The Musical as Drama

a bit uncomfortable, looking at a stage, which is sometimes
said to be “all the world,” but there it is anyhow, a stage. Every-
thing happens on it. The stage version of My Fair Ladyplaces
the Alfred Doolittle numbers like “I’m Getting Married in the
Morning” on the same stage as the Henry Higgins numbers
like “The Rain in Spain,” creating a repetition of space (the set
changes, of course) that underlies differences of class (in this
case) and that corresponds to what we have called the “voice of
the musical.” The film of My Fair Ladysets up different loca-
tions for these numbers.
Musical films passed through a long period of trying to cap-
ture its own version of the theatre’s fixed space. Shooting a film
on location was the simplistic approach. If the plot is set in
New York City, shooting it on location in New York City
might seem a clever move. The opening of the film West Side
Storyshows how disheartening this can be. There are some
brilliant shots of Jets doing jazz ballet turns in streets where
nothing else is happening. The street becomes a space to be
filled by the energy of something dangerous, this male danc-
ing. (The parking garage for “Cool” works this way too, later.)
The street functions as a stage in this regard. But then the Jets
come upon a basketball court, where kids are playing. The
space to be filled with dancing suddenly becomes a space for
dribbling a basketball, and the awkwardness of putting these
dancers into the space of these kids intensifies when one of the
Jets demands the ball be passed to him! The Jets are ludi-
crously out of place snapping their fingers on a playground
while ordinary kids shoot hoops. (And the kids are better bas-
ketball players.) This combination cannot be imagined in a
theatre performance of West Side Story. No basketballs there,
just dancing and a space to dance in, one defined by a high wall
perhaps.
The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers film musicals found
their own way of defining a single space for the length of the
dance. Astaire left the camera in one spot for most of his dances
and even did entire numbers in one shot, as though a theatre
dance was merely being filmed. No one ever thought these
were theatre dances, though. They succeed as film dances

NARRATION AND TECHNOLOGY 175