My interest in languages, and the variations in how speakers sound, developed really early. I was born in Montana and lived in San Diego as a kid. When I was six, we moved to western New York. I could tell that I spoke differently from the people in RACH-ester. I also liked to make my family laugh, by doing impressions of what I saw on television, often based on some nuance or difference in how someone spoke.

I always wanted to work with actors because I’ve always been interested in the performance element—the heightened nature of performance—and I love film and television. I studied linguistics at Rochester and also got involved in Todd Theater and In Between the Lines improv comedy troupe. I thought if I studied language and was also active in performance, I could find a way of tying them together.

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I befriended Mark Brummitt, a professor at the Colgate-Rochester-Crozer Divinity School, and when I told him I was interested in languages and dialects, he instantly said, “Have you heard of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London?” And I thought, “That’s oddly perfect.” The Central School, I found out, was where Judi Dench had gone to drama school, as well as many of the most notable practitioners in the voice industry. I applied, got in, and eventually earned a master’s degree from the Central School in voice studies—specifically, about how to work with the voice in performance.

While I was in London, I ended up teaching phonetics and British dialect to British students and specialized in American dialects as well, though a dialect coach has the potential to be asked to teach any dialect or accent. My process for learning an accent is a bit like that of documenting a language. Ideally you meet with someone, a consultant, who is a native of the area; or you watch a lot of video or listen to a lot of audio from that particular region. Then you establish some sort of framework that you know covers the bases. For my work, there’s a story called “Comma Gets a Cure,” which was written by dialect coaches and linguists in the UK and US, that includes every consonant, vowel, and diphthong that exists in English. So you record a native from the region reading that, select words, and a lot of natural, free speech—because people always speak differently when they read. Then, if the actor or voice talent can isolate the sounds, I can help them adjust the sounds to make them consistent and eventually influence their flowing speech in the new target dialect.

“I always wanted to work with actors because I’ve always been interested in the performance element—the heightened nature of performance—and I love film and television. “

While I was in the UK, I also started working with Amazon as a voice coach. For most computerized voices that you hear, there is someone who provided the initial sounds for that voice. To get full coverage for a voice, you need someone to work with the voice talent to get the thousands of things that make up the nuances of the language and the voice clear and consistent, so the end product sounds like a unified voice. I describe the process as a bit like the scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, when Mike Teavee is sent through WonkaVision. He’s zapped into a million pieces and gets put back together, but smaller. The work is time-intensive, and recording can last weeks, with 30 to 40 hours a week of recording scripts created by linguists and programmers.

I’ve worked on a British version of Alexa, as well as the Samuel L. Jackson voice, the first celebrity voice for Amazon. A lot of the work is about building rapport with the voice talent. I’m the person who has to stop them every time they need to correct something or ask them to repeat something if they were unclear. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, if you will! There’s a lot of back-and-forth banter. I work hard to convey that I’m there to assist, to help them get through moments where they’re gravelly, raspy, or lose their breath or support; or to point out things that sound irregular, or too monotone. It’s a lot of work to speak for six hours a day.

NO DRAMA, PLEASE: Michel says she prefers the wings to the spotlight when it comes to her role as a drama teacher at Monticello High School in Charlottesville, Virginia. “I like the kids to take control.”

When Madeline Topkins Michel ’77 took the stage at the Tony Awards ceremony in June to receive the 2019 Excellence in Theatre Education Award, she quickly asserted that the award wasn’t hers alone—it also belonged to her diverse group of drama students at Monticello High School in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“This award is for all of the students who have found their voice and who speak for themselves, their families, and their community through theater and playwriting,” she told the audience at Radio City Music Hall.

Michel heads Monticello’s drama department, but she came to theater through a side door. An English major at Rochester, she later earned her teaching certification in math and English and as a reading specialist.

She took a job with the Baltimore school district and discovered that the classroom is an inherently theatrical place. When faced with skeptical or unmotivated students, she made her class dramatically compelling. “Really early on, I realized the value of theater in teaching,” she says.

She also coached National History Day teams after joining the staff at Monticello. Students compete by carrying out historical research and presenting their conclusions in the format of their choice. Michel’s teams opted for play performance—and when they brought home national gold medals two years in a row, Monticello’s principal decided it was high time that Michel taught drama. Michel is modest and wry about where her career has taken her. “I’m really not a theater person—despite the Tony Award,” she laughs.

But she’s ardent about inclusive theater. A drama program should reflect the makeup of a school’s student body, but that’s not what often happens, she says. “If you have a group of kids who represent the entire school, then what you get on stage is an energy that’s completely different from what you find at most schools. Everybody’s got a backstory—an interesting backstory— and then everybody learns from everyone else.”

As a teacher, she prefers the wings to the spotlight. “I like the kids to take control,” she says. She helps them stage, choreograph, and direct works that speak to them. And they craft new plays, too. This summer, Michel was working with two groups, each writing a play that they were aiming to have in production this August.

In the wake of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the Monticello drama program staged student Josh St. Hill’s one-act, rap-narrative play, A King’s Story, which examines a community’s response to violence. Student Courtney Grooms wrote the play Necessary Trouble in 2016, about responses to a high school student attending history class dressed in a shirt printed with the Confederate flag. Last fall, the program performed student Kayla Scott’s play #WhileBlack, about gentrification and the racial profiling she experienced in her hometown. Monticello brought home awards for the production from the Virginia Theatre Association.

“When my kids do a show that really has an effect on an audience, people come up afterwards to hug the actors and the playwright,” says Michel. “These were issues they were thinking about and were disturbed by, but they hadn’t seen them dramatized.”

The key to creating an inclusive theater program is patience, she says. In her classroom, “all that’s expected of you is to do what you’re comfortable with. And sometimes it takes a while for people to get comfortable. I have to be willing to let somebody sit in my class and observe for as long as they feel necessary.”

Michel says that taking part in drama builds students’ confidence and presentation skills, something they can carry with them in any endeavor. But it’s not skill building that really motivates Michel or her students.

“It’s that sense of meeting people who are different and building community,” she says. “Ninth graders are there with 12th graders, and I don’t distinguish you by your experience or your reading level or the classes you’ve had before, or anything like that.”

The stage is somewhere everyone belongs, Michel says. In her drama department, “there’s no gatekeeping.”