The Musical as Drama

travesty of the private self touches us and makes us want to join
it. The torch song like “The Man I Love” that gets out of its
show and becomes a standard makes people hum along, or
dance—hum the misery, dance the anguish. Some may think
travestymisses the tone of such performed anguish. I do not
think so. A travesty is a disguising of something more serious
than itself, but in articulating the trauma and making it per-
formable, the travesty torch song can be moving and unset-
tling. It is the disguising of anguish into an accomplished per-
formance that matters most in the torch song. Of course the
woman is unhappy. But look at the disguise she is bringing
off—it turns anguish into song, a travesty of trauma, a perfor-
mance deserving applause.
The torch song in Folliesoccurs in the concluding series of
numbers, “Loveland,” where each of the four main characters
suddenly has a Follies routine to perform. There is no book
reason for the performance of these numbers. The reunion of
former Weissman girls gives way to an eruption of parody Fol-
lies called “Loveland,” and this ends with each of the four lead-
ing characters coming on for a vaudeville routine that dashes
the last element of romantic illusion from their lives. Their
underlying anxieties turn into show business. Buddy, now a
clown in baggy pants with a wooden car around his waist, sings
“The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues,” a clownish rou-
tine that demolishes the notion that the girlfriend waiting for
him in Dallas, Margie, understands and appreciates him for
what he is. The torch song follows. It is Sally’s “Losing My
Mind,” in which the title phrase shakes her with the possibility
that this is true. The woman may be going mad in her loneli-
ness. It was originally written for Phyllis, but then was shifted
to Sally when it was found to be better suited to Dorothy
Collins’s style. The unique psyche is not to the point here. The
song does not “represent” the subtext of character. Instead it
tampers with subtext by turning it into rhyme and the thirty-
two-measure AABA structure used for countless torch songs
before. This time the torch singer really is going crazy, per-
haps, and she is Sally because Dorothy Collins could handle

WHAT KIND OF DRAMA IS THIS? 193