"Creating A Theater in Her Heart"
Merrimack Valley News (July 1999)

by Chuck Ginsberg

Robin Spielberg has sold almost 300,000 copies of seven albums on a regional record label. With no major public relations campaign, she sold the bulk of them through the Internet, word of mouth, non-music stores and concerts. Only recently has she begun to market through book and music superstores.
She has earned standing ovations in two sold-out performances at New York City`s prestigious Carnegie Hall and, inexplicably to her is "really hot" in Hong-Kong. In an era of two-year studio incubation periods, she recorded her 1993 first album, eleven original melodies, in just six hours.
Not too shabby for an aspiring actress who waited tables in an upscale New York City hotel while looking for the ultimate acting job.
"Raised in Maplewood, NJ, Spielberg studied piano as a child and music was always important. She loved acting, too, performing each year in the high school play and musicals. Deciding to take a "little break" from the piano, she matriculated at Michigan State, majoring in drama and working in radio. Two years later, she transferred to New York University where she studied drama with renowned playwright David Mamet and actor William H. Macy.
Mamet and Macy urged Spielberg and her classmates to "be pioneers on our own trail". The advice has served her well. She and those classmates founded the still-thriving off-Broadway Atlantic Theater Company, doing plays they loved with people they liked. In music, too, she traveled an unorthodox path, making her own way, becoming one of the first to market her albums through the Internet.
In 1984, while still in college, she cycled to Times Square on a hot summer day to drop off pictures and resumes and knock on doors of agents and casting directors. Postage was a luxury for a struggling actress. The low-tech business trip changed her life.

She met a friend standing on the long employment line for the new Marriott Hotel. They talked and were still yakking when the friend`s turn came, so Spielberg filled out her own application. Though she`d never waited tables before, she made the cut and ended up in the piano bar.

Spielberg quickly became friends with the pianist, and revealed, after several months, that Hs too, played piano. One night at closing time, she played for the amazed friend who took her to her own agent. The agent set up an audition, her one and only to this day, at The Grand Hyatt across town on Lexington Avenue. A career was born. It was a full-time job. Spielberg worked Monday through Friday, sometimes six hours a day. She played lunch and filled in at breakfast. As her career progressed, she also played during the cocktail hour and dinner.

In the beginning the fare was "lite FM", standards and showtunes. If someone requested Sondheim and she didn`t know it, she substituted another Sondheim piece. Four times a year, she went into a music store with a list of the tunes she didn`t know and purchased the sheet music. Sure enough, someone would request the newly learned song and she could play it, like the others, "off the top of her head".

When you play the piano for six hours a day in the public eye, she recalls,"you get a little antsy playing the same things over and over again". She started writing songs and bringing them in, working on them. She never heard anyone play the kid of music she was writing and make a living at it.But Mamet and Macy taught their students not to "sit around and wait for it to happen". They preached the gospel of "create the theater that is in your heart." At the Atlantic Theater Company, the members stepped forward to direct, write, and make costumes, switched off and changed hats. One of SpielbergÕs tasks was to create the database for the mailing list. Spielberg enjoyed the pressure of performing on the fly. At certain times, being in the theater district, she had to stick to showtunes. Other times, she could improvise and the audience responded.
When customers asked for a CD, she began telling them to put their business cards in a fishbowl. She would notify them when it was available. In several years, she dumped the fishbowl out and 800 cards fluttered to the apartment floor. She knew of no one with a record deal for this kind of music, but she knew there was a market. From her years of "test marketing", a dozen or so of her compositions elicited the most response.Spielberg likens composing in a vacuum to "throwing gum at the wall" She knew what touched her and inspired her and now she knew it also touched and inspired others. Playing five or six days a week, she got instant response, and, she says "you canÕt help getting better playing that much".At home, she played her own collections of discs. When she liked the production quality she checked the credits and came up with a sound engineer named Steven Miller. She scouted around for a recording studio and found one she could afford.
Money was a problem until a regular piano bar listener, complaining that he wanted to listen at home, offered to lend her $10,000. With that stake and $7000 in credit card debt at 17% interest, she approached Miller. Despite his advice that even the best players take one or two weeks, that there is no shame in editing, that recording is not a natural experience, Spielberg pushed for a one-day session. They would rent the studio, engineer, record, and edit. When the money ran out, they would stop. If they hadn`t finished, Spielberg would go and make more money. Wearing dad`s lucky flannel shirt, she played for six hours without a break and ended up with 11 songs. The money had run out, but she had an album. "Heal of the Hand" has sold more than 60,000 copies.

Even as a child, Spielberg found music to be a great way to express herself: happy , sad or frustrated, and her audience responds in kind. She receives daily e-mails and notes from women in labor, a father enduring chemotherapy, people going through divorces, all thanking her for easing them through a difficult transition.

Daughter Valerie spent the first four months of her life in the hospital. A one-pound `preemie` at birth, she also underwent heart surgery. At the neo-natal clinic, the doctors discovered that playing Spielberg`s music helped Valerie and her bay mates. Since then, Spielberg`s label has donated 50 cd`s that are played around the clock. At nine months, Valerie travels everywhere with Spielberg and husband-manager Larry Kosson.

The traditional `stuff` never worked for Spielberg so she hesitates to give advice to young musicians. She and New York musician friends often discuss how irrelevancies can dictate success. A coffee stain on a tux is a bad thing, showing up on time is a good thing, and though neither has anything to do with skill, either can determine the course of a career. Spielberg is convinced her theater background is an integral part of her success. Aside from the computer background that helped her blaze a marketing trail on the Internet, she clinched her courtship by fixing her skeptical future husband`s Mac crash, a skill learned at Atlantic. After that, in the name of true love, Kosson miraculously overcame a serious allergy to Spielberg cats by retraining them into loyal "dog-cats" who fetch, guard the baby, and allow their bellies to be scratched.

More seriously, the trained actress in Spielberg is very comfortable with audiences. Born of necessity when she forgot a program and had to announce each selection, her patter grew as audiences connected. She has expanded her explanations of why a piece was written and how a title came about. She thinks it is a big part of her success because the by-play sets her apart.Certainly it sets her apart from the long dead composers of the past, who like Mozart, cannot explain that he wrote the piece for the woman he loved. Spielberg draws from her own experiences, the sad and happy occurrences of life at home and on the road. She thinks that"traditional" classical music and so-called "new-age" music have much in common. She hammers home that point by explaining that selections like Debussy`s "First Arabesque" and Pachelbel`s "Canon" would today be called "new-age". Besides, she adds, new age is, like jazz, a catch-all for so many styles.

It is not difficult to explain Robin Spielberg`s success. It is a combination of factors. It is the ability to produce beautiful music from a shiny black Steinway. It is the hard work, the musical "chops"to back up the showmanship, and substantial performance skills. Most of all, it is Spielberg`s unique gift, a gift that enables her to transplant the "theater" created in her own heart into the hearts of her listeners.