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The Musical as Drama (review)

2007; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mdr.2007.0034

1712-5286

John M. Clum,

Music History and Culture

Reviewed by: The Musical as Drama John M. Clum Scott Mcmillin . The Musical as Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi+230, illustrated. $24.95 (Hb). Early on in his intriguing study of The Musical as Drama, the late Scott McMillin calls for "a poetics of the stage musical" that accepts and celebrates its origins in American popular music and theatrical forms (14). In essence, this is what his book offers. McMillin refutes the commonly accepted claim that integration is the key word in discussing and assessing musicals. In other words, McMillin correctly asserts that Wagner's theory of Gesamtkunstwerk has been misapplied to this hybrid American form in an attempt to make it more artistically respectable and to deny its pop roots. McMillin argues that, even when the musical might seem integrated, it is defined by the incongruity of spoken dialogue and musical number: "When a musical is working well, I feel the crackle of difference, not the smoothness of unity" (2). The musical is built on the difference between speech and song, because of which the musical exists in two orders of time: the progressive time of the plot and the repetitive time of the songs. Songs, after all, are built on both musical and verbal repetition. The very formula of the typical AABA show tune (the first line repeated, then followed by a new musical idea, which is followed by a variation on the first line) is built on repetition, as are its lyrics (think, for instance, of the repetition built into songs like "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin"' or "I Got Rhythm"). McMillin argues convincingly for the continuity of the history of the musical from the more frivolous entertainments of the 1920s rather than seeing a radical change with the opening of Oklahoma in 1943. Therefore, Rodgers and Hammerstein, often credited with being the fathers of the integrated musical, are praised only for an "enlargement of the kinds of book the musical could take up, and not [. . . for] a transformation of the musical into a quasi-operatic form" (21). However "operatic" something like the bench scene between Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan in Act One of Carousel might seem, it is still a compilation of show tunes connected by underscoring of the dialogue. The key word in McMillin's argument is not integration; it is coherence, "different elements holding simultaneously together without losing their differences" (73). Basing our understanding of the musical on difference rather than integration changes our notions of the function of song and of the creation of character in a musical. For McMillin, "Most songs and dances do not further characterization, they change the mode of characterization - difference again" (8). The numbers turn characters' motivations and innermost feelings into forms of entertainment. Musical characters live in the two worlds of the book and the song and dance [End Page 297] numbers and present both worlds as real and normal. We in the audience accept this doubling as we accept the doubling of character and performer in any play. The musical is even more dependent on the exhilaration of performance. The minute a character sings, she becomes a performer as well as a character, and the audience responds to the performance as much as, often more than, the character and narrative. What holds the disparate elements of the musical together is the orchestra. Here is the one area where McMillin accepts the relevance of Wagner's theories to the musical, "not the unity of all elements, but the omniscience of the orchestra" (127). Whether visible, as in Cabaret or the Walter Bobbie-directed revival of Chicago, the orchestra provides the continuity between book and number. It is also "the agent that always knows what is coming and never misunderstands a character or a turn of the plot" (127). It even knows what is going on in the minds of the characters. McMillin elaborates his argument through extended discussions of moments in a handful of musicals he considers classics: Oklahoma, Lady in the Dark, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Cabaret, A Chorus Line, and Sunday in the Park with George. While his emphasis is on the musical as drama, he has a solid...