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From:  Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...>
Date:  Fri Nov 8, 2002  10:20 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] re: nats and broadway divisions

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...




  Replies Name/Email Yahoo! ID Date  
20798 Is it possible to overtrain?Karen Mercedes   Sun  11/10/2002  
20799 Re: Is it possible to overtrain?Greypins@a... greypins Sun  11/10/2002  
20800 Re: Is it possible to overtrain?buzzcen@a... buzzcen2000 Sun  11/10/2002  
20802 Re: Working as a singer - was: Is it possible to overtrain?John Messmer, M.D. singdoc_1 Sun  11/10/2002  
20816 Re: Working as a singer - was: Is it possible to overtrain?Karen Mercedes   Mon  11/11/2002  
20818 One act Operas?Morgan Godfrey   Mon  11/11/2002  
20819 Re: One act Operas?Jean Marie Henderson jeaniebean77 Mon  11/11/2002  
20820 Re: One act Operas?Amanda Kelley mandasings Mon  11/11/2002  
20822 Re: One act Operas?Karen Mercedes   Tue  11/12/2002  

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