dance, while Candidediffused its satire into narrative conven-
tions, which never work well in musicals. Both of these con-
ventions are discussed more fully later. For the moment, recall
Agnes de Mille’s ballets in the Rodgers and Hammerstein
shows. Oklahoma!and Carouselnot only popularized ballet in
musicals, they centralizedballet for important segments. So did
Robbins with the choreography for his earlier collaboration
with Bernstein, On the Town(which was derived from the ballet
Fancy Free). De Mille and Robbins were following a path made
by Balanchine in the “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet in On
Your Toes, by Rodgers and Hart. “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”
is danced at the climax of act 2. “Laurey’s Dream” sets up the
act 1 curtain. West Side Storymoves dance to the very opening
action and uses it throughout. We have discussed the scene in
which Anita is nearly raped by the Jets and retaliates with a de-
cisive lie about the killing of Maria. Powerful episodes involv-
ing the warring gangs are danced throughout West Side Story,
bringing the ensemble tendency of the musical fully into con-
tact with sex and violence.
After West Side Storythe way was open to many kinds of
experiments with the ensemble tendency of the musical. I have
argued that Rodgers and Hammerstein changed the history
of the genre by basing song-and-dance conventions on more
challenging books than had been used before, but they also
consolidated the ensemble convention into an ideology of
community-mindedness that dramatized the sentimentality of
the form. The Bernstein shows of the mid-1950s shattered the
community spirit of ensemble, and the “concept” musicals that
followed in the 1960s and 1970s found the way open for sharp
and lasting experiments with choruses, chorus lines, and com-
pany song-and-dance numbers.
Concept Shows: Cabaretand Company
Cabaret(1966) challenges many of the musical’s conventions,
none more directly than that of ensemble performance. En-
sembles in Cabaretare for Nazis in the Berlin of the 1930s.