The Musical as Drama

“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 numbers are like the Salvation Army number in one re-
spect: they are called for by the book and are diegetic. The
women who sing them have another mode of song in prospect,
the out-of-the-blue mode, and this other mode leads to what is
presented as a better life, getting married.
Their love duets are out of the blue. Sky Masterson and
Miss Sarah Brown have two out-of-the-blue duets. We have al-
ready discussed the first, “I’ll Know” (chapter 3), the one they
sing before they know they are in love. Later, after they know,
they sing “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” the only love duet
sung on the streets of New York at 4 a.m. after a couple has
been on a bender in Cuba and the man has proved his worth
by not taking advantage of the woman. (While in Cuba, Miss
Sarah Brown burst into her tipsy song, “If I Were a Bell,”
strictly out of the blue, and she and Sky got into a dance brawl
with the Cubans that was strictly diegetic.) The duet is intro-
duced by Sky’s gorgeous out-of-the-blue interlude, “My Time
of Day,” an unexpectedly introspective and chromatic medita-
tion that leads into the more conventional “I’ve Never Been in
Love Before.” These are both out-of-the-blue numbers.
Miss Adelaide’s love duet with Nathan Detroit also comes
from out of the blue. This is from an episode we looked at in
chapter 2, when Adelaide mistakenly thinks Nathan is lying
about going to a prayer meeting. She motors along in her
characteristic triplets (Miss Adelaide’s “note” as a character is
to project her energy and volubility through musical triplets),
complaining that she has given the best years of her life to this
no-goodnik before her, and the no-goodnik turns the argu-
ment into a love duet with his refrain, “So sue me, sue me,
shoot bullets through me, I love you.” They never do sing the
same lyric together in this song, but the comic alternation be-
tween their modes shows that they are a match. They are
speaking for themselves, bursting into song, showing an extra
range of spontaneous expressiveness. Not just love duets but
any kind of number can come from out of the blue. When
gamblers from across the country gather on Broadway to sing

THE DRAMA OF NUMBERS 113