Breaking the Line.

When I started coaching R. in Love Changes Everything, he was singing with far too much line and connected sound for the genre - it sounded too operatic.
First I asked him to do something that not all opera singers are used to... putting into the text all the commas, semicolons and full stops. This may be surprising to non-operatic singers, but opera singers are taught to produce a fully-connected, continuous stream of sound.
Adding the punctuation started to break up the line, but the sounds were still too well matched. The problem here is that the listener focuses on the beautiful arching line instead of the song lyrics. In opera the emotion tends to come from the musical and emotional shapes of the phrases. In musical theatre, the emotion tends to come from the song lyrics, with the musical shapes coming second.
In addition, the song is a classic build song, it starts soft and just continues climbing to the big finish. Unless there is variation in the text and meaning, the singer ends up pushing vocally to top what he has started with. I've seen it happen so many times!