When Mira Stanley was a 17-year-old Capital High senior, she played the lead in a Charleston Light Opera Guild mainstage production of the musical “42nd Street.”
Since then, she has attended conservatory two years in Boston, served internships with dance and improv companies in New York, and worked as restaurant hostess, cocktail waitress and nanny.
Now 21, the singer returns to Charleston at 8 p.m. Dec. 15 to join jazz pianist Bob Thompson in West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s annual “Joy to the World” concert at the Capitol Complex’s Cultural Center Theater.
Stanley is the daughter of “Mountain Stage” Band leader and guitar player Ron Sowell and Charleston graphic designer and Miragraphics owner Barbara Stanley (now where did that company name come from?).
The young girl grew up in the wings at “Mountain Stage,” where Thompson plays piano alongside her father on the Sunday afternoon live radio broadcasts. Mira also took singing lessons from “Mountain Stage” Band member Julie Adams.
“When she was about 2 years old, she saw her dad on stage and came running out just as he finished a song and the audience applauded,” recalled Linda McSparin, associate producer of “Mountain Stage.” “She thought the applause was for her. So she was born to be on stage. She was born to sing.”
“She’s got a great voice,” said Thompson. “She’s just representative of a large group of talented young people who have come up locally in all the arts and are doing well. Ryan Kennedy is my guitarist. They came up together.”
In high school, Barbara Stanley drove Mira to Nashville once a month for private lessons with Kim Wood Sandusky. “I’d tape the lesson and go home and practice every day,” Mira recalled.
After high school, Stanley studied musical theater with emphasis in dance at the Boston Conservatory of Music. Now she is applying to a second Boston conservatory, the Berklee School of Music, where she hopes to study jazz vocalizing, studio engineering and songwriting. “I want to be well-rounded and understand all parts of the process,” she said.
She spends her days waiting on tables, writing music and refining her artistic skills. “I sing with a 78-year-old jazz pianist. I go to his house once a week and sing jazz and old standards.”
“She’s bright, she’s very independent, she’s headstrong,” Barbara Stanley said. “Like her father and me, she’s a perfectionist. Everything that she’s gone after she has gotten. But there has been a lot of hard work. She started dancing at 2 1/2.”
Her year and a half out of school will help her artistically, Mira said.
“I’m living. And that’s important. It’s something you lose track of when you’re on a very set course,” as she was in high school, she noted. “Sure, I still want to be on Broadway. But I don’t want to be on Broadway and not know what I’m singing about.”
Musical theater offers the opportunity to combine all her artistic loves. “I saw this video of Joni Mitchell in which she talks about crop rotation in the arts. I sing for a while. Then I dance for a while, and I have a new appreciation of things. Every time I come back to it, I come back with more life experience and a better understanding. I have something new to say.”
In her year in New York, she moved frequently. “When I came back to Boston, I wanted a one-year lease, and I lucked out. I signed the lease on my landlord’s car with three people I never met. This time I live in a house with a peach tree in the back yard.”
Her three roommates are all male, and two are jazz musicians from Puerto Rico. They play the drums. They let her sit in on extra drums when they practice. “I had no idea who they were when I moved into the apartment, and they’re the best roommates I ever had.”
None of the four has a television. “We sit down and talk a lot. I’m learning to speak Spanish too.” The other man is from Belgium and speaks French. “So it’s an international house.”
To contact staff writer Bob Schwarz, use e-mail or call 348-1249.