Jane Miller, Taurian Teelucksingh and Neema Bickersteth in The Wolf in the Voice.Jae Yang/Tarragon Theatre
- Title: The Wolf in the Voice
- Co-created and directed by: Martin Julien and Brian Quirt
- Actors: Neema Bickersteth, Jane Miller and Taurian Teelucksingh
- Company: Tarragon Theatre in association with Nightswimming
- Venue: Tarragon Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Until Feb. 23, 2025
There’s a wolf inside you.
He lives at the base of your throat, nested into the fleshy walls of your vocal folds. He perks up when you start to sing, growling as you search for the right notes, waiting for an opportune moment to howl.
What’s the perfect time for the canine in your larynx to make himself known, you ask? That’s the question tossed around by The Wolf in the Voice, the beguiling new play about vocal health created by Tarragon Theatre in association with dramaturgical incubator Nightswimming.
The wolf is, of course, imaginary, a metaphor wielded by Icelandic novelist Arnaldur Indridason to demonstrate the passaggio, or the break in one’s voice between registers. At one end of the spectrum is the chest voice, low and resonant, and at the other is the airy head voice, or falsetto. Where those disparate registers meet is where the dog perks up, in the form of a guttural, pubescent croak: Only with years of training can that gap between sounds be smoothed out.
Over the course of 90 or so minutes, The Wolf in the Voice explores all things singing, using three tuneful, elegant vocalists to demonstrate the findings of years' worth of research led by Martin Julien and Brian Quirt. The show brings new meaning to the term “musical theatre,” using songs not to advance the plot but to enrich Julien and Quirt’s data: Music from a variety of genres, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado to Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, pokes at that mysterious chasm between belting and squawking.
Where this show grumbles a bit, for me, is in its non-narrative conceit, which uses a TED talk-style approach to storytelling that eschews plot in favour of a more direct conversation with the audience about a relatively esoteric corner of vocal production. Throughout the play, the audience is invited to sing along, to feel for themselves the physical mechanisms of the human voice, but it’s the performers onstage tasked with the heavy lifting of keeping the show moving – that’s no easy task, in a devised piece without a story to shepherd it forward.
Neema Bickersteth is a gifted, captivating soprano, but she’s soulful, too, with low, passionate murmurs just as engaging as the twinkling high notes at the top of her range. The theatre goes still when she tells us about her headfirst leap into opera as a young adult, and it’s thrilling when the educational context for her voice eventually coincides with the sound of it.
Jane Miller is a chameleon of a vocalist, with the capacity to flip between a classical vibrato to a more straight-toned wail at the flip of a switch. When she recalls a performance from the beginning of her career, when her voice snapped like a rubber band whilst bellowing the words to New York, New York, it’s hard not to feel for her – without her voice, she wonders, who is she?
Taurian Teelucksingh is a theatre kid through and through, whose adolescent memories of singing overlap with promotional vlogs from Broadway stars in the late 2000s. He has to tend to his voice carefully, he tells us, with frequent spritzes from his nebulizer and handfuls of throat-soothing sour candy as needed. His repeated renditions of Maria from West Side Story are compelling and well-sung, and he’s right at home when he gets the chance to show off his high belt toward the end of the show.
Bickersteth, Miller and Teelucksingh are a surprising trio, with their contrasting backgrounds in different genres, but when they come together, the resulting sound is pleasantly plush, somehow greater than the sum of its parts. (The production’s seemingly boundless energy and palpable love of music makes it reminiscent of Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt’s raucous 2 Pianos, 4 Hands.)
Add in Rebecca Picherack’s playful, stripped-down set – indents in the stage floor suggest a piano à la 1988’s Big – and you get a project that could easily tour Canada.
The Wolf in the Voice sticks its landing, with a feel-good singalong that culminates in a delicious howl. But the play starts slowly, and takes its time to establish what, exactly, it’s here to do; it’s not clear until close to the halfway point whether the vocalists are playing themselves, or if they’re mouthpieces for multiple generations of singers. (The answer, it turns out, is that they’re both, switching between personas like songs on a playlist – that could be clearer sooner.)
Singing – much like jogging, reading and eating enough broccoli – is one of those things that’s inarguably good for you. A study published by the National Endowment for the Arts found that singing in a choir correlates with having a positive outlook on life, and with being more tolerant of diverse perspectives. Some of the data suggests that singing can even counteract chronic illness.
In the spirit of that research, The Wolf in the Voice makes a great case for singing more – it’s a joyful, tender-hearted celebration of sound – but the energy spent on taming that titular hound feels misplaced in a show of this length. There’s a pearl of a project embedded into the meat of this experimentation, and this team is clearly up to the challenge of digging deeper to find it; but first, they’ll have to outsmart that wily, willful wolf.