it seems to me that most modern musicals are sung by tenors and female altos. If there's a duet, the man will often sing at the same pitch as the woman.
That's very true - audiences somehow can't "deal" with soprano-pitched voices in musicals any longer, even if done in the "Kate Bush" style. I noticed this last year when I rather mistakenly went to the latest revival of "Rocky Horror"... I was shivering with antici
pation, but it was a big let-down. "Janet" is scored for a lyric soprano, and in fact the role's often done by singers with a "light-classical/operetta" background. "Columbia" is scored even higher, and in the film version it was Little Nell who squeaked through the punishing tessistura. However, in the recent London revival, Columbia's entire role was transposed down an octave (!), and worse still, Janet simply "octaved" all the material she couldn't manage (even in the middle of phrases), which mangled the role entirely. The actor playing Brad (who is supposed to be a kind of light lyric tenor) was so appalling that it wasn't clear what notes he was singing anyhow
David Badella (around whom the revival had been built) mugged through the songs, but he's no singer, and mostly he just impersonated Tim Curry's film performance.
It was interesting to note that in the couple of decades since the piece first premiered, there's been a sea-change to how the vocal parts are performed
It was a night out I was going to remember..... for a
very long time. Unfortunately.
