In Les Misérables, to choose a contrasting example, when the
tables and chairs from the tavern scene slide together to form
the peoples’ barricades, there is no point beyond sheer stage
technology. If the people really did have such magical power
behind them they could not lose. But no one thinks of this pos-
sibility. The stage technology is merely showing its omnis-
cience, while the orchestra plays some underscoring from its
position of omniscience, and the interlocking systems of un-
seen authority have taken over the drama.^15
The Source, and the Special Case of
Sunday in the Park with George
There is a further issue here. Musicals usually have a source
they are adapting. The source can be a novel or a short story, a
nonmusical play, a film, a group of poems, a painting—but a
source of some sort usually lies behind the show. Why? I
would not settle for the standard answer, which is that source
stories are there for convenience. Having a strong plot to be-
gin with is supposed to make it easier to find slots for numbers,
according to the convenience theory. But is it really easy
to build numbers into an Edna Ferber novel, or an Ingmar
Bergman film, or a book of poems by T. S. Eliot, or a play
about Chicago women who kill their lovers and get away with
it in court? If we think further about sources, we will also be
thinking further about sets and narrators, for it is the resetting
160 CHAPTER SEVEN
done on a stage, but I told Hugh Wheeler not to worry about it, to write it as
though it were a movie.” Quoted in Zadan, Sondheim & Co., p. 192. But the ef-
fect of the combined actions depends on their occurrence in a single space, the
stage. Film space is fundamentally different, as the unsuccessful film of A Little
Night Musicshows. See the conclusion of this chapter for a fuller discussion of
theatre versus film.
(^15) The designer John Napier said of Les Misérables: “My starting point was
the centre of the play’s biggest moment, the barricade. Once that was solved
everything else fell into place. The barricade could split, lift, and revolve, and
was a mass of objets trouveswhich the actors picked up from time to time and
used.” Quoted in Goodwin, British Theatre Design, p. 151.