Miranda Sings to Make Art House Debut 8/13-16

Her YouTube parody music videos have been viewed over 16 million times. BroadwayWorld.com called her "an internet superstar" and "the hottest, freshest and oddest breakout star in the musical theatre/cabaret scene." The Times of London added that her videos have made her "a darling of the Broadway musical-theatre scene and an international cabaret star," and that "it is not online but on stage that Miranda truly comes to ghastly life." The Woman Behind The Voice: An Intimate Evening with Miranda Sings premiered to sold-out audiences this spring at Ars Nova in New York. On August 13th - 16th Miranda Sings brings her comic tour de force to The Art House.

Miranda Sings is a character created by comedian and singer Colleen Ballinger. The character is a satire of increasingly common YouTube videos featuring mediocre or even bad, but egotistical, singers who film themselves singing as a form of self-promotion, and who ignore the realistic or cruel comments of "haters" commenting on their videos. She sings comically off-key, is self-absorbed and has a sassy attitude. She responds to viewers who take the videos seriously with the catchphrase "Haters back off!" telling her critics that they are "just jealous" and that "haters make me famous." The character includes facial tics, particularly unusually active eyebrows, a crooked smile and pronunciation quirks. In place of lyrics that she cannot remember, the character "scat" sings. She also wears lipstick drawn beyond the borders of her lips, dresses in mismatched and out-of-style clothing and often dances stiffly to the music she is performing.

Ballinger told The Times of London that the videos were initially intended as an inside joke among her friends, with the character designed to draw negative comments on YouTube. She based Miranda in part on some of the other young music students she knew in the performance department at college. As she relayed to the Times, "there were a lot of cocky girls who thought they were really talented, and they weren't. They were so rude and snotty, it drove me nuts. Then I saw all these girls trying to make a career out of putting videos on YouTube, clueless to the fact that they were terrible. The characters were so ridiculous, I wanted to make my own. Miranda was created out of spite." In a 2009 Backstage interview, Ballinger said that the ‘inside joke' videos "went from 20 to 100 views to 100,000 in a single day" and that "she started getting more fan mail (and hate mail) than she could read, along with requests to perform on Broadway stages." Since then, she has also performed a cabaret act at sold-out venues in New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Dublin, cities in Australia and elsewhere, and has given her patented ‘voice lessons' to the Broadway casts of such shows as Bye Bye Birdie, Mama Mia, Shrek, Billy Elliot and Rock of Ages. Not just a ‘triple threat,' but a "five threat" in her own words, The Art House is excited to present Miranda Sings' P-Town debut.

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