He embodies the award-winning documentary work of PBS’s Frontline
There is a Choice shaping up.
It’s the story of an impeached and imperial president and the man who will oppose him this fall, a former vice president with a penchant for gaffes and for wearing his heart on the sleeve of his blue-collared shirt.
It now slips into even sharper focus after a series of primary contests across a nation were upended by a deadly virus that transformed the race. And the nation. And us.
And even as foreboding medical news still swirls around us the campaign is falling into its final shape, too, for the writers and producers at “Frontline,’’ the acclaimed Boston-based public television documentary series – a journalistic jewel that each presidential cycle produces a masterful, fly-on-the-wall dissection of the race for the White House.
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And that means Will Lyman is warming up his voice, getting ready to step in front of the microphone. Again.
“I’m the unseen voice,’’ Lyman told me as we sat in a luncheon booth over sandwiches in Jamaica Plain, where he lives. “You’re not supposed to be saying, ‘Who is that guy?’ ’’
Who is that guy?
He’s the guy with the unmistakable deep and soothing baritone, who studied theater at Boston University in the early 1970s and once walked into studios on Newbury Street, recording four ads for the newspaper you’re reading right now.
"I got a call from The Boston Globe, as a matter of fact,’’ he said. "I did four spots and thank God I didn’t (mess) them up. And from that point on, in the voice business, I didn’t look for work.’’
Once you hear his voice – and you almost certainly have — you know why.
"I invite people into the room to listen to him when he’s recording something because he’s a master at work,’’ said Michael Kirk, a veteran “Frontline” producer. "To see it, and hear it, and let it help your film is a wonderful thing.’’
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Or, as Raney Aronson-Rath, Frontline’s executive producer put it: Lyman doesn’t just read a script, he is telling you a story in such compelling terms that you dare not turn away — or tune out.
"He comes in and embodies the words you work so hard to write,’’ she said. "He inhabits those words with an authoritative, but even-handed and thoughtful tone. When you listen to him, you’re not only thinking that what he’s saying is true, but it’s clear-eyed. It doesn’t feel like we’re tilting the narrative or putting our thumb on the scale.
"That’s the brilliance of Will.’’
That brilliance has been well-earned, honed over a career that has its roots in Northern Vermont, where he was the younger of two boys, the children of parents who worked as educators and who provided a near-idyllic childhood.
Still, he found that he was not a natural student and gravitated toward theater, an avocation for which his voice work has provided financial support.
Over the years, he’s played William Tell in a French TV show. He once made an appearance in an episode of the popular CBS series "Murder, She Wrote.’’ He has portrayed King Lear in a production on Boston Common.
But his voice work paid the bills.
And he had to overcome a child allergy that often prevented him from breathing through his nose.
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"And so I would compensate in the way I made my vowel sounds and it put a great deal of tension on these neck muscles,’’ he said, pointing above his collar. "I was making all my vowels in the wrong place. So when I retrained myself to reposition the vowels, that was a major moment in my vocal career. I guess I was 42 then.’’
He’s 71 now. And there is no problem with his voice. In fact, people who make their living with voice and sound say it’s nothing less than a spoken-word marvel.
Jim Sullivan, a WGBH sound mixer who has worked on some 350 “Frontline” episodes since the 1980s, said Lyman — through intonation and the subtleties of his tone — can distill a complex subject into easy-to-understand terms. And he can do it in a believable way that is deceptively difficult to execute.
"It’s something in his inflection, and in his tone,’’ Sullivan said. "He’s not talking down to the audience. With some narrators, the guy will sound like me and then you put him behind a mic, and you get that voice of God.
“Will sounds like Will. That’s why he’s the right choice for ‘Frontline.’ It’s a really honest approach.’’
And now, after 36 years as Frontline’s marquee voice, he’s getting ready to do it all again.
The raw material for “The Choice” has been gathered through the snows of New Hampshire to the sunshine of Silicon Valley.
And now the national conventions make official what for months has been a suspense-free exercise in democracy.
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That means Trump v. Biden. It means Pence v. Harris.
That means it’s now down to the people Will Lyman will be talking about after Labor Day, when Americans return from their socially distanced beach blankets and focus on the final stretch of the road to the White House.
He’s a technician.
He’s also a voter.
He speaks as both.
"I often characterize what I do as a professional plagiarist,’’ he said. "Because my job is to take somebody else’s work and make it sound like it comes from my heart. That’s my job.’’
He does that work seamlessly.
But as Election Day approaches, what does the narrator believe, what does he say when the “Frontline” microphone has been put away for the night?
"I’m very disturbed about the apparent disregard of institutions that I think are vital,’’ he told me. "Institutions like the EPA, the FTC the USDA. It seems to be OK to start degrading our water systems and our air. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand why this is OK with people.
“I’m disturbed by having our first citizen, the person who we elect to represent us in the world, be so inexorably concerned with himself and his own image. Somebody who (is) degrading his opponents, which is really frightening. This is not good. This is not a good thing. Do I need to say anymore?’’
But he is Will Lyman. He’s shaped his career by saying something more. And so he does.
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“The voice is something that really exposes who you are,’’ he said. “You want to find a voice that people can say, ‘That’s a real voice. That’s who this guy is. There’s no (baloney) to it. There’s no pretension to it.’ ’’
No, there isn’t.
There’s an authority there. A presence. A real person. His name is Will Lyman, the guy with the golden voice.
The guy who commands your attention. And then keeps it. Now, he’s getting ready to do it again.
Thomas Farragher is a Globe columnist. He can reached at thomas.farragher@globe.com.
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Will Lyman’s rich, soothing baritone is the voice of The Choice - The Boston Globe
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