unprofitably in the category of the stage musical, too. The aes-
thetic basis of the Disney and Lloyd Webber kind of musical is
technological fantasy. Later I suggest that the genre bearing
kinship to these shows is the film musical. But the urgent need,
in my opinion, is for a poetics of the stage musical—first, be-
cause the stage musical tends to be absorbed into the techno-
logical and film musical in the general shuffle of integration
theory, and second, because once the stage musical is separated
out from integration theory and recognized as a different kind
of drama, the genre can be seen to hold fast to its origins in
American popular culture. It has the potential to become the
kind of socially relevant theatre that Eric Bentley despised it
for not being in the age of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Bentley despised the musical for refusing to acknowledge
the drama’s political responsibilities. He may have been right
about the genre as it existed in the mid-1950s. There had been
socially responsible musicals and revues in the 1930s, and
Bentley knew these, but he was looking to the mainstream of a
form that had been politically innocuous during most of the
century. Rodgers and Hammerstein did not write left-wing
musicals. Hammerstein was politically progressive, and he did
work spots of political awareness into his shows, but when it
comes to Indian Territory and what really happened there, Ok-
lahoma!is a crying shame.^17 Rodgers and Hammerstein were
not writing political drama, but they were setting in motion a
further history of the genre in which social and political issues
would come to be prominent even in the mainstream. West
Side Storyis about the violence of a younger generation with
nothing productive to do. Cabaretis about fascism in an urban
society caught up in heedless entertainments. A Chorus Lineis
about sexuality in the theatre, which means to an important ex-
tent gay sexuality. Sweeney Toddis about injustice and the pres-
sure for revenge among the powerless in industrialized cities.
People who find these issues unimportant do not pay attention
to politics, and the shows I have named are among the most re-
vivable American dramas of the past half-century. They are
14 CHAPTER ONE
(^17) See Knapp, The American Musical, pp. 122–27.