Acting in Musical Theatre

A Comprehensive Course

Rocco Dal Vera, Joe Deer, Rocco Dal Vera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415713276, 9780415713269
• eBook ISBN: 9781317911951
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Acting in Musical Theatre remains the only complete course in approaching a role in a musical. It covers fundamental skills for novice actors, practical insights for professionals, and even tips to help veteran musical performers refine their craft.

Updates in this expanded and revised second edition include:

• A brand new companion website for students and teachers, including Powerpoint lecture slides, sample syllabi, and checklists for projects and exercises.

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• Learning outcomes for each chapter to guide teachers and students through the book's core ideas and lessons

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• New style overviews for pop and jukebox musicals

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• Extensive updated professional insights from field testing with students, young professionals, and industry showcases

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• Full-colour production images, bringing each chapter to life

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Acting in Musical Theatre's chapters divide into easy-to-reference units, each containing group and solo exercises, making it the definitive textbook for students and practitioners alike.

Section II
Score and libretto analysis and structure

Musical analysis – listening for clues

4.1 Introduction

4.1.1 Learn to listen

4.1.2 The music never lies

4.2 Kinds of musical information

4.2.1 Composer’s markings

4.2.2 Emotional qualities

4.2.3 Melodic shape

4.2.4 Tempo quality and changes

4.2.5 Rhythmic quality

4.2.6 Musical key

4.2.7 Modulations

4.2.8 Tension and release

4.2.9 Musical accents

4.2.10 Musical dynamics

4.2.11 Musical idiom

4.2.12 Musical character quality

4.2.13 The relationship between melody and accompaniment

4.2.14 The relationship between dialogue and underscoring

4.3 Architecture of the traditional theatre song

4.3.1 Introduction or “intro”

4.3.2 Verse

4.3.3 Chorus or refrain

4.3.4 Playoff or ride-out

4.4 A closer look at the chorus

4.5 Contemporary variations

4.6 The musical “voice” of a song and of a character

4.6.1 Musical voice reveals character function

4.6.2 Musical style reveals character status

4.6.3 Voice type can reveal a character’s nature

4.7 A final thought on musical analysis

Fig. 4 Jessie Mueller as Carol King, Anika Larsen as Cynthia Weil, Jake Epstein as Gerry Goffin, and Jarod Spector as Barry Mann in Beautiful: The Carol King Musical. Photo © Joan Marcus

The best musical actors have a full and considered grasp of their texts and have made strong, appropriate and exciting choices based on that analysis. The three chapters that follow will give you a methodology for exploring the music, lyrics and script, and ways to apply them to a role.

The key element that distinguishes musicals from other theatrical forms is the song, where we experience the emotional high points in the characters’ lives. In the wide range of styles from Verdi’s Aida to Elton John’s, what makes each event a musical theatre piece is the presence of songs as an integral part of the theatrical text.

Unit 4.1

Introduction

Perhaps the only factor that unifies all types of song in musicals is that each is a heightened expression of a character’s experience – a slice of life we go through via the combination of sung words and music. Unlike popular music we listen to on the radio, songs in musicals depend on the story and characters that surround them for specific meaning. Songs in the theatre are written with the knowledge that an audience member will hear those songs in the context the authors intended and with all the necessary background information in place.

As we listen to the music a character sings with and speaks over, we’re given a lot of information about that character, her mood and the emotional changes she goes through. Even though it is not the linguistic information you find in the libretto and lyrics, it is still specific to the character and provides you with character building information. It is this musical information we’ll be exploring next.

After you work your way through this chapter you should be able to:

• Listen to a score from an actor’s perspective.
• Employ a step-by-step way of finding and using acting clues in the score.
• Show the relationship between the character’s journey and the architecture of the traditional theatre song.
• Use your understanding of musical clues to express the character’s function, status and essential nature.

Unit 4.1.1 Learn to listen

Most of us listen to music uncritically. It affects us below our awareness. Take a look at film scores to understand how this works. So, we need to develop the skills to consciously notice and use musical information the audience will take in unconsciously. You don’t need to be a musicologist or even be able to read music to find this information. Probably the most valuable skill you’ll need to acquire for the musical analysis of your songs is an ability to listen to different aspects of the music and to identify how they express the emotional experience of your character over the course of a song.

