The Musical as Drama

song-and-dance man enlarging characters in the silly plots of
the 1920s.
Curly does not dance at this point, one might say. But the
singer repeats bits of the musical rhythm in his gesture, his
movement, his way of putting across the song—singers do
have a choreography. He does not dance like Fred Astaire,
and Fred Astaire did not sing like this Curly before us, but
they both turn body and voice to music instead of speaking
prose in their numbers, and the effect on a listener is dif-
ferent from the effect in the prose dialogue of Green Grow the
Lilacs.
How do listeners react to songs like this one, songs in the
popular vein? Toe-tapping is common among listeners, who
sometimes snap their fingers too, and might hum the tune or
even sing the words. We are looking outside the theatre now,
but that is where the most successful songs are meant to go.
Dancing gets the body moving, which is what the syncopated
repetitions of a popular tune call for. We will later have rea-
son to focus on dance as a major practice in the aesthetic of
the musical. For the moment, though, just picture yourself
tapping your toe if you are a listener, or dancing with a part-
ner on a ballroom floor if you are a lover, or singing and
dancing on a stage if you are a performer, and you will have
the basics of lyric time in view. You are taking pleasure in
repetition, and you aren’t progressing toward any destination
beyond the performance of repetition itself. You may be think-
ing of some other destination, especially if you are a lover,
but you won’t go there until the song is ended or you break it
off. At the end of the song other destinations become possi-
ble, and your performance during the song might improve
the prospects for the other destinations, but your engagement
in the song itself is not dialectical, it is not progressive, it is
repetitive.
The listener who matters in the scene at hand is Laurey, the
one Curly is trying to impress with his “Surrey” number. Lau-
rey is listening with Aunt Eller, and they are drawn into the
rhythm of Curly’s song to the point of silently mouthing the

THE BOOK AND THE NUMBERS 37