your whole life, real life, the whole thing is a work in progress.

And it's a process. And you need to enjoy the journey. And that also reads on the microphone. Also, it reads on the microphone, your joy, your gratitude. It reads on the microphone if you're scared, if you're desperate, I need this job, all of that. I mean, the eyes are the windows to the soul. I think the microphone is just as wonderful in terms of picking up everything when it's real and when it's not real. You lean in when someone's really talking. You just do.

[15:53] Alan Seales: Well, yeah, that goes back to the unconscious perception of joy or of emotion. You want to listen to people that are happy. And yeah, I completely agree with you. But I wanted to touch on the process. You brought that up a second ago. Across everything you've done, how do you approach a new audition that is like Citibank versus Pampers? I would think that that's two different types of tones. Are you different versions of Debra in every read? Or how do you kind of decide?

[16:30] Debra Sperling: Okay, so what I'll tell you is you're different versions of Alan in every single person you speak to. You don't talk to your grandmother the same way you talk to a four-year-old child, the same way you talk to a stranger, the same way you talk to someone you are in awe of when they come on this podcast, or someone that you feel like you wish would leave your life forever. You speak to every single person in your life differently just by the nature of who you are and who they are. And you definitely also speak differently. What do you want from them? What do you want from them when you're talking to them? Like right now, you're talking to me, maybe wanting to pull information out of me. You want this podcast.

You know, what's all the other things going on? You want the podcast to be a success. When real life is there, it might be unconscious, but it's what creates how we talk. Wow. So you have to make those choices for yourself, at least that's how I feel about it. You have to make those choices for yourself almost instantaneously.

[17:40] Debra Sperling: Now that we're most, I mean, it's very sad to me, but I would say 99% of voiceover auditions and things are still being done because of COVID in our home studios. And I miss casting directors, and I miss engineers, and I miss that creativity and having a casting director tell me, okay, we want this, or throwing a choice at me and just bringing it out. My brain doesn't have to work at all when I have the beauty and the talent of a casting director there. So now being in an isolation home studio booth as beautiful as my booth is, it's 100% up to me in most situations now to make those choices. And it's so easy to get stagnant and just start thinking when you're alone, okay, am I hitting the right word? Does this sound right? Let me listen over and over and over again. Instead of keeping it fresh, keeping it fun, making choices, keeping it fun for yourself, keeping your energy and your creativity up by the choices that you make.

[18:45] Alan Seales: I was, while you were saying this, I was reading back through the intro that I wrote for you, and I was thinking about the joy and the excitement that I had in reading that intro, because knowing it was going to lead into this wonderful conversation. And so you're exactly right. Because if I had said, you're familiar with today's guest, and you probably never even realized it. I mean, you've heard her voice everywhere. That's, that's not engaging. Right. So it's, yeah, I completely, I completely get this. And I guess there's, there's part of, oh, God, there's so many parallels to like actual being on stage and TV and film acting, like there's an it that some people have. But it, but it, but it is, but it is the same.

It is the same thing. Because when you're on stage, you are not, you're never thinking, I mean, if well, some people are, we don't probably see them usually on Broadway. But you're never, ever thinking about how the words are coming out of your mouth, then you're not connected to the moment. Right. And it's just this horribly stale performance with no nuance and also doing how many shows a week I mean, and, and just hitting, how do I stress these words every night? No one would want to be an actor. The beauty and the fun in it is you make new discoveries every night. You get off stage, you're like, oh, that moment tonight when that happened, and that happened, it was totally new and real. And always, always challenging yourself, always being prepared in the moment to just let yourself be, let yourself react, let yourself be authentically yourself in that situation, revealing or exposing something about the nature of being human.

[20:36] Debra Sperling: Oh, I love that. Well, it's all, it's all about that. And what about cartoons and video games and things that aren't human? Right? Because, go ahead.

[20:50] Debra Sperling: No, no, no, I'm not, not my, not my, I can, I can give you like three names of people that you should have on your podcast. I do not do animation. I do not do audiobooks at all, so much so that I've never, people laugh at me, I've never listened to an audiobook in my entire life. I've never listened to an audiobook. I've never narrated an audiobook. It is, it is something I know nothing about. Cartoons, I don't do animation. Video games, I, I was the voice of the hooker in the Max Payne video in Max Payne 2. So, yeah, if you get far enough in that game, you'll, yeah, you'll, you'll get a little treat. Little, little did I know when I did that, that it was going to be on IMDB or wherever it was.

