The Musical as Drama

account of lost hopefulness, and now Sam is the one character
responsive enough to hear her song after her death and express
it in his own voice. That is why it is such a powerful moment—
not because one character learns the tune from another, but
because these two, so different in situation, the man with a fu-
ture before him, the woman trapped in a deadly marriage, share
the ability to project themselves in this music. Suddenly there
is an emotional connection between them, carried across on
this melody from the lost woman to the young law student. If
the orchestra simply played Anna’s theme as underscoring in
act 2, no one would be puzzled, for orchestras do this kind of
thing all the time: they know the musical environment better
than any characters do. It is rare for a character to share in this
knowledge. Characters who know everything can be a danger
to the musical, as we will see, but characters like Sam, who
know something unexpected and can suddenly perform it, are
alive to the voice of the musical.
We are talking about a shared musical formality even when
characters are expressing their deep musical uniqueness. The
characters are voicing themselves, yet they are joined by a for-
mal element that lies beyond them. It exceeds their awareness.
Its clearest location is in the orchestra, a point to which we will
return, and when the singing and dancing ensembles suddenly
perform a number all together on stage, they are capturing the
spirit of this musical universe. A wonderful example occurs
early in Show Boat, when the black chorus and the white chorus
(the two ensembles are distinctly identified and usually hold
apart) sing the same number, “Cotton Blossom.” The white
singers, all dressed up and ready to see a show, are singing
about the showboat itself, which is called the “Cotton Blos-
som.” The black chorus is singing about the cotton blossom
they have to pick in the fields, which is their “heavy burden”
when it is packed into the bales the men have been heaving
about on the levee. By putting these two choruses together and
giving them the same melody, the musical pretends that the
racial difference can be overcome in the spirit of exuberant
singing, but in fact the lyrics that are sung concern two very
different kinds of “cotton blossom,” and the kind the white

CHARACTER AND VOICE OF THE MUSICAL 71