people sing about depends on the work that goes into the kind
the black people sing about. But this point of racial difference
is occluded by the blending of the shared tune. Hammerstein
had strong political ideas, but his politics are often smoothed
out bythis tendency of the voice of the musical to take ensemble
forms, as though everyone shared equally in the same world.
The challenge of the post-Hammerstein musical is to sharpen
the political realism of the form without losing the consistency
of the musical composition.^11
The convention of the shared tune can be extended to an ex-
plicit disagreement between the singers. The duet “A Boy Like
That” between Anita and Maria in West Side Storyworks this
way. Anita sings an AABA song on the need for Maria to find
“one of your own kind” to love, but Maria then turns the B
section of that song her own way, “It isn’t true, not for me,”
and invents an obbligato melody—“I belong to him alone”—
over Anita’s reprise of “A boy like that.” The beauty of the duet
is that Maria’s obbligato becomes the lead melody by the end,
with Anita singing it too, in harmony with her. Then the voice
of the musical is enlarged to a quintet when Anita, Maria, Tony,
and the leaders of the rival gangs sing different lyrics over
the “Tonight” harmony. In this case, Anita’s lyric, which is
about sex, squares with the rival leaders’ lyric, which is about
violence. Maria and Tony sing the “Tonight” lyric to this har-
mony too, their passion soaring over the gritty chromatic
singing of the others. Love, sex, and violence operate in the
same harmonic pattern. It is a startling transformation of lead-
ing ideas from Romeo and Juliet.^12
“A Weekend in the Country”
The ending of act 1 in A Little Night Music(1973) shows the
voice of the musical in full form. The succession of events
72 CHAPTER THREE
(^11) For the musical’s tendency to assimilate otherness to an acceptable stan-
dard, see Knapp, The American Musical, especially pp. 179–281, and Most,
Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical.
(^12) See Knapp, The American Musical, p. 213.