West End Secrets: How Vocal Coaches Train Lead Performers in Musicals | Claire Underwood Returns!

How do West End lead singers handle vocal demands, perfectionism, and the pressure of 8 shows a week? 🎤 In this episode of This Is A Voice, we welcome back Claire Underwood, West End resident vocal coach, to uncover more behind-the-scenes realities of training musical theatre stars.

🔹 What you'll discover in this episode:
✔️ How lead performers balance storytelling with vocal technique
✔️ The role of a vocal coach in a West End production
✔️ How to manage conflicting notes from directors, MDs, and coaches
✔️ The secret to vocal safety & longevity in high-pressure performances
✔️ The myth of perfection and why it's sabotaging singers
✔️ Why audience energy plays a crucial role in live theatre

00:00 Helping actors understand music
03:39 Dealing with conflicting directions
05:13 Experienced versus young performers
06:58 The confidence to do what you do
09:56 Sore points, butter knives and velcro
11:21 Perfectionism and the Hamilton Pressure
17:13 The “Good Enough” envelope
20:10 Vocal safety & sustainable performance levels
23:06 Managing the mental pressure of being a lead
25:46 The comfort zone myth

Whether you're a musical theatre performer, vocal coach, or theatre lover, this episode is packed with insights on voice, performance psychology, and surviving the demands of professional theatre.

You can watch the first part of Claire's interview here 
👉 https://youtu.be/MLZoBdVq-dQ

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Transcript

0:12

This is A Voice. A podcast with Dr Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher. Hello and welcome to This Is The Voice Season 11 Episode 3. The podcast where we get vocal about voice. I'm Jeremy Fisher. And I'm Dr Gillyanne Kayes. And she's back! We had such a great time talking to Claire Underwood last time so we brought her back again. Hello! Claire. Hello. I want to pick up on what Claire said because the music does mesh everything together and the music is important. So I'm thinking as a musician, because you're highly trained as a musician, you grew up in a musical family. How do you help people interpret what's being said via the music? Ooh, nice question! Oh, it is because okay, I spend a lot of my time trying really hard not to accidentally step into somebody else's territory in the production, so I can talk about character and emotional expression. But I mustn't step on the director's toes. And I can talk about musicality, and what the music is telling us, and what is being coded in the music, but I mustn't step on the musical director's toes. Because ultimately, those jobs really do stand with them, and I am a facilitator, but the way things work often, they're not in the room with me. God, it's glorious when they are! It's great. Flipping love it, but a lot of the time I'm on my own having to make some suggestions in either of those directions because of the fact that, as we said earlier, we can't separate vocal production from the storytelling or the musicianship. So to try and answer your question I can make observations which I think are solid enough that I feel confident that they're irrefutable. Do you know what I mean? That we're not going to breathe in the middle of that phrase, and actually that's not the important note there, this is, and actually those two phrases are leading to this over here. I can make those observations but I tend not to get I try not to get too deeply into that because the last thing the performer needs is yet another cook. There's a lot of cooks in musical theatre and, as I say, I'm in service to them. I don't want to be another voice that, confuses their game plan. Yeah, it's a fun, it's a fun thing, but And I talk about musical coding a lot. I can see what the music is coding for. And so I think I can take those, I can make those assumptions. And then the deeper musical insights I leave to the MDs. Otherwise you're in a situation exactly said where, you feel you're saying something very different. I've been in that situation in drama schools. And you open your mouth too often. And it's the performer that suffers. Ultimately, that's what I'm trying to avoid because I, have them. all too frequently in the room saying, this person has said this person has said this. Now nobody on the team has wanted to confuse anybody. That's, not the goal. Nobody wakes up in the morning going, let's really mess with this performer. But unfortunately it happens because we all use the same, apparently the same language, the same syntax, but we use it to mean different things from person to person. So, So what. resident director has said clashes with what MD has said, or associate director has said, and actually it doesn't, it's just that we have to leave room for the fact that we're all using the same words differently. So I'm trying very hard to not, I mean I can't avoid it because of course I'm subject to those things as well I use language differently to how you use it. You do use it, or to hell, my MD uses it, whatever, I can't help that, but I try as much as I can to be, a facilitator rather than a dictator. I think it's really interesting because you're also acting as a translator sometimes for something that someone else has said, and you go, Oh, perhaps they said that, but I can see that it would mean this, and that has a different meaning. A lot of that. There's a lot of that. Because, fair enough, our directors don't speak vocal technique, and neither should they. That's, fine. That's for us to translate. But unfortunately the language can get a bit blurry. And yeah. Yeah. is an interesting one, performers tend, some performers tend to take what different people on the team say with the same weight, where even when that person is not talking in their area of expertise. And that's a tricky one. That's, that, that's