What’s with the Broadway Musical these days? The family caught a Sunday-night showing of “Hairspray” over Memorial day weekend, to our three daughters’ everlasting delight. From the opening number, however, I found myself straining for a glimpse of the singers’ strangely stilled throats, the better to catch them in a little Milli-Vanilli. (Quick! Call my old friend Clint Krislov!)
21st century stage performers are apparently fitted with magical invisible microphones, blasting their music and lyrics in multi-direction splendor from monstrous amplifiers throughout the theater. It’s terribly unsettling. I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was bearing witness to a giant hoax. Sensurround-like waves emanate down from the ceiling–not out from the stage. The sound level and quality bears no relation to a performer’s visible effort. Granting the benefit of the doubt, I can only guess that the radio-wave transmission of the singer’s voices creates a nano-second time lag, thus creating the appearance of lip-synching.
The twelve-piece orchestra was also hidden from sight, only adding to my overal sense of loss. During last season’s theatre strike, Harvey Fierstein militantly supported the musician’s union, declaring that live music was essential to the theater-goer’s experience, and that no one wants to go hear “recorded” music on Broadway. But the powerful, multi-directional amplifiers now in use grossly distorted the aesthetics of live musical theater. Maybe the producers won the war, after all.
