Today, we started to expand upon our baseline/ forward placement, and started building Jay's musical theater placement. Our musical theater placement is an extension of our regular placement; it takes certain parts of our forward placement, and takes them to an extreme to cater to this specific genre. In musical theater, the things that we emphasize about our forward placement are the talked words (taking them to the extreme by making them even more forward and adding energy to them), and the power behind our forward placement (taken to the extreme by widening vowels to create an even bigger sound while maintaining the same amount of pressure on the vocal chords).
To start our musical theater placement today, we started by moving Jay's voice to a bigger place that projects more (or sounds bigger and more suited to a theatrical stage). We made it more punchy - or emphasized the consonants of our words more, giving it more life and energy.
We separated our words into syllables to keep up with the music (or stay in the pocket), for style and energy, and to make sure the words were clear enough to tell the story.
Performance technique
We also worked on our performance technique today! Adding movement while singing is a hard thing to do because it gives your brain one more thing to focus on. The first thing that we did was have Jay add character to the song - we talked about how Aladdin would talk (cocky, confident - raising the volume and being deliberate with the pronunciation), how Aladdin would move (exciting movements, engaging the audience in the fast paced scene), and then applied that to our vocals and movement. We started with side to side movements to get Jay used to moving while singing and got bigger and bigger every time.