why I think the translators. The translator role is really important. And learning to politely and gently filter. Yes. You engage the F U filter. Yes. I Absolutely. I did. Could you do that in more blah? Yeah. And I've had many conversations with performers where they're like I got six people telling me different things about this bit. And, I've spoken to really experienced lead role performers about this and how they handle it. And the answer is they take all the advice on board, they listen to it all, they try it all. That's crucial. They try the note. And ultimately, they decide what stays and what doesn't. What fits in their own space and what doesn't. And if the note comes back again, then it opens another conversation that says, OK, I tried it, but I really didn't feel like it worked, so can we work it a different way? Can we try and find what it is you're looking for within what it is I feel comfortable With? and that's fair enough. And I think when you have an experienced performer who's got that sense of their own worth, then of course they're able to do it. But with the, the younger ones, they're just desperate to take on every directive. Yes and there's that other thing about the energy that you walk in with. So if you are young and you've just come from a learning environment, you are cracked wide open in the fill me role. Fill me, I, you have knowledge, I am the recipient, fill me. And that's, you still need that bit of you working when you're a performer, but it, but there's now a filter. There's there's, got to be a sieve on the front of it, so yes, pour everything into me, but I'm going to filter that a little bit, and that takes a while to learn how to do that respectfully, and how to do that with a sense, a true sense of yourself in it, so that you're not just being reactive and, or defensive, and say, no, I won't do that, because actually it feels uncomfortable yeah. There's a level of realisation, I think, that goes into that. There's a level of self confidence where you go, Actually, I can do this, and I do know what I'm doing, and I do know what I'm talking about. And I have learnt to do these things. That's a self realisation thing. And actually, that can come at any point in your life. It could actually come in the first year of your drama College Where you go, No, I know what I want to do. I know who I am and I know what I want to do, and it could come five years into the profession. Where you go, okay finally, I'm not paying any attention to this thing. I'm gonna do what I do. I think, though, that Claire, what you said about coming from an education environment and being cracked wide open to the right, I'm still learning. I think that's so insightful of you, Claire, what you've just said about coming from a, an education environment and being open to everything because you, still want to learn and just being able to move from that into actually taking your own agency and using that filter that you've spoken about. I think that's true but I also think, I mean I think this is a life thing for all of us isn't but particularly in an artistic field that we go into it because there are no final answers. because there is endless exploration. We could sing the same musical from age 20 to age 80 and still find something different in it. And that's glorious, but it, means we do actually quite quickly need to learn to live with, I am open and learning and I have value as I am. And I think a lot of the time, those two things feel mutually exclusive. Either I know enough or I don't. But actually, you know enough and there's more to learn. That's, what you're, I think, saying, Jeremy, about your kind of realization of your, of yourself. It's yes, I've got, I can feel enough of myself in here that I can go on and do this, Why would I want to be in this creative industry if I didn't? feel like it was always constantly going to develop and up for me when you said that, because I get it, and yet, I think, in my head, I see it as two different things. So you've got a confidence in your own ability in some way or other. For instance, it takes bravery to walk on stage and do something at all. It takes bravery to walk on stage and do something in character, and it takes a completely different level of bravery to do that and sing. There's a level of bravery that goes on, and when you do it and when you're comfortable with yourself, that's innate. It's yeah, that's fine, that's my job, I can do that. I think there's an interesting The thing between the type of new information, if it's new information that you go, oh, that's really interesting, I could try it like that. That to me is a piece of information that doesn't affect you personally. It's a new idea to try out. Occasionally, you get something thrown at you that affects you personally. And that's, I think, where the Potentially dangerous stuff is, because if it's, if that piece of information is big enough, deep enough, sharp enough, pointed enough, that it gets into your core, that can really shake your confidence. And then it's a question of how you deal with that. yes I think that's fair and I also think that the shape of the piece of information or the piece of information's blade is sharpened by where you started from inside you if you've got a sore spot about your performing or about your voice, that piece of information could actually have started off as a butter knife, but now is, a full on carving knife. Totally. Whereas given to the person next to you who doesn't have the same sensitivity about that quality in their voice, it stayed a butter knife. And I think it's time to put that metaphor down now. I think I've, hacked it about enough. Ha that I like it a lot. ha. talk about Velcro, we talk about having a piece of Velcro inside which is a fault that you believe you have. And then somebody throwing a stickleball at