From Wynnewood to Broadway: How a Main Line voice teacher spent 50 years training EGOTs and opera stars

Any harmonious vocal activity around Philadelphia — from Broadway shows to singing in the shower — can likely be traced to Paul Spencer Adkins in one way or another.

The 74-year-old Wynnewood-based voice teacher has brought his technical and musical wisdom to some 8,000-plus students over the past 50 years through individual classes and more than 20 years at University of the Arts.

Philadelphia has many great voice teachers, but Adkins also pursued an opera career that made him the first leading Black tenor in many communities.

A mosaic of that history will be reflected July 27 at Bryn Mawr’s Church of the Redeemer where Adkins will be joined by at least a dozen alumni from his studio to celebrate 50 years of his teaching practice.

But Adkins’ eventful life is not easily encompassed from his beginnings in small-town Pennsylvania (Monongahela, near Pittsburgh) to singing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the Philip Glass opera, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, after helping the composer rewrite vocal lines for maximum impact.

His idol was the great but slender-voiced Black tenor Roland Hayes (1887-1977), though Adkins’ own voice is a robust, mainstream tenor. He was a winner at the 1981 Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition in Philadelphia.

The Civil Rights Movement had opened doors for Black singers — sopranos, altos, and basses — but they still hit glass ceilings in 1973 when Adkins arrived in Philadelphia as a lyric baritone to study voice at Academy of Vocal Arts.

When voice teacher Dorothy DiScala vocalized Adkins into the tenor range, she said, “It’s there if you want it.”

A loaded statement.

Most romantic hero roles are written for tenors.

“It’s no problem with a Black woman being romanticized by a white man. But the opposite is very difficult for some people,” said Adkins. “The companies that hired me didn’t have a problem. The ones that would’ve been a problem didn’t hire me.”

In a way, he was shielded by politeness. But not always.

At one audition, a friend reported a casting director’s comment: “He really is fabulous. How do we make him white?” When offered only the understudy role, Adkins knew to say “no.”

That turned out to be an important word, having much to do with why, long after the typical tenor retirement age of 60, he still has a voice.

Tenor George Shirley, now 91, had blazed an international career before Adkins, as the first Black tenor and the second Black man to sing leading roles for the Metropolitan Opera. Starting in 1961, when he became the first Black singer to win the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions scholarship competition, Shirley sung at the Opera for 11 seasons.

When Adkins met him, Shirley was singing a half-dozen roles at the Metropolitan Opera and “covering” (the opera term for understudy) even more.

“It wasn’t healthy [for his voice]. He was afraid to say no because it would close the door for other young African American tenors,” Adkins recalls.

That sort of problem arose for Adkins in other ways.

He was dependable, having sung Rigoletto — particularly tough on tenors — on three consecutive days for Cleveland Opera without sounding tired. But his well-received Met auditions never led to being hired for lack of suitable roles in any given season. Or so he was told.

It wasn’t a missed opportunity as much as a dodged bullet. The cavernous 3,800-seat theater has ruined voices that weren’t built to fill it. Adkins had the high Cs, but who could tell if, in the long run, the required amplitude would’ve overstrained his voice?

Early on at Academy of Vocal Arts, Adkins had heard the advice: “You can make a big splash and have a five-year career. Or you can take your time and have a 25-year career.” Few opera companies warn singers about potential vocal damage.

“They will spit you out and go on to the next one,” said Adkins. Though he sang many major leading roles, one European company offered him Otello, the summit of the Italian tenor repertory, that few singers are truly equipped for.

His answer: “No.” Immediately.

The role is stentorian and Adkins is a lyric tenor. It’s a voice killer if the singer doesn’t have exactly the right vocal equipment.

Adkins stuck mostly to America to be near his Philadelphia-based wife and three children but began winding down when the pull of fatherhood grew stronger.

Having a music education degree from University of West Virginia, he had been teaching voice since his baritone years, often learning more about his own voice in the process. Later, after joining the now-defunct University of the Arts in 1998, he taught entire classes.

Among individual students, he can be strict, with a prescribed diet of Italian art songs, and deadlines for learning the music and what the text means. But much of his teaching involves nonmusical matters, such as audition strategy (start with something unexpected) and, more generally, giving students courage to unlock their own voices.

Amanda Jane Cooper, who has played Glinda in Wicked on Broadway and on national tours, put it this way: “Mr. Adkins believed in me. And he helped me believe that maybe, just maybe, I could live out a dream that had long been in my heart.”

“He’s pure positivity,” said Nathaniel Stampley, who met Adkins as a resident artist at the University of Wisconsin. Subsequently, he practically moved in with Adkins in Philadelphia during intensive work sessions that put him in good stead for his now-extensive resume of shows on Broadway, London’s West End, not to mention a U.S. national tour playing Porgy in Porgy and Bess.

Not all his students go onto singing careers.

Like Benj Pasek, best known as coauthor of the Broadway show Dear Evan Hansen and the film La La Land. The title song of Adkins’ 2010 “popopera” album, Part of a Painting, came from the Pasek-coauthored song cycle “Edges.”

Considering that so much of Adkins’ life was spent in non-pop opera, he has a lot of Broadway singers among his alumni. If anything, they are more in need of his technical solidity to do eight shows a week. Even with microphones, “the amplification is there to get what you do out there,” he said. “Don’t fall prey to the making the mic be your voice.”

In other words — first, last, always, and across the board — “Good singing is good singing.”

📅 July 27, 5 p.m.,📍 Church of the Redeemer, 230 Pennswood Road, Bryn Mawr, 🎟️$28.52, available at eventbrite.com.

Note: Proceeds benefit post-Hurricane Helene rebuilding efforts in Asheville, N.C.