This Is A Voice
This Is A Voice
Coaching West End leads in musical theatre - Claire Underwood on Les Mis, Hamilton, Cabaret & more
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
How do actors and singers deal with performing in long-running shows? And what is the role of a vocal coach - is vocal technique only part of the puzzle?
In this episode of This Is A Voice, we sit down with Claire Underwood — the vocal coach behind Hamilton, Les Misérables, Cabaret, Phantom of the Opera and more in London's West End — to explore:
🎭 How top-level singers stay healthy in high-pressure roles
🎶 Why individuality matters more than copy-pasting a “perfect sound”
🧠 How mindset, belief, and identity impact performance
🗣️ The difference between coaching actors vs. singers
💡 Why the singing isn’t the goal — the storytelling is.
Three high-level vocal coaches, all with West End clients, sharing thoughts on how to support professional performers in musical theatre.
00:00 Claire Underwood’s amazing resume
02:21 A holistic approach
04:11 Finding themselves in the role
05:47 Reinventing a long-running show
07:32 Is there an industry sound?
10:06 Individuality moving from drama student to professional
12:22 Earning the sounds your character makes
14:54 Dealing with conflicting advice in the show
16:12 Why quick fixes might not work
18:36 It’s not my job to…
20:35 Taking over a long-running role
24:21 Working with actors not known for singing
27:51 Difference between actor and singer mentalities
29:41 When “singing” isn’t the goal
Whether you're a professional singer, vocal coach, choir leader, or musician supporting performers, this is a must-watch for anyone serious about thriving in this industry without losing their voice — or themselves.
🎧 Watch the full episode now and find out what’s really going on behind the scenes:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVe-7G6hitI
#MusicalTheatre #VocalCoach #ProfessionalSingers #SingingTeacher #VoiceTraining #PerformerMindset #ChoirDirector #MusicIndustry #StorytellingThroughSong #cabaretmusical
Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell icon for more insightful episodes. Leave a comment below on what inspired you the most! 👇
You can find out about our Teacher Accreditation for singing teachers, vocal coaches and choir leaders and start your own journey here
https://vocalprocess.co.uk/teacher-accreditation/
We've also got this ↓
For the best self-guided learning, check out the Vocal Process Learning Lounge - 22 years of vocal coaching resources (over 600 videos) for less than the price of one private singing lesson.
Click on the link https://vocalprocess.co.uk/learning-lounge/learning-lounge-level-2-deep-dive/
If you want to discover if our singing teacher training programme works for YOU, message us - we can share the process for joining Cohort26. https://www.cognitoforms.com/VocalProcess1/TheAccreditationProgramme
Get the One Minute Voice Warmup app here, it's got a 4.9star rating
Appstore https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/one-minute-voice-warmup/id1212802251
Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.speechtools.warmup&hl=en_GB
Check out our Voice Journal, written with Rayvox's Oren Boder https://www.rayvox.co.uk/products/voice-journal?ref=VOCALPROCESS
Find us - follow us on the socials!
🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/Vocalprocess
📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vocalprocess
📖 Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/vocalprocess
#vocalprocess #teacheraccreditation #voicetraining
This is A Voice. A podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and jeremy Fisher. This is A Voice. Hello and welcome to This Is A Voice Season 11, Episode 2. The podcast where we get vocal about voice. I'm Jeremy Fisher. And I'm Dr. Gillyanne Kayes.
I've been very excited about our guest. The first guest for Season 11 for some time.
And this is Claire Underwood. Hello. Claire.
Now, if people haven't come across Claire, I often think of you as a secret shopper. It's like you were under my radar for a long time.
how I like it, Jeremy.
When you hear Claire's resume, you'll go, Okay! So here we go. You are currently resident vocal coach on Hamilton London and UK tour.
Les Miserables, London and UK tour, Phantom of the Opera, Oliver, Mary Poppins UK tour, Wicked in London and the vocal supervisor on Cabaret in London and New York. You provide technical tuition and performance coaching for the cast and you work in partnership with the creative team. Film and television coaching includes Les Miserables, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Edge of Love, The Crown, It's a Sin, and The Cleaner.
You have an associate team that provide house coaching for other productions including Lion King and Moulin Rouge! the musical in London. And you have a company, Show Minds, that facilitates safe spaces for performers to discuss and receive support for mental challenges involved in performing. And there's something else that you do that when I read about it I went Damn, I wish I'd done that.
