They cast Delia Sorrentino as the lead of “Paper Kingdom.” Sorrentino, who has never sung a note on a Broadway stage. Half the industry thinks it’s a mistake. I think it’s the smartest thing anyone’s done this season, and I want to explain why.
“Paper Kingdom” — the new musical opening at the Sable in November, book by Aldous Fenn, score by the “Ovation” team — is not a belt-off. It’s a chamber musical about a woman dismantling her own myth, and the score, from what I heard at the industry presentation last month, sits low and conversational. It doesn’t ask for a soprano. It asks for an actress who can make sung thought sound like spoken thought. That is a completely different instrument, and mija, that is exactly what Sorrentino has been doing in straight plays for fifteen years.
Here’s the thing people forget. The great musical theater performances are not always the biggest voices. Some of the ones we still talk about came from actors who understood that a song is a scene that happens to have pitch. Sorrentino has that understanding in her bones. I watched her do a monologue two winters ago where she said maybe forty words in six minutes and held a Broadway house dead silent the entire time. A woman who can hold silence like that can hold a lyric. Pero the reverse — teaching a belter to act — takes years, and half of them never get there.
The risk is real and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. Eight shows a week is a vocal marathon, and a performer without musical training can get to opening night on adrenaline and technique and then blow out her voice by Thanksgiving. That’s not a talent question. That’s a stamina question, and it’s the reason this kind of casting sometimes ends in a understudy running the show by December. Whoever’s doing her vocal coaching has the most important unglamorous job in the building right now.
Director Marcus Ojo is the reassuring part. Ojo works from stillness — he builds shows around what a performer can do quietly — and he’d never have cast Sorrentino if he wanted a traditional musical-theater sound. He wants what she has. The pairing tells you exactly what kind of “Paper Kingdom” this is going to be: small, interior, dangerous in the way a whisper is dangerous. Ay, that’s the kind of musical I’ll drop everything for.
So no, this is not a mistake. It’s a bet that acting is the harder half of the job and that you should hire for the half you can’t teach. I’ve watched enough gorgeous voices stand there with nothing behind the eyes to tell you which side of that bet I’m on.
Whether it pays off, we find out in November. But this is the casting I’ll be thinking about all fall, and you should be too. Get ahead of it. Estamos aquí.
“Paper Kingdom” begins previews November 6 at the Sable Theatre.
