A method for musical theatre dramaturgy Brian D.

Valencia

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 possibilities 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 342 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. A METHOD FOR MUSICAL THEATRE DRAMATURGY 343 The
lesson here is that Rodgers and Hammerstein avoided conformity to a dramaturgical model
that did not suit their projects and found unprecedented success in measuring out their own
bespoke distances between their musical books and scores. For them, these distances are
indeed fairly short. For other successful musicals since, they have been sometimes shorter (Les
Misérables, for example, which arguably has no book), sometimes longer (Spring Awakening,
for instance, a kind of concert–play, in which the book and songs are purposely separated by
more than a century’s worth of discrepancies in diction, tone, and style). Undertones of the
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk lurk suspiciously beneath the notion of a “seamless transition”
between dialogue and music, as though, by tethering itself however tenuously back to
Bayreuth, the American musical might claim highbrow continental parentage and, therefore,
heightened artistic legitimacy. Because of the inherent polymodality of musical theatre,
however, there will always be felt, both semiotically and phenomenologically, McMillin’s
evocative “crackle of difference”4 between the book and the songs – or, when there is no
book, between the recitative and the songs, or between one song and the next. In musical
scripts, song lyrics are typically indented, organized into block stanzas, and appear in all caps.
Additionally, materials licensed from Music Theatre International, whose catalog contains over
300 titles (including the works of Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz, and Disney
Theatricals), indicate musical cues via horizontal black bars across the page, marking the start
of each new number. Even in two dimensions, these formatting indications foreground the
musical numbers against the rest of the musical’s text, inviting our special attention. In
performance, of course, musical numbers are foregrounded even further. Highlighted via
instrumental accompaniment, the piling up of singing voices into unison and harmonic
textures, measured repetition of musical and lyrical phrases, changes in lighting, and large-
scale synchronized movement, dance, and other spectacular effects, the songs point to
themselves as moments of keen theatrical interest against the somewhat flatter armature of
the book that holds them in place. As if this were not enough, the titles of the songs (and who
sings them) almost always appear in the playbill amid a listing of numbered scenes. It must be
acknowledged, then, that there are intrinsic forces in musical theatre working at virtually every
level – from the page to the stage to the printed program – to maintain perceptible seams
between the book and the songs. Once we allow ourselves to recognize that they are not
made of the same elastic dramatic material, we can free ourselves from the futile burden of
attempting to integrate the two, whether in development, in production, or in analysis. But if
seamless integration is no longer the ideal, and musical numbers extend distinctive
dramaturgical exigencies separate from those of the book, how should a dramaturg go about
grappling with musical theatre? Rather than evaluating musical numbers by gauging their
conformity to the old functional expectations, the dramaturg might instead ask a series of
openended, exploratory questions about the intent, execution, and effect of each number.
This method allows for each musical moment to be engaged on its own terms and,
furthermore, generates a treasury of possible artistic choices, from which the most exciting
can be selected and tested as part of the creative or analytic process. BRIAN D. VALENCIA 344
Some Questions to Ask a Song: 1 Who is singing? 2 Why does the character sing? To introduce
himself to other characters onstage, or simply to the audience. To communicate directly with
the audience. To impart otherwise-secret knowledge to the audience. To pass the time, or to
make time pass. To stop the show! To punctuate an entrance or an exit. To establish sympathy
with or antipathy to other characters or ideas in the play. To expedite the exposition. To
provide thematic reinforcement. To make the unsaid explicit. To cover a scene or costume
change. To offer textural variety. To ironize – or otherwise defamiliarize – the situation. To
facilitate magic or fantasy. To evoke something that has happened offstage. Because she is so
[fill in the blank] she cannot merely speak. Because the plot calls for a song, or it has been
suggested that someone sing. Because he is in disguise and singing helps to effect his alternate
identity. Because the actress in the role is a star, and, therefore, her fans expect her to sing.
