With playgoing on hiatus, the contributors to New York Stage Review have decided to provide our readers with alternate discussions of theater: think pieces, book/music/video reviews, and the like. We would much rather be reviewing live theater, and we look forward to the day when the curtain rises once again.
More than a decade ago, I had the good fortune of watching the great Barbara Cook give a master class to a group of student opera singers selected for their prowess. One by one, the aspiring artists took turns digging into challenging arias; they all had supple tone and impressive, sometimes dazzling technique, as Cook, who died in 2017, acknowledged with her usual graciousness. “But, honey,” as she told one soprano, in a typical reprimand, “you’re singin’ like crazy.”
By “singin’,” Cook actually meant valuing the expression of technical skill over that of emotion, or more directly put, the lyric. It’s a practice that has, in recent decades, become increasingly prominent in popular music, as I came to appreciate (and bemoan) in my 16 years covering pop and theater for USA Today. It was about two years into my tenure there that “American Idol” began its long reign, on June 11, 2002, a day that should live in infamy for fans of interpretive singing—or anyone who believes that Barbara Cook knew more about music than Simon Cowell.
Like other televised karaoke contests that would follow in its wake, “Idol” gave new fuel to a trend that had been growing in pop and R&B music—a shift from the fundamental notion of the singer as storyteller, one that had thrived through the singer/songwriter era, to one of the singer as a show horse at best, or an idiot savant to be molded by expensive producers. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the turn began, but for me, the release of Mariah Carey’s debut album 30 years ago was a milestone. Blessed with a voice of spectacular range and fluidity, Carey—inspired by more soulful greats of previous generations, like Aretha Franklin and Minnie Riperton—has since proven the most influential singer of our time, launching armies of imitators who would seem to have never met a note they can’t bend twelve times over in a fit of melismatic melodrama.
It was inevitable, given pop music’s general influence on the musical since the latter’s Golden Age (when musicals still influenced pop), that this movement would eventually manifest itself in theaters—particularly on Broadway stages, where ostentatious crowd-pleasing has been a default strategy since before the chandelier first fell in The Phantom of the Opera. Shows with scores most heavily informed by rock and R&B have, naturally, provided the most obvious examples. Think back, first, to the gritty vocals on 1968’s original cast recording of Hair—a perfect marriage of soul-infused theatricality and rock & roll angst, featuring the likes of Melba Moore, Ronnie Dyson and Lynn Kellogg—or the lyrical, nuanced singing on recordings made, just a few years later, of Stephen Schwartz’s early classics Godspell and Pippin, or even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s more bombastic Jesus Christ Superstar.
Now fast forward—past the ’80s and ’90s, when the mega-musical began providing a platform for the more-is-more approach, to singing and everything else, to our current century, when it is not uncommon in certain shows for soloists to stop a performance cold (or at least earn a sustained round of applause) by simply delivering a series of highly decorative riffs, or belting and holding a note for a prolonged period, like a swimmer showing off his ability to hold his breath underwater. There can be a fine line between such showboating and the kind of joyful, stylistically appropriate displays of virtuosity theatergoers enjoyed in, for instance, 2015’s sublime revival of The Color Purple. But to paraphrase that famous line about pornography, you know the showboating when you hear it.
Jukebox musicals, not surprisingly, have been a breeding ground for these indulgences. Burdened with the task of recreating or competing with indelible performances, young artists weaned on the excesses of contemporary music succumb to the temptation to show off, with avid encouragement from audiences. At the performance I caught of Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations, for instance, the crowd roared each time one of the dynamically talented cast members indulged in a vocal acrobatic feat (and not all of them did, to their credit)—when in fact, the Temps’ capacity for silky smoothness and discretion is one of the group’s hallmarks.
Happily, some high-profile composers and performers have also been bucking the trend in recent years. Hamilton, a watershed work on many levels, brought a grace to its seamless melding of musical theater, hip-hop and other pop genres that produced beautifully intuitive, unmannered singing (and rapping). With Dear Evan Hansen, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul married theater and singer/songwriter influences and textures with a deftness recalling Schwartz’s seminal work, while the arrangements Paul crafted with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s longtime collaborator Alex Lacamoire yielded equally elegant vocals. And though it’s been well over a decade since Spring Awakening took Broadway by storm, Duncan Sheik continues to compose musicals that affirm and showcase the haunting power of delicacy; three have premiered off-Broadway since last summer, with a fourth, a new production of Whisper House, postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis.
I was also encouraged while catching another off-Broadway production, just a couple of months ago. In the charming Emojiland, a Grand Jury Selection at 2018’s New York New Musical Festival, composer/lyricist/librettists Keith Harrison and Laura Schein giddily sent up pop clichés from the arena-rock balladeer to the overzealous dance diva, with expert comic performers such as Lesli Margherita and Ann Harada lending bite, and warmth, to the satire.
I was reminded of one of Ms. Cook’s signature numbers, the coloratura vehicle “Glitter and Be Gay,” which Leonard Bernstein is thought to have composed as a parody of the “Jewel Song” from Charles Gounod’s opera Faust. The young Cook’s singing, on the 1956 cast recording of Candide, is remarkable as much for its wit as for its exquisite color and dexterity; even when she holds that high E-flat so forcefully, with a full head of shimmering vibrato, we never forget that her character is laughing. As Cook might have noted several decades later, she wasn’t just singin’ for the sake of singing.