you and it hits the piece of Velcro and sticks or it just falls off That's brilliant. better. If you have that velcro. I like it a lot. Yes. No, I like the butter knife. I'm, sticking with the butter knife. No, Lord. Let's see what happens when that comes out. I was just thinking about you, what you're talking about the evolving process, imagine you were went into a musical age 24 and you did many performances of that musical throughout your, life. Do you think, It is too easy for performers to confuse that evolving process because you're going to evolve a role through a run for starters. They're confusing that with imperfection versus perfection. And wondered how much you come across this idea that, this could be an unformed idea that I'm I think I know. Yeah. I certainly rub up again. It's not quite answering your question, Gillyanne but, over and over and over and over again, perfectionism is an issue. And I think it's fuelled by living in the recorded age because we have so many versions of perfection to listen to and measure ourselves up against without ever articulating that's how it was one day, one moment, in one studio. and that it was then tweaked to within an inch of its life afterwards anyway, so you know, that's a whole other thing, but nonetheless there's a lot of measuring ourselves against it. Do I think it plays a part in role? Sorry, can you, go Gillyanne, go again. I was thinking about a role, and,, someone's preparing a new role, new to themselves and the sense of it's got to be perfect before you go on stage because where I wanted to go is this idea of evolving. Let's just talk about how a performance evolves across a run. And that's actually okay, and with perfectionism being something that can actually really sabotage us. Yes the perfection, achieving perfection before you go on I think sometimes that comes into play, but a lot of the time we're accepting that's why we have previews and that's, built in, you've got a little bit of soft space there to be able to build a product that is, Fine enough, and fine in terms of, fine jewels. And then to be able to build from there. I think most performers assume that it is going to build. There is an enormous pressure, however, especially with these big flagship shows, that match what the audience has heard or seen, much of the audience of Hamilton has watched it on Disney, and they know the soundtrack back to front and upside down. My nine year old knows it by heart because he listens to it every night, so it's, really relaxing when I get home. But He's not the only one. There are a lot of people out there who know that soundtrack back to front and upside down. So the there is a built in pressure to the performers. that they have to at least meet that. And what that ignores is, and I'm going to go back into my woo self now, what that ignores is the energy that takes place in the auditorium, the energy that live brings. You may or may not sing, What did I miss? As brilliantly as it was done on the original recording. You may or may not, it'll be different anyway because you're not him, but actually what's happening in the auditorium is, people and energies are mixing and something else happens and I think it's really important for performers to remember that when they are dealing with issues around perfectionism. So you're like, you are actually, you're, we've been talking about this as well at Secret Sing, no performance that you practice in your bedroom is complete, or can be anywhere near complete, until it has an audience, because it requires their input, it requires their interpretation of it in their own minds, coming from where they were you know, they may have had a good or a bad day, they may have arrived in the theatre feeling flustered or feeling totally ready and full of joy. There's, you have no control over those things but you need those things to exist for your performance to fly and for it to touch one person or another person. So to come back to your point about perfectionism and, building in a role there's an enormous amount of pressure on performers to achieve the same product every night. And yet, it cannot be. And that's what I always try and remind them. It simply cannot be. It's that old thing about you can't put your foot in the same bit of river twice. Because we have totally different energies in the theatre at this point. And so it can't be the same as it was last night. And there's a release in that. Yes, we are always striving for an elite performance. And in that regard, we They can be equated to Olympic athletes or, any high flying, Yes. pursuit. But it is just that, it is a pursuit. We can't find perfection every night. Yes. My name is Jeremy and I'm a recovering perfectionist. Jeremy, I'm proud of Thank you. I have a sentence that I think is relevant, which I learned and talk to myself all the time, which is best I can do today. Yep. And what's so nice about that is best I can do with the knowledge I have today in the situation that I'm in today. And I think the situation thing is really useful because exactly what you're talking about, anything that you do in theatre, must include audience energy. Because what's the point of you being on stage if you then block the audience entirely? Please just go back to your bedroom. It's not, that's not the point of theatre. It's not the point of performing. So the audience brings an energy and you cannot plan for it. You can't. You can maneuver it to a certain extent because I've done it, but you can't actually make them change their energy by force. It doesn't happen. No. So it's really interesting that you must include that in the equation as to whether you're doing a good show or not. It might actually be nothing to do with you at all. And how you feel about it at the end. And by the way, the number of audiences that Performed for that you go, wow, this is