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| re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? | |
| Last Edit: PlayWiz 06:19 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
| Posted by: PlayWiz 06:03 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
| In reply to: re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? - singleticket 03:35 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
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| I was actually more impressed by Paulo Szot's acting than his singing in "South Pacific", as he held back (maybe at director's request) from really singing out "Never let her go" at the end of the first act and several other instances. Maybe they were afraid that the Ezio Pinza full-throated approach might scare people nowadays who aren't used to hearing a big operatic sound outside of an opera house. On, tv they transposed down Kristin Chenoweth's songs as Marian in "The Music Man" because, who knows-- maybe they thought people didn't know what to make of a high note by a soprano on broadcast tv? Like a soprano's high notes were as foreign as a visitor from Mars and heaven protect today's viewers? Very silly as she could have easily sung it as written and have been more effective. Bryn Terfel's acting as Figaro in "The Marriage of Figaro" at the Met when he first started there was very good, though as he took on more Wagnerian stand and sing roles, his acting got less impressive and his voice started to get more of a wobble with the heavier roles. The combination of his rather lackluster Sweeney against the very frenetic and over-acted (and we're talking over-acted against folks like Dorothy Loudon!) Emma Thompson's Mrs. Lovett, made for a less than really effective duo in "Sweeney Todd". Many times it's folks who are wonderful opera singers but less than stars who are really good in musicals. I saw Joyce Castle do a terrific Mrs. Lovett at City Opera years ago, as well as terrific work in opera. Regina Resnik, a name but not as big a star in opera (say, on the level as Carmen that Rise Stevens was a huge star), was effective in musicals, as those who saw her in "A Little Night Music" and "Cabaret" might attest. Robert Weede is fabulous on the OCR of "Most Happy Fella" and there are extended videos from "The Ed Sullivan Show" which show his acting was quite fine (the director must have approved the way he handled the Italian accent and lyrics that Frank Loesser supplied). His voice was gorgeous. It's a matter of making the voice adjust to the style. Maria Callas, who pretty much sang exclusively opera, cared about the acting so much that sometimes she would sacrifice the quality of her voice (and she was many times criticized for this by her detractors). Teresa Stratas would sometimes do this, and she was quite wonderful in her short-lived run in "Rags" and equally great and compelling vocally and acting-wise doing all three roles in Puccini's "Il Trittico" and her other roles in opera. Julia Migenes started as Hodel in the original "Fiddler on the Roof" before turning to opera and mostly having her career in Europe. Opera folks like the late Tatiana Troyanos, Morley Meredith and James MacCracken started on Broadway as well. Besides changing one's vocal technique for musicals by not using as much vibrato, employing more of a straighter tone, more of an emphasis on diction, and sometimes having to sound charactery rather than full-out legit, they have to be able to deal with dialogue proficiently and as well as someone who's doing a non-musical for the most part. Patricia Routledge could sing operetta incredibly well with a wonderful technique, but if you ever hear her doing the famous showstopper "Duet for One" from "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue", she makes herself sound downright ugly in tone at times on purpose, and stops the show cold. The audio is on YouTube. Had she wanted to, Barbara Cook would have been smashing in opera in soubrette and light lyric-coloratura roles. She even auditioned for "Candide" Leonard Bernstein by doing the full lyric-spinto Madama Butterfly's entrance, and she impressed Bernstein into giving her Cunegonde. I once asked Cook about whether she wanted to do opera. She told me that she was really interested in musical comedy and back then, there was enough work in it to make a career. But she'd have been wonderful as all the -inas, Rosina, Adina, Nanetta, plus Adele in "Die Fledermaus", Musetta, etc. if she wanted to pursue them. But she's probably a lot more famous than many who did those roles because she originated Cunegonde and Amalia and Marian the Librarian, when folks were writing musicals that are still being done 60 years later. |
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| re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? | |
| Last Edit: Chromolume 09:39 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
| Posted by: Chromolume 09:36 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
| In reply to: re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? - PlayWiz 06:03 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
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| It's a matter of making the voice adjust to the style. That's certainly a major component. And, much as I'm stereotyping here (also take into account that I'm a huge opera fan, so I'm not being disdainful, just realistic), many opera singers generally seem to concentrate on the music rather than the text, whereas singing the text is much more an expected part of a musical. So, especially with musicals that are heavily based in text (Sondheim, for instance), the music often gets oversung by opera singers, at the expense of that text. Yes, some singers can really get how to approach things the other way around, but many just can't. A related symptom is the tendency to only go for rounded vowels. There was a concert A Little Night Music in Boston some years back with the Boston Pops (with Christine Ebersole and Ron Raines, who were great) that gave most of the supporting roles to young classical singers from the Tanglewood program. I remember, in "It Would Have Been Wonderful," how Ron Raines would say "if" but the young American classical singer doing Carl-Magnus could only say "eeeeeeeef." Is that English?? Similarly, when the Theatre Du Chatelet did Into The Woods, it opened with the theatre singers in the cast singing "I wish," but the more operatic voices singing "I weeeesh." It takes one right out of the performance because it sounds phony and overblown. (I was, however, very pleasantly surprised at Natalie Dessay's Fosca when the same company did Passion - hearing this wonderful coloratura get very appropriately "speak-y" with Fosca's music was a treat. I think she really understood how to go about it.) |
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| re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? | |
| Last Edit: PlayWiz 11:20 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
| Posted by: PlayWiz 11:16 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
| In reply to: re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? - Chromolume 09:36 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
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| I believe that Natalie Dessay started off training as an actress, and it shows in her performances. She retired from singing opera, but still performs in other venues both acting and singing. When I was singing a lot of opera, my opera coach, who's at the Met, was the son of a well-known Broadway musical director and producer. So he knows the difference between musicals and opera performance, even though he concentrates much more on opera. When I first brought in some musical theater stuff to him, he said "You've really got the style right!". Later, when I had been singing a lot of musical theater and had been cast in another opera for him to coach me in, he had me add back vibrato and ground myself more for projection's sake to get back into the different vocal production and style that was right for opera. They have their similarities, but you're right -- someone singing "eeeef" instead of "if" just sounds wrong and artificial in musical theater, unless you intend your character to be that way. |
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| re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? | |
| Last Edit: Chromolume 09:51 pm EDT 08/01/20 | |
| Posted by: Chromolume 09:49 pm EDT 08/01/20 | |
| In reply to: re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? - PlayWiz 11:16 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
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| Staying on "ee" vs. "ih" for a moment - I also have a fun memory of a classmate of mine in high school who was an amazing baritone, but was (if I remember correctly) not vocally trained at all - it was all just amazing talent. After his freshman year in college, he came back for the summer program we had in our town to play Harold in The Music Man. I was playing Jacey Squires, but also doing some vocal coaching, and I remember a night early on when we met to go through his songs. I remember we were doing the lead-in to "76 Trombones" and he, now with some definite classical voice training behind him, came out with "please observe me if you wheel / I'm Professor Harold Heel." And I stopped and said something like "my god, what have they done to your voice?" ;-) | |
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| re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? | |
| Posted by: PlayWiz 11:39 pm EDT 08/01/20 | |
| In reply to: re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? - Chromolume 09:49 pm EDT 08/01/20 | |
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| Well,Ethel Merman did say that George Gershwin told her to never take a singing lesson. She was a natural and someone would have tried to homogenize her voice most likely. | |
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| McCracken, not MacCracken, correction. nm | |
| Posted by: PlayWiz 06:26 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
| In reply to: re: I'm confused. Does anyone actually WANT to see opera stars perform musicals? - PlayWiz 06:03 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
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| nm | |
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