When are accents used in musical theater? The most immediate answer is "when a character is from a different country than the others." Indeed, from King George and Lafayette (Hamilton) to Carlotta (The Phantom of the Opera), this is a common tactic. The foreignness of certain characters often results in certain accents being used -- especially when that foreignness is significant to building the world in which the musical is set (looking at you, Book of Mormon and Cabaret). In such musicals, it is not unusual for the majority of the cast to put on an accent.
Accents don't just depict foreignness. While Place of Origin is probably most people's immediate thought when they consider an accent -- "where are you from?" -- our ways of speaking encode so much more information than that. People make all sorts of assumptions about others just by how they talk:
"Are they upper- or lower-class?"
"Were they well-educated?"
"Are they black, Hispanic, etc.?"
"How old are they?"
The way you talk tells people a lot about you. (Now, the assumptions they make are not always accurate, but there's enough perceived accuracy to them that people keep making them.) In fact, there's a whole subfield of linguistics (the scientific study of language) that's devoted to analyzing these assumptions and determining how they are made: Sociolinguistics.
So it stands to reason that in theater, we use accents and other linguistic markers to denote certain characteristics about a person. Let's look at My Fair Lady (an article on theatrical language would not be complete without mentioning this musical, so let's get it out of the way). The entire point of My Fair Lady is the class distinction we associate with certain accents. In this musical, a linguist trains a young woman who natively speaks Cockney (London's lower-class dialect) to speak the upper-class Received Pronunciation (RP) accent. The crux of the show is that people discriminate against each other based on how they talk, and that one could theoretically game the system with enough linguistic knowledge. Of course, a musical need not be about sociolinguistic classes to employ them: Newsies is an example of one that uses accents to distinguish between the ultra-rich Pulitzer and his dirt-poor newsboys. Pulitzer typically uses a General American (GA) accent, if not with a posh flair, while the newsboys use (often exaggerated) New York accents. And this is where this accent talk gets interesting: it's common in theater to see characters of lower esteem utilizing regional American or British accents (depending on the origin or setting of the musical), while the characters of higher status use RP, General American, or Mid-Atlantic (that "old timey Hollywood" style of speech) accents.
So accents in theater are used to denote a character's place of origin or their social status. What's new?
The usage of accents in musical theater I first mentioned may be used regardless of the musical’s setting; all that matters is that the characters with accents are not from the same place of origin as the protagonist. The second usage tends to occur in musicals without foreign characters.
What about when the characters are all foreign to us, the audience, but not to each other?
When a musical is set in a non-anglophone country, such as France or Argentina, and all the characters hail from that country, what characteristics become the most likely to be represented through accents?
When such musicals feature accent usage, are the accents reflective of the characters' national origin? Or are English accents bearing certain associations more likely to be used?
For example, will RP as a prestige accent or Cockney as a lower-class signifier be more likely to occur than, say, a French accent when all the characters are French?
I pursued these questions as a term paper for my graduate sociolinguistics course. It turns out, very little linguistic work has been done on musical theater in general, much less on the accents used in musicals. Indeed, I found exactly one study on this topic: Sarmi's comparison (20160 of the highlighted features of Cockney and RP in My Fair Lady. While the language of musical theater is an abyss of linguistic work, the use of native and nonnative accents in other media, especially film, and people's perceptions of regional and nonnative accents have both been studied much more extensively.
Rosina Lippi-Green published a book called English with an Accent in 1997, in which she included an analysis of accents in animated films. She found that less than 10% of characters in the Disney movies of the 20th century spoke English with a nonnative accent. Compared to the native-English-speaking characters, twice as many of these characters were depicted as bad (e.g. villains, henchmen, or nuisances).
Dobrow and Gidney (1998) studied accent use in children's animated television. They found that regional accents and foreign accents tended to be used for villains and for comedic purposes.
J. Sønnesyn (2011) analyzed accents in Disney movies after 1995. She found that, while General American was the preferred accent of these films, male characters showed more variation than female characters in which accents they used. Furthermore, "peripheral" characters were more likely to have regional or foreign accents than main characters. Standard or "posh" accents, like RP, would be used for sophisticated characters, while regional and foreign accents tended to be used for unsophisticated characters.