It's Secret Sing, a weekly drop in workshop for singing performers which provides a supportive and confidential environment for performers to test new repertoire and work on their mental strategies before presenting to an audition panel or a public performance. That is an extraordinary CV. I think that's amazing and one thing I can see just even reading your CV here and also having met you before is that You have a very strong focus on looking after the whole performer.
It's a holistic approach. It's not just about the vocal approach. And it's one of the reasons why we wanted you to be our first guests talking about the challenges of high level professional performers.
It, yeah, it's, it's top of my list. When I started working in this field Actually, I would say even, even before then when I was teaching kids it became really obvious that the the vocal technique stuff is like, I always described that as, as the car mechanic bit, I can lift up the bonnet, I can tweak a few things, and, and we can get the engine running really smoothly, that, that's fine, sometimes there are challenges, but, fine, we can do that, but actually I've never quite settled on a percentage, but I think it could be as high as 80 percent of the job is making somebody feel comfortable in the room, because if you're not comfortable, that instrument doesn't work.
It just doesn't work, and you can't get the freedom from it that you're looking for. And so I, I within a couple of years of teaching, realized that more of what I was doing was psychology than, and, and, and safe spacing, if you like.
hmm. Mm hmm. There's something also very interesting, which is getting people comfortable in the room and also enabling them to be able to carry their own safe space into what are essentially unsafe spaces on stage.
That's exactly what I was thinking, Claire, and I'm really looking forward to digging in to this with you because obviously I don't, I haven't had the career that you've had, but I've done a lot of work with professional performers and role coaching and all the rest of it. And what you realize by the time you get to the level that you're working at with people who are in Cameron Mackintosh productions, very rarely about the voice.
Yes, there could be mechanical things, but what a performer, a high level performer experiences is often very, very different than a challenge about their voice. Am I right?
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. There are, of course there are technical challenges. Of course somebody's going to come into a role where, they've got to sing satisfied or whatever, we've got a belt right up to the top. Of course there are going to be challenges and a big chunk of my job is about finding vocal safety in an exciting performance.
That, that I see as one of the paramount things that I need to keep them vocally healthy if I possibly can. But, the much larger part of the job is them finding themselves in the role, and finding the role in themselves. and knowing how that fits in and quite often you've got somebody coming from completely different musical world into a production and so there's a whole style change going on.
There's, there's an awful lot of kind of intricate nuances in there that we have to tease out somehow and it all begins with the person. You can't do it any other way. I can't do it any other way.
I love this. Do you know, I think there's certainly, there has been a myth, which is in a long running musical, if you're coaching somebody to take over a role, that they need to do it in the way that the original person did it. How true is that? Oh,
just, just about and I think it's changed in that time, my perception of it has changed in that time. I think that might have been more true when I first started although not entirely, certainly not entirely, but there was, I definitely worked with some people who felt that they were not achieving the, the sound that was being asked of them.
I think what's become really clear is that actually all of these long running shows work because of the joy of the roles being reinvented from person to person. And that goes there are various extremes of that. You've got, you've got to maintain the, the general product. If people are coming to see Les Mis, they, they want to know that they're getting that, that thing that is famous and that everybody's heard about.
You So the, the boundaries are slightly subtler there, but then you go to something like Cabaret, where we're, we're reveling in reinventing the roles every quarter and, and having new voices and new humans inhabit those people. And so the, the, it's like a, it's like a piece of elastic, it kind of stretches.
But yeah, in general, I would say we are. we are moving towards relishing each new person that comes into the role and what they bring. And that's, that's the joy of it, otherwise I would never have stayed doing this. Can you imagine? Can you imagine just reinventing with,
churning it out. Yes. No, absolutely not. so many actors are going to be happy to hear that, because it's like, when you're cast in a role, you want to bring what you
do to that role. And yes, there are parameters, every, every song, every musical. Has every play with music has parameters that you need to stay within.
Otherwise, the piece itself doesn't
that's the thing, yeah,
or the you skew the attention towards your character too much compared to the rest of the
company. But even within that, there's an enormous amount of
leeway to bring what you do and how you work and how you think about that role in that character.
and I think it's really difficult because I think there seems to be a perception going through drama college that there's a way to do it and that there's a received sound that you must make and, and, and at that point everybody's trying to mould the performers into, into a finished product,
An industry
an industry product, and I haven't been on that side of it so I can't speak to that and, and I know from class teaching that it's just, it's mind bogglingly difficult to look after multiple voices in one class, so I have huge respect for it, but I think the problem that's happening is that those performers come out of the other end and they are then auditioning Feeling like they've got to, to hit some kind of target, they've got to be this kind of person, when actually what the audition panel are looking for is, again, nuanced and subtle and, and a jigsaw of things that, that fits together, but actually is that little spark of, ooh, we really like the way that, that person presents this character.
