Lea Michele sings for a theatre larger than the one she is in, and as Rachel Berry in Glee she made a television comedy hold still for a voice built for Broadway. The trouble is that television has rarely asked her for anything else.
Fi1m perspective
The pilot of Glee (2009) ends with a school choir in a half-empty auditorium singing ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, and the joke is supposed to be that the song is too big for them. Then Lea Michele opens her mouth and it is not too big for her at all. We had come to be irritated and for four minutes we were not, because a voice that size arriving from a girl that small in a room that ordinary is a proper surprise, and the programme was clever enough to know it.
The voice came from the stage, and so did she. Michele was on Broadway from the age of eight, as Young Cosette in Les Misérables, then in Ragtime and Fiddler on the Roof, and by 2006 she was originating Wendla in Spring Awakening, opposite Jonathan Groff. Ryan Murphy wrote Rachel Berry for her, and it shows. Rachel is a girl who has decided to be famous and will be disliked for it if necessary, and Michele plays her without softening the cost. Where a lesser show would have made the ambition endearing, Glee is honest about how tiring she is, and Michele lets her be tiring. That honesty is the best thing about the performance, and it belongs to the first season, before the programme forgot which parts of itself were the good ones.
Six seasons is a long time to play one idea, and afterwards television offered her variations on it. Scream Queens (2015) put her back with Murphy in a horror comedy ensemble; The Mayor (2017) followed. We have reviewed neither, and neither, on the shape of the career, moved her far from the driven, perfectionist young woman Rachel had fixed in the public mind. Typecasting is the one reservation anyone consistently holds about her, and it is fair, though the type was built to her measurements.
Her element has always been live. She has said, "I feel like I was sort of meant to be on stage," and her return to Broadway as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (2022), then in Chess (2025), looks less like a change of direction than a return to the default. On screen the voice has to be recorded and cut and mimed back, and some of its weight goes; in a theatre it lands whole. We have only one of her programmes in our records, and it is a mixed one, so we hold our view of her lightly. What we can say is that in the one place we watched her closely, she was the reason to keep watching.
If you want the case for her, watch the first season of Glee and stop there, which is our advice for the programme anyway. Everything since suggests the screen was a detour.
Biography
Lea Michele, also credited as Lea Michele Sarfati, is an American actress and singer. She was born on 29 August 1986 in The Bronx, New York.
She began performing professionally as a child on Broadway, appearing in Les Misérables, Ragtime and the revival of Fiddler on the Roof. She originated the role of Wendla Bergmann in Spring Awakening.
Michele is known for her portrayal of Rachel Berry in the series Glee (2009–2015). Her other credits include voice work in The Simpsons and appearances in Scream Queens (2015–2016) and New Year's Eve (2011).
