Since the time she stunned Starsearch viewers with an unprecedented 12-week winning streak in 1988, Linda Eder’s own star has been steadily on the rise. Catching the attention of composer Frank Wildhorn during her Starsearch run, Eder entered into what would become a most significant professional and personal relationship–one that would shape the direction of her career and her life. During an audition for Wildhorn’s Jekyll & Hyde in 1988, the pair discovered a musical and personal chemistry that would blend his songwriting skills and her vocal skills into a single creative force inspiring nearly a half-dozen musicals and countless songs.
Today, Eder is well known as Wildhorn’s muse, bringing life to his music through concerts, solo recordings, musical concept recordings and on the Broadway stage. In 1998 they married, at their nine-acre North Salem horse farm in Westchester County, New York.
With a voice often compared to that of Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, and Celine Dion, Eder has become a contemporary pop diva, one whose own legendary status was firmly established at her recent Carnegie Hall triumph this past February. In a remarkable return to her nightclub origins, Eder will appear at Scullers Jazz Club at the Doubletree Guest Suites in Boston for two sold-out shows on April 13. High demand resulted in a third show being added at the Copley Theater, in Boston’s Back Bay, on April 14.
While many are familiar with Eder’s current repertoire of pop show tunes, mostly from Wildhorn’s musicals, Eder’s earliest musical interests were classical. Growing up in Brainerd, Minnesota, the daughter of a Viennese chef and Norwegian mother, Eder studied classical voice as a child. She was infatuated with the arias of Eileen Farrell. However, she abruptly made an about-face toward pop standards in high school, influenced by the theatrical sounds of Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. “I always loved classical music. I still do. But when I saw Garland in a film, something just clicked,” Eder remembers. “It made me want to perform in that way. I’m a shy person by nature. But once I’m on stage I overcome my own shyness, and the embarrassment, and the rejection that comes with performing.”
Without putting her finger on exactly what appealed to her, Eder was instinctively drawn to Garland’s charismatic style and Streisand’s emotive music, and began unabashedly shaping her own vocal style after theirs. Confident in her considerable vocal range and dynamics, Eder frequently offers tribute to her mentors, performing such Garland signature songs as “The Man that Got Away,” and even “Over the Rainbow,” both by Harold Arlen. After a Houston appearance in 1988, The Houston Chronicle reviewer Everett Evan remarked, “Eder segued into a rousing ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade,’ meeting the frequent Streisand comparisons head-on by using the original arrangement and even emulating Streisand’s vocal inflections. The likeness was almost alarming.”
While Eder has been known to sing the occasional song by Stephen Sondheim or Maury Yeston (“I do like singing the songs of other writers. They have their own unique styles: the intervals; the lyrics. They are different.”), it is the music of husband Frank Wildhorn that Eder most often sings. She has appeared on the concept albums for three Wildhorn musicals, Jekyll & Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and The Civil War, is heard on the original cast recording for Jekyll & Hyde, for which she created the role of Lucy in the Broadway premiere. Wildhorn told The New York Times last October, “She is an incredible musician, and what comes out of our partnership, it doesn’t get any better than that. She is the voice I hear when I’m writing for female parts in the theater.”
