With actual shepherd
On top.Sondheim’s superb sense of rhyme makes it certain that the
versifying of Ira Gershwin, E. Y. Harburg, and Cole Porter is
alive and capable of being challenged. This combination of two
climactic numbers, the comic one overtaking the serious one,
shows the musical’s finest quality, the quality of pursuing the
implications of its own book with the verbal and musical glee
that numbers can attain. Phantom of the Operaloses track of its
turning point episodes in its penchant for technology, but here
the turning point is being dramatized through conventions ba-
sic to the musical form. The incongruity between these num-
bers is drastic and delightful. “Turning the coin from melo-
drama to farce” is Stephen Banfield’s way of describing the
combination, just a few sentences before he comments on the
“operatic” nature of the refrain in “A Little Priest,” which is a
music-hall tune.^22 None of these terms is wrong. Melodrama
and farce, music hall and opera—the genres of musical theatre
are all operating in the same world, yet the world seems coher-
ent and exciting because of the incongruities of its design.
The Film Musical: Two Chicagos
I dwell on the Lloyd-Webber and Sondheim shows in order to
illustrate the principles of the musical in one negative and one
positive example, but there is a further issue in that the negative
example is a major phenomenon in the modern musical and
cannot be dismissed simply on grounds that it is overtechnolo-
gized. The technological musical plays a large role in modern
culture, and in saying that it fails to accord with the aesthetic
principles that make the stage musical important, I also wish to
suggest that it falls into agreement with the aesthetic principles
of a different form of musical drama, the film musical.
NARRATION AND TECHNOLOGY 173
(^22) Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, p. 307. Foster Hirsch spots the
music-hall tune, in Harold Prince and the American Musical Theatre, p. 127.