Carrie Hart 'Springs' Eternal at Vitello's

Carrie Hart’s life is a one-woman act, filled with a range of voices that could overwhelm the most seasoned Broadway director.

As a singer, she uses her clear, rich voice to perform American standards as well as her own original jazz and blues songs.

As a management consultant to Fortune 500 companies, she uses her voice to advise them on how to implement computer systems.

As a “spiritual explorer,” she channels the voices of spirit guides.

And this Sunday in Studio City, Hart will channel the voices of songwriting duo Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (no relation to Carrie) in a show at Sterling’s s.

Rodgers and Hart worked together from 1919 until Hart’s death in 1943, writing some of the most well known songs in American history, including My Funny Valentine, The Lady is a Tramp and Blue Moon. After Hart’s death, Rodgers continued his career as the first half of Rodgers and Hammerstein.Hart’s show is called Spring is Here, which is the title of both a song and a Broadway musical written by Rodgers and Hart. She will perform it with musical accompaniment from the Leslie Sharp Trio.

Now in her 60s, Hart came to music late in life. She was older than 30 when she started taking singing lessons from Al Berkman, legendary vocal coach for singers Eddie Fisher, Vic Damone and Linda Ronstadt.

Already well on her way up the corporate ladder as an executive in the computer field, she’d always wanted to sing and singing lessons seemed like more fun than getting her MBA. It turned out to be more than a creative outlet—Hart said singing was also her first spiritual experience.

“Singing put me into a zone I’d never been in before,” she said. “We’ve all heard musicians say that a song they wrote ‘just came to them.’ Well that happened to me, and that amazing feeling of music flowing through me was my first spiritual experience.”

But it was by no means her last. Hart is quick to point out that until her spiritual journey began in 1995, she had no religious beliefs and a healthy skepticism of spiritual and paranormal phenomena.

But that year, she began seeking guidance in spiritual self-help books during what she called a difficult period in her life, after a friend gave her a Deepok Chopra book that she found helpful. One book she was drawn to—in spite of her long-held doubts—was You Are Psychic by Pete Sanders.She began doing an exercise in the book in which she would get into a meditative state while sitting in her rose garden and ask a question of her guardian angel.

Nobody was more surprised than her when she started receiving answers, first just a word or two and then full messages of real guidance that she heard as a feminine voice in her head. When she told a friend what was happening, her friend told her she was “channeling.”

Telling the story, Hart sounds just as bewildered as she must have been that day.

“I had no idea what that even meant!” she laughs. “I said ‘What is that?’”

The messages kept coming from what Hart calls “her angels.” Sometimes they were for friends in need of guidance, and Hart said on one of her web sites that the advice was always so much wiser and different than her own perspectve.

Then one day, an answer to a question she had asked for a friend came through in a different voice. It was masculine, filled with gravitas.

“I didn’t know what it was!” Hart said as she began to laugh again. “So I asked—‘who is this?’” The answer came back, “This is Quado.”

From that point on, Hart channeled daily messages from Quado, who she calls her spirit guide, and for several years would post those messages on her website for others to read.

That began her spiritual quest in earnest, and the path eventually led to her become a spiritual healer, a shaman and a Reiki Master. She details the story of her spiritual development in her books A Call to Greatness and There is a Garden.

Hart no longer performs spiritual healings or has time to post the daily messages she channels from Quado, but she’s used her computer expertise to create a web site where users can visit her virtual rose gardenfor a message from Quado, and another where they can seek their power animal in a virtual forest.

Hart’s main focus these days is preparing for Spring is Here, where she will take the audience on a “journey of the forms and moods of love” found in Rodgers and Hart's music and the challenges they had to overcome as artists. The show is a mini-version of her one woman show The Courage of the Creative Spirit, in which she tells inspiring stories of the early legends of Broadway, like Rodgers & Hammerstein, Cole Porter and Lerner & Lowe in between performances of their songs.

“These men not only had amazing talent and creativity, but a lot of courage,” Hart said. “They kept on going and never gave up. They have so much to teach us about never losing heart and overcoming hardship.”

One of the stories she tells in The Courage of the Creative Spirit is about Richard Rodgers. He had an early hit in his career, then spent the next 10 years producing nothing but failed musicals. He came within a day of giving up his craft to take a job as a salesman. But, like Hart, Rodgers must have been in tune with his guardian angel.

Just as he was preparing to accept a job offer, he heard a voice that said, “Just wait one day.”

He told his potential new boss he’d get back to him about the offer the next day. That evening he received a phone call asking him to do a musical. It wasn’t a professional production though, just an amateur one like so many others in the past that hadn’t paid off. He was about to turn it down, but he heard that voice again.

“One more time—just do it one more time,” it said.

He did, and that musical, The Garrick Gaieties, was a huge success and produced one of Rodgers and Hart’s most well known songs, Manhattan, which launched their career. Carrie said Rodgers and Hart fascinate her because although nobody knows about them, everybody knows their timeless songs.

“Rodgers was a master of melody,” Carrie said with passionate authority, “and Lorenz Hart was a brilliant and clever lyricist."

She said Hart’s lyrics could be very funny and lustful, but they could also be dark and sad. The song Spring is Here, for example, sounds happy, but it’s about how the beauty of Spring is meaningless in the face of depression or heartbreak.

But Carrie Hart’s Spring is Here performance is likely to put a spring in your step. She’ll be telling uplifting stories of inspiration and creativity about Rodgers and Hart’s career and singing their tunes in her own unique voice. Her style is part jazzy, part Broadway, and she has a gentle, entertaining manner of telling stories about the legendary creative voices behind some of America’s most popular songs.It’s been a few years since Hart’s last performance, and she said it feels like she’s come full circle, returning to the craft that kicked off her spiritual journey 15 years ago.

“Music has such a spiritual element for me, it keeps pulling me back,” Hart said.

And one gets the sense that Quado might have told her the same thing Rodgers heard on that fateful night so many years ago: “One more time – just one more time.”

Hart performs at Vitello's on May 1 at 7 p.m.