grief, operatic singing became one of the ways characters could
break into song. Opera singers took lead roles in musicals of
the 1940s and 1950s, although they played off against musical
comedy performers—they were one element of the principle
of difference that has always driven the form. Ezio Pinza and
Mary Martin together formed an astonishing combination in
South Pacific. Their musical styles did not belong together, but
that was the point. Impudent and eclectic, the musical made
the clash of styles into a selling point, with a book that also in-
volved a clash of styles between these two unlikely lovers. This
is not the musical becoming the opera. This is the musical ex-
panding its capabilities.^22
The Concept Musical
After Rodgers and Hammerstein, it seemed that any kind of
plot could be turned into a commercial musical. In the mid-
1950s, three Maurice Pagnol plays were turned into one show,
the Harold Rome/S. N. Behrman Fanny(1954), and Homer’s
Odysseybecame the Jerome Moross/John LaTouche Golden
Apple(1954). The key figure in the wake of Rodgers and Ham-
merstein was Leonard Bernstein, who took on Voltaire’s Can-
dideand Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, creating two record-
able scores for two revivable books. The Bernstein shows line
up with another radical experiment in book writing that is
sometimes referred to as the concept musical. The book of a
concept musical is often controlled by a theme or a metaphor.
Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret(1966) is one of the earliest concept
22 CHAPTER ONE
(^22) Gershwin’s Porgy and Bessis operatic throughout, demanding a company
of classically trained voices. Kurt Weill’s Street Scenedeliberately turns the
Rodgers and Hammerstein example in the direction of opera, with several
roles calling for operatic singers and giving one of them, the lead soprano, a
genuine aria, but it retains the book–number alternation of the musical and in-
serts popular song formats at will. Frank Loesser’s Most Happy Fellowbrings an
operatic singer into contact with musical comedy performers in the South Pa-
cificstyle and goes further toward being through-sung, but no one confuses it
with opera.