the show and spent the rest of the evening backstage.^3 The
point is that the people on stage in the final number are un-
countable, for the convention of the curtain call has merged
with this number ironically called “One,” and with two things
going on at once there is no reason to be counting. The mir-
rors at the rear of the stage double all this.^4
When mirrors are working well in a musical, in other words,
there is a surplus of identity in the doubling between book and
number scenes. What I mean by surplusmight best be under-
stood by looking at a mirror scene where there is no surplus or
doubling but only the use of a mirror by one character to con-
trol another. There is a mirror in Christine’s dressing-room
inPhantom of the Opera, but it is not there for her to see her
reflection. The Phantom makes his spooky appearances in the
mirror, beckoning Christine to follow through the looking
glass, into passageways in the Paris Opera which reach to his
lair in the fifth basement. Christine lets herself be taken into
the mirror and finds herself subjected to high-tech power.
That is the literalization of what happens to Christine more
broadly in the action, where her courageous acts in contact
with the Phantom are shunted off into demonstrations of his
magic. This should be a drama of recognition on her part, but
instead it is a demonstration of Phantom power even up to the
point where the Phantom makes himself disappear for the last
time. We have discussed this effect at some length in chapter 7,
but we are being specific about mirrors in musicals now, and
WHAT KIND OF DRAMA IS THIS? 185
(^3) They have been singing from the wings, adding vocal power at climactic
moments. Giving them costumes for the final curtain call seems only fair and
in keeping with the spirit of the show, but it does add to the expenses.
(^4) In one eventful Broadway performance on September 29, 1983, all previ-
ous performers of roles in what was just then becoming the longest running
musical in Broadway history were invited back to play their roles, and there
were over three hundred costumed dancers doing “One” at the end. See
Mandelbaum, A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett, pp. 227–33.
Nowhere is the drive for ensemble in the musical more fully realized than in
the final number of A Chorus Line, where all the dancers, winners and losers
alike, hold forth on the stage as if the jobs were theirs, and where it once hap-
pened that the previous dancers were there too, hundreds of them, without
changing the basic point of the show.