around which one can think about the musical as a form of
art. My chapters are not primarily about Kern or Rodgers and
Hammerstein or the Gershwins. They are primarily about the
orchestra, or the book and the numbers, or the chorus line—
elements one takes for granted as the conventions of the show.
Conventions are things we rarely think about, and our taking
them for granted renders invisible the aesthetic work that is al-
ways going on. To study the aesthetics of an art form is to stop
taking things for granted and to start thinking about the as-
sumptions that shape our interests. I want to know what those
interests are, not in order to say “I like this” but in order to say
what it is I like in terms that belong to the staging of the drama
itself, its books and numbers, its songs and dances, its routines.
There is even a bit about the curtain and how it was used in
what theatre people used to know as “in one” staging. That is
an aesthetic matter, too.
If there seems to be a stretch between the specific elements
of theatre practice and the aesthetics of musical drama, that is
intended. Thinking about the practices and experiences of real
theatre has convinced me that the theory usually applied to the
musical overlooks the most important feature of the dramatic
genre. The important feature is the incongruity between book
and number, between what I describe as two orders of time,
the progressive time of plot and the repetitive time of music,
yet the theory that usually attends the musical would iron out
this incongruity in the name of integration. Integration holds a
tremendous theoretical position in regard to opera, but the
musical is not a stepchild of opera, opera manqué, opera that
does not make the grade but gets sidetracked into popular en-
tertainment. The musical is a dramatic genre of its own, and in
order to put solid ground under this point, I have turned to
theorists and philosophers who spent much time themselves
in real theatres. Richard Wagner, Bertolt Brecht, and Søren
Kierkegaard are guideposts to the theoretical argument—
Wagner on the side of integration in full-blown opera, Brecht
and Kierkegaard on the side of disjunction between book and
number in the musical.
In my courses on musical theatre at Cornell University,
x PREFACE