The Musical as Drama

action. “With Your help, I’m starving to death,” Tevye says to the Lord in scene 2. “You made many, many poor people. I re- aliz ...

is hurled through Schultz’s window the day after he is recog- nized as Jewish), the Emcee does a vaudeville turn with a go- rill ...

The Assassins’ narrator is forced out of the action too. In scene 15, as he tries to moralize about America as a country where t ...

overdone? The reason lies in the doubling up of all-knowing forces—the orchestra in the pit, where omniscience belongs, and the ...

dency to be through-sung. The director Trevor Nunn dates the change from Evitain 1978, and credits the government- subsidized co ...

As that number ended, the curtains opened to reveal Fred As- taire and the Boys stillsinging and dancing “High Hat” back in the ...

Nevertheless, the theatre will use its new technology and the set does not have to run away with the show. South Pacificwas one ...

In Les Misérables, to choose a contrasting example, when the tables and chairs from the tavern scene slide together to form the ...

of the source that is involved, along with the reinvention of the original narrative. The stage director Nicholas Hytner has sai ...

does not lie behind this musical but is actually represented in the musical, taking shape as a tableau before our eyes. This mig ...

Seurat is long dead at the beginning of act 2. His great- grandson is there instead. The new George cannot get his mod- ernistic ...

scenic effects, and as the figures of the Seurat painting return to the stage, standing in different places this time, a sort of ...

scenes. But they are not omniscient. Omniscience is for the or- chestra, unless the orchestra is placed on the stage. These are ...

opera in its comic scenes of rehearsal of the so-called “Hanni- bal” and performance of the so-called “Il Muto.” Scornful of wha ...

but is being turned into twentieth-century computerized tech- nology, and this is smart thinking about the craft of theatre. Wit ...

Phantom in this regard like other people? Is he different? What lies behind his mask, and how can Christine and the au- dience r ...

you are not alone... Whereupon “she kisses him long and full on the lips” while the orchestra plays gorgeously in approval. But ...

This seems promising, as though it might be a recognition scene for the Phantom too. But he has no response. Instead, there bein ...

Lucy’s earlier “Alms” motif. This is a deliberate “clash” (Sond- heim’s word for it) among reprised segments of earlier songs, a ...

Nor ten men, Nor a hundred Can assuage me— I will have you! The final line—“And I’m full of joy!”—is the musical climax of the r ...