“I know who I am and I sing from who I am.” After her operation, Kristina had done a little vocal rehabilitation – the brief amount available to her with the therapist, but even though she’d given up on musical theatre, she was still curious to see if she could recover her voice. Now in New York, her path to singing didn’t begin with singing at all. “…It came as I started meeting actors,” she tells me. “Four
internationally-recognized school of acting in New York City. “I came back to
[singing] through acting. I was in the Esper Studio, going there for acting, which just taught me so many life skills that I wish somebody would have taught me when I was sixteen, instead of twenty-six or twenty-eight.” At the same time, she’d run into and begun working on singing with both a voice teacher and a speech specialist – work that, as she describes it, was both healing and reprogramming.
That, she says, began “a process of reconnecting all of the parts of me back to my voice, which has taken ten years. The idea of, first of all, understanding who I am and not being ashamed of it, and then starting singing from there, and then getting better at singing than I ever was from there.” And while she believes she’s resolved most of her anxiety she issues, she states that the reason for that is because “I know who I am, and I sing from who I am. I've worked hard at it, it's not like I just solved the problem.” She goes into further detail about that experiencing, noting that
Kristina: My confidence level with singing is now from real as opposed to where it was from before, which was from this idea that there's a right and wrong… It is no longer an objective– I have no objective measure. Often, I'm singing off key, but I don't care. [laughs] I have no anxiety about anybody objectifying my–
Felix: Because you're doing it for you.
Kristina: Yes, and I'm doing it from my centered self. I feel like my technique now comes from my centered self, whereas before I felt it didn't.
Though she feels she’s found herself and she’s confident in who she is, the experience of discovery did leave some emotional scars.
Felix: You used the word ashamed earlier… Kristina: Yes. I was totally ashamed…
Felix: Why do you think that is? You said ‘[ashamed] of yourself.’ Is that related to your musical self or your personal self, or?
Kristina: The split-up self. I would say, if I should say something I'm ashamed of right now, and that I'm still ashamed of that that happened.
Felix: I mean, that’s how we–
Kristina: Yes. That's the shame, the not being able to handle it.
Felix: Right. Feeling like that there was something essentially wrong with you that you weren't able to process this and move through and find what you needed.
Kristina: Exactly. In a way that I should have been somehow able to take
it. I feel like I should have.
“That’s why I don’t do it anymore.” Reflecting on how she ended up where she did, Kristina related her disjointed identity to the several sources, all of which were related her gender and the expectations that come with being a woman – and particularly, being a woman in musical theatre. I ask her to speak more about this.
Felix: The impression that I get is that at one point in your life, you were trying to be all of the things that were expected of you– Kristina: Yes. Without connecting it to anything inside of me. Yes. Felix: –and that that gendering was part of that.
Kristina: Absolutely, yes. I've always thought that that Julie Andrews song from Victor/Victoria, the If I were a man. I’ve always thought that was a brilliant song, because it's so true. That was definitely my experience when I was pursuing theater.
And gender expectations in musical theater begin before a singer even opens their mouth. As she points out:
You’re typed out at auditions before you even do anything. That’s why I don’t do it anymore. I look like I should sing those, the nice people, because I look nice. I look like I– Not that I am a nice person, but I look like one. I look like I should sing Kelli O'Hara or Marin Mazzie or somebody. [That’s not where my voice is comfortable] and I don’t like it… They’re too… something… for me. “Too something,” I find out, means that the high femininity (and often, high femme sexiness) does not feel authentic:
Kristina: It doesn't feel original to me. It doesn't feel like it come– It is to them.
Felix: Because it's an identity issue. That's not the kind of woman that you are. It doesn't fit who you see yourself as.
