The Musical as Drama

Laurey. It’s time to start for the party.” The rapist/murderer of
the dream is to be her date for the box social! So act 1 ends with
Laurey dazed over the collision between the dreamed number
and the reality of the book.
Thus, dramatic recognitions or turning points are normally
achieved through the dialectic of book scenes, in musical and
nonmusical dramas alike. Something else is going on in the mu-
sical numbers, no matter how closely articulated with the book
they are, and this is what gives the musical its extra layer of
dramatic quality. The songs and dances intensify the dramatic
moment and give it a special glow of performance. Performance
has dramatic significance in itself. This is true of all drama to
some extent, but the musical elevates the performance mean-
ing and makes it into the defining quality of the moment. Two
characters can express the same thing at the same time in a
duet and can do so with a style that controls the situation. That
is not the dialectic of the book scene. It is repetitive coordina-
tion in body and voice, lyric time being found in the body,
twice over. Solos have a glow of performance too, once over. If
the character glowing in performance seems different from the
same character in the book scenes, this discrepancy is desirable
because it fits the discrepancy between the two modes of time
that the numbers and the book represent, doubling the kinds
of performance involved in presenting what is supposed to be
one person. Could Shaw’s Henry Higgins ever be imagined
larking about in an impromptu Spanish fandango in his parlor
with a flower girl? No, but Lerner and Loewe use the addi-
tional dimension of musical number to double Higgins’s char-
acter and treat George Bernard Shaw to a bit of cheek. There is
always a bit of cheek in the musical’s revision of its sources, a
matter we return to later.
One more point about the two orders of time. Everyone un-
derstands book time because we think our own lives follow the
progressive mode. We have beginnings and endings too, and
proceed on the assumption that something important happens
in the middle to give shape to things. We do not understand
repetition nearly so well, even though it is going on around us
and within us, as night turns to day once again, as the heart

52 CHAPTER TWO