Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2012

While working on The Passing Show of 1914, J. J. Shubert hired the young composer Sigmund Romberg to write his first full-length revue. Romberg worked closely with lyricist Harold Atteridge, and the two of them put together the song ‘Omar Khayyam’. The reviews for the show declared it a hit, and it was. This article explores the development and deployment of a musical hit in the making. Many sources are used to examine the ways in which the number was treated, including the song’s place in the show and the musical languages within the number. This article presents a ‘biography’ of a song from an early show through the lens of the full score. Not only can we see a song – specifically a revue song – being built up to be a hit, but we eventually see the number suffer from events that prevented opportunities for long-term success.

Kiss Me, Kate, a 1948 musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew with music and lyrics by Cole Porter and book by Sam and Bella Spewack, responded not only to Shakespeare’s play’s gender conflict, but also to post-war discourses concerning the return to domesticity of women mobilized into the wartime workforce, anxieties around female fidelity for returning servicemen and issues of racial equality and integration. By setting up contrasting onstage and offstage storylines, the former all-white, focussed on domesticity and full of double entendres, the latter multiracial, focussed on professional life and characterized by plain speaking, the musical-within-a-musical format accommodated conflicting approaches to theatrical, political and social integration, suggesting the viability, for white Americans at least, both of an ironic performative assimilation to hegemonic social norms as a cover for an unassimilated lifestyle, and the creation of an open society in which individuals negotiate their own paradigms for living with others. In the process, the musical also draws attention to the role of cultural products in maintaining a white hegemonic order and in the ‘taming’ of women. The radical nature of the original production is emphasized by the changes imposed for the highly conservative 1953 Hollywood film version

An inherently musical form, musical theatre illuminates key dramatic moments as music rises up and characters gain expression through song. It has been argued that characters denied access to this fundamental form of expression are dramatically inferior to their singing counterparts. The purpose of this article is to reconsider the dramatic function of the non-singing or songless character. Viewed through the Nietzschian concepts of the objective and the subjective, derived from his understanding of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, non-singing characters fulfil a specific dramatic need. It is my contention that songless characters maintain an awareness of the dramatic stakes and therefore do not succumb to the subjective space of song. A variety of cases considered by scholars who have contemplated the issue of the non-singing character will be introduced, then reconsidered through a Nietzschian lens, demonstrating the dramatic implications of this objective repositioning.

The Follies that opened in London’s West End in 1987 was very different from the 1971 Broadway original – James Goldman had completely rewritten his book and Stephen Sondheim had replaced or changed several of his songs. But although the West End production ran longer than the one in New York and won every important theatre award in Britain, the 1987 version has not been produced or revived anywhere as later productions all went back to the original book. This article provides a detailed comparison between the two libretti and analyses changes in character, plot and structure in order to judge how far the claims that the London show was ‘more optimistic’ and ‘less surreal’ are justifiable. It also investigates whether some of the rewrites that bring the London Follies closer to a traditional book musical may have been instigated and necessitated by the show’s original reception in New York as well as by the reputation the 1971 staging had gained throughout the years. The original production, swiftly hailed as ‘legendary’, still is an inevitable reference point for every new mounting of Follies while the London version is usually seen as no more than another folly on the thorny path to a workable version of this musical classic. Such a comparative evaluation is partly due to the very same nostalgia that the show exposes as both foolish and dangerous.

Jonathan Larson is best known as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer of Rent (1996) and tick, tick ... BOOM! (1990). However, his first major work, Superbia, is often viewed as little more than a footnote to his later works due to its unproduced status. An original dystopia with a vivid pop score, Superbia represents nine years of development ending in a piece which culturally encapsulated the 1980s within a form far ahead of its time. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with Larson’s contemporaries, this article looks at the issues facing Superbia’s troubled creation in the 1980s, its themes of the media’s role in daily life, and its potential for contemporary re-visitation

This study finds that Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk: A Tap/Rap Discourse on the Staying Power of the Beat blurs the boundaries of art and science, embodying the physical equation Bring in P=W/Δt, in which power is attained via working to maintain ‘the Beat’ throughout the history of diaspora Africans in America. Using similar physical relationships, fluctuations in personal/collective empowerment can be attributed to such variables as work and force. As work is directly proportional to force, we explore applications of Newton’s second law, and identify several positive and negative forces. In Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk, the human body, through dance, struggles to thrust the positive force of the Beat against such negative forces as loss of freedom, prejudice and urbanization in order to generate and maintain power over time.

Richard Taylor has composed extensively for the theatre (music for over 50 plays), radio and television. He has been Musical Associate of the National Youth Music Theatre, Composer-in-Residence at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (Performing Rights Society funded scheme) and Artistic Associate at Opera North. His musical The Go-Between (book by David Wood) was a co-production between the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Derby Live and Royal & Derngate, Northampton. It was directed by Roger Haines and it was performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from 9 September to 1 October 2011, at Derby Live from 6 to 29 October 2011 and at the Royal & Derngate from 2 to 19 November 2011. In this interview, Richard Taylor talks to George Rodosthenous about his compositional approaches to The Go-Between, the journey from rehearsal to performance and the inherent ‘Englishness’ of the work. Taylor explains that, historically, ‘the great stories have inspired the great scores’ and that he prefers ‘stories that challenge us and make us wonder why we’re here and if what we’re doing while we’re here is worthy’.

Rob Marshall’s 2009 film of the Maury Yeston musical Nine (1982) received generally unfavourable reviews, and unlike his earlier adaptation of the hit musical Chicago (2002), it failed either to excite audiences or to rekindle the flame of the Hollywood film musical. This article considers some of Marshall’s choices in making the film, exploring his homage to Federico Fellini (whose own film 8½ was the influence for the original stage musical). It suggests that because the songs disrupt the narrative flow, and the unsympathetic lead character Guido lacks the backbone to make his project succeed, Marshall’s work is a deliberate inversion of film musical tradition.

CREATING PANTOMIME, JOYCE BRANAGH AND KEITH ORTON (2011) Ramsbury: The Crowood Press, 208 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84797-255-2, p/bk, £16.99

WILLIAM VINCENT WALLACE: COMPOSER, VIRTUOSO AND ADVENTURER, ANDREW LAMB (2012) West Byfleet: Fullers Wood Press, x+237 pp., ISBN: 978-0-9524149-7-1, p/bk, £25.00

WEST SIDE STORY: CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON AN AMERICAN MUSICAL, ELIZABETH A. WELLS (2011) Lanham (Maryland), Toronto, Plymouth (UK): Scarecrow Press, xiii+312 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8108-7666-8, h/bk, $39.95