Unit 4.1.2 The music never lies

Let’s start with a basic premise that the accompaniment and underscoring for a song or musical scene are always telling the truth about a character’s feelings. This is an important assumption because in the verbal text of a scene, speech or song your character may lie about how she feels, or she may hide the true extent of her feelings to the people with whom she’s talking or even to herself. This is not unusual in drama. In non-musical theatre we often have to guess at the true emotional content of a scene or look for indirect signals to it. This allows for a great deal of flexibility in interpretation. But in the musical theatre we have the added textual layer of music to tell us what is going on under the surface of the scene. Subtext is often explicitly delivered through music. The audience can have the simultaneous experience of the characters saying or singing one thing while the music tells us something else. The music can also agree with what the characters are saying and support it with new, different or varied information. Even when the words are repeated exactly, the music can amplify, diminish or change their emotional impact and meaning. This chapter will outline some of the many ways music can illuminate a character’s experience.

Unit 4.2

Kinds of musical information

As we begin to hunt for character information in the score we’ll see it’s made up of the following layers:

Melody: The tune. More formally, it is the arrangement of pitches in musical time, upon which the lyrics are sung.

Accompaniment: What the piano or orchestra plays while you sing the melody.

Underscoring: Music that has been composed or arranged to be played during the dialogue portions of a musical scene.

Because music is in many ways another language, a specialized vocabulary has evolved over many centuries to refer to its various components. The following are a few central terms that will help you discuss music with coaches and music directors:

Tempo: How fast a piece of music is played or sung.

Rhythm: The arrangement of short and long notes in relationship to each other.

Key: The arrangement of pitches in a song around an organizing pitch, also known as the tonic. The organizing pitch can be shifted higher or lower, changing all of the other pitches in a song in the same relationship. This is called changing the key.

Time signature or meter: A set of numbers, one over the other, which indicates the number of pulses in each measure of music, as in 2/4 (two beats per measure), 4/4 (four beats per measure) or 3/4 (three beats per measure), etc.

Bar or measure: A unit of music containing the number of pulses indicated by the upper number in the time signature. Bars are separated by a vertical line drawn through all five lines of the musical staff.

This is just a handful of terms. If you expect to build a career in musical theatre, it is essential that you eventually get some musical training and develop basic sight-singing skills. But for now, we’re going to listen.

Exercise 4A Ways of listening

Pick two songs from musicals to listen to and work on: one slower song (a ballad) and an up-tempo song. At least one should be from a traditional musical theatre piece; the other will be from something written since 1980. Get copies of the sheet music that you can write on. Have recordings of your songs available in these ways:

1. The song with piano accompaniment and melody (but, no words).
2. Just the piano accompaniment, without melody or words.
3. Just the melody, without accompaniment or words. Be sure that it is played with accurate note value and in consistent tempo.
4. Finally, try to find a recording of the song with full orchestral accompaniment. If you can do this with no singing on that recording, so much the better. But a recording with voice and orchestral accompaniment that matches your piano accompaniment will work, too. Many scores have been recorded for music-minus-one or karaoke singing.

These different ways of listening to your songs are useful because all of the musical information we’ll discuss in this section is either part of the underscoring for the surrounding scene, the accompaniment or the melody for the song.

Exercise 4B Easy listening

Before we begin any formal analysis or get too involved in what to listen for, listen to each song in the ways that we asked you to record it. Go somewhere quiet and close your eyes as you listen. Don’t sing along or read the lyrics or music as you listen. Just listen. You may want to do this several times with each song. It’s important that you can separate the melody from the lyrics for a while as you do these exerci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword to Second Edition
• Foreword to First Edition
• Special thanks and acknowledgments
• Introduction
• SECTION I Fundamentals of acting in musical theatre
• SECTION II Score and libretto analysis and structure
• SECTION III The journey of the song
• SECTION IV Making it a performance
• SECTION V Style in musical theatre
• SECTION VI The profession
• Subject index
• Show, character, and song index