It is all about your individual, individuality in the end. But I think there's a really murky bit there. I think that gets easier once you've got the roles and once your CV starts to reflect who you are and you get hired because you did X, Y and Z before.
Mm-hmm
until that point it's really hard to express your individual quality when you're trying to tame this audition beast and tick all the boxes.
Does that make sense?
I I really? Yeah. Oh, oh, absolutely. I totally, I wanna dig into this. You, you dig first and I want to dig as well about Yeah. Individuality of voice, but, okay. There's a really interesting thing for me, which is, even if you take what you might consider to be template, sounds like everybody needs to belt, everybody needs to sing.
Legit, everybody needs to. To whatever it is that people label the sounds with, there is still something that keeps getting missed out, which is I want your version of that sound. I want your
voice making that sound. I don't want somebody else's
voice pasted onto you because the teacher has said, Oh, that's not belting because it doesn't sound like me.
I hate that. So this, to start with, there are parameters within each individual quote template sound where somebody who has a light, bright voice is not going to sound the same doing exactly the same technique as somebody with a heavy, dark
voice. It's honestly, it's a duh
Yeah.
It's totally.
Honestly. It's totally a duh and it cuts itself off. It gets me riled in terms of individuality of
voice, because exactly what you've been describing. Sorry, I interrupted you. It's a good interruption, I think. Hope which is that, we hear these sounds, and of course, the cast recordings are thrown at us all the time.
They don't necessarily represent what's done on stage, and that's a whole other issue. Well done. An individual is aiming to produce that sound outcome without a deep enough understanding of what that sound might be. Sound like and feel like
in their own voice. And I think that mismatch, which is what you've described so beautifully, which is, final preparation for auditions and things in drama school.
And then making that leap to getting into professional performance. I think a lot of people fall through the net there.
Mm-hmm.
And I think, I know that drama schools are trying to address this because when we went to the Musical Theatre Educators Alliance conference in the summer, this is one of the things that we talked about, working not only with the individual person and inclusivity on the in those terms, but working with the individual voice and allowing people to find their voice within a song and find their voice within a role.
I know you're going to relate to this. I don't know that you should even ever make a sound unless you know why you're doing it.
Yeah. Yeah. I, I quite often. laugh with students when they come in and they want to work on the, the technique and the quality and I say, okay, what are you trying to achieve here? What, what, where have we got to emotionally with this character? What, what is that? I haven't really thought about that.
Could you go out of the room and get your acting self and bring them back in with you please? Because I can't, I can't help you unless we have that whole picture. There's absolutely no point in us talking about this in terms of belt and mixed head and mixed chest and like, where's the joy in that?
And where's the point? Because we can do it and then you're going to go to rehearsal. and you're going to actually talk about character and then you're going to come back and you're going to say, Claire, this doesn't quite work anymore. No, it doesn't work anymore. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree.
It, we have to know what the point is. I'm more and more interested these days. I think I'm becoming an old hippie. I'm, I'm more and more interested in the energy of the character and the energy of the performer and how those two things work together. two things come together and how we earn the sounds that we're going to make with the storytelling.
And from that point of view, you cannot separate the two. You can't, one is entirely governed by the other and we start talking about breath patterns and emotional breath patterns and how the two things come together. rub up against one another and we could spend four months preparing these songs perfectly, we could look at any of the big, on my own, anything, we could look at the big numbers and we can prepare them absolutely perfectly and it's all going to go to the wall when you get in there and you feel your character, you feel them inside you.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Okay, if that makes you know tippy that makes me an even older one because we are on the same Very much. And I think particularly about breath patterns and choices with phrasing and it's you know It reminds me of something that happened about 30 years ago in my career when I was teaching someone Working with someone who'd just gone into their first, high level West End Production having left drama school and they came and had a lesson and I was very much okay, you know I'm working on the voice.
We need to do this this and this and they said to me Gilly, you have no idea what it's like when you're on stage and you have to do this It's it's choreographed without being choreographed.
In other words, it wasn't a dance number. I Can't hear anybody else
On stage in my, in my small ensemble, I'm working with one of the highest level performers in the country and I am fucking terrified.
