I think Broadway audiences are very open to singing in the tradition of Barbara Cook and Jan Clayton - at least if the success of Audra McDonald and Rebecca Luker is anything to go by. And apparently they wouldn't say no to another Alfred Drake - Brian Stokes Mitchell isn't of Drake's calibre, but he comes closer than many of Broadway's male "belters" of recent years. These are only three singers, but they are three of the "top" names in musical theatre at the moment, so at least there's some indication that audiences DO want to hear good singing on Broadway.
Musical theatre, from its outset, has accommodated both "legit" and "non-legit" voices. The earliest musicals (NOT operettas) were music hall/vaudeville type revues that strung songs together for all different types of performers - including operetta singers, music hall comic voices, belters, etc. This trend didn't change as the "book musical" took over from the earlier less-structured "revuesical". Consider OKLAHOMA! Laurie and Curly are the "legit" voices, while Ado Annie is the classic ingenue belter (a la Celeste Holm), and Will is the kind of music hall character voice (besides Will is always hired primarily for his dance ability, not for his voice). Granted, R&H also wrote purely "legit" musicals like CAROUSEL, but too, they wrote THE KING AND I with its "talk singing" King of Siam.
The fact is, in the musical's golden age, composers wrote for specific SINGERS, not for specific voice types. Irving Berlin, I'm sure, didn't think: "I want Annie Oakley to be a belter". He thought: "I want Annie Oakley to be played by Ethel Merman". It's a peculiarity of musical theatre tradition in English-speaking countries that the originator of a given role (or, in a few cases, an reviver even more memorable than the originator, like Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp) pretty much gets to define how that role will be sung by all subsequent portrayers (you'll find these "rules" don't seem to apply in non-Anglophone countries, where musical theatre voices seem to reflect a general audience taste for voices, rather than any preconceptions about how a particular role should be sung to sound as close as possible to the original: thus, Jacques Brel was a perfectly acceptable Don Quixote/Cervantes in France - despite note even remotely resembling the quasi-operatic vocalism of Richard Kiley in the role - and to a player, the Vienna cast of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA would not have been out of place on the stage of the Wiener Staatsoper - because that's what a Viennese audience wants to hear in music-theatre, be it operatic, operettic, or musical-theatric).
This peculiar tradition is no less true of Christine Daae and Jean Valjean than it was of Annie Oakley or Henry Higgins. Of course, there is a direct correlation between just HOW slavishly subsequent performers attempt to conform with a given role-originator's interpretation and the strength and impact of that interpretation. No one seems to much care whether Donna Murphy sounded even remotely like Gertrude Lawrence when the former revived the role of Anna Leowens in THE KING AND I - Lawrence's performance, for whatever reason, didn't leave so deeply graven an impression that Murphy couldn't get away quite happily (and with great critical acclaim) with her strange amalgam of legit and belt vocalism (Lawrence's vocalism, of course, had its own peculiarities). On the other hand, it's hard to imagine any singer today being able to veer very far from the strongly stamped Henry Higgins of Rex Harrison, the exuberant belt of Ethel Merman's Annie Oakley, the semi-musical King of Siam of Yul Brynner, or the superciliousness of Max Adrian's Dr Pangloss. Godspell's Jesus always seems to have a featherweight tenor resembling that of the role's creator.
In recent years, of course, musical have become even more "commodified", and thus producers are unwilling to stray far from the formula that has proved profitable. Thus casting calls that require new performers taking over roles in shows like PHANTOM and LES MIS to be "voice doubles" of the creators of those roles. As a result, all Jean Valjeans will sound pretty much like Colm Wilkinson in the role, and all Eponines will sound pretty much like Frances Ruffelle. It would be too much of a risk to cast extremely different voices in those roles because audiences have been conditioned by the best selling cast recordings to expect a certain voice in the role - and they may stop attending the show if what they hear is too different from what they expect to hear.
Amplification seems to now be a sad (and likely permanent) fact of life in professional musical theatres - not least, I believe, because today's audience members are, increasingly, hearing-impaired by their constant exposure to amplified music and other loud ambient noise that makes up our modern environment.
Given that even Barbara Cook, an icon of "legit" singing, in her live concerts has abandoned non-amplified singing, I fear one has to simply take a deep breath and resign one's self to this "way of the future".
Karen Mercedes dalila@r...
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