The Musical as Drama

mance. These shows push in the direction of aesthetic in-
tegration, and their political implications are imbued with
conservatism and profitability. The other way opens out from
Sondheim and the other writers who use the song-and-dance
conventions and reflect upon them. I think writers following
the Sondheim way will become increasingly political as the
genre matures, because the elation that comes from the best
shows, their numbers and books interrupting each other to the
point of reflecting the interests of both, resembles the political
energy that comes from people with differences coordinating
into a productive relationship. Rodgers and Hammerstein ex-
panded the sentimentality inherent in that view, and the writ-
ers who followed their lead turned the ensemble tendency of
the genre into irony or anger. They did not eliminate senti-
ment. They have proved that when sentiment is recognized in
a structure of coherence, it is one of the elements that stick
together. It joins with other interests, such as the aesthetic
interest in finishing designs that runs through Sunday in the
Park with George, or the search for an end to trauma that runs
through Lady in the Dark, or the determination to reinvent fa-
mous plays that runs through My Fair Ladyand West Side Story,
and a complex form of drama is created, a drama of difference,
a drama of the multiple.
I believe that is the direction in which Sondheim has taken
the musical, along with Kander and Ebb, Michael Bennett,
Bob Fosse, William Finn, Jeanine Tesori, Lynn Ahrens and
Stephen Flaherty—but I have no business making a list. Every-
one can add names for themselves. When the lists include the
names of African-American and Latino-American composers,
writers, and performers, the musical will have overcome its
major political limitation. Minorities thrive in the aesthetics of
the musical, but the genre has fallen short of reaching people
of color. What was learned from Harlem in the earlier years of
the twentieth century was essential to the development of the
song-and-dance aesthetic the musical puts to use, but the mu-
sical has not connected with the African-American theatre, at
least not consistently. I single out the African-American the-
atre because its history is substantial and it has now attained

210 CHAPTER EIGHT