Singing Utopia

Abstract

Singing Utopia offers an original and provocative account of singing voices in musical theatre. It listens to extraordinary voices across fifteen case studies, from Florodora to Hadestown, and hears an emotional and situational directness—a utopian sound which seems to escape the mundanity of everyday life. Yet, the very idea of the utopian is paradoxical, fraught with undercurrents of nostalgia, melancholy, and the perpetual threat of the dystopian. Singing Utopia also explores these facets and considers what it means for a musical to give voice to an imagined world which is always a contradiction in terms. Exploring who gets to inhabit such a world and who may be excluded, the book draws on a diverse range of disciplinary approaches from voice studies and musicology to literary studies and ethnography. It examines the political potentials and paradoxes of musical theatre vocality in relation to class, race, gender, and culture. In doing so, Singing Utopia examines current ways of listening to and analysing voice and at the same time moves 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. Together, these offer readers a new set of tools for listening to voice in musical theatre, with further applications to other fields.