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The Weird, Wide-Eyed, Weepy, and Wild Voices on Broadway
This season there are more types of voices on display than we’ve heard in a long time.
Era-defining actors with unmistakable voices, often ones riddled with imperfections, like Elaine Stritch, Ethel Merman, and Kelly Bishop, were once Tony winners who performed alongside the soaring sopranos, and their originality was treated not as a liability but as a vehicle for storytelling. While your standard musical epics ( Back to the Future, the upcoming Great Gatsby adaptation with Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada) remain interested in a style of singing that is rote to the point of tedium, there are currently more types of voices on display than we’ve heard in a long time — here are some of the standouts. Her raspy vocal pyrotechnics have always been something to behold, but the bag of tricks she displays in Lempicka feels fresh — instead of just focusing on her belt, listen to the way she flicks up her voice at the end of some lines or the way she can pack vibrato into the tiniest word in the show’s signature song, “Woman Is.” For non-musical-theater fans, imagine if Melissa Etheridge did the Disney College Program.
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