The Musical as Drama

The film musical is now gaining a valid aesthetic form of its
own. Through most of its history it has served a long appren-
ticeship as second way of re-presenting successful stage musi-
cals, as when the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals were
turned into film versions. But the film musical is now finding
its unique aesthetic basis, and although the topic lies beyond
the scope of this book, we are in position to relate musical
drama to the central difference between theatre and film. The
difference between theatre and film is that theatre occurs in a
series of events in a single space, the stage, where the vulnera-
bility of the performers is visible, and film occurs as a series
of events photographed and screened, where the vulnerability
of the performers is rendered irrelevant. A film is a system of
technological omniscience in the first place, and questions of
human agency cluster around the director and the film crew,
those who manage the system of technology.
The stage itself, basic to theatre and irrelevant to film, is a
key element in the distinction at hand. This can be seen imme-
diately in musicals which exist in both theatre and film ver-
sions. The theatre version of Phantom of the Operauses the
physical stage sensationally, turning the same space into the
Paris Opera or the lake-and-lair hideaway that the Phantom
occupies five levels beneaththe Paris Opera, and at times that
space is identified with the stage of the theatre in which we are
watching all this showmanship, the one in which the Phantom
prowls about behind us or above us. Now that Phantomhas
become a film musical (I am not speaking of the old Phantom
films that were sources for the theatre version but of the 2004
film that was made of the musical), we can see that as the stage
ceases to be relevant, the space of performance becomes a lim-
itless series of photographed locations, now a dressing room of
the opera house, now the basement lair of the Phantom, and so
on, each capable of close-ups, reverse shots, and unexpected
angles. Gone is the concentration of all locations onto one
stage. This is a difference, not a loss. The result is that any-
wherecan be projected by the film and the audience will be
there to receive it, for the audience assumes it is anywhere,
too. In the theatre, the audience is somewhere, often somewhere

174 CHAPTER SEVEN