Because no entertainment in that century was complete without music. Because the music
adds needed [fill in the blank] to the text. Because he is beginning or ending a scene or act,
when it is customary to hear a song. Because the writer(s) thought it would be amusing to
parody a well-known song.5 3 What has just happened before the song starts? What happens
immediately following? 4 What happens over the course of the song? Is the song an
opportunity to advance the drama (“forward the action”), or is it more of a dramatic resting
place? 5 How much a part of or a digression from the dramatic action or situation are the
song’s music and lyrics? 6 What internal or external artistic and cultural cues govern or
influence the musical flavor of the song (meter, mode, melodic contour, harmonic palette,
etc.)? Does the music reprise any previously heard material? 7 What staging does the song
require or invite? Does it call for dance or other spectacle? 8 What does the song provide that
mere spoken dialogue would not? 9 How might the song’s placement (e.g. opening number,
act-one finale, eleveno’clock slot) affect its role in the drama? Its reception? 10 Dramatically
speaking, what are the relationships among the text, action, vocal line, and musical
accompaniment? 11 Theatrically speaking, what are the relationships among the singer, the
musicians accompanying her, and the audience? A METHOD FOR MUSICAL THEATRE
DRAMATURGY 345 12 Do you see any autobiographical glimmers of the writer(s) in the song?
What might these say about the play, and what might these say about the writer(s)? 13 Do you
see any glimmers of the play’s own cultural moment reflected in the song? What might these
say about the play, and what might these say about the times? 14 Does the performer provide
a credible performance of character? If not, how does this affect the song’s reception? 15
What is the desired effect of the song on the audience? On the page and in performance, what
effect does it have on the audience? The seemingly banal question “Why does the character
sing?” stands to yield several illuminating functional possibilities once the specter of
integration has been dispelled. The sampling of potential responses to this question above
represents not only narrative concerns but performative concerns as well, which, when
combined with one another, assume the capacity to imbue song with a color and complexity
the standard characterological analysis cannot match. Due consideration of all relevant
possibilities for this and for all such questions is not only responsible dramaturgy, it is also a
catalyst for shaking off stale clichés carried over by tradition from one production to the next
(the costly yet frequently clumsy flying sequences of Peter Pan, for one example among many)
and instituting in their places fresh, unexpected solutions. Re-examination of why a song
occurs may very well lead to re-examination of how it occurs. Applicable as they are to the
extant repertoire, these kinds of questions can also be of terrific assistance to works in
progress where the dramaturg can guide a creative team through the slating of hypothetical
answers for a given song spot, and the songwriters can then extrapolate backward from these
answers in order to shape the desired musical number. The clearer the outline of the germinal
song at the beginning of the songwriting process, as determined by the contextual
circumstances of the drama, the greater the likelihood that the resulting song will achieve all
that the moment demands of it. As a check of this, the same questions may be asked again of
the completed number. If the answers this time stray too far from their original targets,
musical or lyrical rewrites may be called for; on the other hand, the writers could decide they
have stumbled upon promising ideas they had not previously considered and re-chart their
course in light of these happy discoveries. The substantial benefit of this method is that it
presupposes nothing of the works it probes, requiring only that they contain discrete musical
moments that can be interrogated independently. It may be brought to Hair as effectively as it
may be brought to Hello, Dolly! since it seeks to identify and dissect the foregrounded work of
the score and its unique functional relationship with the book, without insisting that the one
ought to be wholly elided into the other. When responses to such series of questions are
collected for every musical number over the course of a theatrical score, a data map of this
relationship emerges. Because this map is purposely descriptive and impartial, however,
critical assessment of it can come only through comparison with a given project’s goals. For
example: in a musical two-hander, the writer intends for Jamie’s songs to propel narrative time
forward, whereas Cathy’s songs should repel it backward. Does its map suggest the score
achieves this? BRIAN D. VALENCIA 346 In another show, several of the numbers are meant to
be performances of musical routines from the fictive Weismann’s Follies, not personal
expressions of characters’ individualized selves. Does the map for the production at hand
make this clear? From the first calls to integrate the musical theatre, its music and song have
been instructed what they should accomplish instead of encouraging frontier exploration of
what they might accomplish. This has by no means pre-empted the occasional departure from
the integrated model in both writing and production, but it has discouraged the establishment
of a mode of analysis equipped not only to tolerate but also to value the essential fissures
between disparate formal elements, and to examine the disruptive, as well as the
conventionally non-disruptive, contributions of musical numbers to a dramatic text. By
rejecting adherence to any one particular agenda, the ecumenical method for musical theatre
dramaturgy proposed here offers an analytic framework capable of tackling even the most
peculiar of musical theatre pieces, while supporting the continued expansion of creative and
intellectual experimentation within the form. Notes 1 Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6–9. 2 Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An
Autobiography, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2002), 227. 3 Oscar Hammerstein II, “Notes
on Lyrics” in Lyrics (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 1985), 8. 4 McMillin, 2. 5 Sample responses
adapted and expanded from Elizabeth Hale Winkler, The Function of Song in Contemporary
British Drama (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 30–34.