The Musical as Drama

characters, but the effect of the numbers is not so much to ad-
vance characterization as to double characterization, by turning
Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan into new versions of themselves,
musical versions. Their book versions are one thing, but their
musical versions enlarge them into lyrical power. They are said
to be the same characters, but clearly they are different, and
the incongruity is theatrically arresting. This is the same prin-
ciple by which Fred and Adele Astaire changed from trivial
book selves into interesting song-and-dance selves, only now
the book selves aren’t trivial. This is a complex and sophisti-
cated kind of dramatic characterization. Behind Carousellies
Molnar’s Liliom, a good play from “legitimate” theatre’s mod-
ern tradition. The Molnar characters are better drawn than
their counterparts in the book of Carousel, but they do not have
the doubling effect of the songs in Carousel. They are more
convincing as realistic characters, but the musical gives its char-
acters a dimension that lies beyond realism and increases the
range of their presentation. The numbers in the Rodgers and
Hammerstein version do not advance the characters or further
the book so much as they change the characters and the book
into new versions of themselves that play against our normal
sense of identity and story. The numbers interrupt our normal
sense of character and plot with song and dance, and what we
are left with is not the “one” but the “multiple.”
I will take up the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows in more
detail later. For the moment, the point is that their status in
the history of the genre depends on the enlargement they gave
to the kinds of book the musical could take up, and not on
atransformation of the musical into a quasi-operatic form.
There are crossovers between opera and the musical, of course.
Opera has always been able to borrow elements of popular
music and dance without losing its character as opera. The
musical has always been able to borrow elements of opera
without losing its character as musical—usually in the spirit of
parody in the earlier musicals, but sometimes in the spirit of
imitation in the later ones. Opera was always fair game for the
musical, and after Rodgers and Hammerstein expanded the
range of the book show to include episodes of violence and

INTEGRATION AND DIFFERENCE 21