Fitting the song to the singer

I spend a good deal of my time as a musical theatre vocal coach helping my clients adapt the song to the audition.

Let me give you an example:
The client today was doing the song I'm a Woman - W.O.M.A.N (see previous blog Help! The accompanist's deaf!). After we had sorted out dealing with the pianist, I decided to work on matching the song to the client and her casting.

This particular client has quite a wide range of casting possibilities, from soft-grained Carolina granny to New York business woman to Cockney girl in the street. It's impossible to find one song that will fit all of those characters, but this particular song can work in more than one way.

Bearing in mind that the rhythm and speed of the song are pretty much set in advance, we changed the character who was singing it. The first version was the one she had used in the previous audition - the cockney. The director had given her a clue as to where he wanted to go with the casting, so my client picked up the information and ran with it.

Changing the accent to proper Cockney (East London, born within the sound of Bow Bells) made her characterisation sharper, slightly more up-front and sassy. With this client it also had the effect of changing the body posture and body language, and the sound she made. It doesn't always work that well! For the technically minded among you, she used a thicker fold mass for a stronger, slightly darker version of speech quality, slightly more twang, less breath flow and more pitch drop offsets with shorter notes.

The second version was American businesswoman. More twang, slightly thinner folds, more clipped delivery, and a completely different body language - tighter, more upright and a higher energy.

The third version (my personal favourite) was the Jamaican nurse. The different accent caused the words to have a different accentuation - almost as many glottals as the Cockney ironically. The body language became heavier and more into the ground and the sound got slightly thicker and more relaxed with a wider vocal tract, with more underlying humour.

I chose these three types because I've heard her audition speeches and I wanted to match her sung performances with spoken ones. I believe it's important in an audition to give a matching package. Beward of the "I can do this, I can do that" auditionee - showing everything can end up causing confusion.

Because we've done this type of work before in lessons, when the director at the last audition gave her the acting cues she was able to change in an instant the vocal characterisation she had prepared without either throwing her concentration or upsetting the feel of the song itself.

I'm doing a lot of this type of work now, and the recall rate in my client's auditions has certainly increased.


Jeremy is the co-author of Successful Singing Auditions

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