And it says, Max Payne 2, Deborah Sperling, hooker. So, yeah, that's something that actually until now, never really occurred to me that I thought VO was just VO. And you kind of did different things all over the, the, you know, the poopoo platter, right? But I guess, like, I'm thinking of a Sarah Stiles, right? So, so Steven Universe, she's got a very, like, like a very cartoony sort of character-y voice, right? So she can play, play up to that very well. So there's that sort of thing. And James Monroe Iglehart, I know, like, he's been doing some cartoony character-y stuff. And yeah, so I guess like the timbre and the tone of people's voices must lead them to, to be predisposed to different sort of sub-genres within this niche.

[22:25] Debra Sperling: Yes, I'm absolutely sure that that is true and to have the flexibility with your voice. Now, now vocally, I have a very big range in my voice. So I can be here and sound like this. I can also make a very horrible sound and bring my voice even lower down. I can make an even more horrible sound, which I won't do on this microphone, and rub my sinuses and I can get my voice up really high, just naturally. And I would sound a lot younger if I did that. I'm trying to do it without making that sound, which isn't acting younger, it's placing my voice in a different place in my head. And I do that before I am on the microphone. So I'm never on the mic thinking about, is my voice low enough? Or is my voice sounding young?

Because then, again, it would take me out of the moment. So all that preparation, I do very quickly before I hit record, so that I'm not thinking about it consciously. But, but you know what, the, there, there is such a large range of things that, that you can do even without doing cartoons or video games. I mean, I do video game stuff that's, that's real. Like, you know what I mean? Like a lot, a lot of video game stuff now is they just want real, real people. They don't, they don't necessarily want it to sound like this or, you know, whatever, whatever.

[23:54] Alan Seales: Right, right, right, right, exactly. So, uh, so that's one thing. I mean, I mean, back in the day I was the voice of the Google answering, Google's answering service. Like they're, yeah, I know, I know, right? Yeah. A little connection there. Like, um, hi, welcome to Google. Like that, all of that.

[24:11] Debra Sperling: Wow. That's so cool.

[24:14] Debra Sperling: I was saving that for you. Um, but there, I mean, there's, there's so many different things that people don't even, even realize where voiceovers come in or where you hear people's voices. When I first started doing this, people would ask me, what do you do? I'd say I'm a voiceover artist. And they would look at me with this really odd look. What is that? I'm like, you know, when you turn on your TV, what do you mean? So, and promos is so different than commercials than narration. Like I narrate television shows is a different thing than doing voiceovers for commercials, which is a different thing than promos. When I was doing the Oxygen Network or WeTV, the whole coming up next Friday on WeTV.

And then, you know, all of that stuff, very, love those jobs, love those jobs to be a voice of a network and, and just be able to do so many different things all day long. Especially when you actually get to be in the network and not at home, but you get to physically be there. Once again, COVID.

[25:11] Alan Seales: We're going to take a short break. Stay tuned for more of the episode.

[25:17] Debra Sperling: Voiceovers and commercials seem like sort of this long sought after these dream jobs, right? Because you, you don't need to worry about more or less what you're, what you're wearing, what you look like. Commercials a little bit more, obviously, because you're on camera. But in terms of work time, like you go in for a couple hours or a couple days, and then you get paid a ton of money and, and then never come back again, unless they need you for the next thing, right? It's not like an eight show a week theater sort of thing. And I mean, I just want to acknowledge the amount of sheer, I guess, your credits, right? The amount of sheer fortunate circumstances you have found yourself in. And in no small part due to your talent and your drive and your confidence, it's well deserved.

And so allow me to speak your accolades for you, because you're an amazing person to talk to and an amazing person. Obviously, you're grinning very well. You're just listening to you in, if I close my eyes and listen to you, your voice, the voice is pleasant. You do have a, I know what your agent means now by having a unique voice, because it's expressive without being, well, it's just expressive, full stop. You're not acting like you're happy. You just are happy, right?

[26:41] Debra Sperling: Right, right. And, and thank you for everything you just said. None of it has ever been lost on me. The gratitude, I am so eternally grateful and grateful to every single person that has ever signed me in at an audition or opened a door or an engineer that has helped make me sound amazing. Casting directors that without them, I wouldn't have ever had these jobs. I've just, all of it, just the life, pre-COVID, the life of running around New York City all day long, seeing amazing casting directors, seeing friends auditioning with you, bumping into people on the subway, running from audition to audition to job to job, seeing engineers and people sitting at the desk that you know that are bookkeeping for, just all of it. It's the family. I feel like the entire thing is just this wonderful family. And I, the gratitude and love I have for what I do is, I honestly, there really are no words. I'm so, I'm so grateful.

[27:58] Alan Seales: Well, you pay it forward too. You are, you're actively teaching and coaching, and you do purposely like small classes now through, because of COVID over Zoom and whatnot. Right. So like, talk to me about the teaching side of life, because you're obviously, I mean, if I may, you're successful enough that financially you don't need to teach. So why do you do this?

