Helena-Joyce Wright enjoyed a successful career on Broadway, hitting the low notes as a powerful contralto/alto singer for more than three decades. But after undergoing a series of surgeries starting in 2011 to treat cancer, Ms. Wright, a longtime smoker, thought her career was coming to an end.
That is when she began therapy sessions with Daniel McCabe, DMA, a vocologist at the Eugen Grabscheid MD Voice Center at the Mount Sinai Health System, who told her he was surprised she still had such “incredible range,” despite her continued smoking. He asked her, “Wouldn’t you like to see just how good it could be?” That question was all the encouragement she needed to stop smoking for good.
The therapy sessions helped restore Ms. Wright’s voice. Mr. McCabe’s work, she says, would have made the late Dr. Grabscheid proud of the Voice Center he started in 1989 that bears his name. As a young singer in the 1980s, Ms. Wright had been a patient of Dr. Grabscheid’s, when, she adds, he was the “go-to doctor for most Broadway and opera performers.”
Over the years, the Voice Center—the first of its kind in New York City to specialize in the professional voice—has treated thousands of singers, actors, broadcasters, and teachers.
Ms. Wright credits Mr. McCabe for helping her get her voice back, and she calls the late Dr. Grabscheid, a “guardian angel for professional singers, especially those of us who have committed our lives to performing on stage.”