New FCC rules could compromise use of wireless body mikes on Broadway

So what would actors do who can't use mics? Would singers have to go back to voice training and actually learn how to sing without them?

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I think legitimate is the wrong word. Broadway singers can LEGITIMATELY sing (for the most part). A more appropriate phrase might be legitimately project.

Actually the term "legitimate voice or singer" refers specifically to a singer who is classically trained and has the vocal discipline and technique to project over an orchestra at a volume that can fill a fairly large venue with sound acoustically with little or no microphone enhancement. Very few singers performing in musical theater today have that ability but there are some like Brian Stokes Mitchell, Paulo Szot, James Barbour, James Anest, Nathan Gunn, Christine Ebersole & Barbara Cook. These are all legitimate singers. Kerry Butler, Matt Morrison, Cheyenne Jackson & Laura Bell Bundy are pop singers who do not have the vocal technique or stamina to project or sustain sound without the aid of a microphone. This does not mean that they are bad singers, all have pleasant natural voices but they are not legitimate singers by the above criteria. Many musicals, especially those before the 1980's, require legitimate classically oriented singing, most today require pop singing which is mostly falsetto in the high notes and some still require the classic belt of a classically trained Broadway singer. Luckily we still have a few of those wonderful belt singers around today including Stephanie J. Block, possibly the best singer of this type performing today.

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Updated On: 10/31/08 at 10:36 PM

Shows today are also orchestrated much differently than they were before microphones. Even Ethel Merman would have trouble projected over today's charts.

SporkGoddess: I've heard that same opinion of Stokes Mitchell from a friend who is a voice teacher. It seems that the Broadway voice coaches think he is legit and the opera coaches do not.

You may be right about Jackson; he probably has a good enough natural voice to go legit with some serious voice coaching but I based my opinion on hearing him at a fairly large venue and the sound system failed for about half a minute during his singing performance and the result was that his voice, which sounded great amplified, literally collapsed to barely audible without the sound system. Of course, some singers don't feel the need to project in such a situation so it still may be possible for him to sing legit under more favorable circumstances.

By contrast, I attended a performance which was heavily miked of the Joseph Papp adaptation of Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance" in a 2500 seat theatre which starred James Anest, who is primarily a classically trained opera singer, and his body mike failed halfway during "I Am A Pirate King" and you could barely notice as he was able to use his powerful acoustic voice to compensate for the rest of the number. To be fair though, I suspect that Anest, who I have heard soar above a Wagnerian sized orchestra without the aid of a mike, was probably minimally miked to begin with compared to the other singers in the show. But I have no doubt that James Anest is a legitimate singer based on what I heard that day and since.

My opera voice coach friend knew Robert Rounseville, the original Candide who played opposite Barbara Cook and he said that this show was as difficult to sing as any opera he had encountered and perhaps harder than some. He also said that Cook possessed one of the most beautiful and flexible lyric soprano voices he had ever heard and she was indeed good enough for the operatic stage should she have chosen that route.

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Updated On: 10/31/08 at 11:31 PM

dayao: Oh, that's interesting. You're probably right in that he could do it, but he would need more training.

I think Barbara Cook has a gorgeous voice and definitely was a legit singer, but I was quoting something she said once. Of course, Candide was 8 times a week, which is a lot more than opera singers have to perform.

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"So what would actors do who can't use mics? Would singers have to go back to voice training and actually learn how to sing without them?"

Project!

You also have to remember that today's orchestras are also much more heavily amplified than they used to be, to compete with the heavily amplified singers. And the microphones used to help fill back in the day were not wireless body mics but area/choral mics which do a much different job in terms of helping to sweeten the sound of a show.

There is indeed a lack of training. Broadway wouldn't be quite as hard hit by this if they didn't have to have everybody wearing two or three body mics "in case one goes out." Microphones should be used to enhance and sweeten the sound, not be the full package delivery. Too many young actors rely entirely on their microphones to get them through a performance. I'm currently working on a tour where I sometimes have to mix the show from backstage, thus hear more of the natural voice than what is coming from the speakers. The other day I was no more than ten feet from an actress and could barely hear the words coming out of her mouth during a number. She was relying entirely on her microphone to be heard. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident, with this actress or countless others coming out of the current crop of theatre training programs.

