Week One, Lesson One: Overture: Omigod You Guys
Going Places! Romantics Pursuing Dreams in Pippin (1972) and Legally Blonde (2007).
“SHOW ME A REASON AND I’LL SOON SHOW YOU A RHYME”
“[Music] combines elements at once partly mystical and completely human.”
–director Thomas Kail (2008).
Course Introduction
Our inaugural approach to the Musical weighs the shifts in register between narrative (scenes) and numbers (songs/dances), considering how the latter shape the experience of the art form, alongside some implications afforded by those conventions. Today we’ll:
Lay out some of the guiding concepts and principles we’ll follow throughout the session.
Outline some of our core perspectives on the art form.
Establish some foundational vocabulary we’ll build upon throughout the course.
Initiate an analytic tool making use of the theory of Utopia in relation to Musicals.
Video Clips (access by PANOPTO link on left menu of Sakai homepage). Note: The Panopto library is organized as Lessons 1-23. The example sequence follows the Lesson designation. (Example: Lesson 1 includes five clips, numbered 1.1; 1.2; 1.3; etc. Lesson 2 is listed as 2.1; 2.2; 2.3; onward.)
What to Look For: Common themes of Energy, Empowerment, and Community as expressions of
the Utopian sensibility in our cross-section of stage and screen Musical excerpts.
1.1 OMIGOD YOU GUYS—Legally Blonde (2007)
1.2 CORNER OF THE SKY—Pippin (1972/1981)
1.3 HOW ABOUT YOU?—Babes on Broadway (1941)
1.4 FINAL DANCE—Step Up 2: The Streets (2008)
1.5 PURPLE RAIN—Purple Rain (1984)
[About Video Examples: I’ll always list stage dates first and film versions second where applicable.]
1. Session Proposals
(1) Musicals are a significant genre worthy of devotion and close attention.
(2) Pleasure is valuable and to be defended.
(3) Honest emotion is likewise to be celebrated.
(4) Musicals have their own truth, their own reality.
(5) Realism and razzle-dazzle aren’t opposites but can productively co-exist.
(6) Musicals reflect–and sometimes contest–social values, can promote social change, and
potentially afford an experience of Utopia, the ideal place or existence to which humankind
aspires.
2. Session Perspectives
(1) Musicals are more than simple entertainment.
(2) Musicals have a formal sophistication.
(3) That structural boldness is sometimes tied to conservative narratives, but–
(4) A Musical’s meaning is not bound by story or plot; the power of the form prevails.
(5) The interplay of narrative and numbers creates a potent dialectic.
(6) The genre’s longevity lies in its diversity, adaptability, and essential plurality.
3. Musical Poetics
Like all genres (a term meaning “kind” or “type”), Musicals are defined by an inherent dynamic that typically pulls in two directions (the method known as dialectics). On the one hand, genre depends
on a familiarity factor, adopting standing patterns, elements, and means of expression alongside each
new work’s desire for originality; the latter achieved through recombining the known, finding individual ways of surprising or engaging audiences, and extending the art form toward further growth. Musicals,
then, involve an unending dance between Repetition and Revision. Still, we can outline some basic qualities, related to the human play instinct and the genre’s commitment to what Sigmund Freud
identifies as the Pleasure Principle.
“King (and Queen) of the World!” –Rooney and Garland Gaze into the Genre’s Utopia.
(1) A Poetics of Pleasure: Musicals confirm the value and necessity of both personal enjoyment
and popular culture.
(2) A Politics of Pleasure: Musicals afford audiences an opportunity to reimagine themselves, thus
involving them in the activity of remaking identity and reality itself.
(3) A Promise of Pleasure: Musicals implicate us in the genre’s message of transformation,
through direct (if vicarious) experience, making the seemingly impossible palpable, visible,
realized.
The Paradox of the Musical’s form lies in the genre’s alchemy, transcending Western Dualism’s
binary divisions through a contrary vision of Synthesis or Multiplicity.
In that respect, Musicals bear more than a sonic affinity with Miracles. On the merely practical level,
it’s a miracle that any Musicals succeed, given the wealth of creative elements that must cohere (far
more than the necessities of the spoken-word theatre, or so-called ‘straight’ or ‘legitimate’ drama—
terms which already ostracize the Musical). But more conceptually, in giving us that experience of
fusing opposites and healing divisions, Musicals redefine reality from a new vantage point, making
us reconceive our beliefs and accept our former viewpoints as limited, which is what the miraculous
is all about.
Street Cred: The Unstoppable Dance Crew of Step Up 2: The Streets Proves the Validity of One
of Its Franchise’s Taglines, “It’s Not Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At.”
