There is a T-shirt quote that reads, “I’m not being dramatic, I’m being theatrical” — and it might as well have been made for Emily Herring, the professional singer, actor, and vocal coach whose career has run from a Munchkin costume in Mobile to Broadway national tours, university voice faculties, and now a private studio on Mobile Bay in Fairhope.
Herring’s story begins, naturally, with performance. Growing up in Mobile, she started piano at six years old and quickly discovered she loved being on stage. Her stage debut came with the Pixie Players — today’s Playhouse in the Park — as a Munchkin in “The Wizard of Oz.” By 15, she had graduated to a lead role, playing Liesl, the oldest daughter, in “The Sound of Music.” The show would follow her a long way.
Training: seven years, five languages
The classical foundation came from Betty Rogers at the University of South Alabama, with whom Herring studied voice for seven years. At her senior recital she sang in five different languages — an early sign of the versatility that would define her career. In 1990, she was selected as Mobile County’s Junior Miss, in the program known today as Distinguished Young Women — the Mobile-based scholarship program that has, since its founding, sent thousands of young women to college with an emphasis on talent, poise, and achievement — and the vocal scholarship that came with it carried her to the University of Southern Mississippi, where she majored in voice. A master’s degree in vocal performance from the University of Tennessee followed.
The degrees came with an unusually disciplined start to the professional life. “You have to start at the bottom in musical theater,” she says — so she auditioned for summer stock, performed in Pennsylvania, and took a job as a singer on a cruise line. The work paid the bills, built stamina, and left her, as she notes with pride, with no debt and money in her pocket when she finally moved to New York City.
Learning from the voice behind the legends
In New York, Herring sought out one of the most storied voice teachers in show business: Marni Nixon, the soprano who ghosted some of Hollywood’s most famous musical performances — the singing voice of Natalie Wood in “West Side Story,” Deborah Kerr in “The King and I,” and Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady.” Nixon became more than a teacher; per Herring, she has been a mentor and a friend. The investment paid off quickly. After studying with Nixon, Herring landed lead roles in three Broadway national tours.
The first was “The Sound of Music” itself. In 2000, Herring co-starred with Barry Williams — best known as Greg from “The Brady Bunch” — in Troika Entertainment’s touring production, playing Mother Abbess, the nun who delivers “Climb Every Mountain.” Critics across the country took notice. The Naples Daily News wrote that she “has a voice as majestic as the mountains she sings about,” and that audiences kept applauding after the house lights came up. A Michigan reviewer went further: she had “the best voice of anyone I’ve heard sing this role, including Peggy Wood from the movie.” The National Broadway Theatre Awards nominated her for Best Actress for the role in 2001.
Her second tour came with NETworks’ production of “Ragtime,” in the role of Mother. Based on E.L. Doctorow’s celebrated novel about turn-of-the-century America, the musical weaves historical figures with fictional families, and the role of Mother — a genteel suburbanite whose world widens with the century — became one of the show’s emotional anchors. That production carried its own piece of history: opening night fell on September 11, 2001, and the performance was postponed as the country absorbed the day’s events. A Kentucky reviewer, watching her step up for ailing star Rachel York, wrote that the understudy “has the role all tied up… her ‘Mother’ was splendidly mature and moving.”
In 2003 she returned to the road as the title role — Lilli Vanessi, also “Kate” — in Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate,” the 1948 backstage musical built around a company staging “The Taming of the Shrew.” The part is famously punishing, requiring Lilli to carry both the Shakespeare-within-the-show and Porter’s greatest numbers; Herring estimates she was onstage for 90 percent of the performance. “I was exhausted!” she says. A Detroit reviewer called her “outstanding vocally, especially in her rendition of ‘So In Love.'”
From the road to the classroom
Exhaustion turned into a career pivot: Herring moved to Birmingham to teach. Her resume accumulated institutions the way her tour resume had accumulated cities — the University of Alabama’s Department of Theatre and Dance, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Montevallo, and Birmingham-Southern College — alongside regional theater productions around the area. Her operatic training never left; over the years she has performed roles including Adele in “Die Fledermaus,” Zerlina in “Don Giovanni,” Angelina in “Trial by Jury,” Yum-Yum in “The Mikado,” and covered Musetta in “La Bohème.”
In 2018, the bright lights called again, and Herring joined the voice faculty at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York — until the pandemic shut the city’s classrooms and moved her teaching onto Zoom. “I was so glad I still had a job when everything was shut down,” she says, “but I went back to Birmingham where I felt safer, and continued to teach remotely.” She taught online for AMDA for two years. Then she found an apartment on the bay in Fairhope, and the next chapter began.
Emily Herring’s Vocal Studio
Today Herring runs Emily Herring’s Vocal Studio in Fairhope, teaching every style from classical to country. Her students are a deliberately mixed crowd: children ten and older, musical theater kids who need audition skills, and adult singer-songwriters looking for coaching — with contemporary commercial music among the most popular requests. She also works as a music director in Baldwin County, having led the pit for musicals at Daphne and Foley high schools, and teaches in person or over FaceTime and Zoom.
She still performs — now largely as a jazz singer at private parties, restaurants, and venues, along with weddings, church services, and symphonic concerts. Her international resume runs deep: featured soloist with the Alabama Winds and Georgia Winds on their 2016 tour of Italy, and a featured singer-dancer in “The Magic of Musicals” in Athens, Greece, with other concert and musical credits in Canada, Italy, and France. “I’m a cabaret singer,” she says, “but I truly miss the theater.”
Fairhope, with its thriving arts scene and its appetite for music education, is a fitting home base for the next act. The Eastern Shore now counts among its residents a singer whose “Climb Every Mountain” once stopped shows in cities across America — and a teacher who can walk a student from a first warm-up to a Broadway audition. The studio fills a real gap on the coast: young musical-theater students who once had to look to Mobile or beyond for serious vocal training now find an instructor whose own resume includes the roles they dream about, and adult singers find a coach who treats contemporary commercial music with the same rigor as an art song. Between the private lessons, the school musicals she music-directs, and the jazz dates around town, Herring has embedded herself in the community’s cultural life from three directions at once.
For Herring, the through-line is simple and, like her, energetic: perform, teach, repeat. “I have really done a lot when I tell it all at once!” she says. The bay, it turns out, is a good place to catch your breath between verses.