Are female performers vocally limited?

[minor muppetz]

I have noticed that most female performers don't really have a lot of regular characters. Now, Fran Brill has performed a lot of characters on Sesame Street, including Prarie Dawn, Roxy Marie, and Zoe, and when she performed on The Jim Henson Hour she performed most of the female characters on that show, and Eren Ozkar performed a lot of female characters during the first season of the muppet show, but the others don't seem to have many characters.

One example is on Fraggle Rock. There were four main female characters on that show, not counting Cotterpin. There was Mokey, Red, Marjourie, and ma Gorg, and all of these characters had different performers. Marjourie was even performed by Jerry Nelson, instead of one of the females, and she regularly interracted with Gobo. Karen Prell could have easily performed her. Ma Gorg had two voices, but neither of them were done by Karen Prell or Kathy Mullen.

On The Muppet Show, the only major character that Louise Gold played was Annie Sue Pig, and she wasn't even too major (an action figure wasn't even made of her). Louise Gold didn't have very many other characters (there was Lou, and there was the guitar player from Geri and the Atrics, and that was it). Also, Kathy Mullen was a main performer on that show, but her most major character was gaffer, who didn't even talk. In season 3, there was a new female character, Gladys The canteen Lady, but she was performed by Richard Hunt. Louise Gold could have performed her. In the Dizzy Gillipsie episode, we meet waldorfs wife, Astoria, but she was performed by Steve Whitmire. They should have cast either Louise or Kathy to play her.

Does anybody know what the deal is? I am wondering if they are limited in voices, although that shouldn't really be a problem, since many of the male performers only have a small number of different voices anyway. Most of Jim hensons characters who are not Kermit have the same gruff voice. Steve Whitmire has a lot of characters with high-pitched voices (like rizzo, wembly, and bean).

 

[Skekayuk]

I think that the problem with the female puppeteers on The Muppet Show was not their vocal abilities; but their puppeteering ability at that time. In fact Louise Gold at least, and to a lesser extent Kathy Mullen, voiced all sorts of bit characters. If you pay close attention you will find them at work doing numerous, quite diverse voices. Louise Gold was even hired partly on the strength of her abilities as a voice-artiste (in the Rich Little episode - as part of her audition - she sang Chanson De Amour triple tracked with herself, and thus had to sing the same song in three different voices). However, her puppeteering ability was at that time rather limited, owing to her inexperience. You have to remember that until she joined TMS in July 1977, she had never worked as a puppeteer before. Hensons had to train her from scratch. She made good, but had to basically learn her craft on the job on TMS. The other woman in the TMS Eight, Kathy Mullen had some familiarity with puppetry, but even so it was not much. By contrast, Steve Whitmire was already an experienced puppeteer, even if he had not done much TV or much voice-work before.

I think it's been a problem of puppeteering experience (and abiltiy at the time) that has limited, not their vocal abilities.

 

[minor muppetz]

It is a little bit weird to know that performers that are not too talented do not do voices just because of the lack of talent. If they are bad at puppeteering, it should be noticable if a background character is poorly performed. Voices shouldn't be a problem, although very few performers only supplied voices.

I can't really tell the difference between good puppetry and bad puppetry (I also can't tell the difference between good and bad singing), although i did notice poor lip sync on some of the male corus members in the original opening of The Muppet Show.

 

[Skekayuk]

I wouldn't call it a lack of talent in the case of the TMS Muppeteers, the talent was all there, it was simply a lack of experience, due to them being rather new to puppetry at the time. The talent was all there, it just hadn't yet been fully developed by training.

One thing apparent with both Louise and Kathy, is that their puppeteering has improved so much over the years from their TMS days. For example compare Louise's performances of Annie Sue on TMS with say Raisin in SLoT, the latter is so much more polished. There are quite a few occassions on TMS, where Annie Sue is in a production number (probably because they wanted Louise's excellent singing voice), but the puppet moves very little, its as though that's a deliberate device to keep her within her limits at the time.