The Voice Behind the Stars

The name ‘Marni Nixon’ is probably best known to the fans of movie musicals: she’s the singer whose voice was dubbed in to replace the singing voices of Deborah Kerr (The King and I), Natalie Wood (West Side Story) and Audrey Hepburn (My Fair Lady).  She also did some high notes for Marylin Monroe in ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’.  Hers was the voice you heard and the face you never saw – and weren’t meant to see.  The studio and the producers swore Marni Nixon to secrecy and she didn’t get a credit on any of those movies, didn’t get paid much, and didn’t get a royalty until West Side Story – and even then, it was tiny.  The movie soundtrack album of that movie is one of the biggest selling albums of all time, but that isn’t Natalie Wood singing ‘I Feel Pretty’ or ‘Tonight’ – it’s Marni Nixon, much to Natalie Wood’s chagrin – as we learn in this show.    

To demonstrate the process, Eliza Jackson as Marni Nixon steps up to a microphone on a stand and sings.  But where’s the screen with the moving image of whomever she’s dubbing?  Quite likely there’d be copyright problems with the clips needed to show that – and, overall, the sound design here is beautifully done, with Ms Jackson’s own voice blending through to movie soundtrack with Nixon’s voice.

The ‘dubbing’, however, was not so simple – and it might have been interesting to hear more about it – the process of recording the star – say Deborah Kerr singing ‘Getting To Know You’ - then filming Deborah Kerr singing or miming in sync with her recorded self (known as ‘shoot to playback’, the technique used on every movie with songs you’ve ever seen).  Then Marni Nixon watches the screen very, very closely and while watching, sings not just in the voice of the star, but in perfect sync with her.

Ms Jackson, however, keeps her show simple and ‘accessible’ and it’s almost all about the big movies everyone knows, and she’s had great success with it.  (There was a full house at the performance I attended, but I do wonder if we heard anything we didn’t know already.) 

There was a lot more to Marni Nixon.  As well as making ends meet by singing advertising jingles, she worked with Robert Craft and sang for Stravinsky, sang in the first performances of the incredibly difficult Webern songs in New York, and was a close friend and collaborator of Leonard Bernstein - with whom and the New York Philharmonic, she sang songs by Pierre Boulez.  She was in fact a superb musician -as well as being violinist, she could sight read and sing just about anything straight off - as well as the actress she had to be to do her dubbing work.  Should you wish to know more, there’s a fifty-minute interview with Marnie Nixon, recorded in 2014 (she died in 2016), by Andrew Ford on ABC Radio National’s ‘The Music Show’.  The link:  

https://abcmedia.akamaized.net/rn/podcast/2014/04/msw_20140426_1105.mp3

The show’s flier to the contrary, the show doesn’t tell Marni Nixon’s story – it tells well-chosen bits of it.  The promised reveal of ‘scandal’ and ‘secrets’ is, I guess, that the movie producers exploited her talent, swore her to secrecy and paid her peanuts – but that’s scarcely unusual.  It’s a business.  If you cast a ‘name’ – and every big budget movie must have ‘names’ – and the name is the box office draw but can’t sing, get someone who can and dub that voice onto the soundtrack.   

Maybe what we get here is pretty much high-class gossip, without a great deal of revelation of insight, but it’s very well done.  Can Ms Jackson sing as well as Marni Nixon?  That’s a big ask, but Ms Jackson is a most engaging performer who brings a lot of oomph, humour and considerable skills of mimicry and singing to this bright and entertaining hour.  The audience loved it – and her.

Michael Brindley