“Good Morning Baltimore” and Your Brain 🧠

In the first fifteen seconds of the show, we learn that Tracy is in a long-term internal struggle. She always wakes up feeling like she is in a fight with her own body. Not just today, but every day.

The brain’s ability to sense, interpret, and integrate internal signals is called interoception. This includes information about physiological states such as hunger, thirst, heart rate, breathing, temperature, and emotion.

Tracy is aware of a visceral need that she has, but she also feels like she should resist that need. She is pulled into an intensely interoceptive state.

While interoception is vital to maintaining physical and emotional balance, too much of it can lead to rumination, which is the repetitive and passive focus on negative thoughts, emotions, or experiences.

Basically, paying too much attention to your internal state can just make things worse.

So, what does Tracy do to get out of rumination? She hears the beat. 

When she listens to the sounds around her, Tracy is engaging her exteroceptive systems, which are the senses responsible for detecting stimuli from the environment.

She listens to a beat that is not self-generated—it’s the rhythm of town, and it’s calling her down. All of a sudden, she starts feeling more energized. Tracy is in a flow state.

Flow is characterized by an effortless merging of action and awareness, and it aligns with an external focus of attention. This is why thinking about your voice in performance usually doesn’t help (and this is coming from a voice teacher). Once you’re onstage, it’s better to lean into storytelling and interacting with the environment around you to promote vocal success.

Here’s a quote from researcher Gabrielle Wulf: “Enhanced performance or learning with an external focus has been found for various measures of movement effectiveness (e.g., accuracy in hitting a target, producing a certain amount of force, maintaining a balance position) and efficiency (e.g., reduced muscular activity, oxygen consumption, heart rate).”

She’s saying that focusing on cues in your environment (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, etc.) improves your results and reduces your muscular tension. (This is one of the reasons that I believe very strongly in vision, hearing, balance, and sensation drills for singers.)

If you’re a performer, have you ever felt nervous when you practiced a song on your own, but then once you got costumes, props, lights, and a scene partner, everything felt fine? That’s the magic of external focus, and it’s why I carry gear around the world with me to use in your voice lessons.

As “Good Morning Baltimore” continues, Tracy tells us that “every day’s like an open door,” and “every sound’s like a symphony.” The rats at her feet aren’t scurrying but dancing, and the bums who spent all night at the bar cheer her on as she makes her way to school. She is a classic optimist.

Optimism is influenced by several interconnected brain regions, many of which are in your frontal lobe. Among its many functions, this brain area inhibits primal emotions like fear and anger. Being an optimist means finding a way to feed your frontal lobe.

A great way to do this is through movement. The primary motor centers in your brain are located in the frontal lobe, so learning new ways to move pulls you toward resilience.

What is Tracy’s preferred movement strategy? She dances. 

She hears music (external focus) and moves her body accordingly (which helps her stay optimistic). This winning combo gives her the confidence to create the social change that she achieves in the course of the show. All the other characters benefit from her positive energy (heck, even the von Tussles shake their fanny muscles in the end).

“Good Morning Baltimore” is a shining example of the best that musical theatre has to offer the world, and it’s been my honor to be involved with this brilliant material.