FAST FIVE: Presley DuPuis hits all the right notes

Meet Presley DuPuis, the resident music director for Aspire Community Theatre, which performs quarterly at the Kroc Center Theatre. He grew up in Coeur d’Alene’s music and theater scenes, training as a student with Christian Youth Theater North Idaho and studying music at North Idaho College where he now works as an adjunct professor in that very same music department. Presley serves the Inland Northwest as an accompanist and private voice/piano teacher, with youth outreach and education in the arts being his greatest passions. He has been involved with music directing, playing keyboard and performing with community, youth and university theaters for the past decade — working with hundreds of actors of all ages, fellow artistic team members and many wonderful musicians. This year, 2023, has been a standout year of projects including playing Harold Hill alongside his fiancée in the summer production of Christian Community Theater North Idaho’s "The Music Man," and music directing Aspire Community Theatre’s The Who’s "Tommy" this past fall, both at the Kroc Center. He is currently preparing the debut of his Christmas cabaret: "Offbeat Christmas," which is collection of the silly, somber, sincere and less familiar Christmas songs. More information can be found at aspirecda.com.

1) How old were you when you fell in love with the stage and what made that happen?
When I was a little kid, I was always sneaking around trying to get onstage or backstage at events or trying to talk into microphones. I guess there was always an innate desire to do something big — and if people were there to watch it happen, it was all the better. When I was 11, my mother signed me up to audition for a production of "Snow White," which at first I thought was girly, but after I was cast as the Magic Mirror, I was hooked for life. I did theater every season of the year throughout high school, but as I got older, I ended up preferring to be behind the scenes. My then-separate passion for piano started to overlap with theater while I was in college, and that’s how I fell in love with music directing and accompaniment.

2) What do you enjoy most about a live performance, from the cast/crew perspective and from the audience perspective?
The best part of being involved with live theater is the collaboration of abilities and efforts. As a music director, I find that the most exciting thing about a production is when all the separate individuals start to layer their roles into one singular moment. Actors learn their blocking from a director, then their vocals (from me), then they are placed onto a set that was built by hand and eventually, a pit orchestra of several live musicians — specializing on all sorts of different instruments — build a musical texture that elevates the whole thing. It gets me giddy just thinking about it. It’s an incredible feeling to hyper-focus on your “thing” that you are in charge of, and then zoom out and see how everyone else doing a little part in the same big picture.
It’s kind of the same thing that I enjoy from the audience perspective. Working in the industry makes it easier to shift between taking in the big picture and noticing little aspects of a production that make you imagine how it came to be. My mother is a costumer and my sister is a choreographer, so I don’t just have the musical insight. I’ll see little production aspects and think about how people had those roles and were able to make something beautiful happen.

3) What are some of the most common pointers you tell people to help them improve their acting and singing?
With singing, I like to show students how much they can actually control when they are using their “singing voice.” I go through the ways we can affect a note differently — starting with some obvious binaries, like loud vs. soft, high vs. low. After that, I like to go over the ways different resonances can change how you sing. Basically, airflow and phonation can be affected from any part of the voice — so you can sing from the top of your throat, the middle of the mouth or right in the front behind your lips for a clear and pure sound. I love demystifying singing and showing folks how there’s a huge part of our own voices that we never get to use just from talking.
With acting, it becomes a lot more subjective! I always like to commit big ideas to scenes I’m in. I’ll do something really over the top or make a weird choice. I know that it doesn’t always work out or end up in the final version, but for my process, I feel like if I have a lot of ideas then something will eventually work out. 

4) What is something people would be surprised to know about you?
At theater camps, there’s this game that we play where at the end of the week, each counselor writes a bunch of fun facts. Then the campers, who have gotten to know us better, guess who wrote what. For that reason, I started keeping a list of random fun facts on my phone so I wouldn’t forget them each year, so I’ll copy a few of those from there down:

• I’m allergic to bananas.
• My first car caught on fire while driving down the freeway.
• I used to be captain for a video game team.
• For three years in a row on Halloween, I dressed up as a monarch butterfly as a kid.
• I placed top three in my college’s campus-wide speech contest with a speech about the evidence for Sasquatch.
• If any future campers read this interview, I guess they’ll have an advantage. 

5) Who are a few of your performing arts idols and influences and why?
Locally, I’m a huge fan of Trigger Weddle. She is the artistic director for Aspire, and has been my mentor and friend since 2009. She taught me how to value people in the arts — elevating them as individuals, not just as performers. It has always stood out to me how her productions felt different, and were more than just a chore that began and ended. I’m super honored to work alongside her after training with her as a kid.
On a broader scale I’m a big fan of Dave Malloy, who also wears several hats as a composer, lyricist, orchestrator, music director and performer. It’s fun to wear a lot of hats, even if they get tiring after awhile. But I also love uplifting fellow “multi-hat-wearers.” Collaboration is everything!