Kristina: No, [it doesn’t fit]. In musical theater, I could either become that or– it's fun when [her musical theatre coach] would talk about this, "You have these long legs, you should do like the Ulla in The Producers." Or, "You should have that showgirl thing, the sexy Chicago thing." I'm like, "That's so not who I am either." That's even less what I am. Those are kind of my
options. Meanwhile, I'd sing Aldonza,10 and not with that [legit, soprano, feminine] voice, but in my belty voice, the way she probably would sing if she's a whore somewhere in Andalusia or wherever it takes place in Spain.
Felix: You see your brand of femininity as being more associated with your belt, with taking power, with agency?
Kristina: Yes, absolutely. Without sexuality.
Felix: Your agency is not related to your sexuality?
Kristina: No. I think that's a big thing that musical theater expects you to have if you're going to have agency. The Wicked role, the
Elphaba, was the first role I saw, who had the agency without the sexuality. It does have a little sexuality in there, but it's mostly without sexuality.
Felix: Was that discomfort with that aspect of agency through sexuality something you always felt or was this part of your self-discovery?
Kristina: That was part of the self-discovery, I think. Because I have played both– Actually, all of the spectrums of those. In Nine, I've played both the– At school, we did Nine and I played the wife, which is super sexy. Then I've also sung In A Very Unusual Way.
Felix: At some point the sexy characters felt okay because it wasn't ‘you’?
Kristina: Right. I sang a lot of sexy roles. I have no problem with it, but I also don't identify with it at all. It was like playing a role as opposed to being authentically inside of something.
Social expectations around sexuality and women in musical theatre were something Kristina felt she had to conform to, to have a place in the industry. “Theater has a sexual element to it,” she says, but
I've also played – in straight11 theater – I found more roles where you can both be sexy and have agency and be smart. Because that's really who I am.
10 From Man of La Mancha. 11 e.g., non-musical plays.
Yes, I'm a very multifaceted identity, but mine is more balanced, and it's important for me that it's balanced. Whereas to some people, they identify with one part of themselves very much, and I don't. I needed to have a balance. I think that's where musical theater just didn’t provide that. No, because it's not about balance, it's about archetypes. Then, of course, that has changed somewhat. Today, I could totally play Jessie Mueller's role
in Waitress. [Roles like that] didn't exist when I was in musical theater. “I felt I should sound the way I look.” These days, in addition to her non- musical theatre work, Kristina sings primarily her own music – a kind of indie folk/rock that allows her write and sing about the things that are meaningful to her. One of her favorite themes is the inclusivity that she felt as a child, that made her want to perform music in the first place.
Kristina: That's a big thing I care about, and I write about it a lot. Actually, the thing I talked about in the beginning, where I experienced that magic of, "I belong but I'm me," that's what I write about.
Felix: Because that was the defining moment for you, that was what made your life, is feeling, "Okay, finally there's a place where I'm me, and I am included in the group."
Kristina: It was right at my first experience of identity. Do you really have a lot of identity feelings when you're a kid, kid before you are a teenager? When you become a teenager, that's a whole new thing. That is what I care about, I care about people being individuals, but accepted in a sense of community. I write about that.
Felix: Do you do it through the lens of romance, at all?
Kristina: No, there's very little love song, in my repertoire. There's some protest song to it. The guy I play in a band with, he writes similar types of songs, it's very little romance.
Felix: It seems like, in a way, you're rejecting all of the traditional tropes for women.
Kristina: Yes. It doesn't interest me at all. I don't have interest in that. It's melancholic optimism, is what we call it.
Her rejection of musical theatre as a genre that she could / would sing in seemed quite resolute, and I asked her about that.
Felix: Do you think that gender expectations had something to do with your reluctance to do anything but the indie thing?
Kristina: Yes, probably. Because I could never really get behind it. I couldn't actually fulfill that expectation. My own authentic self, I couldn't put that in there.
Felix: You felt the pressure to be that.
Kristina: To be able to, yes. I felt like that I should sound the way I look. That was the expectation. Like, "Why don’t you sound the way you look? Why can't you just fucking sound the way you look? Why can’t you act and sing the way you look?"