The way that women musical theatre singers produce their notes sounds ugly to me; it seems forced, strained and chesty. I realise that this is deliberate, and I don't like it. It's entirely different from operatic voice production; compared to the best and clearest of operatic voices - which are, in Lotte Lenya's expression, fleischlos or fleshless - this seems to me to be an all-too-fleshly abuse of the singer's vocal chords and of the listener's ear. Of course, for the "can belto" songs and the comic female bruiser numbers, it's fine. But for the lyrical sentimental solos, it can be genuinely horrible. Add to that a cute little Cinderella-girl singing a lame melody childishly flat and you have something which confirms all my prejudices.
Both productions had, admittedly, outstanding qualities, and the audiences absolutely loved them. I saw Les Mis next to a chauffeur from Merthyr Tydfil, bringing the Mayor up to London for a palace garden party, who was there for the fifth time, and knows the music by heart. Buoyed up by the enthusiasm of the man from Merthyr, I did love some aspects of it. The star, Drew Sarich, has a beautiful voice, and a very commanding presence musically and theatrically; he made the show moving at times. And as theatre it was hugely slick and magnificent, with inspired direction and sets throughout, especially in the lowlife crowd scenes (which classic opera usually does abysmally badly), particularly in some heart-stopping Géricault-like moments of death and blood on the people's barricades.
As for Chicago, it was equally slick and professional, but in the American style. The dancing is technically superb. Yet as my neighbour the horticulturalist from Northants said, she didn't fancy a single man. For all the exquisitely choreographed bump and grind - and this show is about sexual display: lap-dancing for the respectable - Chicago was completely sexless, as in coldly, unfeelingly professional. I found the music unpleasant. But the show did begin to intrigue me as a postmodern gender-bending exercise. The leading women were carrying on like female impersonators, and I kept asking the lady horticulturalist if this one or that one was a man; in the end it turned out that one actually was and had been singing falsetto throughout as a newspaper sob sister, so I wasn't entirely wrong. It is so difficult to know, in an unfamiliar idiom. However, musical theatre is an idiom that I think I intend to keep unfamiliar.