4. Potential
(1) METAPHOR – Musicals move beyond Shakespeare’s famous assertion that “All the World’s
a Stage to affirm it’s a CABARET at that:
with repercussions for the role of song and dance in defining IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE,
and TRUTH.
(2) BAROMETER – Musicals absorb and reflect their surrounding culture and values BUT:
sometimes LEAD the way by crystallizing new perceptions into the communicative form
of popular art.
(3) PORTAL – Musicals provide both social history and a path to deeper SELF-KNOWLEDGE,
fuller IDENTITY, and greater COMMUNITY.
the promise of MORE to discover, be, express: again, that window on or threshold of UTOPIA.
5. Process
Returning to that dialectical principle of familiarity and freshness, the Musical is constantly revisiting
and revising its conventions, as it simultaneously animates and reanimates reality. The core template
of the BOOK MUSICAL—defining a Musical alternating song and dance with spoken word scenes—
most explicitly demonstrates this positive dynamic by exploring relationships between Narrative &
Numbers, and making Utopia a humanist, imminent, and so habitable place.
Getting a Leg Up: Occupying Utopia in Photographer Jordan Matter’s Dancers Among Us (2012)
(left), and our titular wanderer from the Broadway revival of Pippin (right).
The American Musical, then, embodies:
the PROCESS of Personal Identity and National Consciousness.
championing IDEALS & LIBERATION over perceived Limitations.
So we can approach and appreciate the genre as:
a form of ART, a state of MIND, and a way of LIFE.
Thus, forming:
a CULTURE
a PHILOSOPHY
and a WORLDVIEW.
Another Time, Another Prince:
The late Artist Formerly and Again Known
as Prince Makes the Connection
Between Inwardness and External
Expression Concrete in a Cathartic Number.
Magic to Do! Our Journey Begins…
Next Lesson: Musicals and Utopia.
Week One, Lesson Two: Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?
“AROUND THE CORNER / OR WHISTLING DOWN THE RIVER / COME ON,
DELIVER TO ME…”
“A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing.”
–Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891).
Utopia in Performance
Lesson 2 Examples run the gamut from expressions of individual aspiration, to communal experiences of shared anticipation or attainment, to a relationship established through music & dance, to the qualified utopianism of a bleaker, more forbidding present starkly contrasting the ideals of the
“green world”.
2.1 BELLE—Beauty and the Beast (2017)
2.2 WOULDN’T IT BE LOVERLY?—My Fair Lady (1956/clip 1958)
2.3 DANCING IN THE DARK—The Band Wagon (1953)
2.4 CLOSE EVERY DOOR–Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1981 NYC/
London/clip 1998)
Vocabulary
REALITY/UTOPIA
HESIOD (Greek poet, c. 800 BC)
UTOPIA (eu topos, “good place”)
DYER – FRYE – ARCADIA
“OKLAHOMO!” All theatrical and cinematic representations of human beings are more than uninflected mirrors: they carry social, cultural, sexual, political & economic meanings. Where expression is more pronounced (as through song & dance), those inscribed meanings—intentional or not—can be writ that much larger and assert themselves that much more forcefully (for good
or ill). So, do we experience heightened oppression and amplified bigotry in musical numbers,
or (alternately) LIBERATION from constricting and/or defining definitions of the self? Our Tim MILLER essay and this section takes the latter position. On a related note, the chapter excerpted from Gerald MAST restates a wider case for the genre’s significance as a whole.
1. Reprise: Why People Deride Musicals
Dismissed as clichéd, obvious, VULGAR, reductive, sentimental.
Can’t buy leap into conventions of song and dance.
Genre MISCONSTRUED as totally ESCAPIST—but that’s mistakenly looking simply
at surface CONTENT–Musicals engage us equally at the level of FORM or STRUCTURE.
2. A Defense
Musicals pass beyond verisimilitude or conventionally representational art into something higher, finer:
by exploiting their tension between REALITY and the ARTIFICIAL.
All theatre by definition works this polarity of reality and fiction, but MUSICALS, far from downplaying the paradox, highlight, sharpen and CELEBRATE it.
Here “ARTIFICE” is used not as a pejorative but as a distinct and vital plane of fantasy, imaginative
experience, deliberate theatricality—
Thus, Musicals are a potent mix of the LITERAL and LYRICAL, the ORDINARY and the EXTRA-ORDINARY.
Approaching the Green World: Paradise as a Physical Place or State of Being (right).
3. Opposites Attract
How can we reconcile such seemingly contradictory tendencies?
Through an opposition or tension between reality and UTOPIA—most frequently played out in
Musicals in the meeting of Narrative and Numbers (Song/Dance).
