1Singers and actors who can learn music quickly and accurately have an enormous advantage in today's increasingly competitive field. With Music Essentials for Singers and Actors, award-winning composer and music director Andrew Gerle has written a music theory text especially for singers, focused exclusively on topics and techniques that will help them in the rehearsal room and on stage. Gerle leads readers step by step through every aspect of written music, using over one hundred real-world examples from Broadway scores. His common-sense, methodical approach demystifies abstract concepts, and his unique 1-STARRT method teaches singers to read musical "words" instead of single notes, enabling confident sight-singing of any score. Drawing on his years of experience as a Broadway vocal coach, Gerle also shows readers how to use music theory to think like a composer, analyzing scores for dramatic clues to create a more detailed and powerful performance. Each chapter is accompanied by downloadable audio examples and exercises to lock in newly learned concepts.