They utilize song as an efficient means of capturing character voice in musical contexts. Music can be an effective tool for conveying character voice, especially when done well. In musical scenes, when characters break into song, it allows the audience to understand their thoughts and feelings more clearly. This technique helps them to better capture the character’s voice.
The basis of this is the idea that each character must sing as distinctively as he speaks. Like speech, the song should reflect the character’s personality, history, experience, and emotions at the particular moment in the show when he sings. The words, the music, the rhythms, the harmonies should clearly identify who he is when he sings, so the audience knows him without our having to tell them. A brassy young man might sing in loud, long, assertive rhythms, and brassy words, while a sensitive older man might sing slowly, with high melodies and many words, and many emotions in those words. This creates a show in which you don’t hear one writer with a lot of different wigs; you hear many people, and the musical becomes a collection of characters rather than one long characterization.
These voices are born early on, part of the prose character description and part of what is happening to him in the story at this moment. What does he want? What is he afraid of? What tools has he learned to help him cope in this life? How can we turn these questions into musical statements? If he has been suppressing emotion, I might set his words in short and abrupt phrases with wide intervals to suggest turmoil inside.
Throughout the story, these musical characteristics need to continue to develop as the character develops, in order to retain their believability and effectiveness. So if a shy character finds their confidence, for example, their singing could expand in terms of range, rhythm, and shape to reflect that transformation. If a “bad guy” starts out singing something smooth and beautiful, it could morph into something pointier and more jagged as they become more malevolent. That way, the audience is subconsciously experiencing the transformation musically before it fully manifests in the action and dialogue, which I think is a really powerful tool.
The process of librettist, composer, and lyricist working together is key to defining these voices. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get it right. Maybe there’s a ‘temp’ melody that serves the emotion of the scene, and later the lyricist and composer craft a theme that will come back in different ways in the character’s songs. You want the theme to come back enough to give a sense of continuity for the character, but not so much that it gets boring. And then maybe there are a few times that you listen to the song and perform it in a workshop where it seems like the voice of that character isn’t really defined, so you go back to the drawing board and refine the voice of that character.
At its best, the use of character voice in musical theatre elevates the musical story from a series of catchy songs into a richly human experience that makes the listener see their own lives, challenges, and transformations reflected in what they are hearing. This in turn allows the listener to identify, contemplate, and remember what they are experiencing long after the curtain closes. As the character voice technique continues to evolve in musical theatre, there will always be more to discover in the limitless relationship between the character and the music, as the possibilities for making the inner life of a character sing will continue to emerge.
