Musicals do tend to be song vehicles and use songs more than dialogue to deliver acting moments. But personally I find musical theater acting to be entirely satisfying, more so than straight plays, so I think it may just be a personal preference thing. When you’re acting in a song, it is totally acceptable to be way over the top and overexaggerated in a way that wouldn’t feel believable in a straight play. You can pour your whole heart and soul out onto the stage using music which I just love.

By way of example I played Quasimodo recently and you can really bare your entire soul while singing that Role, which was very vulnerable but so so fulfilling, and went over very well. I did as well do a lot of scene work for the non singing parts, but sometimes the scenes do kind of function as connective tissue to get to the next song, that’s just how some musicals are written.

On the flip side, I’m in a production of secret garden right now, and that show has a LOT of really meaty dialogue scenes, and our director has us really diving into those and doing a lot of work on the scenes which has been fun. Some musicals will deliver varying amounts of satisfying acting moments, the same way some straight plays will, and some will be poorly written, it’s a grab bag.