Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 8, Issue 3, 2014

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical theatre has tended to resist interpretations that view it as an affirmation of the musical theatre itself, as an effort to construct the musical theatre’s historical roots, and as a means of insisting on its centrality to human (or, at least, American) survival. The term metatheatre may encapsulate this persistent trope in R&H’s world. For, despite the term’s slippery connotations since its coinage more than 50 years ago, it serves as a concise way to accentuate a broad, yet not fully recognized, phenomenon in their work. Metatheatrical numbers, scenes and patterns emerge in The King and I, The Sound of Music, and South Pacific that help to illuminate the previously unrecognized metatheatricality of Carousel.

This article investigates the musicality of Stanislavsky’s theatre practice by focusing specifically on his conceptions of rhythm and tempo-rhythm. It refers to the work Stanislavsky conducted during the 1918 Bolshoi Opera Studio and the 1935 Opera-Dramatic Studio. The article draws on recent scholarship on musicality in theatre in order to propose that although not immediately visible as an ‘outcome’ of his theatricality, Stanislavsky’s musicality was located beyond the limits of music as metaphor to theatrical activity, and was evident in processes of embodiment that Stanislavsky was developing with his actors. This rather broad musical dimension is foregrounded in Stanislavsky’s consistent attention to rhythm, and the ways rhythmic awareness affects the actor’s presence. This led to the development of the notion of tempo-rhythm. It will be argued that beyond its apparent dualistic nature, if reconsidered as a ‘relational dynamic’ tempo-rhythm emerges as a key element of Stanislavsky’s musicality. The author concludes that in his quest to promote acting as embodiment, Stanislavsky developed, through musicalized processes, strategies of physicalization of action that promoted acting beyond imitations of scripted texts.

Jason Robert Brown is an American musical theatre composer who sings as he composes and ‘write[s] everything at the same time’. This article focuses on Brown’s small-scale melodic construction techniques through discussion of the horizontal pitch content from his musicals Songs for a New World (1995), Parade (1998) and The Last Five Years (2002). The article concludes that, once Brown has established a ‘structure that [he] can just start playing with’, he regularly uses highly structured melodic cells when creating his melodic lines; repeatedly employs dissonance when his characters are experiencing fear, nervousness or regret, and uses consonance and unison as dramatic symbols in his love duets.

Since Bruce Kirle’s death in 2007, the Music Theatre and Dance Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education has sponsored the competitive Bruce Kirle Memorial Emerging Scholars panel in Music Theatre/Dance at its annual conference. Each year, the winning panelists present their work at the ATHE Conference that was held this year in Scottsdale, Arizona, in July 2014. This year’s panelists, Janet Werther, Hannah Adamy and Alison Walls, presented their papers in Arizona, and have revised them for publication as articles in Studies in Musical Theatre. Mary Jo Lodge, the respondent to the papers at the ATHE Conference, introduces them in this short article.

This article considers Mary Wigman’s career and her work’s relationship to canonicity in both dance and theatre studies with a focus on her position as a female authorial artist in Weimar-era Germany. The article compares Wigman’s early group work The Seven Dances of Life (1921) with Oskar Kokoschka’s seminal expressionist play Murderer Hope of Womankind (1909), arguing that the works have inverse relationships to textuality and to canonicity. This article also explores Wigman’s closeted bisexuality, suggesting that an acknowledgement of the artist’s sexual proclivities is integral to understanding her resistance to the traditional power structures of the theatre and her development of alternative power structures and homosocial female communities.

There is no word that brings to mind simultaneous bodily, vocal and affect excess quite like ‘diva’. Contrary to popular belief, the opera diva’s behaviours both in and outside performance are results of her training and the Euro-classical repertoire. On the levels of the body, voice and affect, the student soprano studies and performs a particular kind of ‘divaness’. She inures herself into a particular tradition that teaches discipline through repertoire. Through an analysis of Euro-classical pedagogical discipline on a soprano’s body, voice and affective display, this article presents a theory of diva performativity using Judith Hamera’s definition of virtuosity, Roland Barthes’ ‘The grain of the voice’, Wayne Koestenbaum’s discussion of ‘divaness’, and Naomi Cumming’s illuminations of Richard Schechner’s ‘not me, not not me’. At these levels, a soprano’s vocal study teaches her to be always and already excessive.

The classic American musical Show Boat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, holds at its heart an intriguingly gothic scene. When Steve drinks Julie’s blood in the climactic ‘miscegenation scene’, his actions recall that of a vampire – a gothic suggestion that is reinforced in the libretti for the original 1927 production, and can also be found in other moments in the musical. Viewed within the contextual framework of the culturally embedded connotations of the vampire, the socio-historic context of the work itself, and the significant role of the American musical in the formation of national identity, this gothic figure can be seen to encapsulate the profound concerns embedded in the musical, and mediate the era’s cultural climate. Such a context may also suggest a particular resonance for the musical’s Jewish creators. In addition to this, Show Boat’s vampiric suggestion reveals a troubling reflection on cultural appropriation.

In this short performance review, the author considers the recent ‘revisal’ production of Brigadoon, staged by the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in the summer of 2014. One of the charms of this production was its revised libretto, by Brian Hill, which sought to contextualize the myth of the disappearing village of Brigadoon against a backdrop of genuine Scottish historical events. The revisal also strengthened the character portrayals to appeal to the tastes of contemporary audiences. The author explores some of these changes and reflects on the success of the production.

Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, Carol Oja (2014) New York: Oxford University Press, xvi+399 pp., ISBN: 9780199862092, h/bk, $27.95

Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality, Pamela Karantonis, Francesca Placanica, Anne Sivuoka-Kauppale and Pieter Verstraete (eds) (2014) Farnham: Ashgate, xxvi+238 pp., ISBN: 9781409469834, h/bk, £58.50

Musical Theatre: A Workbook, David Henson and Kenneth Pickering (2013) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, x+124 pp., ISBN: 9781137331625, p/bk, £15.63