Antipholus, who has come to town unbeknownst to anyone.
She thinks it is her husband. Romance is going haywire.
This splendid variation on the lover’s duet may sound like
the well-known cynicism of Rodgers and Hart musicals, but
Shakespeare got there first. In the corresponding scene of The
Comedy of Errors, the source of the musical, Adriana gives an
impassioned speech about marriage, not knowing that she ad-
dresses the wrong twin. Husband and wife are “one flesh” she
says, thinking she is speaking to her husband. But she isn’t. She
is speaking to the wrong piece of flesh. She is speaking about
“one flesh” to the wrong flesh. Her one-flesh doctrine, which
is central to the Christian conception of marriage, comes from
St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in Scripture, and Shakespeare
knew exactly what he was doing. He set the play in Ephesus
(changing hissource, Plautus, on this point). Rodgers and Hart
redesigned the cynical comedy of the scene into the book-and-
number format and highlighted Adriana’s plight by having her
sing her diegetic tune to the wrong twin.
The Number to Be Completed
That songs or dances can be called for within the book raises
the possibility that the number being called for is incapable of
being completed for some dramatic reason. The drama focuses
on the challenge of completing the number, and at that point,
the completion of a song or dance may become a turning point
of the book, perhaps theturning point of the book. This idea
goes deep into operatic history, with Die Meistersingerbeing
perhaps the best-known example. One of the earliest musicals
to use this idea was Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta(1910),
in which the heroine has vowed to marry only the man who
can complete a melody that came to her once in a dream. This
turns out to be “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” which fortunately
is sung by just the right man at just the right time.
Dance can work the same way. In On Your Toesthe Russian
dancers dolearn their swing lessons, and the show is able to
reach its conclusion when they join the Americans in a jazz bal-