And, you know, I mean, I'd worked on productions at drama school level, but I haven't done what you've done. And I think the making the step from the vocal preparation, when they do, they do their acting classes and all of those things that they've been through and their showcases. And they've been taken up by an agent.
And then suddenly, bang! Into something that is very different from what they experienced at
drama school. And I wondered how often you'd had to work with people going through that process and how you help
More and more these days, I think, because, because we seem to have some very young casts. coming and it's super exciting and it brings such a vibrancy with it but their shell shock can be huge, really huge, and that's very problematic because that shuts down all the things that we as voice practitioners need them to open up and that can be that's a process of slowing down.
And that's really difficult because you've got the creative team saying we need this, then we're not yet delivering this. And the performer saying, I'm not meeting the mark, I'm getting all these notes, I need to, and actually, what we need to do is slow down and take a breath, but how do you do that when you're going to be on stage that night, I'm working with you, one o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, you've got a performance that night, and, and your, your voice coach is saying, okay, we're going to need to take a few weeks to do this, now I never say that out loud, but, but the, the, Actually, what needs to happen is we need to go into slow motion, we need to take the body back down, we need to take the emotion back down, ground back in what they know, how they know their voice works, and work it up from the basement that way.
Yeah, and it's, it's challenging because they want a quick fix with it, but actually, what I've, I'm beginning to realise is that You can't, quick fixes are lovely as a teacher as well. You're like, oh yeah, I fixed that one. That feels
Oh, you feel so good. Yes. It's
but in those instances, there is no quick fix.
We've got to do this piece by piece and that's the only way it's going to work because actually quick fixes make the thing worse at that point. It's like their brains are spinning and now if you, if you just change one thing, it's still spinning. You've got to stop the spin.
very interesting. There's something very clear. The first thing that I think in that situation is, this person was cast, therefore they are a fit for the role. that's one of the most important things that you can say. To that to the person because it's like you were cast so you know people have confidence in you and they have faith in you So that's where you start and but you've just said it's so important that you take somebody back to what they already do And go how do we get from there?
To where you need to be. Not, how are we going to add something on to where you already are in this maelstrom of emotion. We can't add something on to it. Because it's just going to be put on top of a maelstrom of emotion. That's not going to work. So you take people back to where they were because actually where they were is where they were when they were cast.
And that's how they got the job. Yeah. And they may now be being asked to do quite different things. I think sometimes there's a difficulty in their perception of why they were cast. versus why they actually were cast. So they're trying to hold on to something that they think is the very reason they're there and that if they drop they'll lose the job.
And actually sometimes my job is, is translating and I don't always know. I don't, I wasn't there in the audition room. I try really hard not to be there in the audition room because my anxiety levels go sky high. But Trying, trying to translate what's the essence, what do I see that I understand, because I've watched a lot of casts of this show that, that made them go, okay, here's that.
It's not my job to, to decide what it is, but it is my job to help the performer find that in themselves and, and let them see that the thing that they're being asked to let go isn't, isn't the essence of them. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
what we're talking about here are, performers beliefs about themselves. And, when they have a belief, whether it's to do with the way they physically produce their voice, or the kind of sound they're supposed to produce, or whether they have a belief about what they think their skills are.
Then that's always the, the overriding thing, isn't it? And you have to somehow gently challenge or tweak that belief while still holding a space for them because tonight they're going on
stage.
and you can't, I can't live with the idea of sending somebody out of the room unraveled as part of an ongoing process. I can't leave them unraveled for a week, that's not that, so it necessarily has to go in slow motion because we have to do it gently and carefully and fundamentally it has to be their discovery.
it's not my, it's not for me to say this is the thing about you, I can spot it and I can, I can tease you towards it, but actually the discoveries have to be theirs because that's, that's how they then live with it.
They've got to realize it for themselves and then it becomes part of them
rather than, it becomes innate rather than you telling them. Mm. Because that, that is then again, something external. This, for me, this is one of the biggest differences between working with drama college students and working with professionals.
Is that in drama college you have the luxury of being able to go, no, that's not working. You need to do this or you need to go away or you need to whatever. And we've got a much longer timeframe when you're working with professionals. The show is tonight and I need a solution that's going to work in some way tonight.
I, you can't exactly, as you said, you can't afford to tear people apart because it means they won't be able to go
on that night. And that's expensive.
Yeah.
