Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2012

Taking its cue from Aristotle’s twin statements only that which has soul in it can have voice, while yet not everything that is in the voice has soul in it, this article explores the expressive forms and forces of the veiled, fatigued, disfigured or denatured voice, in hissing, sobbing, grunting, croaking, howling or growling. My particular focus will be on the psycho-cultural fortunes of the voiceless velar fricative, the sound heard in the Hebrew ‘ruagh’ (breath, spirit) and the Greek ‘chiasmus’.

As performer Capathia Jenkins sings in Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me, it has become almost de rigueur to have ‘a big black lady stop the show’ on Broadway. This article uses theories of affect and performance studies to examine the theoretical significance and performative effects of this common trope, arguing that these black female performances are both integral to, yet remain separate from, mainstream Broadway musical theatre. These songs are multifariously excessive, and their excessive nature places them at the fringes of the musical proper, thus in some sense reaffirming Broadway’s existence as the ‘Great White Way’. However, the intense popularity of these songs must also be acknowledged; indeed, they play a key role in the production of affect that is an essential part of Broadway musical theatre. And it is the affective power of these vocal performances, along with their ability to actually halt a show’s progress, which points towards their queerly subversive potential.

This article explores and challenges two philosophical perspectives on the voice in performance, seen in Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (2006). Through a consideration of two songs from the 2005 musical The Light in the Piazza, I explore the relationship of the voice to language, and the voice to the body. Examining the effect of the foreign tongue in Piazza, and the prevalence of vocalize as a dramatic device, I conclude that our essential experience of voice is an embodied one, and not paradoxical as Dolar’s theories often suggest. Drawing on neuroscientific and biological perspectives, along with performance theory and musicology, I offer a concept of ‘corporeal vocality’, for understanding the voice as the paradoxical keeper of both linguistic utterance, and the bodily presence of the speaker/singer.

Jean-François Lyotard saw the combination of drama and vocal music as an aesthetic ‘apparatus’ designed to capture and transform energy. Within the parameters of contemporary sound theatre involving the voice and live/interactive electronics, this amalgamation can be extended into a theatre of ‘instruments in space’, delimiting the borderline between the real and the imaginary and setting up a ‘play’ between multiple characters. It is this aspect that I examine with reference to a number of recent works, including aspects of my own practice-based research that resulted in a collaborative composition.

My theoretical interest in the relationship between body and voice in recent opera was stimulated when I attended a performance of Michel van der Aa’s opera One (2003). In it, soprano Barbara Hannigan, looking identical to her life-size two dimensional video image, ‘competes’ with her ‘second self’ – the projected image and pre-recorded voice. A ventriloquism-like discord between what is seen and heard is significantly different from what is usually experienced in western mainstream operatic repertoire. Voice appears beyond the body that produces it due to technological means that act as a kind of prosthesis to the expressiveness and instrumentality of the singing body. In order to show how the body–voice relationship becomes opera’s major productive force I use the concept of prosthesis by Sandy Stone, the concept of vocal uniqueness by Adriana Cavarero, and the concept of intruder by Jean Luc Nancy to illuminate the relationship between singing body and voice in One.

Contemporary philosophies of voice, like theories of the musical, rely on integration. But sound resists contextualization, integration, and wholeness. Embracing the exhilarating possibilities of vocal play, I read Stephen De Rosa’s performance of a community theatre troupe’s version of ‘The Baseball Game’ from Falsettos as a sign of the inherent multiplicity of voice. In De Rosa’s vocal agility, I hear a transgression of the integrated voice and the assumption of a polyvocality in which voice refuses the claims of a singular, corporeal identity. But, like the musical, voice can find strength in disintegration. Singing along to cast albums – which, although they separate the sound from the show, permit the musical to reach a broader audience than productions alone – fans find pleasure in a cacophonous polyvocality that our voices are always ready to unleash, if only we set them free.

This article explores the phenomenon of the male impersonator in popular song from the pioneers of the music hall in the 1880s up to the present day, with particular emphasis on the disjunction between physical and vocal performance of gender, and in context with my own performance choices in The Girl I Left Behind Me – my current solo piece about Victorian male impersonators.

Brazilian singer–songwriter Itamar Assumpção (São Paulo, 1949–2003) is best remembered for his complex composition style and theatrical live performances. In the early 1980s, he started working with elements of what would later become his trademark songwriting style: role playing, irreverence, acid social criticism and the overlapping of different rhythmic patterns. On Assumpção’s first album, the independent release Beleléu leléu eu (1981), the songs form a narrative body portraying the life of Beleléu, a dangerous criminal (created and performed by Assumpção himself), and his gang (also his band) called Isca de Polícia (police bait). The songs are based on an ambiguous play between biography and fiction: a complex identity (de/re)construction in which Assumpção was able to transport the possibilities of stage performance into the album, revealing to the listener his various personas through various uses of his own voice. The songs combine the lyrics, rhythm, guitar/bass lines, the use of spoken word and backing vocal interventions to create a highly innovative songwriting style. The analysis of this album was complemented by a 1983 videotaped concert with a similar repertoire.

ZIEGFELD: THE MAN WHO INVENTED SHOW BUSINESS, ETHAN MORDDEN (2008) New York: St Martin’s, 335 pp., ISBN 978-0-312-37543-0, h/bk, $32.95

THE GUEST LIST: HOW MANHATTAN DEFINED AMERICAN SOPHISTICATION – FROM THE ALGONQUIN ROUND TABLE TO TRUMAN CAPOTE’S BALL, ETHAN MORDDEN (2010) New York: St. Martin’s, 317 pp., ISBN 978-0-312-54024-1, h/bk, $29.95

SHOWTIME: A HISTORY OF THE BROADWAY MUSICAL THEATER, LARRY STEMPEL (2010) New York: Norton, 826 pp., ISBN 978-0-393-06715-6, h/bk, $39.95; ISBN 978-0-393-92906-5, p/bk, $29.95

CHANGED FOR GOOD: A FEMINIST HISTORY OF THE BROADWAY MUSICAL, STACY WOLF (2011) New York: Oxford University Press, 306 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-537824-5, p/bk, $24.95