The Musical as Drama

make a mistake). The onstage players are coming out of the
omniscience of the pit orchestra, where a mistake is awful but
cannot be seen, and entering the area of vulnerability, the stage,
where a mistake doubles up on disaster by being visible.
For a diegetic orchestra that really plays, there is nothing
finer than the conclusion of Meredith Willson’s The Music
Man,where the youngsters of an Iowa town try to play Mozart’s
Minuet in G on band instruments, although they have not had
the lessons that Harold Hill has promised. They are an awful
diegetic band for a minute. Their mistakes are part of the plot,
and their parents are thrilled over the inept performance—at
last these kids are focused on something worthwhile. Then
comes the curtain call, and (as the show is best staged) the entire
cast, young and old, come out dressed in band uniforms, play-
ing “Seventy Six Trombones” on their own instruments. They
are suddenly good! Only those who can actually do it are play-
ing the horns, of course, but who knows if they all might not be
doing it? The diegetic band has now enlarged to the convention
of the curtain call, and Harold Hill’s ability to build confidence
in people has actually worked to the full. These actors can play!
No doubt they are being supported by the brass players in the
unseen pit band, too, but I confess that I have never thought to
look into this, always being absorbed in the curtain call, where
the “Seventy Six Trombones” number is refashioning a basic
convention of theatre, the curtain call. There almost seem to be
seventy-six trombones in this curtain call. It is a large cast.
Return now to orchestras onstage for the entire show. The
musical that made the onstage orchestra into a telling aesthetic
effect was Cabaret. The orchestra in Cabaretbelongs to the Kit
Kat Club and thus has a diegetic relation to the club’s scenes. But
for the scenes in other parts of Berlin, the orchestra belonging
to the Kit Kat Club can provide normal accompaniment for the
numbers, as though it were omniscient. The players are onstage
and are rather seedy, but they have the strange power to accom-
pany scenes elsewhere. Like the Emcee of the cabaret, who also
seems to know what is going on elsewhere, the orchestra has an
eerie authority that comes from its contradictory standing, as
diegetic accompaniment in the Kit Kat Club and as nondiegetic

THE ORCHESTRA 147