I was just thinking, Claire, is it, do you think this process is harder for someone who's taking over a role in a long running musical as opposed to someone who's workshopping and then creating a new role in a new musical?
I think that's probably fair to say. The joy of creating a new role is that you can bring yourself into it fairly unapologetically, I think. Yes, I think it is certainly harder taking over and, and there's all, there's With a show, again, I'm going to keep referencing the same shows, these, these big flagship shows, you, you are inheriting all the greatness that has come before you.
And, and there's an instant sense of, can I live up to that? If you don't walk in with your, with yourself strapped in, if you don't walk in with. Okay, this is what I'm bringing. And, and what I realised, see, every, all conversations come back to Secret Sing for me, I'm amazed I haven't mentioned it this far.
I've tried really hard because these discussions happen there all the time about who, who you are as a performer, and what you bring, and the trouble is, that it is so easy for all of us, performers, teachers, all of us, to, to ignore the thing we do best because that just feels like nothing. That there's no effort to that.
I'm just doing that. That's just the thing.
Yeah, I don't know, I'm not
I'm not trying. It's just the thing I do. And so I think it takes, some really careful, mental skills building, for want of a much better phrase for a performer to gather those things, be able to accept them and go, Oh, okay, that's the thing. That's the thing.
It's not necessary that I riff beautifully or that I have this belt. It's these other things that I stopped admiring in myself when I was about 14 because they weren't interesting anymore to me. And I've been
I wrote a whole chapter on
Did you?
I wrote a whole chapter called Falling Off a Log. You're singing our music,
Yeah I
I mean Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The Falling Off a Log thing is so interesting because it's so easy for you to do that you don't
rate it. Mm.
exactly it.
And until you see somebody else struggling with it and you go, why is that difficult for you, it's so easy?
Yeah.
now, and I am really interested in the things that are so easy that you don't even rate them because that's where you live. So can we start from there, please? And I'd like just for anyone listening, I want to give an example. Jeremy is an ace with keys.
Now you know how sometimes a key gets stuck in a lock and it's a blooming nuisance. Of course I'm just terrible. I go yeah I can't open this. Jeremy will come along and go and opens it. It's a metaphor for life. He actually does this when he coaches people as well. And he does this when he's career coaching. And I think it took us both, because obviously, we run a business together and we have worked collaboratively for 30 years or so. think it took a while for you to realize what an amazing skill that is.
Because you have that ability to go, I think it works like this. Whereas I'm much more, I will build, build, I'll explore, I go through my little checklist. And then I amalgamate all of that, and then I'll go, I think we need to do this. I have a very different process from you. It's a lovely example, because I just think, why can't you open the door? Yeah. But also I think, seriously,
it. Yeah.
He, I seriously, I think he goes, what does that keyhole feel like? I
do. You do? I do. I know you do. I, I've seen you do it. I find it's nuts. It is gonna sound so odd, but I find the energy of the keyhole. I can't help it.
No, I, I hear you.
listen, I want to go specifically to cabaret. Because that show more than anything demonstrates that every time there's a cast change of who I think of as the two
leads, every time there's a cast change, that show, the performances are entirely different. It's going to shift. Now, you coach extremely experienced professional singers. You also coach extremely experienced actors who are not known for their singing voice.
Is there a difference?
Oh, there's an enormous difference. There's an enormous difference. And it, in a funny way, it comes down to that difference between teaching drama college students and teaching them once they're in the professional zone, in a way, in that the, okay, I see myself as in service to the people I work with.
I am there to help them sing, sing the material they need to sing, the way they want to sing it, and safely. And with somebody who has a really excellent working knowledge of their own voice the way we can work is completely different to somebody who has an excellent working knowledge of the text, way beyond anything that I can.
I can get into but doesn't have the familiarity with their own instrument that somebody who's trained does. so it becomes, there's a little bit more car mechanic in that one, and we tend to start early on, so we'll have started however their, their working schedule will allow for, but three or four months in advance just going from basics of breathing and phonation and, and helping them find their voice.
And then helping them learn how to do all the things they already know how to do, but through pitched voice. And quite often we'll use other repertoire to work on with that because we, we almost want to save the cabaret material as, as a kind of Something precious for them to, to get into it at the end there.
