COLLEGEVILLE — A guy is standing on a street corner in Manhattan, looking lost. He stops a passerby and asks, “Hey, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?”
“Practice, buddy,” the man replies. “Practice.”
Heather Lucas might never have heard the old joke, but, at 15, she understands the premise behind it. The Perkiomen Valley High School freshman has been singing since she was 5 and taking voice lessons since the sixth grade, and Monday, she will take the stage at New York City’s premier concert venue.
“I’m not nervous right now,” she said June 5 at her home in Collegeville, “but I’m sure once I get there, I’m going to have a little bit of nerves.”
Lucas has advanced to the final round of the Crescendo Competition, an international youth talent search. She is competing in the Little Mozarts division for singers and instrumentalists who were between the ages of 3 and 14 as of February. To make it to Carnegie Hall, heather, who celebrated her 15th birthday June 10, had to place first or second at an audition held Feb. 23 at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. She placed second.
“When she gets on stage, she’s transformed into this spectacular singer,” her mother, Michelle, said. “I keep telling her, ‘I’m your biggest fan’ … I see how hard she works and what she goes through to work.”
Her father, Frank, has also become a booster, and he credits much of her development as a vocalist to the music program at Perkiomen Valley, where Heather sings in the chorus and the Women’s Select Choir and appeared in the school musical.
“Their women’s choir is just amazing,” he said.
It is one thing for a singer to have the support of her family, however. To impress a professional is something else again, and Mary Lee Slemmer, Lucas’ voice coach at the Skippack School of Music, said that although it is too soon to make any firm predictions, she has the potential to become a standout singer.
“She’s so young, I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, she’s going to be on Broadway,” Slemmer said in a telephone interview. “She has incredible pitch … She has a very good ear and she takes instruction very quickly. She’s serious about what she’s doing. I really believe she has a gift.”
Lucas has a vocal range of about two and a half octaves that includes high C, Slemmer said, and when singing in the school choir, she divides her time between the alto and soprano sections.
To be a standout, however, a singer needs more than a good voice.
“She is very dramatic,” Slemmer said. “She has a fine stage presence and she connects emotionally instantly with the audience. That’s one of the things I find very unusual in a 14-year-old. She’s mature. She really sings from the heart.”
Stage presence will count for much in the Carnegie Hall competition. Contestants are required to dress formally, and Lucas will be wearing a gown. For her number, she has selected “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera.” Slemmer will accompany her on the piano, in addition to providing moral support.
“I think I have a pretty good chance,” Lucas said.
Whatever the outcome Monday, she intends to return to New York someday. Her ambition, after high school, is to study at the Juilliard School of Music.
“It’s something that’s been always there for me,” she said.
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