Theatrical Singers: An Exploratory Psychological Study of Opera and Musical Theatre Performers

Opera and musical theatre are both complex artistic forms that feature similar components of narrative, performance, music, and movement. Despite these similarities, opera and musical theatre are often considered distinct in pedagogical, technical, and marketing perspectives. In psychological research on the arts and aesthetics, both opera and musical theatre performance are not only under studied, but have not been well theorized, either as distinct or linked art forms. Therefore, this paper presents an exploratory qualitative study of semi-structured interviews with six professional musical theatre and six professional opera performers with the aim of exploring the psychological outcomes different kinds of theatrical singers’ experience. Performers were asked how they approach and describe their craft and how they view the priority of different technical and psychological elements of their craft. Through a thematic analysis, two main themes emerged: Acting Habits of Mind (AHoM), and Artistic Boundaries between performer and character. While the extant AHoM Framework consists of eight different skills associated with learning to perform in straight (i.e., non-musical) theatre, both types of performers discussed using seven of the eight original AHoM, plus an additional emergent theme of “openness to continued learning” in their rehearsal and performance practices. Next, all performers discussed the importance of drawing on their own experiences while still holding emotional distance from characters they portray. The psychology underlying how musical theater and opera performers rehearse and perform may be more alike than different. Future research may thus consider these two contexts as psychologically similar, despite technical and genre-specific differences.