Utopia, a dream of perfection, or vision of change doesn’t have to be the ostensible SUBJECT
or THEME but remains a presence in the very FORM of musicals: It can be a literal theme but,
even where latent, a musical’s structure by definition challenges or transcends dull reality.
This vision that “Something’s Coming”, that we’ll all find our “Corner of the Sky” or be purified
in a “Purple Rain”, of superceding or escaping yourself or circumstances—
A sense of Promise, anticipation, hope—
is a fundamental PLEASURE PRINCIPLE seminal to the musical experience.
From Conflict to Concord: Peace Through Dance Marks the Works of Astaire & Rogers.
4. More Than a Feeling
Entertainment’s “utopianism” is LIBIDINOUS, SENSUAL, IMMEDIATE–
Its effect is on the level of our SENSIBILITY—less a literal map or guidebook than a sensory impression–so that should we ever arrive at literal UTOPIA, we’ll recognize the feeling. (Recalling Aristotle’s definition of the dramaturgical term anagnorisis, usually translated as “recognition”
but whose literal meaning is “to know again”.)
To repeat, the site of fruitful conflict starts at the level of FORM: Hamlet’s “mirror to nature” alternating with the MUSICAL NUMBERS, simultaneously offers a reflection of and a TRANSCENDENCE of common reality, speaking to the genre’s recurrent values of ENERGY, EMPOWERMENT & COMMUNITY.
5. Interlude: Dyer’s Distinctions—A Table
Despite its brevity, film historian Richard DYER’s 1991 essay “Entertainment and Utopia” immediately established itself as a seminal text in approaching the Musical globally well beyond the article’s tighter focus on Hollywood varietals, and has repeatedly informed both theoretical and practical discussions
for the last twenty-five years. We’ve drawn on several of his ideas up to this point, and will continue
to utilize his perspectives on the elements and significance of Musicals.
Dyer contrasts characteristics of reality (and so, a Musical’s book scenes or Narrative) with that
lyrical space of the Numbers as follows:
Narrative
Numbers
scarcity
abundance
exhaustion
energy
dreariness
intensity
manipulation
transparency
fragmentation
community
We can productively boil those five positive hallmarks to the triple-play of ENERGY, EMPOWERMENT & COMMUNITY introduced above (and visualized below).
Going Green: Eliza Doolittle Heads for Happiness on Stage & Screen.
6. Multiplicity
The formal DUALITY of Musicals (speech to song, behavior to dance) with those expressive
registers affirming PLURALITY (the multiple truths of both self and experience) form an image
of RENEWAL, of a more passionate, expressive and liberated self. Again, this effectively challenges
the concept of Western dualistic thought, which is founded on myths of a lost unity or wholeness,
with a predicate division (mind/body, flesh/spirit, thought/feeling, etc.) as our essential human condition.
As far as considering the conventional idea of “integration” being the evolution and goal of the form
of musicals, even in the most harmonious of unions of those primary elements (story, song, dance),
the DIFFERENCE between speech and song or behavior and dance is always evident: so it’s not just
a question of the employment of song and dance to serve the narrative, but the opposite, too!—it’s
a 2 way street—
The ANTI- or SUPER-realist conventions of the musical numbers shade into and INFLUENCE the realistic, more strictly representational narrative portions (in other words, song and dance have an impact on plot/story and the narrative conflicts). In short, entertainment can be a powerful medium
for helping us construct or manifest a utopian reality: by teaching us how to feel our way there — potentially, (to borrow a title from West Side Story) Something’s Coming, for real.
7. Green Colored Glasses
In summary, the virtual world of a musical number becomes a site for TRANSFORMATION and REGENERATION as described by critic NORTHROP FRYE as the “green world” in his famous
study, Anatomy of Criticism (1957) – for our purposes, as temporary glimpses, heralds, and foretastes
of paradise or UTOPIA.
“Go, Go, Go Joseph…You’ll Make It One Day!”
Next Lesson: We consider Utopianism’s flip side.
Week One, Lesson Three: Wouldn’t It Be Loverly? (cont.)
“STIll I always feel / This strange estrangement / Nothing here
is real / Nothing here is right”
“The hope feeds the criticism, the criticism the hope.”
–Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia (1970).
Lesson 3 Examples can serve as rebuttals to the attitude and assumptions of the previous section’s
examples, bringing stronger elements of wit, irony, critical intelligence & protest, even solemnity
and mourning to bear on the NUMBERS themselves.
