From the Stage to the Clinic
Speech pathologist and “The Producers” star Robert Fritz draws on performance experience to help patients find their voices.
Back in 2015, Robert Fritz was a BFA student in the University of Miami musical theater program. He remembers Adam Lloyd, SLP, assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, talking to his voice performance class about how speech pathology could help with potential voice issues.
That visit didn’t change Fritz’s desire to become a performer, but it planted a seed.
A decade later, Dr. Lloyd is now his supervisor in the Miller School’s Division of Speech Pathology. And Fritz, CCC-SLP, is using his performance training to help both his patients and his fellow members of the local performing arts community.
Connections Between Theater and Speech Pathology
After graduating with his BFA, Fritz was working as an actor and juggling a number of part-time jobs to get by. But he started feeling like a change might be in order. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a useful pause.
“It gave us all time to stop and reflect. And taking everything off my plate, I then got to decide, well, what do I want to put back on my plate? What do I want my life’s work to be? And that was the impetus to go back to school,” he said.
In 2023, Fritz completed his master’s degree in speech pathology. Given his musical theater background, he knew he wanted to specialize in voice work. When a job for the UM voice team opened up, he applied and was accepted.
Now Fritz helps patients across a wide range of professions learn to use their voices effectively.
“I’m privileged to work with a lot of people who rely on their voices for their livelihood, whether they be performers, teachers, lawyers or salespeople,” he said. “A lot of the work I do helps people recover from a vocal injury or use their voice more effectively to meet their demands, whether those be social or workplace demands.”
For instance, Fritz has been working with a physical education teacher who had sustained vocal cord injuries in the course of managing groups of students in the gym and on the field.
“Most people go through their lives never really thinking about how they use their voice, until something goes wrong,” he said. “So in that case, I’m doing a lot of education about how to take care of the voice and also building the skills of how to use a voice that is loud, clear, expressive and flexible in a way that’s healthy and sustainable.”
Fritz draws on his own physical training as a performer in his work with patients. However, he finds that less obvious aspects of theater come into his work as well.
“One of my favorite parts of acting is being live in the moment with another human being on stage, and that allows me to connect with people in a very honest way. And I think that helps me sensitively navigate the therapeutic process,” he said.
Back to the Stage
Now that he’s situated with his new line of work, Fritz is delving back into performance. In December, he starred as the timid accountant turned musical theater production swindler Leo Bloom in the Delray Beach Playhouse production of Mel Brooks’ musical comedy, “The Producers.”
He’s found that working as a speech pathologist encourages him to approach his own performance work differently.
“I was much more relaxed and at ease during this process when it came to how I was using my voice,” Fritz said. “Looking back as a performer, there’s a lot of anxiety around doing things the right way, sounding as good as you can. Having all the knowledge and training that I have now, it really allowed me to have more and more confidence in myself as a voice user, and it made the process more fun.”
But his training also made Fritz aware of his responsibility to model good voice hygiene for other performers. By opening week, performers were experiencing vocal fatigue. Fritz was able to offer resources to help performers take care of their voices during rehearsals.
“What I love being able to do is provide good, evidence-based information, when appropriate, to people I’m working with, and to be a source of information and potentially an entry point into voice rehabilitation,” he said. “It was really meaningful for me as an actor who then came into this role of speech pathology to bring some of that expertise back to the community.”
Tags: Division of Laryngology and Voice, Division of Speech Pathology, otolaryngology, speech pathology, vocal folds