overdone? The reason lies in the doubling up of all-knowing
forces—the orchestra in the pit, where omniscience belongs,
and the computerized lighting and set design, which covers
song-and-dance with another layer of infallibility.
The set looms as the new mother of musical theatre. This is
a special feature in shows produced by Cameron Mackintosh,
working with such designers as John Napier, Maria Bjornson,
and Timothy O’Brien.^10 A theatre chandelier seems to crash
onto the stage in Phantom of the Opera, and a helicopter takes
off in Miss Saigon. The crashing chandelier reminds one that
the Phantom is a technologist himself, capable in his magic
of destroying the stage on which he is represented. When he
sends the chandelier crashing to the stage, the event is con-
tained within the fiction that this is the Paris Opera, but later,
shooting fireballs out of a skull he has at his disposal, he seems
to set the entire stage on fire, and this seems to be the stage of
the musical itself. (We will return to Phantomfor an extended
discussion later in this chapter.) These things would be excit-
ing in a theme park, but in the musical they turn the drama
into spectacle, gliding the sets into place before our eyes, stun-
ning us with wondrous lighting, and integrating the show into
the interplay of special effects. Sunset Boulevardhad a set for
which the theatre had to be redesigned and which eventually
cost so much that the Broadway show had to close, for it was
losing money even on full houses. (A Harold Rome show from
the 1950s, Wish You Were Here, had its own usable swimming
pool, and huge pool effects had earlier been practiced in shows
like Neptune’s Daughterat the Hippodrome, but these efforts at
least made money.)
The set goes with the theory of the integrated musical. No
longer is it only the book that is to be integrated with the
music or the dance that is to be integrated with the book; now
it is the mise-en-scènewithin which everything else is to be in-
tegrated. This is one of the outcomes of Wagnerianism in
the musical theatre, and the set-driven shows also have a ten-
156 CHAPTER SEVEN
(^10) See Goodwin, British Theatre Design: The Modern Age, for a solid account
of design in musical theatre.