The Musical as Drama

because they define a dance space to be transgressed and come
as close as possible to transgressing it without losing a step.
The band pavilion for “Isn’t It a Lovely Day” in Top Hatand
the railed dance floor for “Pick Yourself Up” in Swing Timeare
such spaces, and “Pick Yourself Up” even does transgress the
space when Fred and Ginger leap the rails, go beyond the
limit, then dance back into the space. Even when they dance in
a nightclub, as in “Cheek to Cheek” in Top Hat, they fill the
entire dance area with their movement and grace, hinting that
they have mastered this space and are on the verge of dancing
beyond it. Fred’s gimmick dances, such as the wall and ceiling
dances in Royal Wedding, show the same tendency to let the
dancing master the space by which it is confined. But the con-
fining space has to be there, and when a film merely roams
about in its “on location” freedom, dancing can seem ground-
less and uninteresting.
The film musical had to find its own spatiality. So long as it
depended on the Astaire-Rogers use of dance floors or the on-
location way of filming “real” spaces, it was trying to imitate
the stage musical instead of finding conventions within the
medium itself. Advances have now occurred. The space of the
musical film has come to be interiorized, as though the eye or
the dream or the hallucination were the location of the musical
element. The film of Chicagois a case in point, for it transfers
its musical numbers into Roxie’s fantasy life and rejects the use
of the stage space in the theatre version. The theatre version
makes the stage into a nightclub, with show business serving
as a metaphor for the system of justice in Chicago. Velma and
most of the other imprisoned women are aware that they are in
show business, with the lawyer Billy Flynn as their stage man-
ager and leading performer. One woman never understands
the metaphor—Hunyak, the Hungarian, who believes in truth
instead of show business and is hanged. Roxie Hart does not
grasp the show business metaphor at first, but she catches on
once Billy Flynn works her over (the precise moment of her
new understanding is “We Both Reached for the Gun,” in
which Billy turns her into a dummy and they put on what is ac-
tually an old vaudeville routine). So the stage on which the

176 CHAPTER SEVEN