The Musical as Drama

crucial book scene from our view and supplies a boy singing in
a tree about the scene he cannot see either, for the benefit of
himself as an old man who cannot remember it. Had anyone
described these scenes for Jerome Kern and asked him to write
the show they come from, he would have declined. They go
too far for Kern. Yet the scenes involve the same conventions
Kern helped to establish. They make the genre aware of itself,
forming an attitude of aesthetic radicalism that refuses to be
controlled by the established conventions even when the es-
tablished conventions are the source of inspiration.
The mirroring that runs through these examples suggests
that the main issue is not how elements of the musical are
forged into a unity but how the elements remain distinct
enough to reflect each other, as though difference could be the
groundwork for coherence. Coherenceis the word I am after. I
have been using the term mirrors because musicals use them
too, but when difference is working well in a book-and-
number format, coherence is the result—different things hold-
ing together by adherence to common principles, when they
could very well be flying apart. In calling the stage an area of
vulnerability, I mean there is a danger of things flying apart. In
referring to the voice of the musical, I mean there is a musical
formality that holds them together, songs and dances working
by design, singers and dancers recognizing the same beat and
going on with it. In saying there are multiple selves projected
by the singers and dancers, so that their characters are more
than single personages, I mean that these people have the
power to exceed their ordinary selves and cannot be pinned
down. The deeper feelings are coming to the surface, and gai-
ety is at work in the upsurge. Actors take on otherness by act-
ing in the first place, then they multiply the otherness by
singing and dancing too, and their singing and dancing can be
matched by others who share the voice of the musical. They
are giving Kierkegaard’s demon an outing, and they are only
trying to put a number across.
I take “coherence” to be a political word as well as an aes-
thetic word. I set it forth as a better word for the aesthetics of
the musical than “integration,” the word that usually attends

208 CHAPTER EIGHT