The Musical as Drama

of the illegitimate theatre, the Broadway posse. Teenagers in
America testify to this experience, as can be seen in recent ret-
rospective books by John Clum, D. A. Miller, and Stacy Wolf.
All three books are also about growing up gay—the appeal of
double-coding in the subversive format of musicals is a power-
ful draw. Everyone who is drawn to the musical should listen
to these books, for they are urgent accounts that can tell any-
one what lies at the heart of the illegitimate theatre itself: it
is not the gayness, or not only the gayness; it is the double-
coding and the subversion and the repetition. The philoso-
pher, the gays, the teenagers testify that low-class theatre will
have its way with us, and readers who are old, straight, and
nonphilosophical will have their own versions of being carried
away. Kierkegaard knew that these experiences come about
through repetition, which is what gives the musical its lift, its
deepening, its ability to enter the second order of time, which I
have called lyric time.
Constantin Constantius especially wants to see the popular
comics Beckmann and Grobecker again and again. The comic
Beckmann draws attention because of his pantomime ability
and his unrestrained dancing. He has the ability to conjure up an
entire environment by his way of walking: “with his little bundle
on his back, his walking-stick in his hand, carefree and indefati-
gable, he is capable of coming on the stage with the street-
urchins following him—which one does not see” (pp. 163–64).
He is like Chaplin for later writers, a story in himself, thanks to
his walk and his props. He is supposed to be playing an appren-
tice on the road, but really he is an “incognito in which dwells
the mad demon of laughter.” The demon is released when he
dances. “He is now beside himself. The madness of laughter
within him can no longer be contained.” Bergmann releasing
the demon inside him into the form of comic dance—this has
happened before, again and again, and it leaves no room for set-
tled thought about the morrow, or what one is going to do after
the theatre, or how one’s year is going. This is a travesty of or-
dered and settled life. It has happened before, but when it hap-
pens now it is bringing its pastness into fresh awareness of a
present that needs no future. It is repetition.

WHAT KIND OF DRAMA IS THIS? 181