A method for musical theatre dramaturgy

The role of a dramaturg on a musical project – one in development, in production, or in scholarly analysis – is a perennial problem. If a dramaturg is not a trained musician, the musical components of “musical theatre” can seem arcane or intimidating, prompting the dramaturg to skirt them altogether. If a composer and lyricist are suspicious of input from those they perceive to be uninitiated in the mysteries of their craft, the dramaturg can be deliberately sidelined from the discussion of musical ideas. Or, if the creators of a musical project attempt to avoid the taint of what they judge to be a bourgeois Broadway style, they may argue that theirs is not a conventional musical and that its musical material is, therefore, intentionally unconventional and ought to be left alone. The result in any case is the same: the songs are left to fend for themselves as the dramaturg limits focus to the play’s more familiar, non-musical terrain, dramaturging it as he or she would dramaturg a non-musical play. Yet musical and non-musical plays are not the same and cannot be approached as if they were. Besides the specialized personnel and additional rehearsal time music and song can require of a musical production, music and song often impose unique structural and theatrical demands on a dramatic text, many of which stem from temporal considerations. A musical score fixes theatrical timing in ways that are difficult to amend and almost impossible to halt without sabotaging a piece’s musical and dramatic momentum. Stage activity and characters’ emotional discoveries cannot be allowed to unfurl in their own time; rhythm and tempo dictate when and at what pace both explicit and implicit action occur. Because musical numbers occupy considerable stage time, the spoken book scenes must accomplish their work with a super efficiency unknown to most non-musical plays. They do this by relinquishing to the songs much of the development of character and theme typically found in a play’s dialogue, making the musical’s book look and feel comparatively abbreviated. In exchange, music and song considerably expand the range of expressive possi- bilities conventionally available to realistic spoken drama. They can complicate and sometimes confuse the boundary between subtlety and exuberance. They can jolt the hierarchical balance among the theatre’s always-already shifting relationships among multimedia elements, thus suddenly altering tone. They can excite or subvert expectations, amplifying a musical’s ability either to penetrate or else to alienate its audience. And by augmenting the suspension of disbelief – facilitated, as the late Scott McMillin posited, by the modal separation of the musical numbers’ suspended, ruminative “lyric time” from the progressive, expository time of the book1 – music and song can rather handily make the implicit explicit (“I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar) and the hypothetical immediate (“If I Loved You” from Carousel); they can stop or accelerate narrative (the “Tick Tock” ballet from Company, in the latter case) and effortlessly welcome magic or fantasy (“Come Spirit, Come Charm” from The Secret Garden). The list of functional possibilities hardly stops here. When musical theatre practitioners do acknowledge such manifold possibilities for a song, they almost always do so tacitly, relegating them to secondary or tertiary importance, as they are anathema to the contemporary American musical theatre’s dogged commitment to “emotional truth” and the outmoded dictate that good theatre music will do one of two, and only two, things: “forward the plot” or “illuminate character.” Limiting musical functionality to these two narrative-based alternatives ignores the fundamental polymodal fabric of musical theatre, stunts the theatrical imagination, and results in replicative productions in which putative realism often exists uncomfortably alongside the musical’s inherently non-realistic conventions. Much of this attitude is rooted in the faulty “integration” model of the form, which persists as the supposed zenith of dramaturgical responsibility for musicals. In actuality more a salable brand than an artistic method, integration was touted by Rodgers and Hammerstein as the capital achievement of their 1943 musical Oklahoma!, the work still looked to as the exemplar of it. In his autobiography, composer Richard Rodgers describes his long-held “theory” of the integrated musical show – in an attempt to set it apart from the musical comedies of the early twentieth century, with their stock plots and hodgepodge scores – as one in which all of the elements dovetail with each other, there is “nothing extraneous or foreign,” and, though the work of many hands, the result gives “the impression of having been created by one.” “In a great musical,” he writes, “the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look,”2 and it was on this platform of purported homogeneity that he and his librettist collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II informally but effectively marketed most of their musical plays that followed. In the absence of a systematic definition of integration, the term has come to mean the aspiration to seamless transitions from spoken book scenes into musical numbers and then back again, and the assurance of a logical cause-and-effect relationship between the dialogue and the songs over the full arc of a musical’s plot. It is the second, though, and not the first part of this working definition that Rodgers and Hammerstein really set up in Oklahoma!, and this, perhaps more than anything, is the significant artistic achievement of that work. In his 1949 essay “Notes on Lyrics,” Hammerstein explains that the innovations of Oklahoma! were born of “a conflict of dramaturgy and showmanship,” in which the dramaturgy won out.3 The writers rejected the then-expected inclusion of the flashy opening chorus, non-sequitur specialty numbers, and extraneous comic subplots not in the high-minded name of integration, but because their project – the musical adaptation of the somewhat sober play Green Grow the Lilacs – did not support them.