In this modestly proportioned space I have heard young singers of the Dell’Arte Opera Company perform Monteverdi, Poulenc, and Richard Strauss. They have been accompanied by small ensembles that, even in the Strauss (Ariadne), came much closer to satisfying the textures of those scores than did the Carmen combo, yet they meet the vocal demands of these dissimilar scores with wildly diverging degrees of success, but without audibility issues. I’ve also heard Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shakespeare with no difficulty that could not be attributed to a woefully under-energized actor. I had never till C. J. encountered a mike. But then, C. J.‘s weren’t opera singers, they were music theatre singers, and between the vocal distributions of this production and those of the Preminger film, there’s room for comment on the different twist they bring to what has perforce become the dominant theme of technical talk here: registration. Since I work with singers, when I go to hear them my critical evaluation is always supplemented by an intense and sympathetic interest in how they’re managing with whatever technique they have under whatever conditions are imposed upon them, which in this instance included microphone usages, close-up acting expectations, and a continuous run of nightly performances with no scheduled alternates. Mere survival merits admiration and support. But it doesn’t preclude evaluation, including technical analysis. And so:

The prevalent peculiarity of contemporary music theatre vocalism that has any designs on singing quality is its habit of taking one of several forms of chest voice well above the passaggio, whereupon it gives way to a head-voice co-ordination that is of necessity unbalanced and weak by classical standards. However clever a given performer may be, it is impossible to smoothly blend the registers, or even establish an equalized “click point” between them, when they are thus displaced. The problem exists for both male and female voices, but is more obvious in female ones, since in classical ranges they must extend much further beyond the “break” than do mens’. It doesn’t take expertise to hear this, just awareness and attention. At CSC the Carmen was Anika Noni Rose, a very gifted music theatre performer with an attractive vocal timbre in its “soprano” adjustment. Her early scenes, defined by a sexuality both appealing and dangerous, and by teasingly inflected singing that stayed on the heady side of her voice, were enjoyable. But as the role moved away from light-opera mode, her voice’s inability to respond to dramatic pressure revealed itself. In the Card Song, she resorted to a light, thin belt mix that, by the time it strained up to the repeated Ds and E-flats before flipping over to the single climactic F in head, was painful to hear. The rest of the distance, despite many redactions clearly meant to spare both Carmen and Joe most of their upper-range challenges, she faced the same predicament: the things she’s learned to make use of don’t work, or work badly, in operatic tessitura, even with the assistance of the mike. Lindsey Roberts, the Cindy Lou, showed greater range development but the same imbalance, her stronger chest voice pushed too high, then her upper range longer in extension (to the high B-natural, unless my ears missed a transposition) but erratic and uncentered.