The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim.
Wells, Elizabeth A.
The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions
behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim. By Scott McMillin.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. [xvi, 230 p. ISBN-10
0-691-12740-1; ISBN-13 978-0-691-12730-9. $24.95.] Illustrations,
bibliography, index.
Rarely does a book come along that seems to elegantly summarize
what has come before while taking its subject to the next level. The
Musical as Drama by Scott McMillin is just such a book. Published in the
last year of the author's life, this volume encapsulates an entire
career's reflection on the nature and structure of musical theater.
Although he doesn't advance any one overarching thesis, McMillin
looks at musical theater as a dramaturgical phenomenon, not searching
for organic unity within works but instead exploring the incongruities
and disjunctions that form one of the central tensions in musical
theater. Taking examples from among the best known and best loved shows
in the repertoire, McMillin successfully argues for a more subtle
reading of musical theater works as products of a collaborative process,
and, as he asserts, the most important form of drama produced so far in
America.
Scholarship on musical theater has tended towards studies of
individual works (bruce mcclung's Lady in the Dark: A Biography of
a Musical [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007]) or, more commonly,
studies of the works of one composer (Stephen Banfield's
Sondheim's Broadway Musicals [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993]), or one issue (lesbian and feminist reality in Stacy
Wolf's A Problem like Maria [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2002], or Jewish identity in Andrea Most's Making Americans:
Jews and the Broadway Musical [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universtiy Press,
2004]). Alternatively, a number of books have come out in recent years
that provide a broader narrative of Broadway appropriate as textbooks
(Joseph Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey [New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990] or Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Showboat to Sondheim [New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997] for example). Rarer is this kind of
study, which takes a critical and dramaturgical look at a number of
important musicals from different historical eras, and advances ideas
about how the disunities of the genre function dramatically, and how
music and text and staging make the musical "work" in the
theater. As McMillin notes, "I am not aware of a book that brings
the musical before us as an aesthetic entity, a genre of drama with
definable conventions around which one can think about the musical as a
form of art." (pp. ix-x).
McMillin also poses a crucial question: "There is a challenge
involved, and it is offered to the universities: are we in universities
able to use our methods of analysis--historical, musical, literary,
philosophical--and still get this form of popular entertainment
right?" (p. xi) Certainly if musical theater history has had a weak
spot, it is that few scholars can be adept in all of these areas at the
same time and conduct research that adequately addresses the
multifariousness of the genre while at the same time representing it
realistically. One of the central issues in musical theater history has
been the extent to which musicals of different eras are
"integrated," i.e., the extent to which the various elements
of the musical belong together. McMillin dismisses to a certain degree
this emphasis--born from organicist and in some ways European models of
looking at opera--as inadequate for dealing with the way in which
musical theater works operate. Bringing to bear on his analyses are a
number of thinkers, including Joseph Kerman, Brecht, Wagner, and
Kierkegaard. More prevalent is his borrowing of aspects of narrativity
from Carolyn Abbate, who is best known for her work on opera,
particularly the music dramas of Wagner (see her Unsung Voices: Opera
and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century [Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991]). Specifically, he borrows Abbate's idea of
the "voice of the opera" as "the voice of the
musical," a space in which the musical speaks (or sings) from its
own context, bringing the individual utterances of the characters and
the actors into a larger mode of expression that belongs to the genre
itself. Realistic stage time and acting are drawn in to the musical
moments, and are subsumed by it.
McMilllin's central discussion is the distinction between book
time (the spoken parts) and lyric time (the musical portions). By using
a couple of examples, most notably the opening scene from Oklahoma!, the
author compares the level of detail, dramatic effect, and sense of
elapsed time between the original play by Lynn Riggs and the musical
version of the same scene by Rodgers and Hammerstein. McMillin argues
that most songs don't advance the plot, given that they are
emotional or expressive expansions on a situation that has already been
established and that is being commented upon. A notable exception
springs to mind, "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man of Mine"
from Show Boat, a song complex in which interpolated commentary from the
characters helps both to elucidate relationships and in some ways to
advance the plot. McMillin discusses this number later in the book, but
still asserts that for the most part musical material exists in a mode
of verbal, rhythmic and musical repetition that suspends action in the
normal sense and sets it apart strikingly from the spoken portions of
the musical.
Perhaps one of the most useful and illuminating parts of the book
is McMillin's comparison of dramaturgy and structure in two
important musicals of the last few decades, the wildly successful
Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Stephen Sondheim's
Sweeney Todd. Both seem on the surface to deal with similar kinds of
moods and subject matter, but McMillin convinces that the artistry at
work in Sondheim's show is operating on a different (and higher)
level than in Lloyd-Webber's, although he does not say so
explicitly. Drawing the comparison does, however, reveal much about the
"technological fantasy" (or megamusical) genre that the author
identifies earlier in the book. Certainly writers like Mark Grant (The
Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical [Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 2005]) have weighed in with their opinions on the more recent era
of megamusicals, but McMillin does so in a thoughtful manner that does
not sound like partisanship. In the final pages of the book, he posits
two large directions for the musical to take in the future, one along
the megamusicals path, the other the more introverted and experimental
Sondheim track.
McMillin does not shy away from the most popular musicals, taking
many of his examples and illustrations from Show Boat, Oklahoma!, and
West Side Story, but he does delve into lesser known repertoire, too,
like Weill's Lady in the Dark and Street Scene. The book has a
potentially wide readership: jargon-free, it would be ideal as reading
for undergraduates in a variety of fields, or to a general readership
that has some familiarity with the musicals McMillin discusses. It also
adds to the growing scholarship on musical theater and makes interesting
reading for specialists in that field. Although McMillin does cover the
music somewhat technically (writing about key and harmonic areas, for
instance), the discussion would not bewilder someone not familiar with
this terminology
If any part of the book is not entirely successful, it might well
be the final chapter. As fascinating as the inclusion of Brecht and
Kierkegaard is within the approach, these thinkers are brought up almost
too quickly and too late, and one wishes that the book could be expanded
somewhat to include a more comprehensive discussion of their ideas and
their influences on McMillin's analyses. One of the most important
things that McMillin achieves is doing away with traditional ways of
looking for organic unity or overarching relationships between musicals
and to focus instead on what he calls coherence. "Coherence means
things stick together, different things, without losing their
difference" (p. 209).
Sadly, McMillin's death will not allow us to read his next,
and perhaps more searching, commentary on the musical. As it stands,
though, this
well-written, lucid, and effective book should serve as a fine
addition to the expanding scholarship on America's musical theater.
ELIZABETH A. WELLS
Mount Allison University
