Finding Fulfillment In Song And Stage

CORRECTION: June 22, 1996; V6 Whitworth College professor Thomas Tavener, who was mentioned in last Saturday’s Valley Voice, is alive, well and still making music. An article profiling April Dawn Vogel stated otherwise.

When April Dawn Vogel asks her students to “sing to the yellow fire hydrant,” it makes a wacky kind of good sense.

She means the fire hydrant across busy Argonne Road. And she wants her students to learn to project their voices.

Vogel, 36, teaches young singers from a shoe-boxed size studio in the midst of Millwood.

The accomplished singer and actress admits her place is “too noisy and too dusty” for a proper voice studio. But she’s clearly delighted that she can ride her bike from home - and that her studio sits just steps away from the former drugstore where she used to buy penny candy on the walk home from school.

Five parts love, three parts pizzaz and two parts grief, Vogel throws her heart into her music.

The singing and the stage bug came in her blood, she says. Most children breath air; she breathed in music.

“I would sing to everybody. I would sing to the paper boy in my pajamas,” she said.

“We weren’t rich. We drank powdered milk,” she said. But she soaked up a lot of different kinds of music.

She advises parents today to let their kids do the same.

“Let your child have a wide view of the music available, not just through a funnel.”

That doesn’t mean necessarily buying tickets to “Les Miserables,” she advises. It could mean hearing a concert at Gonzaga University, or Whitworth College, Vogel’s alma mater.

When Vogel was a child, her family moved to Spain so that her father, a Spanish teacher, could teach English at a university. She sang.

“I sat on the street corner and sang. And my brother painted on the streets of Valencia,” she said. “Really. He painted.”

She also landed a movie role in Spain. In one scene, she died, ketchup on her blouse. “It took them all day to shoot,” she said, “and then they didn’t even use it.”

Back in Spokane, West Valley High School had no drama program. So Vogel turned to North Idaho College for musical stage experience, even as a high school student. She took voice lessons there and acted in college plays. She also studied voice for 17 years under the late Thomas Tavener of Whitworth.

Musicals, commercials, choirs, 28-day runs, every singing experience she could nab - and “tons of stage experience,” mostly in the Northwest - have turned Vogel into a confident performer.

She says, “The April I like best is on stage.”

She seems to almost cherish certain roles she has played: the narrator in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Coat,” and the lead role in “Evita.”

Much as music has been the love of her life, she is determined that her four children, all performers in their own way, know that there’s more to life.

“I’ve done a lot. I’ve done a million things,” she said. “But I missed out on a lot.”

Vogel’s mother died of cancer two years ago. She was just 52. Vogel still is finding her way back from grief. She teaches. She’s eager for her next role on stage.

And when she warms up her voice in her little shoebox of a studio, her voice is laden with life and love.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: Saturday’s People is a regular Valley Voice feature profiling remarkable individuals in the Valley. If you know someone who would be a good profile subject, please call editor Mike Schmeltzer at 927-2170.