3.1 GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Once More, With
Feeling” (TV, 2001)
3.2 IT’S THE HARD-KNOCK LIFE—Annie (1977/1982)
3.3 THERE’S GOTTA BE SOMETHING BETTER THAN THIS–Sweet Charity (1966/1969)
3.4 WHAT DO THE SIMPLE FOLK DO?—Camelot (1960/clip 1961)
Vocabulary
REALITY/UTOPIA
SIR THOMAS MORE
UTOPIA (ou topos, “no place”)
DYER – FRYE – AMBIVALENCE
Like Richard Dyer, we can read the Musical as an empowering genre fundamentally rooted in an experience of transcendence—of limitations on our expression and autonomy, of conventional definitions of the self, and of dramatic and theatrical verisimilitude. But there is a contrasting component to Musicals as well, which will serve as this section’s focal point.
Reprise
Musicals are founded on principles validating ENERGY, EMPOWERMENT, and COMMUNITY.
The Lyrical World of the NUMBERS can liberate us from both the Realist constraints of
spoken word drama, and the singular “reality” of a Musical’s NARRATIVE (or its Historicity,
meaning a fidelity to conventional time and space).
The UTOPIAN experience is inherent in Musical FORM or STRUCTURE. It may or may not
be reinforced in the CONTENT of any given Musical.
1. Utopia’s Shadow
The very concept of UTOPIA implies a strong critique of the present.
If UTOPIA is the symbol of human DESIRE or LONGING, a secularization of religion and
myth, then SATIRE is the secular form of ritual MOCKERY & RIDICULE.
So, SATIRE and UTOPIA are not really separable: the former a critique of the REAL WORLD
in the name of something better, the latter a hopeful construct or vision of A WORLD THAT
MIGHT BE, however qualified by acknowledging human nature.
Thus, the SACRED & the PROFANE are both included in UTOPIA itself, as well as in
those IDEAL & REAL expressive vocabularies of Musicals.
2. Arcadia vs. Ambivalence
Where the rhythm or dialectic of UTOPIAN Musicals is between a normal world (ostensible
reality) and a “green world” (the ideal realm), with the sincere UTOPIANISM of the
NUMBERS transforming the NARRATIVE, we inhabit the comic mode of ROMANCE.
But another relationship is possible, too, reflecting another model of comedy. Where the
GULF between NARRATIVE REALITY & MUSICAL NUMBERS asserts itself, we enter
the mode of SATIRE or IRONY. The difference is one of tone or perspective. Conceive of it
as a shift in emphasis, as with this play on titles of Man of La Mancha’s signature song, “The
Quest”: We journey from “The Impossible DREAM” to “The IMPOSSIBLE Dream.”
In the ironic mode, UTOPIAN TRANSCENDENCE becomes less assured, more diminished, transposed to a minor key, and subject to time, human nature and experience (unlike the
atemporal, purer landscape of traditional myth), as witnessed in Sir Thomas MORE’s classic
Utopia (1516) which coined the term and recognized its aspect of wish-fulfillment.
Where Utopian RELEASE appears more distant, its ILLUSORY nature can dominate, and
the “Reality Principle” of the NARRATIVE world and its conflicts bleed into and qualify
those rarer territories of the NUMBERS.
In other words, the fertile DREAM WORLD of our IMAGINATION collides with the
follies of the WORLD OF EXPERIENCE, resulting in a deeper presence of melancholy,
dissatisfaction, doubt, disappointment, cynicism, even DISILLUSIONMENT.
In brief, DYSTOPIA threatens UTOPIA. Such a contrast is blatant if we compare the last
two Hollywood Musicals to win Best Picture Oscars: Oliver! (1968) and Chicago (2002).
The combination of hope and skepticism makes this most American of genres expressive
of the full range of national characteristics, which can be defined as equal parts PASSION,
OPTIMISM, and IRONY.
3. Two Crucial Qualifiers
STILL, if UTOPIA contains its opposite, so does SATIRE. As Northrop Frye writes of Romance, its archetypal DESIRE “is not an escape from reality but the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate.” Or as the late Dale Wasserman’s Don Quixote puts
it in La Mancha, perhaps the greatest folly/insanity of all is “to see life as it is and not as it
should be.”
SO, as we trace that abiding motion between NARRATIVE & NUMBERS, even the Anti-
Utopian impulse in Musicals refuses complete submission or capitulation to existing
circumstances, but instead–because of those heightened vocabularies of SONG & DANCE–
remains an act (and crucially, for us as an audience, EXPERIENCE) of RESISTANCE.
4. Comparative Table with Lessons 2 & 3 Examples
Arcadian
Ambivalence
BELLE
GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS
WOULDN’T IT BE LOVERLY?
IT’S THE HARD-KNOCK LIFE
DANCING IN THE DARK
THERE’S GOTTA BE SOMETHING
BETTER THAN THIS
CLOSE EVERY DOOR
WHAT DO THE SIMPLE FOLK DO?
