Broadway’s Belters: Michele on Streisand, Hudson on Holliday and More
They are the big mouths of musical theater. The ones with their dental work on display. The ones who look as if they’re eating an invisible apple whole.
They sing the most dramatic songs, starting low and soft to win your confidence. But the breathy pianissimo is just preparation for the long climb from sorrow to exaltation, found only at the top of their range.
They are the belters, though many don’t like the term. Others don’t like the sound. Too loud, too high, too intense, they say — which, oddly, is exactly what the rest of us love. Belters tell a part of our story no one else can tell.
That story is largely American. Women like Ethel Waters and Sophie Tucker, assisted by the classic songwriters whose work they sang, took the dainty European operetta sound of early Broadway on a tour of synagogues, factories and juke joints, dragging it by its petticoats in new directions. By the 1940s, Ethel Merman, a former stenographer for the B-K Booster Vacuum Brake Company in Queens, could be the queen of musicals, the five-alarm voice in a crowded theater.
Now there are six-alarm voices. (Merman topped out around a C; Idina Menzel belts an F in “Defying Gravity.”) Now, too, we acknowledge the male belting voice. And a debt to the Black singers who found the depth in a joyful noise.
To celebrate and explain the thrill of that sound, we assembled a chorus of 15 people who love the belt, including Lea Michele, Jennifer Hudson, Adam Lambert, Christine Ebersole and other stars and experts. We asked them to name a performer who might convert agnostics into fans, and to provide a Broadway or Broadway-adjacent song as evidence. Naturally, their testimony is dialed to the max: as loud and intense as belting itself. — Jesse Green
***Only Idina’s excerpt is posted below***
Idina Menzel
‘Defying Gravity,’ from ‘Wicked’
The thing that is so thrilling about Idina’s voice, especially in “Defying Gravity,” is that as she’s climbing higher and higher, vocally and literally, you think: Is she gonna make it? Is she gonna make it? And she makes it! But that doesn’t happen without amazing technique. After our little moment together in that song, I would go to the side of the stage and watch her sing the rest of it. I could see how she breathes from her back, sending the sound around her like an inner tube. Also, by keeping the larynx down and thrusting her tongue forward a little bit, she forces the sound through an opening only about an inch wide, which resonates in the dome of her mouth and comes out huge. Then there’s her God-given shimmer — and something else. She’s an original. You can imitate her sound but not what comes with it. That’s because she’s not just singing Stephen Schwartz’s music but also living his lyrics: “Tell them how I am defying gravity / I’m flying high, defying gravity!” And her voice does exactly that. She’s releasing the hounds, and it’s thrillifying, if I may, because it’s exactly the same technique as in the very quiet, unforced “I’m Not That Girl,” earlier in the act. I don’t even call it belting. I call it “one voice.” — KRISTIN CHENOWETH, singer and actor