By Jupiter, or Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash in One Touch of
Venus, can be delightful in song and dance, because they have
little claim to omniscience in the first place. The Judeo-
Christian God the Father is a different matter. He is not
brought into musicals very often, although the impudence of
the genre does tempt some people to try. God comes into the
second act of the recent Jerry Springer: The Musical, for exam-
ple. His number is called “It’s Not Easy Being God,” which is
questionable on theological grounds. The number tries to de-
flate omniscience into human ruefulness. Rodgers and Ham-
merstein flirted with the God problem in the Starkeeper of
Carousel, a stand-in for the Almighty, but his role is to take
Billy Bigelow back to earth where he can hear the music and
see the dances of the show’s final scenes. So the Starkeeper
likes musicals even if he doesn’t perform them. Other examples
of God in musicals could be mentioned, but the point is that
He doesn’t fit the form, because He possesses the attribute al-
ready possessed by the orchestra, omniscience.^2
Deliberate Downgrading: The Narrator
Who Does Not Know
On this side of God, however, there are the omniscient nar-
rators who have written the books on which some musicals
are based. These narrator-authors do enter into musicals, and
something must be done to prevent them from clashing with
the true source of omniscience, the orchestra. Cervantes ap-
pears briefly at the beginning and end of Man of La Mancha,
but he is then downgraded to the role of Don Quixote, who
is anything but infallible and is certainly capable of song and
dance. The original version of Candide(1956) places Pangloss
in the troubled position of being both narrator and character, a
NARRATION AND TECHNOLOGY 151
(^2) Musical versions of the medieval mystery play sometimes use Christ as the
performance version of the Almighty. God sends a part of himself into the
world as a man, which is theologically correct, and the man, being something
like the rest of us, can do song-and-dance. This happens in the South African
The Mysteries, which played in London in 2002.