The Musical as Drama

neither realizing that it has just come along. They do not know
they are falling in love at first sight. In fact, they are sure they
are on different wavelengths. Sarah has a diagram in mind for
her lover and is looking for the right man to fit it, while Sky is
leaving the entire business to love at first sight, what he calls
“chemistry.” One thing is certain on the surface: these two
think they are at odds with each other. That they sing the same
tune to the same accompaniment lets us know what is going on
beneath the surface. They are already falling for each other.
When Sarah hears Sky sing his “chemistry” lyric, she is so ob-
viously drawn to him that Sky puts a move on her—and she
hauls off and socks him. So this is a love duet in which the
lovers say they haven’t fallen in love and which ends with a
sock on the jaw. No matter. They are intimate with one an-
other’s tune, one another’s harmony.
The duet makes it clear that their differences can be adjusted
into an ongoing relationship. That could be said of people who
fall in love in real life, too, but the musical can condense the re-
lationship into the difference between chromatic and diatonic,
which can be perfectly resolved. Sky is the chromatic one. He
will show this later, in “My Time of Day.” Sarah tends to remain
diatonic, even when she gets tipsy and reveals a nice feel for
swing in “If I Were a Bell.” These differences are musical, and
they will come out on the diatonic side (with Sky playing the
bass drum in the Salvation Army band), after Sarah has a minor-
key fling with Miss Adelaide in “Marry the Man Today.” But the
early “I’ll Know” duet offers a shared diatonic harmony even
while the characters think they are at odds with one another.
Why do we take these figures as real? In performing their
numbers they impress us not by their reality but by their musi-
cal talent. The singers and dancers take these elaborate struc-
tures of repetition, the numbers, into their bodies and voices.
They are joined by the orchestra. There is a voice of the musi-
cal that sings through them, and the drama lifts onto a plane
that is different from the plane of a book scene. This plane of
the number does not represent real life. The book scenes are
already once removed from real life; the numbers are twice re-
moved.

60 CHAPTER THREE