[28:19] Debra Sperling: I, it is, I love it so much. I learn from my students. I love it so much. When I was getting my master's degree at Case, I was fortunate enough. I taught the undergraduate acting classes when I was getting my master's. And it, I love teaching. I mean, even when Stephen McKinley Henderson, I was his TA for three years in Buffalo. I've always loved, loved teaching. And it's not just paying it forward. It's, it's, it's helped. I mean, I guess it's paying.

[28:55] Debra Sperling: But just being involved in that creative process and being able to be there and witness and help someone to discover, to be there for their discovery that they're enough, or to be there for their discovery that they've, yeah, I know for someone who's so, it chokes me up. It chokes me up. So, I have always coached since I really probably about, I don't know, two or three years into doing voiceovers when people would ask me, oh, I would really like to know more about this. And can I hire you? I would go and I would work with people or talk to them about the craft and work on scripts with them. And back in the day, I didn't even charge anyone. And people were like, what are you, crazy? I was like, well, I just, I don't need to charge it.

I just love it. And it's not like I'm doing it every single day. And it makes me happy. So, when COVID hit, just the disconnection everybody had was heartbreaking enough. And then I saw something else that really broke my heart, which was there were so many people that came out of the woodwork on Zoom that were not in the business that were all of a sudden coaching. People that hadn't been on a microphone for 25 years. People just, I don't want to go into it, but just a lot of people that had no business coaching were coaching. And I'm not saying people that can't do like all of that things. If you can't do, you teach. I mean, all of that stuff. I'm not saying that. I'm saying I know for a fact that there were people stealing money from basically from people.

And it infuriated me. And I also miss teaching so much. And the connection that happens when you are one-on-one and because of Zoom was so amazing. And my class authenticity and voiceover is a one night, three and a half hour class. And I explain it to people as to think of it as a small group acting class. It's a maximum of six people. A lot of times, only five. And everyone's on the screen all together. No one's pinned. It is one. It is just a group. It is a group of six people that come together and at the end feel really connected to each other. And especially at a time when everyone was wearing masks and you couldn't even see people to be able to create that kind of safe space and be able to have creativity happening and people opening up and authenticity coming through.

It was life-saving. It really was, especially, and I know how much it meant to people that were living alone. It meant, I feel like it saved me because what teaching has given me over the past year is immeasurable. Just to be able to help guide people toward that and the relationships and to be able to witness such amazing creativity and bravery. Well, next time I see you in person, I'm going to give you the biggest, longest hug because I think we both need it at this point in the pandemic.

[32:51] Alan Seales: So I first met you when you were on Josh Swallow's Broadway with Josh Malouf's podcast, right? And you told a story that I thought was hilarious that from Long Island, you had a deep, deep Long Island accent.

[33:03] Debra Sperling: More Queens, but yes. Well, no, I lived on the border of Queens and Long Island, and I used to talk like this. When I went to the High School of Performing Arts, sometimes it's even hard for me to get back into it, but when I went there, you had to be from the five boroughs, and my zip code was actually right on the border of Queens and Nassau County. So I had to even prove that my house was in Queens after I got in or they wouldn't let me go because my zip code was a Long Island zip code. But yes, I used to talk like this. I used to say, oh my God, I used to say coffee. I watch old videos of me with my brothers, and yeah, so this is how I talked. But back in the day in high school, they would say, you know, get in line or we're going to send you back to your zone school.

So that would have been for me Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, which is not really where I wanted to go. I liked being in the middle of Manhattan and going to high school. I didn't mind getting up at four o'clock in the morning and taking two buses and three trains to get to high school. So I used to walk around talking like this because it needed to be very conscious for me in the beginning of every sound that I was making. So I know all my friends would make fun of me in Queens, but because I was overdoing it, because I just needed it to become second nature for me. And that was the process I needed to go through. And thank God that I did. Because if I was talking like this, and like I said in Josh's podcast, when I talk about it, I have producers that have me then at the end of a session, they'll have me do a take like this.

And just as a joke for themselves, or to send to the client as a joke, oh, well, we're looking for approval on this spot. We just got what we think is Deb's best take. What do you think? And all of a sudden, I'm like, you know, Cascade, let your dishwasher be the dishwasher, you know, or whatever it is. But yeah, it's a funny thing. I'm horrible with accents. I don't do accents at all. That's just used to be my voice. So I can fall into it. But yeah.

[35:32] Alan Seales: I thought something funny you said, too, was that you thought the forehead was legitimately far head.

[35:37] Debra Sperling: Oh, yeah. No, no, no. Okay, so something I didn't say, which I think is really funny, that the far head thing, I never saw the word written down. And it's not a word you use all the time, by the way. But I was teaching. This is when I was in grad school. I didn't tell the story. I was teaching, and I would do these meditations before we work on certain days. And so I would have everybody laying down on their back. And now I hear my mother, things lay, people lie, or lying down on their back. And I would talk about, there's a smooth, fluid, blue liquid. And you're just going to feel it going up through your spine. And you're going to take a deep breath in, and take a deep breath out, and let out all the negativity.

