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Nick Drivas

Timothy Ellis

Estill

October 26, 2017

Of Thee I Sing

The musical, Of Thee I Sing, was recently performed on the Main Stage at TheatreUCF

as the musical for the Fall semester season. The role of Matthew Fulton was played by senior,

Kyle Laing. Matthew Fulton is the New York Newspaper king who steer heads the entire

direction of the campaign for John P. Wintergreen for president. As the chairman for the

committee of advisors for Wintergreen, Matthew Fulton as what director, Mark Brotherton,

refers as: the backbone of the entire show. Kyle Laing (along with the equally impressive

Katie Whittemore) was awarded an Irene Ryan KCACTF nomination for his performance as

Matthew Fulton in Of Thee I Sing.

The way he chose to portray the character, both physically and vocally, differed

drastically from any major production in the past. Normally played stoic and pompous with an

operatic golden age vocal quality, Laing chose to embrace the Hollywood, 1930s fast-talking

archetype for the basis of his portrayal. Always in constant thought and always with gears

turning, he played Fulton with an assured frenetic arrogance that actually served well in driving

the pace of the scenes that he was involved in. For the most part, every scene that Fulton had

dialogue in required him to drive the scene and set/maintain the quick pace of the show.

Vocally speaking, Laing utilized a lot of nasal twang in his voice to capture that 1930s

Hollywood actor sound. Nasal twang is something that Kyle has in his normal speaking voice on

a daily basis; and it seemed that rather than go a completely separate direction that stemmed
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away from his natural vocal tendencies, he chose rather to enhance his vocal qualities and

heighten them in order to create the sound of the period and embrace the exaggerated, satirical

sense of the piece.

Along with the utilization of nasal twang, Kyle had intentional moments of constriction to hit

key words or moments in the text. The sometimes crass, overly direct authoritarian nature of his

character was well served in the few but well chosen moments of constriction in his voice.

Keeping on the topic of constriction, throughout the run of the production, Kyle had difficulty

maintaining his vocal health and the fatigue in his voice became more and more evident each

night with the amount of unintentional and (sometimes) distracting constriction growing each

night. Its possible that the overt use of constriction at times gradually fatigued his voice, as well

as moments where he pushed his voice into ranges that go past his points of comfort when

speaking for comedic effect or to serve the character. His intention as the actor were always good

and were always to serve the story, but his choices following these intentions did not serve his

vocal health well and did cause for major concern regarding the remainder of the run, where the

understudy was having to be prepped and put on call every day up until call time waiting to see

how Kyle was holding up. In the future, it would probably serve him best to find the boundaries

of his voice and train himself not to go past them no matter how tempting. Vocal choices need to

be decided on the basis of whether or not they can be kept up eight times a week. Modifying his

choices with options like retracted vocal folds and shortening the speaking range of his character

would likely help I'm maintain his vocal health eight times a week.

Work Cited

Klimek, Mary McDonald, et al. Estill Voice Training System. Workbook.

Estill Voice Training Systems International, 2005.