Keala Settle

Watch where Settle puts her chin. In "This Is Me", the number that made her name in The Greatest Showman (2017), Lettie Lutz begins half-hidden in a back corridor and by the last chorus she is leading her company out through the front doors with her head up. The voice does most of it, a big gospel-inflected R&B instrument that she pushes from a murmur to a shout without ever sounding as though it costs her anything. It moved us more than we expected, and what did it was not the volume but the walk, the body catching up with the voice one step at a time.

She came to film late and from the stage. Before Barnum she had spent years on national tours, as Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray and Bloody Mary in South Pacific, then on Broadway in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (2011), Hands on a Hardbody (2013), where she created the part of Norma Valverde, the 2014 revival of Les Misérables and Waitress (2016), where she was the first Becky. Her first film part was Sharon in Ricki and the Flash (2015), opposite Meryl Streep. Then Michael Gracey handed her Pasek and Paul's anthem and the one sequence in his film that people remember. The years since have gone on an EP, a tour with Hugh Jackman, Rent: Live (2019), West End runs in & Juliet and Sister Act, and Miss Coddle in the two Wicked films (2024 and 2025).

What she does that most musical performers do not is refuse the trained musical-theatre sound. "I really am not a musical theatre performer. I'm more an R&B singer and have been doing that my whole life," she has said, and you can hear it: the notes bend and slide before they land, and it makes her outsiders sound as though they have been singing to themselves for years before anyone listened. Directors keep casting her as the strong one at the edge of the frame, the bearded lady, the diner waitress, the headmistress. She is good at it. The trouble is that film keeps cutting away from her. Our chief complaint about The Greatest Showman was that Gracey did not trust her to hold the shot during her own song, and the camera left her face again and again when it should have stayed. Wicked gave her Miss Coddle and, by most accounts, not a great deal to do with her.

She has said she is looking for work that frightens her a little. We hope somebody offers her some, with a director willing to point the camera at her and leave it there for three minutes. The voice has already carried a film's best sequence; what it has never been allowed to carry is a whole scene without help from the editor.