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 for the
theory of the integrated musical. The number still has its own
structure and its own time scheme, but because it is called for
in the book, it seems to be integrated into book time. The
most famous opening song in a musical, “Oh, What a Beautiful
Morning,” from Oklahoma!, is a diegetic number. It is famous
because it begins offstage as an a capella solo, challenging the
usual chorus opening of Broadway shows, as we saw in the pre-
vious chapter. It is diegetic because Curly is singing it to be
heard as a song within the book. Cowboys sing on fine morn-
ings like this, we are to understand. Aunt Eller, churning but-
ter out in the yard on this fine morning, hears the offstage
song just as we hear it in the audience. A smile crosses her face.
She knows it is Curly, and in a few seconds, there he is, onstage
and singing what passes for a cowboy song.^2
My argument that numbers are set off from the book by
virtue of their different order of time needs to take the diegetic
104 CHAPTER FIVE
(^1) Diegeticoriginally meant “narrative” and was opposed to “mimetic” in
Plato, a distinction that becomes “somewhat neutralized” in Aristotle (Gen-
ette, Narrative Discourse, p. 163). See also Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism,
Anti-Theatricality, and Drama,pp. 22–28. Film theory has changed the mean-
ing: the diegetic is everything that falls within the frame of the shot. Borrow-
ing from this, recent narrative theory applies the term to the world in which
the narrated events occur. The two meanings are distinguished in Prince, A
Dictionary of Narratology, p. 20. If a scene in an opera calls for an aria to be per-
formed as part of the fiction (as happens in the party scene of Eugene Onegin,
for example), this can be called a diegetic aria, as opposed to arias that arise ap-
parently spontaneously from impassioned characters. The diegetic convention
in musicals is discussed by Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, pp. 184–87.
Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century, p.
5, uses “phenomenal performance” instead of “diegetic.” Here is her defini-
tion: “a musical or vocal performance that declares itself openly, singing that is
heard by its singer, the auditors on stage, and understood as music that they
(too) hear by us, the theatre audience.”
(^2) The flatted seventh that occurs on the first syllable of “morning” in the
title phrase marks this as a cowboy song reimagined for the St. James Theatre
on 44th Street in New York City. Riggs used the real thing as the opening for
Green Grow the Lilacs: “Get Along Little Doggies.”