Mixed Reality Profile: Broadway Star Tamra Hayden Makes the Metaverse Her Stage

Tamra Hayden from her homepage, and her SL avatar, Tamra Sands

If you happened to catch a performance of Les Misérables during its '95-96 season on Broadway, you may have seen Tamra Hayden in the ingénue role of Cosette; in 2000, she was also part of the Broadway cast of Cabaret, playing Texas. (Cast photos and more on her homepage.) In recent years, however, Second Life has become a more regular live music venue for her-- upcoming playdates on her SL Profiles page. She was initially invited to perform a single show on SL's Broadway Live Island, but remained to become a fixture of the world's music scene. Already an established and successful musician in real life (she recently put out a CD, "A Day at the Fair", and performed with the Palm Beach Pops and Tuscon Symphony), she enjoys the collaboration with other artists across the metaverse, and engaging with an international audience. (Lately, she's been performing in-world duets with a violinist from Holland, known in SL as XanderNichting Writer.)

"What I like the most is the connection with people all over the world," she tells me. "I like to bring Broadway to people who aren't able to get to it." She makes just enough in Linden Dollars to cover her SL expenses. "I make a good living in real life," as she puts it, "and so I don't look at this as income but as an ambassador for Broadway."

I discovered that Second Life counts a Broadway star among its community totally by accident. (Then again, even after six years of doing this, I still generally stumble into the most unexpected metaverse phenomena that way.) In this case, it was via the blog of Mo Hax, an SL developer and Software Engineer for IBM, who recently recounted a visit with Tamra and her husband in New York.  Computer programmers and Manhattan starlets rarely socialize, it's fair to say.  However, as Mr. Hax puts it, "These glowing, wonderful experiences happen every day to people from all backgrounds and interests all over the world who come together... in Second Life." Or as Grace McDunnough called it, a platform for binding weak ties.

Comments

[Phoenix Psaltery]

Very cool! Wonderful to hear of things like this.

[Mo Hax]

Thanks for that Hamlet. Your version is so much easier to read. Tamra is great, like so many others that could choose to not share their talents with the rest of us. So grateful they do, even when tips are sparse. I got such a kick out of Tamra sharing an experience in SL where she had to sort of audition and 'prove herself' to a venue. I couldn't stop laughing. In a funny way it illustrated how equal we are really all viewed in SL.

[Mitch Wagner]

I attended a concert by Tamra Friday afternoon -- she was terrific.