5. In Conclusion
The modes of ROMANCE/SINCERITY and IRONY/SATIRE are equal parts of the full Comic
spectrum, so these tonal perspectives in any given Musical aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive
but can contribute toward an overall complexity of the Musical form. It’s also not either a simple
contrast of “happy” vs. “sad” show, or a basic equation of compositional style (an up-tempo number
vs. a ballad, for example, or abrupt, angular movement vs. lyrical dance in choreography), but a
Musical can invest the relationship between NARRATIVE & NUMBERS with a great deal of
subtlety and layered meaning–again, as much communicated by the FORMAL elements, the STRUCTURAL components, as anything else (plot, character, theme, etc.). So formally, once more,
that UTOPIAN impulse (whatever the manner of its expression) seems fundamental to the genre.
Musical Sing-Alongs! Hmm…Am I Feeling More Sound of Music or Buffy?
Next Lesson: We explore Musicals in relation to the historical figures of Wagner and Brecht.
Week One, Lesson Four: Wouldn’t It Be Loverly? (cont.)
“THERE MAY BE TROUBLE AHEAD / BUT WHILE THERE’S MUSIC AND MOON-
LIGHT AND LOVE AND ROMANCE / LET’S FACE THE MUSIC AND DANCE”
“Any great work of art…revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success
is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world—the extent in which it invites
you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”
–Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music (1958).
Wagner, Brecht, and Musicals
Lesson 4 Examples cover the spectrum from “Wagnerian” holistic music-drama, to “Brechtian”
self-reflexiveness and deliberate irony employed (in varying degrees) to qualify both a unitary effect
and responses rooted in simple immersion.
4.1 PUT ON YOUR SUNDAY CLOTHES—Hello, Dolly! (1964/1969)
4.2 I WANT IT ALL–High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008)
4.3 FALLING SLOWLY—Once (Ireland, 2007/ NYC 2011)
4.4 HAPPY WORKING SONG—Enchanted (2007)
4.5 ELEPHANT LOVE MEDLEY—Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Vocabulary
INTEGRATION / INDEPENDENCE
IMMERSION / IRONY
WAGNER / GESAMTKUNSTWERK
BRECHT / VERFREMDUNG
ANDREA MOST / ASSIMILATION or INTERPLAY
Our Song So Far
Tim MILLER, Gerald MAST, Northrup FRYE and, particularly, Richard DYER have all provided valuable initial perspectives on the affective power of the Musical. On a cue from Dyer and drawing
on literary history and theory as relevant models, we can productively apply the concept of Utopia to the genre. This utopian component germane to Musicals can run the gamut from sincerity (the
romantic mode) to satire (the ironic mode) and all points in between. We’ve begun our course
journey, then, at the level of FORM over content, CONVENTIONS before their individual employ-ment, and GENERAL PRINCIPLES preceding specific application.
That structural foundation of negotiations between Narrative and Numbers is a genre convention
which carries its own experience, irrespective of content. In practice, the varied dynamics among
a Musical’s formal elements of scene, song and dance, and the genre’s core values of energy, empowerment and community, in conjunction with the wide range of potential relationships among
these discrete vocabularies, in the context of that embracing Utopian orientation (itself a pluralist
concept) combine to make the Musical’s “mirror to nature” both vivid and, on occasion, surprisingly complex.
1. A New Key
Shifting gears from literary to dramatic theory, we can locate two formal tendencies of American
Musicals: one in an antecedent of the genre and one exemplar of a rival approach emerging in
the era of the Musical itself.
2. The Antecedent: IMMERSION
From the world of 19th century OPERA, we can find the antecedent in the works of RICHARD WAGNER (1813-1883). His towering achievement is Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) or The Ring Cycle, a sequence of four music dramas, Das Reingold, Der Walkure (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods), which attempt the grandeur
and sweep of Greek Tragedy, draw on Norse mythology and have a strong echo in Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings.
Wagner’s aim was a heretofore unattained organic wholeness to Musical Theatre, with all
of the composite arts working together toward a single, overwhelming effect. Wagner’s
solution was to through-compose his music dramas, so that complete unity of expression through continuous music achieved his ideal of artistic “INTEGRATION”, contributing toward an experience
of IMMERSION in the work. Where American Musicals adopted selective elements of this “integrated” aesthetic, there still remained obvious difference between speech, behavior, song and dance but the abruptness was minimized through the collective efforts of composers, lyricists, bookwriters/librettists, directors, choreographers and designers to smooth the transitions and lend
a sense of cohesiveness to the whole. If not the “total theatre” of Wagner, then at least a more
consistent structural experience than had been the norm in American lyric theatre.