So we'll, we'll work on adjacent repertoire and we'll work on all sorts of exercises, throwing the voice around, playing, playing with talking taking lines from anything that they've done and, and throwing it around in different emotional ways, seeing, letting them see how that might affect their voice and it, it I mean the whole thing that I suppose the reason I'm struggling to find words for it is that in either instance The process is very delicate because I'm there to guide, to assist, to offer tools But if, if you are, if you haven't got a working knowledge of your own singing voice I liken this to like an artist's palette You might not know, you might get given one of those little palette pots that kids get with like a making kit and it's got red and it's got green and it's got blue and it's got white, right?
You might not know what colours you can make that are in between all of those because you've never heard yourself do it and if you haven't heard yourself do it you can't imagine it in the role. A lot of my job is to help them find sounds they didn't know they had in case they might be useful.
Nice. I
a, with a with an experienced singer the job becomes more about helping facilitate them tell the story a lot more.
I was about to say a lot more character discussion. That's not fair. It's a subtler process and it's probably a slightly more mechanical process, perhaps. Gosh.
I think it's also really interesting for you as a, as a teacher when you're working with somebody, 'cause we talk about somebody who has an actor mind and a singer
mind, and they're so different. They're so different to work with, and they also require different prompts. So you could give the same prompt to a singer mind and an actor mind and they would even take it in a completely different way, let alone then produce something for you.
that's absolutely true. And I think the other thing is about the language that they speak. So you're changing, you're, you're changing the language you use to help them find these things. And also appreciating that for the, for the experienced singers, as you're saying, a singer mind. has chosen that route because they find music and sound making, an accessible way to express themselves.
Absolutely. It's a primary mode of expression. Yes.
And, and actually with them, quite often, not exclusively, but quite often, I'm having to remind them for that production that, that actually isn't the vehicle through which we're telling the story. The music is. unbelievably important. Every single part of that production is, is the mesh that, that makes the whole, of course, but actually we're not doing it through beautiful production of a song.
We're not, we're not nobody's there to hear those songs be sung as, as brilliantly as they could be. The, the, what they're there for is to. to hear that story being told
Mm hmm. Mm
those characters struggle and unravel through a story which is, which itself morphs as the world around us is changing.
You see the audience is taking it differently, so it's incredibly relevant. So it's really important, certainly to me, it's really important that that the narrative and the characters and the emotion comes slightly ahead of the musical product. That isn't, that isn't to say we're going to drop the musical ball, it's too important, but it, but it's just slightly ahead of that.
Yeah, it's very interesting, 100 percent with you. What's also fascinating is since in a show like Cabaret, the story is so strong and it's so important and it's so emotional, if you did sing one of the songs as a vocal showpiece, it wouldn't fit
that's the problem. That's, that's exactly it. Yeah.
And the audience would then come out of the story and out of the plot and sit back and go, oh, didn't that sound lovely? Yeah.
and where I was going to go with that was, so the singing isn't the goal.
Exactly that.
the singing is the vehicle. Listen up, musical theatre singers, this is so important. Sorry, I know you've worked for, years and years on your technique, but the singing isn't the goal. Singing is it's all about the experience that you, with your colleagues, together with the music and the whole stage performance. are creating and sharing with the audience in the room. That is, that's the goal.
yes, absolutely.
People talk about, oh, there's no difference between opera and musical theatre really. And I'm going, they are diametrically opposed. theatre, musical theatre is story based and opera is
music based. And that's why you get voices, it's why you get techniques, it's why you get mentalities, it's why you get And interestingly, the thing I was, I always go to corners, where things might or might not change.
And there's a really nice corner, which is as a, an acting, sorry, an opera singer who acts well, you are often criticized in reviews. Oh, they're an actor singer. Mm hmm. And it's what, you mean they,
they, they're not a musician? Yeah, yeah, they told the story, yes. But apparently that was worth picking up on in your review as a potential negative.
And I'm going, it's not whether that actor, singer is good, bad or indifferent. That's not the point.
The point is that it doesn't fit the genre, according to that reviewer. And there are too many of those reviewers saying the same thing for it not to be a thing. It's like in opera, it's very much about voice and phrasing and architecture and sound quality and emotion sound, if you like.
And the music, the interpretation. And the interpretation of the music, And in theatre it's about story, text, it's about word by word, moment by moment emotions. And the voice needs to reflect what those moment by moment emotions are and it's a different language.
Sorry, I'm off my Hobby horse
No, you're all right, I'm on, I'm on it with you.
Claire, this has been so interesting and I know that we're gonna have more to talk about. So should we have her back again?
Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. We'll see you next time.
I look forward to it
Bye. This is a voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.