Chapter Eight

WHAT KIND OF DRAMA IS THIS?

Releasing the Demon: Kierkegaard on Repetition

S

TAGE musicals depend on such incongruities as Mrs.

Lovett singing about cannibalism after Sweeney Todd has

reached a peak of operatic fury in his “Epiphany.” Why

should incongruity be desirable, even a delight? The simpler

pleasure would seem to be unity, a seamless interweaving of

book and music, the Phantom disappearing to heart-rending

orchestral accompaniment. The answer is that simpler pleas-

ures are not what one goes to the theatre for in the first place.

One goes looking for something other than totalizing systems

of omniscience, something related to the strange business of

watching people pretend to be other people and engage in

made-up stories for hours at a time. That odd desire lies be-

hind all theatre, the desire to see actors take on new characters,

and it multiplies in the musical theatre, when the new charac-

ters break out in song and dance, adding musical selves to their

book selves. They become doubly other, more than one person

certainly, even more than two.

What kind of drama is this? It is popular and illegitimate,

originating in vaudeville and revue as well as in operetta, and

retaining links to the tradition of low culture despite its high

prices. When Oklahoma!arrived in New York in 1943, one

would have added that most musicals are comedies that end in

marriage between hero and heroine, but the possibility that the

genre was becoming a form of romantic comedy was brought

to an end by Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves in Carousel

(the marriage occurs early and the husband is killed) and The

King and I(the attraction between Anna and the King of Siam

cannot develop into romance), and by Elmer Rice, Kurt Weill,