of the source that is involved, along with the reinvention of the
original narrative.
The stage director Nicholas Hytner has said that musical
dramatists use old plots “for the excitement that is to be found
in the acquiescence of a story to the musical form.”^16 That
seems exactly right to me. The musical transforms something
that already exists on its own terms into a set of different terms,
the book-and-number combination we have been discussing. It
is not a matter of convenience so much as a matter of formal
desire that the musical be based on something else, something
ripe for dislocation. The numbers reformulate the sources,
taking a settled mode of representation—a Ferber novel, say—
and turning it into a new mode of representation—a stage play
for one thing, and a stage play with numbers for another. A
narrator who knows the source stands in the way of the trans-
formation into song and dance. Heis part of what must acqui-
esce to the new form, and he must be fed to the Giantess in
some way.
What I have called the area of vulnerability where per-
formance takes place is thus tinged with subversiveness. The
singers and dancers have a touch of transgression about their
performance. They are making time with settled things—
singing and dancing into the book narrative, turning Ferber’s
Magnolia into the soprano who must rise to the lyrical heights
of “Make Believe.” There are two stages of dislocation here.
Magnolia, who begins as a character in narrative prose in Fer-
ber’s novel, is dislocated to the stage when an actress takes on
the role, and this dislocation is doubled when the stage actress
bursts into song. Ferber’s narrative has now become unmoored
twice, first by being acted and then by being sung. The musical
thrives on changing its source into something new.
The most sophisticated treatment of a source and its author-
ity figure in a musical is Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with
George. The source is the famous Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of
La Grande Jattepainting by Georges Seurat, which is created
in tableaux at the end of each act of the musical. So the source
NARRATION AND TECHNOLOGY 161
(^16) Hytner, “When Your Characters Are Speechless, Let ’Em Sing.”