Still Here? Aging Female Vocalities in Musical Theatre.

What is it about?

Musical theatre has a complex relationship with aging (and especially female aging). As youth has always been at the forefront of musicals, essentialist approaches to aging in articulation and enactment of aging musical characters often lead to aesthetic peripheries and creative stagnation. Aiming for a deeper understanding of how female aging vocalities are perceived, dramaturged and performed in musical theatre, the article discusses perceptions and dramaturgical representations in musicals and takes under consideration viewpoints from aging female performers who work at the centre of the musical theatre industry (Broadway and The West End). Situated at the intersection of interdisciplinary voice studies and musical theatre studies while also drawing from age studies and music studies, it examines, under the lens of intersectional feminism, two aging female characters: Madame Armfeldt in the musical A Little Night Music and Grandma in Billy Elliot the Musical. This study stems from a four-year doctoral project which has proposed the conceptual framework of the aging female voice as pharmakon in musicals, in order to further understand how the aging voice oscillates between progressive and regressive elements embodied and envoiced within each of the roles examined.

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