Animaloopidy
About T.O.
I grew up in a musical family. Both of my parents were conservatory-trained singers who also loved to sing show tunes and popular music. When I was young, we performed as a family: The Singing Sterretts. My parents also both played piano well, and my older brother and sister were piano students before I was. When you’re a small child your home is the center of the universe, and I still (vaguely) can remember discovering to my surprise that not everyone played piano.
In high school I entered competitions as a singer and a pianist and performed with my friend Ginny as a singing duo with keyboard accompaniment in coffee shops and at special events. We would come up with our own vocal arrangements…and we would get very silly when rehearsing. In fact, silly and zany humor has always been an important part of my life. And I was starting to compose my own songs and instrumentals as well as arrange songs by others. I had a book of Bacharach and David songs that I fell in love with, and I played them over and over, gradually turning all the songs into my own versions.
Flash forward and I spent years working in musical theatre, in rock and blues bands, playing and singing in recording studios, did a European tour with a rock band, did a couple of national tours of musicals, worked with Livingston Taylor, Ellen Foley, Didi Stewart and other singers, and then eventually ended up working on Broadway with the show CATS.
Since then I’ve worked with a dozen other Broadway shows, but it was during my time at The Meow-Meow Show (as I sometimes refer to it) that I wrote and recorded the songs on ANIMALOOPIDY.