a tough audience getting nothing from them at all. And you get the standing ovation at the end and screaming and cheering and you go, hang on, where did that come from? Because you haven't displayed any of that all the way through the show. You've been no help at all. yeah, Extraordinary, isn't it? Mm hmm, couple of things I want to talk about. First of all, I think we should talk about safety, because this has come up in what you've been telling us all the way through, so it'd be good to talk about that. But just thinking about helping a performer find what I'm going to call the envelope of good enough. So if you have that envelope of good enough, which, sometimes it can be a bit bigger, a bit smaller, but that's something that you're able to help them build so that when they do go on stage and things, maybe, maybe they didn't get that wretched top note the way they wanted to, or the audience didn't give them the massive applause at the end of that number that they got the other night. How do you help them find that good enough? It's a fantastic question. And I don't know if I have a ready answer. Except to say that I think that's where the car mechanic bit comes in. I always talk about technique being like a Zimmer frame. that's there for you when the magic isn't when, you feel low, when the audience isn't giving you back quite what you thought they were going to, when you've got an understudy in front of you who you're more worried about them than you any of those situations that's when your technique comes, bubbling to the front of your subconscious, at the front of your conscious, from your subconscious Because if you've worked, if we've worked that in our sessions and we know what, points we're trying to hit, what flavors we're trying to hit along the way, you have to rely on the fact that, as Jeremy said earlier, you were cast. So there is an essence of you that is right and you have delivered that on a nuts and bolts level you have delivered what you needed to deliver. The other thing that I really remind them of a lot is it doesn't matter if you are the principal role. It doesn't matter if, if you're Valjean and you're on most of the show. Yes, you carry a huge amount of the show, but the show isn't you. It's not you by yourself. So if you're having a night where all you can think of is, okay, I'm just going to mix through this, I'm going to belt that, you've left your emotional self behind somewhere. Actually rely on the fact that the rest of the cast aren't all in that same place. We're, very rarely all in that place all at once and that the story is still being carried. It's also still being carried by the nuts and bolts that you put in place in rehearsal and that's the point of the rehearsal is to, create something that to create the bare bones of something that tells the story. That's the director's job is to make sure that's in place. So to your question about the envelope of good enough, which I really love you have to rely on the fact that all those other nuts and bolts were in the right place at the right time, and maybe you didn't feel it tonight, and maybe Mm. didn't shine as much as you know it can do, but in the context of the whole, that's enough. I think that's so important. So Gillyanne mentioned safety. Can you talk to us about safety? What does that mean to you? Safety means to me the thing that keeps me up at night. Safety is vocal production within a comfortable limit of your ability. Safety is essentially your 70 or 80 percent performance. It's not your one off recording performance. It's not your one off cabaret performance. It's your eight shows a week. performance. And and finding that limit, that, that can be one of the most challenging things we work on in a one to one session, is I know you can give this, and I know that to you, especially for the actors, actually who, have the actor minds it, is anathema to them, the idea of pulling back on that storytelling. their perception that they're pulling back, but of course they're ignoring that their base level of storytelling is stellar and that we could just listen to them read, the telephone book and get a story out of it. They're forgetting that but helping them learn to live with a performance that doesn't feel like they're 150 percent, which is so exciting and they want to deliver And just saying you could, you can maybe have one of those in a week. I'll give you one. But if you try and give me eight of those, then we'll be talking on a Zoom by Thursday and, you'll be croaking and you'll be off and you don't want that. Finding the safety means finding the safe limits within which we can tell the story to the best of our ability. And that changes from performer to performer, and there's a lot of shame around it. There's a lot of, feelings of obligation For all performers, but I find it is magnified in our cabaret performers because, they're only there for a short time. They don't want to miss a single show. They're aware that people might have come specifically because they're there and they really don't want to take the time, but we have to both build a performance which means that they won't need to take the time, but if that can't happen because people get sick and bugs go around the building, and because ultimately this is a fragile, beautiful, living piece of tissue, it can't always be bulletproof then we have to be able to say it's not safe for you to go on tonight, I need you to take a rest. and that rest is going to be as long as it until it is safe again. That's a really hard conversation. And do you take that decision with the performer or do you sometimes get external help for that, for instance from a laryngologist or, a physio? Yeah. Absolutely. It's a, it's teamwork. Ultimately, it's the performer's decision. It's their body. It's their career. It's their decision. We are there to advise and in