The Musical as Drama

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 ...

“Take Back Your Mink” and “A Bushel and a Peck” belong to a milieu different from that of “Follow the Fold,” but the night- club ...

an anthem in four-part harmony about “The Oldest Estab- lished Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York,” the num- ber comes fro ...

women not by means of dialogue in a book scene but by means of shared music in the numbers they perform. This sharing of musical ...

Antipholus, who has come to town unbeknownst to anyone. She thinks it is her husband. Romance is going haywire. This splendid va ...

let, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” There is a further diegetic problem that has to be solved before this number can be com- plete ...

musical theatre. Everything clicks into focus, the lyric is sud- denly clear, the precision moves of the line are perfect. This ...

six, seven, eight” turning into “one, two, three, four” over a sustaining and open harmonic structure without the pauses by whic ...

with other Weill/Gershwin songs is better than most plots in the legitimate theatre, which have no Weill/Gershwin songs at all.^ ...

Figure Gertrude Lawrence in the Wedding Dream from the original production of Lady in the Dark . Billy Rose Theatre Collection ...