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As Glinda in the forthcoming movie musical, Grande will be showing off high-altitude vocals that rarely take center stage in contemporary theater and film. Northeastern experts break down why.
When Ariana Grande appears on screen in “Wicked,” she’ll be doing something audiences don’t hear her do very often.
The role of Glinda, the sugary “good witch,” in the film adaptation of the popular musical retelling of “The Wizard of Oz,” will have the pop star singing music that is a lot more operatic than her usual material.
A promotional video released for the movie (coming out Nov. 22) teases Grande doing scale warmups in a high soprano range, then holding a sustained high note (A above high C on a piano, specifically) that you never hear on pop radio — and these days, rarely in musical theater.
Originated by Kristin Chenoweth in the 2003 Broadway production, the Glinda role in “Wicked” is for a high, bright, flexible voice, with showy vocal trills and a range hovering near the top end of most female vocal ranges.
It’s a bit of a throwback to an earlier era of musical theater, when the art form drew a lot from operetta, says Allen Feinstein, a teaching professor of music at Northeastern University. In those days, musicals were more often song showcases built around thin storylines; the vocals were more about showcasing the singers than advancing the story.
“The characters that were frequently assigned to soprano voices were these ingénue anchor characters; they weren’t that dynamic,” he says. “A lot of what they were singing didn’t have a lot of plot involved.
“Then American musical theater outgrew that with composers and lyricists like Stephen Sondheim, or Kander and Ebb,” he continues. “They were creating multidimensional characters, and they weren’t saying, oh, the female lead is going to only have these types of emotions and these types of responses. She can be much more complex.”
Now, as a product of that, you’re more likely to hear main female characters with lower, belting voices — like Elphaba, Glinda’s counterpart in “Wicked,” played in the movie by Cynthia Erivo. There’s a simple reason for this: that range is closer to human speech.
And in the more complex stories that characterize musical theater today, that makes things easier to understand.
“It’s a storytelling form, and you are often conveying very specific information that you want the audience to process,” Feinstein says. “They have to understand the words. By the necessity of that principle, as musicals have evolved to be more emotionally complex over the last half-century or so, they have become less operatic.”
Feinstein writes musicals himself, and says he generally limits the top range for his female characters to a “C” on the treble clef — nearly an octave below the top notes for Glinda — “mostly for clarity of communication.”
“You want to be in a range that [the audience] is used to hearing,” he says. “If you’re listening in a very high range, or for that matter, a very, very low range, it’s just harder to understand the story.”
Feinstein adds that performers tend to communicate more effectively in a more speech-like vocal range — with a few notable exceptions, including the woman for whom the Glinda role was written for. “The thing about Kristin Chenoweth is she can deliver a lyric with clarity in most of her range,” he says.
In Grande, a singer known for her vocal chops and theatricality, the “Wicked” filmmakers may have found someone who can do that, too, says Hilary Poriss, a professor and the chair of Northeastern’s music department.
“She has this amazing talent for singing impressions,” Poriss says, pointing to the pop star’s “Saturday Night Live” appearances and dead-on impersonations of Britney Spears, Shakira and Sabrina Carpenter. “Her virtuosity rings out very clearly there.”
Poriss’ academic research is in 18th- and 19th-century opera, with a special focus on the opera divas who sang it. There aren’t many recordings of those women — the technology didn’t exist. But Poriss says that ironically, based on the little she has heard, Grande could probably blow most of them out of the water. She just doesn’t often have occasion to.
“It’s a lot like athletics. The training has just gotten better and better,” she says. “You know, you look at Olympic gymnasts from the 1950s and juxtapose that with Simone Biles and you’re like, ‘My God.’ But it’s not as necessary to sound that way in pop music and musical theater.”
As a celebrity, Grande has other parallels to the divas in Poriss’s research. Adelina Patti, a globally famous opera star, was one of the first product spokeswomen in the early 20th century. They had personal lives that were subject to widespread scrutiny.
“People wanted to follow the divorces and the marriages and the many, many pregnancies out of wedlock,” Poriss says.
The similar nature of Grande’s fame — and the fact of her starring in a big-budget movie — gives the type of singing those women were known for a rare platform. Poriss and Feinstein doubt it’s more than a one-off, born of very specific circumstances (Feinstein points out that in a fantasy tale like “Wicked,” fantastical singing may be a better fit than in realist, character-driven musicals).
Still, Poriss would love to see it in popular media more often. “One of the things I want to do is be a consultant on a limited series like ‘The Crown,’ except about a family of opera divas,” she says.
There’s at least one singer out there who could probably tackle it, if she’s available.