Pao (2004) wrote an article about the use of accents both on stage and in film. She discussed how studios prefer to hire dialecticians over voice actors with authentic accents when casting characters with Asian accents. Often, producers are not interested in the authenticity of accents; rather, they want accents that remind the audience of a specific region, language, or people, while maintaining the ease of intelligibility that comes with a lightly added accent. Pao does bring up musical theater when discussing examples of how this can be poorly received (specifically, the controversies that Miss Saigon faced, especially when first transitioning from London to Broadway).
A Backstage article (Haagensen, 2002) featured musical writers who write both the lyrics and the books for their shows. The article included interviews with several lyricists, including Tim Rice (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar) and Lynn Ahrens (Once on this Island, Ragtime), who described their motivations in writing. Rice compared his work to the musicals in the Golden Age of Broadway – to lyricists like Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter. Such lyricists, Rice commented, wrote with a certain sophistication of style that appeared throughout their work. This allowed the songs to survive well beyond the musicals for which they were written. However, Rice said that he preferred to write in ways that his characters would believably speak.
Roessel, Schoel, and Stahlberg (2018) wrote one of numerous articles on native speakers’ perceptions of nonnative accents. They found that native speakers tend to have spontaneous negative reactions to hearing nonnative accents. Fuertes (2002) discussed a similar issue, noting that people use accents to make early judgements of others.
HYPOTHESES
Golden Age (here referring to pre-1968 -- pre-Hair) musicals, like films of the era, tended to use Mid-Atlantic accents. Thus, it is expected that musicals from this time period will not generally have characters use foreign accents, regardless of setting or social status.
Between the shift to contemporary singing and speaking and the motivation of modern lyricists and librettists to write realistic speech for their characters, I predict that, not only will native accents be more common than Mid-Atlantic accents after 1968, but foreign accents will become much more common.
Furthermore, I expect antagonists and tertiary characters to use regional and foreign accents more often than other types of characters will. There are two reasons for this: as discussed above, foreign accents can trigger spontaneous negative reactions from native speakers, so this may be used to establish villainous or antagonistic characters. Accents are often used to provide the sense of a certain region, regardless of authenticity, so minor character roles will use accents more in order to reinforce the setting without getting in the way of the audience’s ability to understand the plot.
METHODOLOGY
Designing the Study
While film has an unambiguous definitiveness – the version of a film that was released to the public is the version that the writers and directors decided is the best version of the film – this is not the case in theater. Theater is constantly changing: actors are constantly joining and leaving the casts, directors and conductors may come and go, and musicals may be entirely revived or even rewritten to some extent (consider Patti LuPone’s recounting of the tumultuous 1975 production of The Baker’s Wife, where the content of the matinee performance was not guaranteed to match that of the evening performance). All of these may factor into the decision to use an accent for any particular character.
In an effort to create a standard for definitiveness, this article only takes into account musicals that have run on Broadway or the West End. Most lyrical changes occur prior to a musical reaching this stage (though there is precedence for altering lyrics well into or after a show’s initial run on Broadway, such as In the Heights omitting a reference to Donald Trump after the commencement of his 2015 presidential campaign). Despite the changing nature of theater, there are two forms of a musical that do not change: the official cast recording and the published libretto (a libretto is a complete script of a musical, including all dialogue, songs, and descriptions of setting and staging). These are held as the standard for any musical in this article, partially because they have not been modified, and partially because these are the versions of the music and script that have been released globally, as happens when a film is released theatrically. All data in this article is taken from either the original cast recordings or the libretti, where applicable.
Many musicals have been performed both on Broadway and the West End. In such cases, the production that came first is the only one observed in this article. For example, The Phantom of the Opera premiered in the West End in 1986, followed by a Broadway production in 1988. Only the Original London Cast Recording (OLCR) is relevant for this study. The reasoning behind this is that, as Patti LuPone discusses throughout her book, musicals transferred from one side of the Atlantic to the other generally do so after the initial production was successful. Producers may try to replicate that success by creating carbon-copies of the original show (LuPone cites the Original Broadway productions of Evita and Les Misérables as facing pressure from producers and directors to directly imitate the Original London productions). In such cases, it is not possible to say that an accent choice was meant to reflect any characteristic instead of simply copying the other production.
