form of drama in the age of Rodgers and Hammerstein, when
the book became integrated with the music. I wish to say that
the musical was already an important form of drama by the time
of Rodgers and Hammerstein, that it never depended on the
integration of book and number so much as on the alternation
between them, that Rodgers and Hammerstein greatly en-
larged the kinds of books that could be used for musicals, and
that the age of the concept musical carried this advance in
book-and-number formatting to the point that there is virtu-
ally nothing that cannot be imagined an effective topic for a
musical. The ferment of ideas behind the concept show com-
bines innovation with a strict sense of the musical’s history (the
revue as called to life in Follies), the musical’s procedures (the
audition and rehearsals of A Chorus Line), and the musical’s re-
lationships to other forms of theatre (the Kabuki methods in
Pacific Overtures). The past and the future of the theatre are at
issue in the best of them, which one could also say of Eliza-
bethan drama and of other periods of greatness in the theatre,
and this could not have happened without the advances made
in book writing on Broadway from the time of Show Boat
through the time of Oklahoma!and beyond, to our own time.
The musical is arguably the major form of drama produced so
far in America.
Brecht and the Drama of Disjunction
It is the difference between book and number that gives the
musical its potential as major drama. The European theorist
who understood this aesthetic of disjunction most fully and
who should stand in the place of Wagner as a challenging and
instructive figure for the musical was Bertolt Brecht. That he
cannot stand there is a sign of the amalgamation that has al-
ways existed between the Broadway theatre and the commer-
cial interests of American show business. Brecht seized on the
interruptive quality of the musical number as one means of
“alienation” or “estrangement” in drama—the idea that audiences