our experience to say, look, when I've seen this before, I'm This is how long it takes. I advise that you take this time. But it is just advice and they have to decide and if they decide to go on then it is my job to try and support them as best I can and for us to Yes, muster together a plan B performance yeah, make adjustments. Yeah, cope with that night. I just want to go into something because that's such a clear answer. It's also very nuanced answer as well. And you're absolutely right that changes per performer, because safety limits are really interesting per person. What I think is fascinating is that there's an also an underlying thing, and you've highlighted this and I love this. It's the idea that. You've got people in the audience coming to see you specifically, they've paid a lot of money to come and see you, there's a sort of expectation, there's a responsibility. And it's almost like this, it feels like this one thing that the performer is missing, and it's, I'm going back to casting again. Which is, they, you just walking onto the stage has given them what they want. That's it. Literally, you could walk onto the stage, open your mouth, say nothing, and walk off again. And there is an element of, I've just seen that person. Rather than going, I need to give my absolute best every night. Which, my absolute best is 100%, and I, like you said, I would be on the floor by Thursday. There's also a longevity thing, which is, I need to give what I can, that works, and that makes me feel satisfied, over the whole run. And so there's a time thing as well. Which is, yes, you can give 100 percent if you want to on the first night. And what about the second, and the third, and 90th? It's there's a time limit, but there's also a belief that you are good enough doing what you mm, You don't actually need to do any more. yeah. It's, so hard for, I I agree with you, but it's so hard for them to live with, and I think we can probably relate to that as teachers, the days where you show up and you, all your senses are on, all your sixth sense is fully firing and you know that you can see properly and, that you can use your tools to help that student. It's so exhilarating and it's so rewarding, so wonderful that it's very easy to then think on the days where, you didn't get full night's sleep and the week's been really tough and you're not, that sixth sense is like somebody's cut off I've lost my touch I've lost my touch. I'm no good. I'm no good, I have nothing to offer this student because he's not there today. They have that multiplied a million times on stage. And as I say, just helping them find what you were describing, the good enough envelope, but that feels satisfying to them as well, is really, that's a challenge. But it's one that I engage in very, readily because it's a really important one and I always say to them, you don't owe this audience your voice, you don't owe them your vocal safety and this is one piece in what I hope will be a long and beautiful career. So yes, we have an obligation to this production and we're going to do the very best we can to get you on as many times as we possibly can but, we don't owe anybody the function of your voice, that's too precious. And on that note, I want to thank you for having talked about singing within your vocal comfort zone. Because in a performance art, such as musical theatre, there's often this sense, this need that being in your comfort zone is not good enough. You're, you need to stretch beyond. And of course, when you're being educated, yes you will stretch. As my PhD was all about looking at comfort zone. And I think it's such a powerful thing that you've said, being in your position, which is you've got to find your comfort zone so that you can be safe. And that then comes back to working with the actor minds who maybe don't have as much singing training, that actually then there's a bigger responsibility for me to decide what is their safe zone, because everything feels like an out of comfort zone to them. So me Yeah, them to stay within their vocal comfort zone, they're like I don't, yet know what that they don't know it. I understand. Yeah. Very interesting. This is not a question so much as a possible statement. the idea that singing voice, because it's more extended in both pitch and duration shows things up more. So I'm going to go, can you get away with vocal problems as an actor that you can't get away with as a singer? Ooh, wow. okay, fair. We'll just have to have you back. Just say what, occurs to What occurs to me is that I think that might be true, but I feel like I might have just opened myself up to a lot of spoken voice practitioners going, No! In which case, I'm really sorry. Wow that's, a humdinger of a question. Certainly it is the case that the sustained quality means that we have to be very careful about how we work around a voice that is struggling. Yes, because we sustain pitch. Great answer. Yep. It's as simple as that Shall I apply a position as an MP now? Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Great answer. Oh. Don't we have to have something controversial on here? sure. Absolutely. Claire, this has been amazing. I'm so pleased that I'm thrilled that you are our first guest on this I'm delighted and honoured. Thank you both. And thank you for the work that you do in talking about all these things. It is so important and such a comfort as a vocal practitioner to have conversations happening because otherwise you just feel like you're in an echo chamber of your own making. Thank you. So we will actually hopefully see you again because we're going to have you back on. Oh, we've got a bit more to talk about. I think we've got a few more things we can maybe just discuss. But that's it for the moment. Thank you so much, Claire. Thank you. This is a voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.