Eight musicals that fit the above descriptions were analyzed for this article. Five of them originally appeared on Broadway, and the other three first debuted in the West End. The American shows are as follows:
Aida (2000), set in Ancient Egypt
Kismet (1953), set in Ancient Bagdad
Once on this Island (1990), set on an unnamed island in the French Antilles sometime after the French conquered the island
She Loves Me (1963), set in Hungary during the 20th century
Spring Awakening (2007), set in Germany circa 1905
The British musicals in this article are:
Evita (1978), set in Argentina during the mid-20th century
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992), set in Argentina in some unspecified time
The Phantom of the Opera (1986), set in France in the 1870s
Two minor characters in The Phantom of the Opera are Italian, rather than French; they have been omitted from this data.
Labelling the Data
All accents were given one of six labels: RP, GA, Mid-Atlantic, Regional American, Regional British, and Foreign. Cases where an actor did not put on any sort of accent received the label Native. Faked accents in musicals are generally easy to notice. The styles of singing tend to level variation in speech, so actors counter this by exaggerating the accents (see Peron in Evita’s performance at the 1979 Tony Awards for an example of this). However, prestige or standard accents – GA, RP, and Mid-Atlantic – are often used not for character-defining purposes, but for uniformity, propriety, and inconspicuousness. These accents are usually less noticeably fake, which can make identification of them difficult. For such cases, the actors’ native accents were identified through researching the actors’ place of origin, and, when necessary, finding videos of the actors speaking unscripted.
All characters were labeled as one of the following four character roles: protagonist, antagonist, secondary, and tertiary. This was done through reading the libretto if it was available or summaries of the plot if the libretto was not available.
‘Protagonist’ was assigned to the characters around whom the central plot pivots. Generally, there is one protagonist per musical, though there were a few shows with two.
Antagonists were characters who directly opposed the protagonist in some way (note: they are not defined by villainous traits).
The category of ‘secondary characters’ was defined as characters who are present for much of the story, but who are not ultimately a protagonist or an antagonist. Secondary characters often have some sort of character arc throughout the story. Examples of such characters include sidekicks and love interests.
Tertiary characters are characters with much smaller roles. They are often barely present and provide little to the plot. Tertiary characters are one-dimensional characters.
Any character who was not the protagonist was also assigned one of the following three character roles if applicable: love interest, narrator, and authority. These roles are not defined by character size but rather how the character acts in the story.
‘Love interest’ was assigned to characters pursued by a protagonist for a romantic or sexual relationship (not the other way around; the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera was not assigned this role because he, the antagonist, has a one-sided infatuation with the protagonist).
‘Authority’ was assigned to any character who held authority over other characters, such as a parent, a boss, or a political figure. In most situations, a character who held authority over one character had authority over all or nearly all the characters, so the specific relationship to the protagonist was seen as less significant.
‘Narrator’ was assigned to any character who habitually spoke directly to the audience to provide exposition. Some of these may overlap (e.g., several characters in Once on this Island were labeled as both narrator and authority because the entire show is a story told by the gods).
Finally, the characters were labeled as either male or female. Because cross-gender roles are not unusual in musical theater (e.g., women are traditionally cast as the titular role in Peter Pan, while men are typically cast as the protagonist’s mother in Hairspray) and at least one character in the musicals being observed is implied to identify as the opposite gender, it is necessary to specify that all reference to gender in this paper will be to whether the role is typically given to male actors or female actors, not to the identity of the character. The question here is therefore whether male actors are more or less likely than female actors to put on an accent for their performances. Whether the characters themselves are male or female is not being considered because actors may put on accents when playing a character of the opposite gender, and this would add a new variable that was not intended.
The data for this study was collected by listening to each musical in full and identifying the accents of all characters with sung or spoken lines on the Original Broadway Cast Recording (OBCR) or OLCR. All accent identification was done through auditory analysis alone. For characters with accents that were harder to define, their parts were listened to several times. Because the only method of listening to the characters was through the cast recordings, many characters were not able to be identified. This is because most of the musicals in question are ‘book musicals,’ a term that refers to musicals that have both spoken and sung dialogue. Generally, such musicals do not include spoken dialogue on cast recordings, except for the occasional lines that interrupt a song. In many book musicals, tertiary characters do not have any singing lines at all, except for in ensemble numbers.
RESULTS
There were 86 total characters from the eight musicals. 53 of them were male roles, and 33 were female roles. Figure 1, below, shows the overall distribution of accents among the characters. There was a preference for actors not putting on any sort of accent (‘native’), and there were almost exactly as many characters with foreign accents as there were characters with prestige accents. All foreign accents were accents that are used by speakers of the language the characters are assumed to speak (e.g., French accents in musicals set in France or Spanish accents in musicals set in Argentina). In general, the use of regional English accents in these musicals was a very unpopular choice: only one of the 86 characters had a nonnative regional American accent, and none of them had a regional British accent. However, over a quarter of all characters did not have any lines on the cast recordings and so were unidentifiable.
Nearly half of all protagonists did not have an accent, as shown in Figure 2. Of those who did have an accent, the vast majority of them were prestige or standard accents. Indeed, only one protagonist used a foreign accent, and none used regional English accents.
This was not the case with antagonists. Only a quarter of antagonists had the actors’ native accents. Standard accents were less common. Indeed, there were as many Mid-Atlantic accents as there were foreign accents. The only usage of a regional accent was by an antagonist: Zoser from Aida uses a Southern American accent. However, over a third of the antagonists did not have any sung lines.
The only instance of a majority of characters preferring one accent type occurs in the Secondary Characters category. Over half of the characters had the actors’ native accents. Of the characters who did not have a native accent, most used foreign accents.
Well over a third of the tertiary characters did not have any sung lines. Another third had the actors’ native accents. Finally, prestige or standard accents were preferred over foreign accents among the characters who put on accents.
Exactly half of all love interests did not have accents (Fig. 3). Another third of them used the Mid-Atlantic accent, with the one remaining character having a foreign accent.
Two thirds of the narrators used foreign accents. The rest did not use any accent. This was the only category in which foreign accents dominated.
The largest category of characters to have no lines on the cast recordings were the authority figures. Over two-thirds of these characters were not able to be identified. Of the remaining characters, there was a clear preference for foreign accents.
Two thirds of all characters played by male actors either had no lines or used no accent (Fig. 4). Among the rest, twice as many characters used a prestige accent than a foreign accent. Half of the female actors used their native accents in their performances. There were as many female characters who used foreign accents as there were female characters who used prestige accents or who had no singing lines.
As displayed in Figure 5, musicals set in Latin America were far more likely to have characters use foreign accents than musicals set in any other region. Musicals set in Europe had a clear preference for native accents, though a large portion of the characters did not have lines on the cast recordings. The results for the musicals set in Asia and Africa are not as telling, as there was only one musical for each. The musicals set east of the Atlantic had a similar percentage of characters without lines, regardless of the continent. Meanwhile, Latin American-based musicals had very few of these characters. This is not so much a linguistic trend as it is a trend of how Latin American musicals seem to be written, with smaller casts and larger roles.
The musicals set prior to Broadway’s rock revolution had no characters with foreign accents, while 20% of the characters in the more modern group of musicals had foreign accents. The opposite trend is true for the use of the Mid-Atlantic accent. It was by far the most popular style of speaking in the older musicals, but was almost non-existent in the modern ones (indeed, only one character in a post-1968 musical used this accent).
PROBLEMS
Despite the inclusion of nearly 100 characters in this analysis, only eight musicals were studied. This is not a large enough sample size to negate stylistic variation between shows. For example, the largest accent category for antagonists was “no singing lines.” It is not, in fact, common for antagonists to have no singing lines. Antagonist roles are usually some of the largest roles in musicals. However, Spring Awakening integrates music into the plot in a unique way. The teenage characters, who are the primary focus of the show, are the only characters with sung lines. The adults, multiple of whom are antagonists, do not sing and therefore do not appear on the cast recordings. Likewise, it seems that Latin American musicals are far more likely to have characters use foreign accents. While all three musicals set in Latin America had at least one character with a foreign accent (which cannot be said for the three European musicals), every character in Once on this Island used a Creole accent.
Furthermore, it cannot be determined by cast recording alone whether tertiary characters use foreign accents more frequently than other characters, as so many of them do not have signing lines. Ultimately, to do a proper analysis of accents in musical theater, more shows are necessary, and the data has to be collected from the shows themselves, not just the cast recordings.
REFERENCES
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Evita Original London Cast Recording. (1978).
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Sarmi, N. N. (2016). Cockney and received pronunciation accents as significant social class determiners in my fair lady movie. https://doi.org/10.25139/dinamika.v4i2.1599
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Sønnesyn, J. (2011). The use of accents in Disney’s animated feature films 1995-2009: a sociolinguistic study of the good, the bad and the foreign. University of Bergen. http://bora.uib.no/bitstream/handle/1956/5356/82634254.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowe.
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