Chapter Five

THE DRAMA OF NUMBERS

The Diegetic Convention

A

Chorus Line’sway of dramatizing a convention of musi-
cal theatre itself leads us to a broader consideration of
“backstage” musicals, which have always been with us
and have rarely been theorized. Backstage musicals are about
putting on musicals, so that the plot is about the means of its
own production. Since the characters are show people whose
job is song and dance, much of the singing and dancing is
called for by the book. Show Boatis about entertainers, so they
sing and dance. The Rodgers and Hart Babes in Armsis about
kids putting on a show in a barn, and Pal Joeyis about Chicago
nightclub performers. The improvement in book writing in
the second half of the twentieth century led to inventive varia-
tions on this theme. Much of Cabarettakes place in a Berlin
nightclub where the heroine, Sally Bowles, is a singer and the
orchestra for the entire show is more or less the nightclub
band, but the cabaret is a metaphor for the rise of Nazism, and
there are strange links between the nightclub and episodes oc-
curring in the city. Phantom of the Operauses an opera-within-
the-musical device—the plot occurs at the Paris Opera where
various operas, including one by the Phantom himself, are be-
ing rehearsed or staged. Folliestakes place at a reunion of for-
mer Follies showgirls, who perform some of their old numbers
for one another. There are even ghosts in Follies, and they per-
form, too—they were showgirls once. The backstage musical
has probably taken on more new lives than any other subgenre
of theatre in the last fifty years.
The usual view of this phenomenon is that it is a conve-
nience: it is easier to justify numbers arising out of a book that