vulnerable, and the danger of failure adds to the excitement of
their performances.^1
It can be a costly mistake to disturb this balance by having
an infalliblecharacter on the stage as a second source of om-
niscience. If there is to be an approach to omniscience, it is
to be the orchestra’s approach. This is one of the sharpest
distinctions between opera and the musical. Through-sung
nineteenth-century opera can double the orchestra’s role by
building omniscient narration into the action, as in Lohengrin,
where the hero’s narration in act 3 is the dramatic climax.
The drive toward unification in Wagnerian opera can at the
same time be a drive toward omniscience occurring both on
the stage and in the orchestra pit. If all is to be one in the the-
ory of the form, omniscience running through the elements of
the work is a logical outcome. This is a totalizing drive that the
musical resists in its book-and-number format. The musical
relies on song-and-dance performances to stop the show, bring
the book to pause, and skirt the dangers of fallibility in their
disruptive performance.
Thus an omniscient narrator is out of place in a musical, and
any other kind of character who “knows everything” is equally
inappropriate. The classic case of the all-knowing character
troubling a musical is the psychoanalyst in Lady in the Dark,
who puts Liza Elliott through the talking cure and understands
her problem thoroughly—he even cures her. The psychoana-
lyst is the dead hand at the center of this bold show, because
he lacks the fallibility of musical performance. He never sings
or dances. Lyric time is beyond him. He cannot be imagined
singing or dancing. Because he knows everything, he has no
enlargement into song or dance, nothing musical to be fallible
about. His only text lies in the book. The riskiness of the num-
ber is beyond him, and there is nothing that he cannot reduce
to psychoanalytic explanation.
God poses problems for musicals on this score. Fallible gods,
like the Greek Olympians Rodgers and Hart wrote about in
150 CHAPTER SEVEN
(^1) This quality of live performance is fully described in States, Great Reckon-
ings in Little Rooms, and Goldman, The Actor’s Freedom.