Description of Activity
This paper will explore the cultural politics of voice in ‘bio-musicals’. In such productions, actors are expected to imitate the voices of well-known artists, being required to ‘sound like’ them.Employing a tripartite critical framework, I seek to articulate the limitations and potentials of such vocal mimicry. I do this through three case studies taken from Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story (1989), Jolson—The Musical (1995) and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (2013). First, I draw on Roland Barthes’ discussion of the ‘grain of the voice’, to understand the difficulties inherent in any claim to fully ‘sound like’ someone else. Second, I employ Hillel Schwartz’s conception of
‘bewilderment’ to more fully articulate the way an audience’s agency might reside in a space between the original voice of the artist and its theatricalised recreation in a bio-musical. Third, I suggest that strategies from translation studies which focus on adaptation can offer a sense of the
potentials of imitation in this form.
Drawing these strands together, I conclude by offering a neologism that encapsulates the phenomena of simulated voices in popular stage musicals.
| Period | 26 Jun 2019 → 29 Jun 2019 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Song, Stage and Screen XIV: (Re)-Inventions: Adaptations and New Directions in Musicals on and between Stage and Screen |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 14 |
| Location | Leeds, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |