3. Another difference, closely related to the above: the conductor and orchestra. Both speaking and singing actors must cooperate with, and ultimately obey, a director. But the role of the latter, whether collaborative or authoritarian, and however closely it may shadow the finished performance via stage management protocols, essentially ends with the rehearsal period. The director is not a performer. But the conductor is, and so are his players. They are living, acting partners with the singer in the sphere of vocal/musical interpretation. Thus, the singing actor must remain in live, alert interpretive contact throughout rehearsal and, night after night, the performance run, with not only his onstage colleagues in the vocal and physical acting out of the drama, but with the conductor and his players in the vocal and musical realization of it. There is, again, no equivalent for this state in the speaking actor’s work.

4. Yet another: studio prep. Conscientious singers arrive at a first rehearsal with an “interpretation” (the vocal part of it, that is) at the ready. In our production system, they need to. They must memorize the role and “sing it in,” so that the voice has an inviolable route through the music. They must be open to the advisories of conductor and director (which so far as they are concerned, come late in the game), but must bring to the table a basic vocal security that will not be undermined by their influences. Unless circumstances squeeze their prep time, such preparation will also do more than conquer the absolutes and groove the “line readings” mandated by the score. It will also have explored the interpretive territories that lie beyond those rough contours, where the peculiarities of the individual artist’s voice, temperament, and musicality meet up with the absolutes to create his or her unique fulfillment of a role, a scene, an aria, a phrase, nay, a single wordnote—in short, the specifics that set off the classical singer’s mode of interpretation from all others. They, too, are “sung in” so that they become reflexive and utterly reliable. The more thoroughly, imaginatively, and inventively this work has been done, the more the singer and his teachers and coaches merit congratulations for superb preparation. And: the more elaborate the singer’s point of view (conscious or unconscious) on “how things should go” has become—before meeting a partner, before exchanging a glance or a word or discovering a single thing that may actually transpire (as distinct from what is “supposed to” transpire) once his character is on his feet.

Way back in the day, speaking actors, too (leading ones, anyway), memorized their roles, and even their gestures, before entering rehearsal. It was a rhetorical age, and the rhetorics of voice and gesture, based on idealized models, were of far greater importance than anything we would call “behavior.” Rehearsal (of which there was much less than is now common) was devoted to staging, not exploration, and the actor’s ambition was to equal or transcend the rhetorical accomplishments of other great exponents of his or her roles—in other words, to meet or exceed expectations. ^(I) But modern speaking actors seldom memorize their roles before starting rehearsal. The craft-oriented among them will study their roles, looking for connections to them, defining objectives, creating backstories, etc., and in that process will become familiar with the text. But they don’t want to nail down the words, because in that process they also nail down a way of saying the words—and how would they know exactly how they want to say them until they have found out exactly what’s going to happen? So they try to leave that as open as possible, and instead to work on “what comes before,” their objectives and actions, whose word expressions will be found simultaneously with their behavioral ones in the course of rehearsal. They are not so much trying to meet existing expectations as to create new ones. They would consider themselves boxed in by any equivalent of the singer’s preparation process, and singers would consider themselves at sea in dangerous weather by the actor’s. The gap here is wide.