Here’s a representative quote by composer Richard Rodgers on the “integrated Musical”
or “MUSICAL PLAY” as it would come to be known–a label given works embracing wider subject matter than the simple love stories and topical humor of established MUSICAL COMEDY–and
that (most relevant to our present focus) attempted a degree of formal INTEGRATION that would
aid an audience’s suspension of disbelief.
“In a great musical, the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look.”
–Richard Rodgers (1975).
The self-conscious ambition to elevate the American Musical from the ragtag entertainments of
its humble origins into the rarified realm of high art is a legacy of Wagner’s idealism. From the top
of the 20th century, though, Musicals equally adhered to rival conventions that made no pretense
toward masking their disruptive elements. Why must scene, song and dance aspire toward harmony
in the first place? Isn’t there as pleasing an experience in the snap of maximizing their differences?
The INTEGRATION ideal, then, later dominating in the Rodgers and Hammerstein model will
redirect the structure, the composite relationships, and the appeal of musicals altogether. BUT–
3. The Contender: IRONY
In contrast to the Wagnerian model, playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) collaborated on several important music pieces including Rise and
Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930) and, most famously, The Threepenny Opera (1928), which champion the alternate view.
Brecht advocated for another style of Musical altogether. As we’ll see in coming weeks, the American Musical develops from popular forms of entertainment that maintain a sharp DIVISION between Narrative (Book) and Number. And many forerunners of the Musical have no book at all. Thus, with different goals, Brecht connects with a PRE-ROMANTIC concept of Musical Theatre, where—as the Brecht/Weill challenge is most specifically to reigning conventions of Opera–arias were clearly separated from recitative (melodic speech, a middle ground between speech and song often intended to smooth the transition) and favorite numbers could be interpolated and repeated without regard for dramatic logic. Brecht championed this model as a proven means of breaking the steady progress and cumulative power of classical opera in order to use music as a point of dramatic INTERRUPTION toward desired ends: in his case, to provide a fresh perspective on a dramatic
event or moment, make ironic commentary, or to draw attention to stock emotions which should be subject to rational argument.
“Words, music and setting must become more independent of one another.”
–Brecht, “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre” (1930).
Instead of the Wagnerian goal of organic harmony, Brecht advocated a style he labeled “Epic Theatre”–art that drew attention to its own artificiality, employing techniques of REFLEXIVITY
so the work could be recognized as a simulation–in Brecht’s hands, deliberately conceived for
a practical role in helping reform reality.
4. Wagner vs. Brecht: A Comparative Table
Gesamtkunstwerk
Verfremdung
engagement
estrangement
integration
dislocation
continuity
montage
identification
judgment
catharsis
commentary
Either approach has valid ambitions, while offering competing visions of the place and function of
art in our lives:
Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) had the lofty goal of empowering its audiences (“the folk”) through the majesty of art. To that end, its power lies in the WORK ITSELF.
Brecht’s Verfremdung (alienation, estrangement) privileges more immediate social
application, and (by drawing attention to its devices) its power lies in the PROCESS of art, with a sustained point of focus OUTSIDE of the work itself.
Music Drama for Wagner was effectively a new religion, and art a temple or sacred shrine. For Brecht, it was instead a practical laboratory and school for social research. Again, both valid ideals, but miles apart, and equally capable of misunderstandings (a fate repeatedly befalling both artists since their death).
So, carving these edifices down to manageable proportions, we might characterize these rival
directions as being founded on core structural principles of INTEGRATION and INDEPENDENCE.
5. The Mediator: INTERPLAY
There are certainly 20th century Musicals which are pure expressions of one model or the other,
but just as Utopianism can inform the genre in multiple ways, these models can be COMBINED
or joined in a dialogue or “dialectic” in their own right through Musicals simultaneously offering
In and Out: Musicals Exhibit Dialectical Tendencies of Identification and Distancing.
both a powerfully engaging experience and a healthy critical distance. Scholar Andrea Most
coins the term “ASSIMILATION EFFECT” as a necessary distinction for American Musicals
from both the Wagnerian “G-EFFECT” and the Brechtian “V-EFFECT”.
We can assimilate Most’s term for our own purposes to describe how a Musical achieves
A MARRIAGE OF CONTRARIES (“assimilating” both integration and independence) in works inspiring both identification and estrangement, or absorption and perspective. The “either/or”
practices of Wagner and Brecht can be reconfigured in a “both/and” relationship, resulting in a
hybrid or symbiotic form. Once again, on another level, plurality trumps division.
