Singing Utopia is an original study of voice in musical theatre. Rather than focusing on how actors sing or analysing voices using established approaches found in opera studies, this book offers readers ways to understand musical theatre voices from a cultural perspective. It argues that musical theatre singing allows listeners and audiences to escape their everyday lives; and that voices can 'be' utopian. It then considers what this means and uncovers some paradoxes and difficulties in this idea. Introducing a new set of terms, it provides a way to listen to, think about, and even perform, voice in popular musical theatre.
Singing Utopia is a unique and ambitious work which asks us to listen differently to voice in musical theatre. Across fifteen case studies from Florodora to Hadestown, Ben Macpherson hears something utopian in the extraordinary, emotional, and situational directness of singing voices as they escape the confines of everyday life. Yet, as this book discovers, the very nature of utopia is paradoxical, fraught with undercurrents of nostalgia, melancholy, and the perpetual threat of the dystopian. Singing Utopia listens across these fault lines in our understanding of utopia and asks what it means for a musical to give voice to an imagined world which is always a contradiction in terms. Who gets to inhabit such a world? Who is excluded? How can we locate utopia in musical theatre voices, and what might be the consequences when its complexities are exposed?
Listening for answers to these questions, implicitly connected with concerns of class, race, gender, and culture, the author draws on a diverse range of approaches, including voice studies, musicology, sound studies, literary studies, political philosophy, and ethnography. In doing so, Singing Utopia examines current ways of listening while moving beyond them to develop a series of new terms, including 'decadent appropriation', 'simuloquism', two kinds of 'voiceworld', and three new approaches to the chorus and ensemble. This book offers an original and provocative account of musical theatre singing, exposing the power, possibilities, and paradoxes heard in voices that promise 'something better'-whatever, in the end, that might be.
