If he does other bit parts so vividly, he'll be stamped as a character singer for life".
Despite all that, there was a brittleness to his delivery; here was the character singer inhabiting the vet who is still jumpy in car parks, who's endlessly travelling the country end to end, working on the rigs and flying choppers when he could – the PTSD sufferer desperate for the last plane out of Sydney so he might whore away his haunting dreams on a Hong Kong mattress.
The cast includes 73 deaf and disabled professional performers and also well-known names like Sir Ian McKellen as a Prospero-type character, singer Beverley Knight and 3,250 volunteers aged 10-80 from all over the world.
Mr. Bostridge has shown on recordings that this strenuous role, long relegated to character singers chosen, you could believe, for an annoying nasal quality, can actually be sung beautifully.
He became more character than singer: his sequined glove, his whitened face, his moonwalk dance move became embedded in the cultural firmament.
Wandering around the lavish home of Tony Lacey Paul Simonn in a mercifully rare screen role), Allen's character Alvy Singer hears one pair of partygoers discussing money.
In the Christopher IsHowwood-inspired How Long?, one character asks singer Sally Bowles: "Do you know the proper way to ask for a cigarette?"; the gnomic reply is: "All the people run from the horizon".
His character, the singer Ma Rainey's stuttering nephew, is supposed to say the line as an introduction to one of the songs being recorded, and he repeats it over and over, trying to do it without stammering, in a performance that Howard Kissel in The Daily News called "funny and touching".
Raya, on the other hand, hurls an encyclopedia of trivia at us: Rayna James, lead character country singer of the show, has hair "so famous it has its own tumblr 'dedicated to Connie Britton and her hair.'" Bluebird Cafe is what Raya calls the show's "centrifuge".
Such laxness contrasts starkly with his Annie Hall character, Alvy Singer – depicted as so finicky about cinemagoing that he refuses to enter a theatre two minutes after a Bergman film has started, even though, as Annie (Diane Keaton) points out, "We'll only miss the titles – they're in Swedish".
Her chain-smoking character Marla Singer signalled to Hollywood that she was also able to play more off-beat and contemporary roles.
