by Ziye Hu. @ziyehu.
JERSEY CITY, NJ - Hooray! The Broadway Beat has gathered sufficient evidence to report that, by the skin of her teeth, Jersey City native Brianna Anderson, recent star of Two River Theatre’s Les Miserables, managed to snag herself a ukulele off of Amazon today.
“My friend Emmy recently went viral after spending the past six months churning out piano covers from her bedroom,” Anderson explained while unboxing her new Audio Technica microphone, blithely unaware that Emmy has a far better voice, bone structure, and a lighting setup a fancy mic won’t be able to compensate for. “I figured ‘I can do that, too!’ It was tough deliberating between the guitar, the mandolin, or the bass clarinet, but I concluded that the ukulele fits best with my intention to rebrand from wispy ingenue to edgy folk-pop darling.”
Samara Johnson, close friend and ex-partner, rolled her eyes when asked for comment.
“I wouldn’t call her a pop singer, no. Like, at all,” noted Johnson. “Somebody complimented her one time after performing ‘Brave’ at Broadway Sessions, and since then, she’s been smoking cigarettes to ‘texture’ her voice, and convincing herself that she’s a gritty Zooey Deschanel when she literally can’t not sound like a 19-year old Carolee Carmello. I had to break up with her because she was spending an hour every day screaming into a pillow at the top of her lungs.”
Abi Osborne, a former coworker of Anderson, was marginally more supportive of the local actress.
“She would do great if she stuck with musical theatre repertoire. And maybe threw her ukulele out the window,” stated Osborne. “She actually asked me if I was interested in doing a ‘collab’ with her, which is weird because I don’t sing, so I said no. Well, I didn’t just say ‘no’; I said ‘no... one needs your low-budget, single-instrument campfire cover of Florence + The Machine sung in a lowered key.’ She stopped speaking to me after that.”
At press time, Anderson intends to initially build her audience by giving donation-based Instagram Live concerts every Tuesday and Thursday at 9 pm EST. Assuming people don’t mute her from excessive notification alerts, she plans on making the big transition to YouTube by December. We’ve just received word that Anderson has deleted her entire self-tape outtake footprint, shortened her name to simply ‘Brianna’, and amazingly, not lost any close friends yet because, as the friends report, “at least she didn’t decide to start a frickin’ podcast.”