The Musical as Drama

dance, while Candidediffused its satire into narrative conven- tions, which never work well in musicals. Both of these con- vent ...

The number that demonstrates this chilling reversal of the Broadway convention is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” Kander and Ebb’s ver ...

himself ) catch sight of the funeral procession from their win- dow. They don’t know who has died. Sally does not care. Chris ca ...

in the musical, a prostitute named Elsie. Elsie gave Sally Bowles this number and then achieved her place in memory when she die ...

show, a basic convention of the musical is being turned around. The final episode of Companyputs the ensemble out of the pic- tu ...

for Bobby might be taken to mean that the ensemble possibil- ity drains away, but Companycannot end with Bobby singing alone. Ev ...

member of an ensemble to have his own integrity and dreams.”^16 It is true that the musical offers temptations toward that inter ...

She walks into a room and you know She’s uncommonly rare, very unique, Peripatetic, poetic, and chic— In fact, this sensational ...

reflexivity does create a kind of integrated musical, but not the kind that is usually meant by that term. This is not the seam- ...

Chapter Five THE DRAMA OF NUMBERS The Diegetic Convention A Chorus Line’sway of dramatizing a convention of musi- cal theatre it ...

is already about the performance of numbers. True, but I think there is more to it than that. Many songs are called for by the b ...

someone has a song to sing, according to the book, and goes ahead and sings it.^1 The diegetic number would seem to work wonders ...

convention into account. If numbers are lyrical inserts that bring book time to a pause, what about numbers that are called for ...

The main issue is to see and hear this tune to its ending, as it becomes an ensemble performance by the black characters and the ...

And the number that made it happen did intentionally put the blues elements into the pop-song format for Julie to sing. The cond ...

By the end everyone onstage is dancing. The shuffle has rep- etitions of its own, the body in motion with or without the words. ...

Barbra Streisand, and a further list of singers, a triumph of detachability within the show and in the song’s long after- math.^ ...

themselves through repetition—lifts the song to another layer of reference above the normal agony of being “about” love, or “abo ...

the rain,” and “the rain it raineth every day.”^7 Lyrics to show tunes do not often become so intricate. Hollander would call th ...

good show tunes have their own structures of repetition and refrain, waiting for a good singer to do something with them. Out-of ...