The Musical as Drama

the form. Integration is a political word too, and it means some-
thing different from coherence. Integration means the blend-
ing of difference into similarity, as though things are being
melted in a pot. It would produce a unified whole, both in its
political idealism and in its aesthetic meaning. When I sug-
gested that writers coming after Rodgers and Hammerstein
used their accomplishments to turn the convention of ensem-
ble performance in very different directions, harsher direc-
tions, directions that reject the “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over”
kind of celebration, I had in mind writers who have revised the
sentimentality of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ethos without
abandoning the artistic principles of the form which Rodgers
and Hammerstein popularized and broadened. The later musi-
cals we have been discussing show that aesthetic integration
was never the real issue in this artistic form. The real issue was
always coherence, which could be masked into integration for
a time but which would eventually reassert itself.
Coherence means things stick together, different things,
without losing their difference. That is literally what the word
means. Different elements managing to stick together without
losing their individual identities is coherence in a musical no
less obviously than in a city or a state. I do not mean that the
best musicals are political in themselves. Most musicals are not
political, but all musicals depend on conventions that translate
into political terms. The political implication comes from the
conventions of the musical itself, which establish a ground-
work of doubled time and character, source stories reformu-
lated into the routines of the show business, raids on private
motives most of us keep to ourselves in normal life, a delight in
throwing authority off balance, and a desire to maintain song-
and-dance formats that go back to Harlem and the Lower East
Side. It is an illegitimate drama that disturbs the managers of
our affairs the more it remains true to its roots in popular en-
tertainment. Its aesthetic is radical, and that means its political
potential is always there, as a matter of the form.
The future of the musical has two broad paths before it. One
is the way of high-tech integration, which I have suggested
degenerates from the conventions of song-and-dance perfor-

WHAT KIND OF DRAMA IS THIS? 209