Behind the Accents: A Conversation with Sierra Rizzo, Dialect Coach for Murder on the Orient Express
Introduce yourself! Where have audiences seen your work before and where can they see it next?
Hi everyone! I’m Sierra Rizzo, dialect coach for Vintage Theater’s Murder on the Orient Express. I’m studying writing, anthropology, and linguistics! I’ve loved languages and the magic of the spoken word ever since I was little, and I always found myself imitating funny voices in the movies I watched and the video games I played. This was my first solo project without my mentor, so it was a very big deal for me, but I like to think I’ve made him proud. I’ve previously assisted on Noises Off at the Arvada Center for Performing Arts, and assisted with A Christmas Carol at the DCPA. Keep an eye out for me around the Denver area!
For those who aren't familiar, what is a Dialect Coach, and how do they help actors in a production?
A dialect coach teaches everyone how to talk! We work with actors to create a specific voice and accent for a role. Our aim is to sound authentic to a given region and time period, fitting for the character, and understandable to the audience. But the most important goal is consistency. Making sure that certain words sound the same way each time a character says them.
In the early stages, I met with actors one on one. I gave them the key features of an accent and went through important phonetic and musculatory components. And then we went into design work. What felt genuine to the character, to the story, and to the actors’ version of their character? What could we add or substitute that would make this a more exciting experience for the audience, or a more authentic experience for the actor? For example, Josh Levy and I discussed how Poirot’s meticulous and precise control would show up in his speech and cadence, and soon Josh’s Belgian accent made me think “There he is! Poirot’s right here!”. I was also blessed that so many actors started with incredible ability in their accents at the beginning, which helped me get extra specific and detailed, and the actors really start having fun with their characters.
A big focus for Murder is the fact that there are simply so many accents, and many of the characters are coming and going frequently. Maintaining their own accent and not slipping into another’s in the European smorgasbord of accents was a big challenge! I made sure to listen for that and give specific words or phrases that could help them stay in accent. Hilariously, for Princess Dragomiroff, Deborah Persoff discovered that saying “Bolshevik!” instantly transformed her voice Russian again.
Practice was critical for this show, and making sure that everyone got lots of time to run their lines in accent and still allowed for authentic expression. Many of the actors were putting in extra hours outside of rehearsal time to listen and practice, which was incredible and made their progress sound so smooth. As the weeks went on, I listened to individual scenes and made notes of which words slipped out, or when an actor had trouble maintaining the accent. And by the end, I was listening to the entire show. It was a long time before I actually got to *watch* it despite being at most of the rehearsals!
How did you become a Dialect Coach?
I took a voiceover class at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where I met the amazing Jeffrey Parker. When I was doing self-introductions in the class, he told me I would be a good fit for his Advanced Speaking class, which taught oral awareness and accents. Boy was he right. I loved it so much, it was one of my favorite classes I’ve ever taken. His teaching style and philosophy really resonated with me. I then became his teaching assistant for the course, and his apprentice as I shadowed him and assisted him on different projects.
Murder on the Orient Express has multiple accents that are layered with each character's backstory--how do you approach your work on a show like this where you're coaching multiple actors with different accents?
Accent packets! My mentor taught me how to make them and they are just about the best thing ever (for nerds like me). It’s a document that gives you the 411 of an accent: the history of the people who speak the accent, key characteristics of it, and then the phonetics and practice sentences. For Murder, I had eight accent packets that detail important vowel and consonant shifts, and how your mouth will naturally sit to accommodate these changes. I shared these packets with the actors so they knew the characteristics of their accent overall, and we could work individually on shaping what a given character needed. Referring to these packets was really important, especially in the early stages!
Historically, a lot of emphasis has been placed on sounding “correct” and pronouncing things the “right” way. But I’ve been trained in Knight-Thompson speechwork, where we throw those ideas out the window and focus on “right for a given context”. Sometimes that meant forgoing a particular sound in order to make something more understandable for an audience, or to help an actor maintain consistency in the accent.
It was important to me to work with each of the actors on the kind of character they wanted to create. For example, Terence Keane wanted to use his natural accent to find a sweet spot of an almost “harsher” but more relaxed voice come to light for his performance as Samuel Ratchett, which let us create just a wonderfully scummy guy. Haley Johnson and I discussed giving Mrs. Hubbard a thick Minnesotan accent, but we feared the extravagant brassiness tipping into cartoonish, so we kept her natural accent and her hilarious Trans-Atlantic flairs.
Do you have a favorite accent to teach?
French! Great news for me on this show. I studied French all throughout middle and high school, and took the IB and AP French exams. It’s just such a fun language, and to me feels like a combination of elegant and silly that I can’t help adoring. I actually learned Belgian French specifically for this show, and spent three whole days listening to nothing but Walloon Belgians speaking (and tried not to get too mad when my family spoke to me with their American accents).
Are there any tips you can share for those who are interested in diving deeper into strengthening their dialect work?
Number one rule in accents: listen. Listen, listen, listen. Find real people or videos online of people who naturally talk in the accent/dialect you’re looking for, and listen to how they talk! Do they talk slow or fast, what rhythms does their voice naturally follow, what kinds of sounds tend to appear when? How can you make your mouth make those sounds? The other important thing is to let yourself sound weird and strange! You’ll be making a lot of sounds your mouth isn’t used to, so it will probably fight you at first. But as you get more practice, your mouth will start to figure out what’s happening, and the repetition and muscle memory will become your friend.
What is a favorite memory from working on Murder on the Orient Express?
During the early stages of working with the set pieces, the door to Ratchett’s room was flying open. Which is a problem, because in order for the plot to work, the door needs to be locked. Several characters mention several times that they can’t get the door to open and they’d have to force it open. But actually the door was flapping open the entire time. “It’s locked!” No, I don’t think it is actually. “Force it open!” I promise, no force will be necessary for that thing as it swings open on its own. It was great fun to watch, and I loved the moments of (in accent~!) improv that some of the actors added during those moments, making it feel like that was actually part of the story rather than a kink to be ironed out.
But to be honest, most of my memories on this show are my favorite. During my time on Noises Off, if my mentor wasn’t with me, I found myself quite lonely. The cast and crew were very nice, but I didn’t work very hard to come out of my shell. But while working on Murder on the Orient Express at Vintage, I pushed myself to try to initiate more conversations and connect with the incredible cast and crew. Everyone was warm, welcoming, and passionately dedicated. They didn’t let me feel lonely for a single moment.