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Surtitles should be routinely used for stage musicals as audiences are often unable to fully appreciate the lyrics, the leading songwriter Sir Tim Rice has said.
“It’s very frustrating at times, especially if you’re the words man,” said Rice, 80, whose hits with composer Andrew Lloyd Webber include Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar. The pair have reunited to write songs for a comedy play, Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Days of Christmas, to be staged at Birmingham Rep this winter.
Rice took encouragement from the growing popularity of TV subtitles for younger people, with one study finding that 80% of viewers aged 18 to 25 commonly have them switched on. “Maybe there’s a new generation coming up which would welcome surtitles in theatres,” he suggested.
The lyricist, who is in the elite club of “Egot” winners with Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards, said that he did not encounter the problem with solos, observing that “you’re always able to hear Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from Evita. He said that choral songs in particular can be hard to follow. “I found that was a major problem with us years ago when we did Chess [his musical with Abba’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus], which did not do as well as it should have done although it’s coming back to Broadway, believe it or not, this autumn. Time and time again, the lyrics couldn’t be heard when it was choral. If you’ve got great singers like Tommy Körberg or Elaine Paige [in the 1986 production of Chess] singing the songs solo, you do hear the words, but the choral stuff can often be quite important and you just don’t hear it.”
When Chess was put on at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2008, the opening comic number Merano was accompanied by its lyrics on screen. “And for the first time ever the song got laughs and a big cheer,” said Rice. “And I thought, well, there you are!”
Surtitles, creative captioning as part of the set design and the use of smart caption glasses are gradually becoming more common as accessibility improves in theatre. But musicals have still not caught up with opera, which regularly uses surtitles. Rice joked that theatre directors were reluctant to include them “because it means people might spend three seconds not looking at the brilliant direction”. He singled out Hamilton’s performers for their skill in clearly conveying Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrics.
Last year, the US star Patti LuPone – who played Evita in the musical’s original Broadway production – said that many lyrics go misheard due to a lack of technical training and overbearing sound mixes. “Young performers have no idea how to project,” added LuPone, who will perform a solo concert in London this month at the Coliseum.
Reviewing a production of Evita at the Dominion in London in 2014, the Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote: “Has anyone thought of using surtitles in musicals? I ask because the one flaw in this highly skilled revival … is the lack of attention to vocal detail. We lose many of the heavily amplified words, and that matters in a musical that rests on its ambivalent attitude towards its protagonist.”
Rice said that he and Lloyd Webber were “hired hands” on Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Days of Christmas, created by Humphrey Ker and David Reed from the comedy troupe The Penny Dreadfuls. The songwriter said they had provided “half a dozen little light moments” for the yuletide mystery (a play with songs rather than a full musical) which features Arthur Conan Doyle’s Baker Street sleuth investigating the deaths of West End actors.
Humorous lyrics were easier to write than serious or romantic ones, he said. “If it’s a funny song, you can use almost any word. Often just the fact that it rhymes with something else is the joke.” Rice quoted a couplet from another of his hits with Lloyd Webber, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: “All these things you saw in your pyjamas / Are a long-range forecast for your farmers.” At the time he thought that was just an efficient rhyme. “It’s actually very funny – I don’t think I realised!”
