{"id":1429,"date":"2026-05-04T16:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T20:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/?p=1429"},"modified":"2026-05-04T16:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T20:48:09","slug":"broadways-belters-michele-on-streisand-hudson-on-holliday-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/broadways-belters-michele-on-streisand-hudson-on-holliday-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Broadway\u2019s Belters: Michele on Streisand, Hudson on Holliday and More"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn\" data-testid=\"companionColumn-0\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">They are the big mouths of musical theater. The ones with their dental work on display. The ones who look as if they\u2019re eating an invisible apple whole.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">They are the belters, though many don\u2019t like the term. Others don\u2019t like the sound. Too loud, too high, too intense, they say \u2014 which, oddly, is exactly what the rest of us love. Belters tell a part of our story no one else can tell.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn\" data-testid=\"companionColumn-1\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">Now there are six-alarm voices. (Merman topped out around a C; Idina Menzel belts an F in \u201cDefying Gravity.\u201d) Now, too, we acknowledge the male belting voice. And a debt to the Black singers who found the depth in a joyful noise.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">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. \u2014 Jesse Green<\/p>\n<p>***Only Idina&#8217;s excerpt is posted below***<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 id=\"link-557d33fd\" class=\"css-1njxe4c eoo0vm40\">Idina Menzel<\/h2>\n<h3 id=\"link-3823add9\" class=\"css-xbcl5e e1gnsphs0\">\u2018Defying Gravity,\u2019 from \u2018Wicked\u2019<\/h3>\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">The thing that is so thrilling about Idina\u2019s voice, especially in \u201cDefying Gravity,\u201d is that as she\u2019s climbing higher and higher, vocally and literally, you think: <em class=\"css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0\">Is she gonna make it? Is she gonna make it?<\/em> And she makes it! But that doesn\u2019t 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 <em class=\"css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0\">huge<\/em>. Then there\u2019s her God-given shimmer \u2014 and something else. She\u2019s an original. You can imitate her sound but not what comes with it. That\u2019s because she\u2019s not just singing Stephen Schwartz\u2019s music but also living his lyrics: \u201cTell them how I am defying gravity \/ I\u2019m flying high, defying gravity!\u201d And her voice does exactly that. She\u2019s releasing the hounds, and it\u2019s thrillifying, if I may, because it\u2019s exactly the same technique as in the very quiet, unforced \u201c<a class=\"css-yywogo\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=QAvtDomJqvE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">I\u2019m Not That Girl<\/a>,\u201d earlier in the act. I don\u2019t even call it belting. I call it \u201cone voice.\u201d \u2014 <strong class=\"css-8qgvsz ebyp5n10\">KRISTIN CHENOWETH, singer and actor<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They are the big mouths of musical theater. The ones with their dental work on display. The ones who look as if they\u2019re 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[89,5],"class_list":["post-1429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-89","tag-wicked"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-n3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1430,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429\/revisions\/1430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}