6. Comparative Table of Lesson 4 Examples
Immersion
Irony
PUT ON YOUR SUNDAY CLOTHES
I WANT IT ALL
Interplay
FALLING SLOWLY
HAPPY WORKING SONG
ELEPHANT LOVE MEDLEY
7. In Conclusion
Whether “Wagnerian” or “Brechtian”, Musical variants might be more properly defined as employing
those models of integration and independence which Wagner and Brecht expressed through their
practice. So while INTEGRATION and INDEPENDENCE are prominent structural modes for the
Musical, we can avoid a good deal of critical baggage by acknowledging the impact of Wagner and
Brecht but using these broader classifications in reference to our protean genre. Still, those purer, influential visions deserve our attention as precedents.
Next Lesson: We further examine the Musical’s combinations of scene, song, and dance.
Week One, Lesson Five: Putting It Together
HI, YOU HUGO! / [GOIN’ STEADY!] / HI, YOU STUPID! / [GOIN’ STEADY!] /
WHATJA WANNA GO GET PINNED FOR?
“Musicals not only show singing and dancing; they are about singing and dancing,
about the importance of that experience.”
–Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (1993).
Narrative Strategies in the Musical
Lesson 5 Examples demonstrate distinct combinations of Narrative/Numbers in a quintet of
musical openings, moving from conventional passages of scenes into songs and back again, to rival relationships privileging song and/or dance, to works establishing immersion/unity or irony/variety
as preferred vocabularies.
5.1 AN ENGLISH TEACHER & THE TELEPHONE HOUR—Bye Bye Birdie (1960/1995)
5.2 SIT DOWN, JOHN, PIDDLE, TWIDDLE AND RESOLVE & TILL THEN—1776
(1969/1972)
5.3 RUNYONLAND, FUGUE FOR TINHORNS & FOLLOW THE FOLD–Guys and Dolls
(1950/1955)
5.4 OH, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL MORNIN’—Oklahoma! (1943/1999)
5.5 WILLKOMMEN—Cabaret (1966/clip 1967)
Vocabulary
INTEGRATION/INDEPENDENCE
UNITY/VARIETY
ARISTOTLE (Greek philosopher, 4th c. BC)
Second Chorus (a recap)
DUALITY (Narrative/Numbers, for example) is a key structural feature of Musicals.
The genre’s DOUBLENESS is part of what defines its experience.
That dualism undergoes a metamorphosis resulting in reconciliation or SYNTHESIS.
This synthesis transcends division to affirm PLURALITY or MULTIPLICITY.
UTOPIAN affinities are founded in this process (and promise) of harmony or SYNERGY.
This transcendent, transformational process links Musicals to the concept of MIRACLES.
Relatedly, Musicals are inherently political in their expansiveness beyond NATURALISM.
So far, we’ve considered dualities broadly through the varied perspectives of literary theory
(UTOPIAN roots), film theory (DYER and MAST), and dramatic theory (those formal ideals of
WAGNER and BRECHT in addition to Tim MILLER’s thoughts on reception) which extend into
concepts of INTEGRATION and INDEPENDENCE, and can be further explored through those
models of IMMERSION, IRONY, and Andrea MOST’s inclusive concept of ASSIMILATION (INTERPLAY) as a hallmark of the genre.
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1. Focus
This section’s additions to our critical foundations will complement the readings to date by adding
adding some further theory into the mix, as we begin to narrow our focus by looking at some basic
strategies in applying those inaugural principles to Musical Dramaturgy. Throughout this scene, we’ll
address central issues of UNITY and VARIETY in the handling of NARRATIVE and NUMBERS:
What are some various employments of Musical conventions? What are possible relationships among
Musical elements, and what are the effects of altering the basic trajectory of scene into song into
dance? Most globally, in actual practice, do the Numbers simply inform or transform the Narrative
reality?
We’ll also consider CORE GENERIC CONVENTIONS of (a) SONG & DANCE; (b) CHORUS/
ENSEMBLE; and (c) THE ORCHESTRA (an element with its own voice, presence and impact).
2. The First Ten Minutes
“The purpose of the first ten minutes of any musical is not to challenge the audience but
to hook it so firmly it will stay hooked for half the first act. Then you can challenge away.”
–Arthur Laurents (2009).
Playwright, librettist, screenwriter and director Arthur Laurents (West Side Story, Gypsy, La Cage
aux Folles) stresses the vital importance of the first ten minutes of any show in establishing Setting,
Character, or Style (and, in the best openings, all three) and, in Musicals determining the basic
grammar: the vocabularies of both the material and production, the means by which story and
character will be served by genre conventions, and how and whether the audience will be engaged.
We will compare and contrast some notable openings for their respective approaches to (a) those
foundational Musical elements; as well as (b) associations with wider structural tendencies toward
UNITY or VARIETY–terms which are extensions of those recent contrasts between Immersion
& IRONY or Integration & INDEPENDENCE interpolated from Wagner & Brecht.
