Rebecca Luker.(singer)(Interview)

Tony-nominated Broadway soprano Rebecca Luker greeted me recently at the door of her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, remarkably flesh-faced and grateful for my lateness for our early-Saturday-morning appointment. In a musical world filled with American Idol wannabes, Luker has consistently worn the "Barbara Cook" crown for two decades, in stage productions including The Music Man, The Sound of Music, Showboat, The Phantom of the Opera, The Secret Garden and New York City Opera's Brigadoon.

OPERA NEWS: Where were you raised and what was your training?

REBECCA LUKER: I was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. I came from a musical family, although not professionally, and started studying with a man named Ben Middaugh when I was sixteen--and doing all the leads in the musicals. Ben just sort of left me alone and assigned the right repertoire. I did the old Italian songs and arias and actually sang Monica in The Medium.

ON: Did you have a "whistle voice" when you started--the high Es and everything?

RL: I never had those.

ON: So when you did Christine in Broadway's Phantom of the Opera, that's not you?

RL: It is me. I managed to pop one out for the tape, or maybe two. But I'm really a lyric. I have a lot of low and middle, which has really expanded in the past five or six years. When I was younger, my teacher had to give me exercises to even find where my "speaking middle" was. Over the next two decades, because I do so many of those middle sopranos, it's gotten stronger.