The Musical as Drama

travesty of the private self touches us and makes us want to join it. The torch song like “The Man I Love” that gets out of its ...

the song better than Alexis Smith could.^9 Alexis Smith was then to do a mock striptease, “Ah, But Underneath,” in which Phyllis ...

also reached the end. Buddy makes a remark about what will happen “tomorrow,” and Sally, seeing the morning light in the window, ...

Discomfort The composer and lyricist Michael Friedman, writing in the London Review of Books, has recently asked why the musical ...

ing the first London production of Companyin 1972, Hobson wrote: “It is extraordinary that a musical, the most trivial of theatr ...

AABA is a trivial form—commonplace, found everywhere, the sort of thing Hobson would have been ready to write off when a musical ...

scenes I have mentioned political in design, but these instances of multiplied self that put power off balance bear on Brecht’s ...

principles of difference that we have been finding at the heart of the genre. Political Drama: Cabaretand Pacific Overtures Let ...

were both fast asleep.”^14 That is what Cliff is writing on the train. Christopher Isherwood wrote better prose than this, but t ...

cabaret, a metaphor for Nazism on the rise, and then leave it behind as though one were free of the experience. We have been in ...

their soil, the Japanese have rigged a gangway of straw mats leading into the Treaty House. The mats and the floorboards are to ...

reach its own form of closure, through the kinds of repetition that lyric is capable of, and when the three singers join in thei ...

goes without saying—for that is the show we are seeing at this moment, an American show that pretends to be created from a Japan ...

These numbers stop the show. “Someone in a Tree” stops it because it surrounds a book scene that is not there, a turning point t ...

The other side of “Your Turn” is “Next,” the Westernized rock-and-roll extravaganza with which the show ends.^19 The entire comp ...

crucial book scene from our view and supplies a boy singing in a tree about the scene he cannot see either, for the benefit of h ...

the form. Integration is a political word too, and it means some- thing different from coherence. Integration means the blend- i ...

mance. These shows push in the direction of aesthetic in- tegration, and their political implications are imbued with conservati ...

the momentum of greatness in the plays of August Wilson. Many of the conventions we have been discussing for the mu- sical are a ...

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