“Soliloquy” never loses touch with its sources in American
song. That is its genius. It builds several songs and segments
into a continuous number neatly connected to the book and
gives the baritone playing Billy Bigelow a shining moment
of recognition (and a high G at the end), both for his voice
and for his character’s realization of impending fatherhood.
This was real innovation in the mid-1940s. It was not the first
pseudo-aria in American musicals, but it was the first to let a
character sing his way into his most important recognition in
the plot. Then the number comes to a close and the book re-
sumes. The Billy Bigelow of the shining moment of recogni-
tion goes back to being Molnar’s foolish circus barker and lets
himself be suckered into a futile robbery, in which he is killed.
There is a difference between the character of the singing Billy
Bigelow who makes recognitions and the foolish Billy Bigelow
who is killed in the robbery attempt, and this difference is not
the deepening of a psychological entity but change of mode
in the characterization itself. There are two Billys, only one of
them capable of hitting the high G (the original Billy, John
Raitt, sometimes managed a high B-flat), and the startling, en-
livening fact is that they are projected by the same performer,
adept in both orders of time, the book and the number.
I would like to examine some turning point or recognition
songs from the era of Rodgers and Hammerstein and its after-
math, in the spirit of admiration for the strong connections
composers and librettists and lyricists learned to make between
book and number. These are numbers that verge on including
plot elements within their structures, thus seeming to unite
book and number. We will see that even when book and num-
ber are closely coordinated, the two remain distinct from one
another.
Guys and Dolls
A turning point changes the direction of the plot in some de-
cisive way. Reversalis another name for it. In most musicals
the reversal is a scene in which the lovers, having encountered