which carries the characters into new versions of themselves.^7
On rare occasions this new dimension of characterization does
contain an element of plot, but the book usually repeats the bit
of plot incorporated into song on these occasions anyhow, and
the most frequent phenomenon is for the plot to come to a
standstill during the time required for the song and then to re-
sume when the song is ended. Yet there is often an impression
that the plot has advanced. Lyric time has reached its conclu-
sion, creating the illusion that it was the plot that was moving
along. It wasn’t, it was the performance of the number, but il-
lusions count for a great deal in the theatre and deserve to be
taken seriously.
One technique is to make a number refer to a crucial recog-
nition on the part of the singing character. The singing charac-
ter cannot do anything about the recognition while the song
continues (apart from sing about it, which is the other dimen-
sion), but the recognition belongs to this character alone, and
it is important. In Carousel(1945), Billy Bigelow discovers (in
the book) that he is going to be a father and realizes that he
will have to find a way to get money, perhaps even by stealing
it. Molnar’s Liliom, the play on which Carouselis based, does
not give the circus barker even one line about this, the recog-
nition is so obvious. In one of their finest decisions Rodgers
and Hammerstein gave him a number titled “Soliloquy,” which
consists of two songs strung together, one about the possibility
of a son (“My Boy Bill”), the other about the possibility of a
daughter (“My Little Girl”), and blended the tunes with other
song segments (“I wonder what he’ll think of me,” “I don’t
give a damn what he does”) to give the impression of a musical
structure that is open to the character’s expressiveness—the
impression of an aria, in other words. But the segments come
out of popular tune formats too (as they do in some arias), and
42 CHAPTER TWO
(^7) See Knapp, The American Musical, p. 12: “music notoriously does not un-
fold in ‘real time,’ but rather imposes a kind of suspended animation so as to
intensify selected emotional moments, and through this dramatic hiatus di-
rects us all the more urgently to see behind the mask/makeup/costume of the
performer—even as he or she embodies the role being played even more fully
through the enactment of song.”