and Langston Hughes in Street Scene(the young lovers break
apart at the end, after the girl’s mother is murdered by her
husband). Since then, and certainly since West Side Storyin
1957, the most influential musicals have not had the love-and-
marriage outcome of romantic comedy, and the question of
what kind of drama this is demands a broad and inclusive
answer.
In a central episode of Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition, the
hero goes to the theatre in an effort to repeat a memorable
experience. The hero in search of repetition is named Con-
stantin Constantius. Kierkegaard is playing some jokes with us.
This is the comic half of a book that (as with all of Kierkegaard’s
jokes) is meant to be utterly serious. Constantin Constantius
seeks to repeat a memorable experience by going back to Berlin,
taking the rooms he stayed in before, going to the same theatre
he went to before—not the higher theatre of comedy or tragedy
but farce theatre, the mixed-level musical theatre of the posse,
at the Königstädter. This is a German version of the theatre
we are examining—an illegitimate, popular musical theatre.
The low-level musical theatre is where one can be “carried
away,” as Kierkegaard puts it, turned into new variations of
oneself by music, dance, and comic routines that depend on
the very thing, repetition, that the hero is trying unsuccessfully
to create in his journey to Berlin.
Many people have been carried away by low-level theatre,
especially when they are young. Kierkegaard says it is where
one can hope to be “swept along into that artificial actuality in
order like a double to see and hear himself and to split himself
up into every possible variation of himself, and nevertheless in
such a way that every variation is still himself.”^1 Young people
who might never read a word of Kierkegaard know this experi-
ence of being carried away by the illegitimate theatre. Their
experience of growing up is intertwined with seeing their first
musical in the theatre, with singing along with cast recordings,
with slipping into Broadway houses at intermission to take a
standing-room place for free, all in order to catch the excitement
180 CHAPTER EIGHT
(^1) Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, p. 154.