And the reason some are told not to sing out is because others won't/can't because they think the body mic should be doing all the work, and yes, it does then make it harder to make those people sound natural against the people who are actually well trained.

"But it's obvious most people around here are far more interested in bitching about the present in favor of the past than thinking about any sort of future, as evidenced by many of the responses here. I forgot, it's the unions and the lazy actors who need to "go back to voice training" and not any sort of lack of vision that's hurting the theatre today."

Agreed temms: Not being able to be heard over an orchestra in a large space filled with bodies absorbing sound doesn't mean the actor is not well trained - it could be that their voice is just not designed to sing over an orchestra like that, especially when doing eight shows a week! Good utilization of microphones does nothing to detract from a show.

Sonic manipulation and sweetening may be a more recent development in musical theater, but it has been a part of the film industry since the mid 1930’s, when as a rule, all the musical performances were pre-recorded with the singers at the actual shooting lip-syncing to the playback of their recorded performance. When it was discovered that several musical performers who were sensational dancers were just so-so vocalists, and actors with no musical experience or talent who were nevertheless big box office stars were cast in film musicals, the illusion was taken one step further and ghost singers were brought in to record the songs and the on screen actor would lip-synch to someone else’s recording. Even if the performer had a good singing voice, as was the case with the brilliant dancer, Eleanor Powell, if the studio decided that the actor’s “singing voice” did not match their on screen persona, they too were dubbed with another singer. Powell, who appeared on Broadway as a dancer and singer, had a recording contract with RCA and also sang on the radio before becoming a MGM musical star. Oddly, her real singing voice was a more brassy Broadway type sound highly suited for the musicals in which she appeared but at this time Hollywood wanted female singers to sound sultry like Alice Faye so Powell was more often than not dubbed. The same was true of Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, who both had pleasant singing voices but more often than not were also dubbed by other singers in their musical films.

Jeanette MacDonald had a very small voice and she sang flat a lot. The sound engineers would record up to 15 takes of a song and film editor Bob Sterling would select the notes that were on pitch from these takes and assemble a final performance to be used in the film. A much more refined version of this technique is still being used in films today to sweeten and add polish to the on screen vocals of actors such as Madonna, Anne Hathaway, Rene Zellweger and probably most of the cast of the High School Musicals. Before anyone feels the need to come to the defense of these performers, let me make it clear that this is not a criticism of these actors’ singing abilities but more an example of the fact of Hollywood’s insatiable need to tamper with every aspect of a film before releasing it.

When Jeanette MacDonald was teamed with Nelson Eddy, an operatic baritone with a large, powerful voice, a new problem resulted, how to balance him to MacDonald’s very light voice. The solution was to use a new type of microphone at the time, the directional cardioid, to record MacDonald and the more typical nondirectional microphone to record Eddy’s voice. But MacDonald’s cardioid was much noticeably larger in size than Eddy’s mike, and Eddy, not fully understanding what the sound mixers were trying to achieve, refused to record unless he had a mike just like MacDonald’s. So the MGM crafts dept built a housing to look exactly like the cardioid and placed the microphone they had been using all along to record Nelson Eddy within it and Eddy was none the wiser and the recording session resumed. This situation is encountered in live musical theater today as operatically trained singers like Paolo Szot, Nathan Gunn & James Anest are performing with pop singer leading ladies in musicals and in some cases, even though these singers are holding back much of their full power for the microphone, the sound designer is faced with the task of blending these different sized voices to a more unified sound perspective. However, the sound designer should not have the last word on how much any singer holds back for the microphone. This is an artistic as well as a technical issue and should be decided by the show’s director, the singer and the sound engineer in consultation and the final say and/or compromise should be made by the show’s director, in my opinion. If these matters were taken into account during casting, there would be less of a problem, but more often this is not the case as movie people with little understanding of the unique requirements of live theater are becoming the norm rather than the exception in the production of many recent Broadway musicals.

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