Crossing Over - Musical Theater

I've been researching what it would take to get into some crossover work. During the holidays I saw a community theater musical; a kind of modern day passion play at the Ivoryton Playhouse in CT, with 2 ringers in the lead roles. The whole time I kept thinking, "I could do that..." The female lead, the 'Mary' character, was a good ingenue. Pretty, sweet smile, very pretty soprano-y voice, training at SF Conservatory I think... It couldn't have been the most rewarding of roles since the music was hokey and the community cast members were all over the board theatrically. But, I can imagine it's a start for her. And in a way, I envied her.

I know the grass always seems greener on the other side, but between getting paid peanuts to sing all the time, or getting paid peanuts to sing sometimes, and then work a day job the rest of the time, when you're currently doing the latter, the former sounds pretty enticing, albeit romantic.

I have a pal, Iris McQuillan-Grace, who is a great actor. She has been instigating some of my interest in musical theater recently. Her question to me one evening at a bar was, "Is it that you're in love with just opera, or you just want to be on stage performing?" To genuinely find that answer, I felt I should explore a wider range of performance opportunities. I can draw on my initial career of musical theater as starting reference: When I was 6, I was cast in my first musical, The King and I. Then shows like Annie and Carousel followed and I learned how to take direction from a director, learned more about projection, the rules behind the stage, actors etiquette, etc. I got into operatic/classical singing once I started taking voice lessons around age 13. My reasoning for sticking with the Mozart lieder and Faure Melodie was that if one could sing classical music, one could sing Broadway -- not vice versa. That's mostly true.

I had my first voice lesson last night with a musical theater oriented voice teacher. I took a Kurt Weil song to her, "My Ship." My approach to the song was, from a classically trained perspective, to be less formal with the diction, feeling free to "chew" a bit more, and to feel freer to use my chest voice, rather than a mix around middle C. She said I did pretty well, but we could free up the chest voice even more in the future. Her valuable advice to me: "In opera, the voice informs the character, more or less, while in musical theater, the character informs the voice. At least, that could be your approach so you don't mix the two styles up."

It hadn't really been my concern that I might mix the styles together. They feel so different to me even without any previous theatrical guidance. And even in opera, I tend to let the character inform the voice, which may make me a little different from most classical singers. Maybe that's how I was fairly successful at fooling more than a few people into thinking that I was actually a boy 2 years ago in Cavalli's La Didone in D.C. I've always had an urge to use many more vocal colors in opera, even singing Barbarina's lines when she's quoting the Count's own words in Le nozze di Figaro an octave below what's written, thereby using the chest voice to imitate a man's. I didn't know if I was allowed to do it or not, but after trying it out in rehearsal, the director was pleased. Soprano Patricia Petibon, who sometimes over does it, really achieves some amazing vocal range of color in her recordings -- like vocal fireworks!

On a side note, maybe that is also why I tend to enjoy the outlying operatic styles more rather than bel canto opera. It seems early and contemporary music allows the singer to infuse more character into the role than bel canto/Romantic operas.

So, along with a freer vocal interpretation in musical theater, the freer, seemingly riskier theatrical approach is more than a little intimidating. How do you approach the line "perhaps I'm bad, or wild or mad!" in the song Much More? How does one loose the inhibition that isn't necessarily addressed in opera? You're closer to the audience in Musical Theater -- less artifice to hide behind. As difficult as it is to get recitative learned and memorized, it seems 10 times more difficult to get a monologue down. We're confronted with dialogue and monologue every day in real life. We know what does and doesn't sound real in an instant. Any laymen can see a soap opera on t.v. and know that half the cast on the show are really bad. But, how often do we hear someone sing the specials on the menu at lunch, or sing the new vacation policies in the office? Never. Bad acting in the form of recitative is easier to stomach because it's so far from our daily experiences. Opera is grander and can be painted with a large brush, often void of the little details like half smirks and raised eyebrows (the exception, or near exception, I would say, would be Teresa Stratas).

On a practical level, what does all this mean? It means acting lessons, unfortunately for my pocket book. It also means subscribing to the audition announcement websites for the NYC area. Moving closer to the city will help. And it means continuing with voice lessons with two different teachers, for now. Yikes! The musical theater world feels 100 times more competitive than the operatic world, so I imagine this will take some time.