Anna’s aria after her death in Street Scene, one could say that
Sam is a sensitive character, but that is not the full point. The
full point is that the chorus of tenement dwellers sings the
context for his sensitivity. They sing “The Woman Who Lived
Up There,” the choral number that makes room for Sam’s sud-
den reprise of the aria. They do not know who she was, exactly,
or how she came to be murdered by her husband, and they do
not share Sam’s sympathy for her at first, but their chorus sets
the harmony for Sam’s reprise of the aria. Then they join him,
and the aria ends as a chorus. This number reaches its full-
throated beauty because they allshare in Anna’s death. Real
tenements are not like this. Tenements in legitimate plays are
not like this. The tenement in the source play for the musical
is not like this. “The crowd surges about uncertainly, not know-
ing what has happened, and buzzing with questions which no-
body can answer” is Elmer Rice’s stage direction in his Street
Scene, the play on which the musical is based, and Sam’s role in
the play at this point is to sympathize with the daughter of the
murdered woman, Rose. He has nothing to say about Anna.^4 It
is music that lets him share Anna’s aria, music enlarged to
choral performance in the background.
A fine opportunity for sentiment lurks in this ensemble ten-
dency of the musical. Or it did lurk there, until Rodgers
and Hammerstein drew it out and made it so obvious that a re-
action set in. Rodgers and Hammerstein perfected the “Clam-
bake” version of the ensemble number, whereby groups of
fellow citizens get together and demonstrate through singing
and dancing that a community spirit prevails. I am thinking of
THE ENSEMBLE EFFECT 81
(^4) The concluding perception of the play is that one must belong “to one-
self ” before one can depend on anyone else. This is what Rose tells Sam after
the murder of her mother, when she rejects Sam’s offer to go away with her.
Rice originally wrote it this way: “I don’t think people ought to belong to any-
body but themselves. I was thinking, that if my mother had really belonged to
herself and that if my father had really belonged to himself, it never would
have happened. It was only because they were always depending on somebody
else, for what they ought to have had inside themselves.” That is full-blown
American individualism, more congruent with the “legitimate” drama than the
musical. The musical retains those lines, incidentally, but counters them with
the ensemble effect of “The Woman Who Lived Up There.”