The Musical as Drama

scenes. But they are not omniscient. Omniscience is for the or-
chestra, unless the orchestra is placed on the stage. These are
some of the ideas I have discussed, and I summarize them here
because I want to take up two musicals, Phantom of the Opera
and Sweeney Todd, which differ in their treatment of these con-
ventions. In many ways they are similar shows. Both become
virtually through-sung in their final scenes, challenging the
distinction between book and number that I have been taking
as a basic principle of the musical. Both have sources that
reach back—one century for Phantom, at least two centuries
for Sweeney—to lurid and melodramatic tales of urban violence
in Paris or London. Oddly, both took hold in the minds of
their composers during visits to the Theatre Royal at Stratford
East in East London, where Sondheim saw Christopher Bond’s
melodrama Sweeney Toddin 1973 and Lloyd Webber saw Ken
Hill’s melodrama Phantom of the Operain 1984. The musicals
that resulted used vast stage sets in their original productions,
and both were directed by Hal Prince. Yet the two musicals oc-
cupy vastly different worlds, and in addressing the differences
between them we will also be addressing a contrast in the ways
the basic principles of the musical form are put to use.
Phantom of the Operaworks its way into a through-sung series
of episodes in its final scenes. Those who love Phantom—there
are many who do—might say that it fulfills the promise of
Rodgers and Hammerstein on the ground that Rodgers and
Hammerstein intended to write integrated musicals and did not
quite manage. Where Rodgers and Hammerstein fell short,
Lloyd Webber carries through. Thinking on the contrary that
Rodgers and Hammerstein mastered the principles of differ-
ence that formed the earlier musicals, I find that Phantomdevi-
ates from those principles in ways that make it pretentious and
overblown, but I do not have the last word on these things and I
can see the logic of claiming that the drive for integration has fi-
nally been achieved in Lloyd Webber. Perhaps Phantomshould
be celebrated for being a musical on the verge of becoming an
opera.
There is more to be said about this operatic tendency.
Phantom of the Operacontains a parody of nineteenth-century

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