Sharpen Your Skills as a Singing Actor

ABRAHAM LINCOLN supposedly said, “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the ax.” The same rule applies to singing actors: If you want to “nail it” every time you perform a song in a musical, you’ve got to spend a substantial amount of time sharpening your skills.

What are the best ways to do that? I’ve taught musical theatre performers for nearly 40 years. Watching many different students tackle the same songs has made it clear to me how an artist’s skill and technique makes or breaks their performance. Good singing presents challenges on its own, but singing in a musical — as a character in a dramatic situation — is even more challenging. You must create behavior, singing while using your face, body, and voice to communicate drama with clarity and force. This means mastering an array of choices and coordinating them with the music of your song.

I’ve learned there are four key attributes to effective singing acting.

Specificity
Authenticity
Variety
Intensity

To be a good singing actor, you must incorporate all four qualities in your work.

The relationship between what you’re feeling and thinking inside and the way you express that outside is a two-way street. Photo from the 2019 International Thespian Festival by Corey Rourke.

SPECIFICITY

Being specific means making choices. Without specificity, your work will be general, and Stanislavski warned that “Generality is the enemy of all art.”

Being specific sometimes means making internal choices: intention, motivation, action, subtext, point-of-view — things that happen in your head. But being specific also means making external choices: a gesture, line reading, facial expression, or dance step. One kind of choice isn’t necessarily better than the other. Some acting teachers will tell you it’s better when you work from the inside, but the number one complaint I hear from singing actors is that they get stuck in their heads. It helps if you can work both inside-out and outside-in.

When you routinely practice making both internal and external choices while you sing, you get better at it. You discover that the relationship between what you’re feeling and thinking inside and the way you express that outside is a two-way street.

Making choices feels scary. When you make a choice, you’re putting yourself out there for others to judge, and that can be intimidating. And making choices is hard. Singing — remembering the music, keeping the beat, staying in tune, resonating and articulating, breathing and phrasing — requires thought and effort. You may think that’s all you can handle.

Practice is the magic bullet. Get in the habit of making choices when you practice alone, and it’ll be second nature when you get to rehearsal. Your capacity for multitasking and creating behavior while you sing will grow with repetition. Push yourself to go a little farther each time.

AUTHENTICITY

Being authentic means being real, seeming truthful. It means finding the personal truth in your song and letting it illuminate the song from within.

It also means eliminating what makes you seem phony or false. Turns out, when you sing, there are things that happen to your face, eyes, and body that make you look less believable onstage unless you take steps to correct them. Without realizing it, you may be staring at one single spot or standing rigid and tense, your face showing no emotion apart from the effort of singing. It’s part of the fight-or-flight response that many people experience when they do something difficult, and for singing actors, it’s the kiss of death. You’ve got to retrain yourself to loosen up, especially in between phrases, and get in the habit of using your face and eyes expressively when you sing.

When you’ve chosen a song that’s right for you or when you’ve been well cast in a role, the things you sing will be suited to your personality and qualities as a performer. But many roles will call upon you to stretch your notion of what you can truthfully express. They’ll require you to be truthful in extreme states of emotional arousal, which is often the case in drama.

You may prefer to keep your thoughts and feelings to yourself in real life. You may not want to venture outside a narrowly circumscribed set of expressions. Characters in musicals don’t do that. They go to extremes. You need to be able to go there and still be you, still be believable and truthful. Deliberate practice is the key to unlocking your superpower of authenticity and getting rid of what’s false in your singing.

VARIETY

One of the most common problems I see in performances is that every moment looks and feels like every other moment. I’m sure you’ve seen it and maybe even felt it: that stuck, static feeling where you keep staring at the same spot and your body feels encased in carbonite, like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back.

Without variety, a performance is like applesauce. Every spoonful has the same flavor and texture. A diet of nothing but applesauce would drive most people crazy. What you want instead is something more like a shish kebab, in which every bite you take contains something different.

It’s more exciting to think of a song as a journey in which individual phrases are twists and turns to be navigated. That means you’ve got to steer and make new choices for each phrase of your song. Pay attention to how the phrase you’re singing now is different from the one you just sang. This requires you to analyze how song phrases differ from one another, then diligently practice so you can articulate those differences in the song’s journey.

When you make specific choices over time, your performance has variety. A performance with variety is more compelling because your spectators infer meaning from the changes they see you make.

INTENSITY

Intensity is your ability to do more. The words intensity and tension both come from a Latin root meaning reaching out or stretching. Characters go to extremes in dramas, especially musicals, building to climaxes that often involve long, loud, high notes with exaggerated body language to match.

Achieving intensity requires you to stretch yourself. Sometimes intensity means louder and bigger. But it may mean you need to make your performance more intimate, more truthful, more beautiful, or more complex. A singing actor needs to deliver whatever the song calls for.

However, the last thing you want is for audiences to see your effort. The pursuit of intensity shouldn’t lead to straining. The challenge of getting through those high, loud notes and tricky musical passages may cause your face and body to freeze. With practice, you’ll find an optimal balance between effort and ease.

To increase intensity, you must train like an athlete, building range, stamina, and coordination, doing a little more each time. That’s how you’ll learn to express yourself in a way that’s bigger than life while still lifelike and truthful.

PURSUING MAXIMUM “SAVI”

There’s no shortcut to cultivating your skills as a singing actor. You must practice making specific choices, executing internal and external behaviors, polishing your agility and coordination to achieve greater variety, and exploring levels of intensity. When you do, you’ll be capable of practicing and performing better, deepening your authentic, personal connection to every choice.

This article is adapted from The SAVI Singing Actor by Charlie Gilbert.