Critically-acclaimed, award-winning Broadway star Susan Egan will release her sixth solo CD, The Secret of Happiness, in stores nationwide and online November 15, 2011. The recording, produced and music directed by Georgia Stitt, celebrates the worlds of classic and contemporary Broadway and Pop/Rock, taking the listeners on Susan's personal journey from Broadway to babies and beyond.
Check back on BroadwayWord in mid-November for a pre-release, behind-the scenes, exclusive video from Egan!
Egan's The Secret of Happiness includes popular standards from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim and Paul Simon, and new, modern music by composers Christine Lavin, Paul Gordon, Brian Haner, Georgia Stitt, Jason Robert Brown and Egan herself. With instrumentation ranging from solo piano played by Brown to a full orchestra conducted by Stitt, the recording weaves intimate moments into lush musical events. Her most personal album to date, Egan's message in The Secret of Happiness is humorous, authentic and universal, and her voice has a richness beautifully captured in the material and recording.
Susan and Georgia Stitt will be performing The Secret of Happiness - Live to celebrate the CD's launch on Sunday, November 13th (6:30 and 8:30pm) at Show at Barre, located at 1714 N. Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90027. For tickets call (323) 661-6163 or visit www.showatbarre.com.
To accompany the release of The Secret of Happiness, Egan has filmed a music video for one of the album's songs, Nina Doesn't Care. Written by Brian Haner and Susan Egan, the tune laments that Egan's daughter finds no value in the fact that her mother is a bona fide Disney princess. The video, produced by Susan Haner, will be released on November 15th as well, exclusively on Egan's YouTube page: www.YouTube.com/SusanEgan. Making this truly unique in the Broadway and cyber worlds is the fact that the video opens with Egan sharing the screen with 2-D animated characters, created especially for her by Duncan Studios in Pasadena. This marks a wonderful reunion between Egan and Ken Duncan, who animated Susan's character of "Meg" in Disney's feature Hercules.
Egan's humor and insight, in addition to her voice, which critics have called "the perfect Broadway instrument," have made her a popular and universally praised concert performer. She has appeared with over sixty symphony orchestras worldwide at venues such as the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center and more, as well as hundreds of theatres with her one-woman show, The Belle of Broadway. Her latest concert, Susan Egan: The Real Housewife of Broadway, combines much of the music on her new album with behind-the-scenes stories that rival any reality show. In 2012, Egan is booking tour dates in South Africa, the UK, on the Disney Cruise Line, and in dozens of cities across the US.
A native of Southern California, Susan was in the first graduating class of the Orange County High School of the Arts, continued on to UCLA and soon after made her Broadway debut as "Belle" in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, garnering her both Drama Desk® and Tony Award® nominations as "Best Actress in a Musical." Egan has starred in five Broadway shows, TV series and specials, independent feature film and feature animation. She has five prior solo CDs: All That and More, So Far, Coffee House, Winter Tracks, and Susan Egan: Live. She and Georgia Stitt pen the blog GlamourAndGoop.com: "two musical moms find themselves the center of attention on stage and the center of the storm at home." Egan currently lives back in Southern California with her family: husband, Robert Hartmann, and their two daughters, Nina and Isla. Read more about Egan at SusanEgan.net.
