“Be aware when things are out of balance.” — Tao Te Ching
The first and most persistent mantra in my work is this: it is not one or the other.
Not singing or acting. Not technique or impulse. Not musical precision or emotional truth. A singing actor must live in the liminal space where disciplines converge, overlap, and sometimes collide.
This is, in many ways, the central paradox of musical theatre performance. Singing and acting, though interdependent in our field, arise from fundamentally different physiological and psychological processes. Acting demands moment-to-moment responsiveness, imaginative immersion, and psychological flexibility. Singing requires structure, regulation, breath management, resonance, and muscular consistency. One is inherently variable; the other depends on repetition and reliability.
Thus, the singing actor faces a unique problem of integration — what contemporary performance theorists might call embodied synthesis. The art lies not in merely pairing two skill sets, but in creating a third mode of expression in which neither discipline is diminished, and both are transformed.
The Persistent Bias in Training
Historically, the pedagogical split between music and theatre has been reinforced institutionally. Music departments prioritize technical vocal development, laryngeal function, and stylistic accuracy. Theatre departments emphasize psychological realism, impulse-driven behavior, and text analysis. Even now — nearly a century after the emergence of the integrated book musical — these disciplinary prejudices remain remarkably entrenched.
The result? Many young artists internalize a false binary:
- ”I’m really more of a singer.”
- “I’m more actor than vocalist.”
This self-labeling becomes an artistic limitation. When one facet is privileged over the other, the expressive instrument becomes lopsided. One cannot access the full narrative and emotional architecture of the musical theatre without acknowledging the equal weight of both.
Musical Theatre as a Distinct Expressive Form
It is worth stating unequivocally: musical theatre is not a subset of acting nor an embellished version of singing. It is a separate discipline — an intermedial art form — requiring its own epistemology, vocabulary, and technical approach. Just as opera singers inhabit a musical-dramatic world with its own aesthetic logic, and just as film actors navigate the psychological intimacy of the camera, so must singing actors develop a mode of expression that is native to the musical stage.
To claim your identity as a singing actor is to accept that your instrument must operate with simultaneous artistic and cognitive duality. You must be capable of executing refined musical choices with consistency while remaining psychologically open, reactive, and present within the fictional circumstances.
The Balance as Practice, Not Resolution
Integration is not a destination but a continuous practice. In rehearsal, you will often find yourself out of balance: leaning too heavily toward vocal security or collapsing into emotional indulgence at the expense of musical integrity. The work, then, is diagnostic. The singing actor’s perpetual task is to recalibrate — to sense when the scales tip too far and to bring the system back into equilibrium.
This is the essence of the craft:
- Holding form and freedom in equal tension.
- Honoring structure while pursuing spontaneity.
- Keeping your technique alive without letting it calcify.
- Letting your emotional life breathe without allowing it to distort the musical line.
Claiming the Identity
So when you catch yourself insisting, even defensively, “I’m really more of…” — pause.
That mindset is not only artistically unhelpful but fundamentally inaccurate. You are neither half of a hybrid nor a divided talent. You are a singing actor, a practitioner of a discipline that requires integration, not hierarchy.
The moment you relinquish the binary, your craft expands. You step into a fuller artistic identity — one capable of nuance, complexity, and the kind of expressive depth that makes musical theatre uniquely transcendent.