And now let that blue liquid go up the back of your spine to the top of your head. Take another deep breath in, and another breath out, and let out all the negativity. And now that blue liquid is going to go right into your far head. And it's going to go right into your far head. And I had two people open their eyes, and look at me. And I don't know if it was during the exercise, or the exercise stopped, but that day, I learned very quickly that the word is not F-A-R-H-E-A-D. It is forehead, and not far head. Especially when you're doing this beautiful meditation, and you say the word far head. And you over enunciate it, so they could feel the beauty of the word that doesn't exist. Like, wait a second, am I projecting myself to some other place? Yeah, it was really, it was really funny. And I didn't, I didn't learn that till much, much later on.

[37:40] Alan Seales: Would you say you were in grad school? That's, that's quite a long time. But that's, that's really funny. I, it speaks to, it speaks to a lot of, I guess, is what, what we pay attention to. I think it's fascinating how people's brains differ like that. Like some people see, you know, can feel colors, or they can see, see sounds, or the way that, like some people just, you literally, how many times in a book, right? Did you read the word forehead? And it just didn't, you know, it's like, okay, cool. And whereas other people can't hear the nuances between different people's voice inflections, or whatever the case is. So, I'm fascinated. I'm, I'm, all the psychology of the brain is, is so amazing to me. And I think I missed out as a second life as a, as like this deep dive psych, psychiatrist, or psychologist, or something.

[38:26] Debra Sperling: Oh, I feel, I feel that way, too. I've had people tell, people say, oh, take Deb's class, you'll cry, she'll cry, but it's an amazing class. I'm like, what? I'll cry? It's a voiceover class? It's, it's, I was gonna say, it's also a therapy class. It's not a therapy class. It is, it is trying to help people get to the place where they realize that they're absolutely enough, 100% authentically themselves. And sometimes when people realize that, it opens up a lot of stuff.

[39:08] Alan Seales: Yeah. It's, it's, there's a lot of, uh, of insecurity, and imposter syndrome, especially in these, this business of performing, and that's why a lot of people get into it. But I think this is a beautiful place to wrap up. And I want to, I want to end with the three standard closing questions that I ask everybody on the podcast. The first one, just very simply. Is this James Lipton? No, I'm kidding. Very simply, what motivates you?

[39:52] Debra Sperling: Ah, joy.

[39:57] Alan Seales: I love that. Okay. What advice would you give to your younger self and younger people listening now starting out down a similar path?

[40:10] Debra Sperling: Um, the advice I would give to myself is to, uh, damn you, Alan. Um, the advice I would give to myself is to trust that you're enough, and you have something beautiful and special to give, even though you're from Queens. I don't know if she would listen, but I would try my hardest.

[40:39] Alan Seales: That's beautiful. Thank you. And so now, hardest question, last one. If you can only see one show for the rest of your life, but you can see as many times as you want, what would you see?

[40:48] Debra Sperling: Oh my goodness gracious. Oh, that's so hard. There's, oh, um, one show or one performance. Your choice. Okay. I have to say, I have to say that seeing Ben Platt do Evan in person, I know people call him the unicorn, to be able, talk about authenticity, to be able to bring that level of truth to every single performance, along with that level of technique. And I'm not, I'm not a singer. I'm actually tone deaf, which is a whole other thing, how I have this career. But to be able to do that, I, I think I had my mouth open and tears running down my face the entire show. But that was, that was him. It was, it was, I was in awe of what he was able to do. So. So the, the OBC of Dear Evan Hansen with Ben, yes.

[42:02] Alan Seales: Yeah, snot, snot falling from his nose and perfectly hitting all of those notes. I agree with you. Yeah. Very few people. I just, I mean, and I, I mean, I also saw the original cast of Hamilton, which, which is like, right. Absolutely up there. Yeah. I mean, there's just so many could, could, could go on and on, but yeah. So then where can we connect with you and find you online, get information about all of your coaching?

[42:25] Debra Sperling: Oh, um, thank you. Uh, Deborah sperling.com. D E B R A S P E R L I N G.com. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at theater underscore podcast on facebook.com slash official theater podcast. Please leave a rating and a review wherever you are listening right now. This has been edited by well-rounded hoodlum productions. Thank you to jukebox, the ghost for the intro and the outro music and Deborah sperling. Holy cow. Thank you for such a real genuine and authentic conversation. And I cannot wait to give you that in-person hug. You are just such a beautiful person inside and out. I love it.

[43:08] Debra Sperling: I love it. Thank you, Alan. Thank you for having me on. It's been really wonderful.