Divine Decadence!: Spectacle Commands the Stage in the Opening of Cabaret (1966).
3. Integration & Independence, Round 2: UNITY, VARIETY & ARISTOTLE
As we’ll explore in coming lessons, the Musical has a divided history in terms of decisive influences.
On the one hand, the styles of BALLAD OPERA, COMIC OPERA and OPERETTA gravitate
toward Wagnerian structure and point toward the “integrated” model ahead. On the other, popular entertainments of CIRCUS, MINSTRELSY, and VAUDEVILLE (all closer in alignment with
Brechtian values), employ another stable of techniques entirely.
Virtues of the UNITY model are a work which is balanced, hierarchical, centered, and oriented
toward closure or resolution. Dramas conceived on such principles are referred to as ARISTOTELIAN
after the Greek philosopher Aristotle, whose crucial (and foundational) work on dramatic theory,
Poetics (c. 335 BC), champions plays which honor Plot and Character above the element of
Spectacle. The VARIETY model, in contrast, proceeds in a NON-ARISTOTELIAN fashion, choosing
copiousness, expansiveness, blatant spectacle, and openness as essential parts of its rival toolkit.
The “legitimate” stage (meaning spoken-word drama) of the late Nineteenth Century (when the
American Musical is emerging as a genre) with its aspirations toward verisimilitude(“lifelikeness”),
ensemble acting, thematic consistency, and “4th wall” illusionism—all qualified but still viable enough
goals given our genre’s additions of music and dance–exerted its gravitational pull on the developing INTEGRATED Musical. The alternative VARIETY model measured success differently, champion-
ing ideals of effectiveness and virtuosity over logic, smoothness, and structural harmony.
Like Times Square’s “Crossroads of the World” Rival Aesthetics Can Also Be Points of Intersection.
So if traditional, unified narratives develop horizontally, with part of our enjoyment tied to
an awareness of one sequence building on the next, the Variety model proceeds more VERTICALLY
(each element for itself). Its individual units (in Musicals, story/song/dance) assume no obligation to
Advancing a horizontal action (such as plot, character or thematic development). In place of a through-
line, Varietyoffers a series of discrete isolated experiences that may contribute toward an overarching
fit while still denying the supremacy of any linear, cause-and-effect narrative.
4. Comparative Table of Structural Orientations
Unity
Variety
integration
independence
representation
reflexivity
linearity
verticality
story
spectacle
containment
freedom
5. Aristotelian vs. Non-Aristotelian Drama
As with all previous applied relationships—NARRATIVE/NUMBER, REALITY/UTOPIA, ARCADIA/AMBIVALENCE, IMMERSION/IRONY, INTEGRATION/INDEPENDENCE—such
absolutes can blend in practice, and even the most tightly-wound, INTEGRATED Musical (with its
ties to ARISTOTLE & WAGNER and expressing the UNITY model) may contain components which
appear to head in that contrary direction (and vice versa). So, overall tendencies, not the artificial
purity of a hermetically-sealed theoretical form, should serve as our analytic yardstick.
It’s important to bear in mind, then, that those polarities from Dyer’s seminal table in “ENTERTAIN- MENT AND UTOPIA”—Scarcity vs. Abundance; Exhaustion vs. Energy; Dreariness vs. Intensity; Manipulation vs. Transparency; Fragmentation vs. Community—can, through alternate means and
with contrasting emphases, equally inform both Musical dramaturgies (structural features).
Ensemble Stylings: Birdie’s “Telephone Hour” c. 1960 & the Mythic NYC of Guys and Dolls.
6. A Final Thought on the EXPERIENCE of Musical Elements Irrespective of Orientation
From opposite directions, both the UNITY and VARIETY models acknowledge our human instinct
for discovering patterns. In that way, neither approach is superior, more sophisticated or valuable than
the other. Each conveys distinct impressions of art’s mirrors while affording its own particular pleasures.
7. Running the Numbers
In threading our class examples to date, let’s take a moment to review the potential functions of Song and Dance in a Musical:
* establish mood, tone, atmosphere, rhythm
* define setting
* set a style
* propel plot
* identify characters, relationships
* embody themes
* replace dialogue
* mark significant points in action
* heighten and compress action
* crystallize a dramatic moment or emotion
* bring inner life to the surface
* provide commentary or relief
* generate comedy
* effect transitions
* engage through spectacle
* expand the diegetic frame
* unify a work
* lend variety
Quite a diverse dramatic and theatrical arsenal for elements which are often taken for granted as self-evident or dismissed as merely decorative additions!
Figures Welcoming Us into the Contrasting Worlds of Oklahoma! and Cabaret.
Next Lesson: We continue tracing the diverse relationships between Narrative and Numbers.
