Lovers
Maria is the Puerto Rican girl unlike other Puerto Rican girls,
the one who can reach up to that unexpected G-flat at the be-
ginning of the B section of “Tonight.” She is nervy and vibrant,
qualities that shine in her singing. Tony is the Polish boy who
sings with or about Maria. He does little else, but on the
“Maria” theme he is terrific. Everything he sings refers to
Maria. She is “Something Coming” and “Maria” before she
joins him in “Tonight.” Actually, she sings the main theme of
“Tonight” first, and he proves that he can catch her melody and
sing it too. He can repeat the structure and rhyme scheme of
her song. That is the kind of young man he is, the kind that can
sing with Maria. He is the only one like that. Compare Chino,
and the point will be clear. Can you imagine Chino singing a
duet with Maria?
We do not think of real people while we watch the perfor-
mance. We think of performance people, people who can sing
and dance, numbers people. Chekhov and Shakespeare charac-
ters are performance people too, but the song-and-dance per-
formance is not the same as the Chekhov or Shakespeare per-
formance. If a suspension of disbelief occurs when we watch
characters in a Chekhov play, it occurs twice when we watch
characters from the book scenes of a musical open themselves
into musical performance in the numbers. They are changed
by the music. The film director Atom Egoyan in speaking of
opera calls this “the transfiguration of real people into a sepa-
rate reality.”^5
In an early scene of Guys and Dolls, the gambler Sky Master-
son and the Salvation Army worker Miss Sarah Brown sing a
duet in their first encounter. They are bragging to each other
about how they will know when the real thing comes along,
CHARACTER AND VOICE OF THE MUSICAL 59
(^5) Time Out, 10–17 June 1998, p. 24. Chapin, Everything Was Possible, pp.
90–94, discusses the deepening of character that comes from song, using the
example of “Losing My Mind” from Follies—Sally’s song as it turned out, al-
though the disunity of book and number is shown by the song’s having been
tried for Phyllis too.