accompaniment for the other scenes. Cabaretis a brilliant musi-
cal because of its revision of basic conventions. What do they
know, this Emcee and this orchestra? The question begins as an
aesthetic ambiguity, but it soon becomes political, a question
about Berlin and the rise of Nazism. This orchestra is female,
another reversal from the norm. They are bored showgirls at
the Kit Kat Club, under the thumb of the rouged and over-
elegant Emcee. How do these women know what is going on in
the rest of Berlin? How might they be involved?^13
The onstage orchestra in Cabaretis now being repeated in
other musicals (the Kander and Ebb Chicagoamong them). It is
a brilliant stroke because it subverts the omniscience of the pit
orchestra yet retains an aura of ambiguity in its ability to know
everything anyway. If the true Wagnerianism of the musical
lies in the omniscience of the pit orchestra, it is coming in for a
bit of the old razzle-dazzle when the entire orchestra takes to
the stage.
A further variation has occurred in a recent production of
Sweeney Toddunder the direction of John Doyle at the Water-
mill Theatre in England, and then on Broadway, where the
singer-actors also serve as the orchestra. When they are not in-
volved in their book and number characters, the actors take up
their instruments and accompany those who areengaged in
book and number. They triple their identities, in other words,
doubling through the combination of book and number and
then gaining a further identity as instrumentalists. This is an
extreme variation on the diegetic convention, but it is not a
disruption of the convention (as perhaps it would be if Mimi,
Rudolfo, and the other bohemians were also the orchestra in
La Bohème). The musical thrives on such rearrangments of the
norms it is based on. Tinges of experiment and parody have
marked the genre all along.
148 CHAPTER SIX
(^13) Finian’s Rainbowbegins with a sharecropper playing his harmonica on-
stage, and some productions enlarge this with several real instrumentalists—a
fiddler, a flautist—in the sharecropper group. With the sharecroppers is Susan,
who expresses herself only through her dancing, or “feet talk,” as the share-
croppers put it. Thus Susan brings dance diegetically into the book too, until
the end, when she gains speech.