The Musical as Drama

form a song of its own. It raises the expectation of a song, but it sustains the drama by underscored segments in the meantime. ...

The musical exchanges are fundamental to the drama being enacted here. Magnolia is showing that she can play a love match with G ...

friend has found as a boyfriend ( Julie proves he is a common porter). The result in the episode between Julie and Liliom (the b ...

structure halfway through and keeps the expectation alive that the real number is still in the offing. The bench scene is one of ...

orchestra. When it finally arrives, the “Mr. Snow” song has great piquancy. The way is prepared for something solemn and grand, ...

the popular song formats and arranged into a kind of avenue that leads to song or that connects one song to another. The avenues ...

giving voice to the same music the orchestra is leading into, this long series of segments that promises a song and then fi- nal ...

motif, a descending A-major triad ending on a D-sharp, that will have consequences in later numbers, but we don’t know that yet. ...

require words, just music and the dancing body. Dance can use words, but it does not have to.^9 The opening of West Side Storyis ...

Figure “The Rumble,” from the original production of W est Side Story . Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Lib ...

Where is the music? It no longer seems to be accompaniment. It seems to be the dance itself. This opening dance number has great ...

is the opening of “Somewhere,” an AABA song. Such uprisings of song out of musical cells are basic to West Side Story, a lesson ...

They are the same.” Who says this line, who says that matters less than the saying, for dancing has become the relationship of T ...

146 CHAPTER SIX only to use this convention most of the time but also to deflate it on special occasions. Let us look at some of ...

make a mistake). The onstage players are coming out of the omniscience of the pit orchestra, where a mistake is awful but cannot ...

accompaniment for the other scenes. Cabaretis a brilliant musi- cal because of its revision of basic conventions. What do they k ...

Chapter Seven NARRATION AND TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS OF OMNISCIENCE The Character Who Knows Everything I Fthe onstage orchestra puts t ...

vulnerable, and the danger of failure adds to the excitement of their performances.^1 It can be a costly mistake to disturb this ...

By Jupiter, or Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash in One Touch of Venus, can be delightful in song and dance, because they have little cl ...

piece of awkwardness not entirely solved in the revised versions of the 1970s and 1980s, which divides the role into Voltaire (n ...