The Musical as Drama

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 ...

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 ...