Discomfort
The composer and lyricist Michael Friedman, writing in the
London Review of Books, has recently asked why the musical makes
intellectuals uncomfortable.^11 The expected answer might be
that intellectuals tend to dislike popular entertainment, but the
answer Friedman gives is better. It’s the music that causes trou-
ble. The songs seem designed to make audiences feel good,
Friedman says, but they have an unsettling effect anyway, be-
cause they resist the book. They stand apart from the book,
even from the book with which they might seem to be inte-
grated, declaring that something else is going on here, some-
thing that the book cannot observe, something that might be
under the surface. We are adding that the numbers do not
leave the secret under the surface. They dally with the secret
and rearrange it into song and dance, often with a glee that can
be disturbing.
In chapter 1 I noted Rousseau’s dislike of the mixture of
speech and song in opera. Rousseau was presenting himself as
an uncomfortable intellectual, and while opera advanced in the
next century to create a through-composed solution to the
problem, the musical arose in the century after that to repack-
age the discomfort in its book-and-number formats. The num-
ber resists the book even when it closely dovetails with the
book, and if Friedman is right to say that it is the musical side
of the disjunction that makes us uncomfortable, we are adding
that this lyric dedication to tapping into the wellsprings of our
behavior, this travesty of our private anxieties and desires,
ought to be disturbing at the same time it is being pleasurable.
The songs and dances are not very disturbing, and the pleasure
can be fine—but even then, we know the disturbance as a sil-
houette of the pleasure.
Here is one of the finest London drama critics, Harold Hob-
son, showing his discomfort over a Sondheim musical. Review-
196 CHAPTER EIGHT
(^11) Friedman, review of Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of
National Identity.