Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment

Millie Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317091356
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

What is it about musical theatre that audiences find entertaining? What are the features that lead to its ability to stimulate emotional attachment, to move and to give pleasure? Beginning from the passion musical theatre performances arouse and their ubiquity in London's West End and on Broadway this book explores the ways in which musical theatre reaches out to and involves its audiences. It investigates how pleasure is stimulated by vocal, musical and spectacular performances. Early discussions centre on the construction of the composed text, but then attention is given to performance and audience response. Musical theatre contains disruptions and dissonances in its multiple texts, it allows gaps for audiences to read playfully. This combines with the voluptuous sensations of embodied emotion, contagiously and viscerally shared between audience and stage, and augmented through the presence of voice and music. A number of features are discovered in the construction of musical theatre performance texts that allow them to engage the intense emotional attachment of their audiences and so achieve enormous popularity. In doing this, the book challenges the conception of musical theatre as 'only entertainment'. Entertainment instead becomes a desirable, ephemeral and playful concept.

Chapter 1
Musical Characterisation in HMS Pinafore and The Rocky Horror Show

How is a musical theatre text understood? How can the combination of texts from the disciplines of music and drama contribute to the construction of meaning in ways that are particular to musical theatre? In his comedy show, recorded on video as Unrepeatable (1994), Eddie Izzard performs a sketch in which he describes a character in a film who cannot hear the background music that accompanies the scene. The character walks along in the park having a thoroughly good time, but the music gives the audience a premonition of impending disaster. The comedian plays on the different information available to character and audience for comic effect. The sketch also draws attention to the way music, character and narrative interact in film. The audience reads the performance signs; body language, text, scenery, lighting and so on, and understands the light-hearted emotion of the character. It also recognises the musical signs that suggest that something unpleasant will soon befall the character. Both of these systems rely on cultural recognition of previously established conventions and are apparent in film and musical theatre. Most interesting in this case is that the coded messages give different information so that one element disrupts the easy acceptance of the others. This results, as Izzard rightly points out, in the audience being in the position of having more, or different, information than is available to the character; it has narrative information that in this case is conveyed through music. The cultural knowledge required to process and read the signs, which seem entirely obvious in the example above, can be unpacked to reveal how the interaction of music with a dramatic performance adds to the total effect: it is more than the sum of its parts.

Nicholas Cook’s Analysing Musical Multimedia proposes that each individual text mediates the other(s) to produce a meaning that is not musical or visual but arises from the interaction of the parts.1 This idea is fundamental to writing on film music, such as Unheard Melodies by Claudia Gorbman.2 In this she suggests that film music’s interactions with visual images are extremely complex:

Its nonverbal and nondenotative status allows it to cross all varieties of ‘border’: between levels of narration (diegetic/non-diegetic), between narrating agencies (objective/subjective narrators), between viewing time and psychological time, between points in diegetic space and time (as narrative transition).3

It is clear that musical theatre texts are likely to be at least as complex and that music can have multiple functions simultaneously that are read in relation to other parts of the text. The combination of music and other texts that results from the performance of musical theatre can produce complex or multiple readings. These ideas will be developed over the following chapters, beginning here with an exploration of how musical theatre uses genre for character stereotyping and satire.

Signs exist in the words, the music, the structures and the genres of the text, all of which are read as mediating each other within a cultural context as the work is performed at a particular time and place. Musical styles or signs can point to location, historical epoch, mood, or race/class of the performers. So in Show Boat4 Joe sings ‘Ol’ Man River’, which is coded in the style of spiritual/gospel music, and frames him as black, god-fearing and working class. This is supported in the script and performance and points to the potential for a high degree of over-coding in musical theatre texts. Julie’s performance of ‘Fish Gotta Swim’ differs from Magnolia’s as required by their racial backgrounds, and begins the narrative of racial difference through vocal and musical signification. A more recent theatrical example can be found in Jesus Christ Superstar.5 In this musical one can draw a comparison between Jesus singing ‘Gethsemane’ and drawing on the codes and signification of rock music, while ‘King Herod’s Song’, in a music hall style, signifies Herod as a light-hearted entertainer. Thus, Jesus is portrayed through the musical genre as a rebellious defender of the people, while Herod is seen as a fool and a jester.

In this chapter I’m going to introduce W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s opera of 1878, HMS Pinafore. The second half of the chapter contains an analysis of several songs from the opera to exemplify the ways in which understanding of character, location and historical period can be produced through the combination of music and lyrics in performance. The analysis will consider two issues of representation in this opera. These are the representation of seafarers in folk-song and in the opera, and the representation of comic and heroic characters through a combination of verbal presentation and musical language. The reading of the combination of musical and dramatic signs in this work, when considered in its social context, is discovered to contain the potential for ironic or satirical readings that might not be understood by a twenty-first-century audience.

Finally, the signification of characters in a very different work, The Rocky Horror Show,6 will be analysed briefly to demonstrate how character signification through musical genre has continued in the twentieth century. The overall aim is to identify how characters are created in various degrees of complexity through the combination of music and lyrics. Moreover, I will place the texts in their historical contexts to propose contemporaneous interpretations, even while remaining aware of the potential for multiple or divergent interpretations.

HMS Pinafore

To begin to explore the ways music can signify in a musical theatre text, I have chosen to analyse a selection of moments from HMS Pinafore. This work is still performed, so it must still be understood by, and appeal to, a contemporary audience, though the contemporary interpretation is doubtless substantially different. W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) wrote their comic operas over a period of 25 years from Thespis in 1871 to The Grand Duke in 1896.7 The connection to the broader field of opera is implied in the subtitles used to describe these works; most are described as ‘comic opera’. This terminology may have served several purposes. It associated these works in the public mind with grand opera, a respectable and high-class entertainment, while at the same time avoiding the term ‘operetta’ and seeking dissociation from risqué, ‘foreign’ entertainments. Certainly it was clear to audiences that while the entertainment was comic, they weren’t going to be subject to the raciness of burlesque. The musical content was of a more sophisticated type than other such popular entertainments and audiences were alerted that they were going to hear some trained ‘operatic’ voices. Finally, the term was probably used for purposes of comic irony insofar as there is often a mock seriousness in W.S. Gilbert’s libretti and operatic parody in Arthur Sullivan’s music.8 It is generally agreed that their works offer a representation of a changing national identity9 or social commentary.10 However, it is their influence on the subsequent development of American musical theatre11 that makes their work particularly suitable as a starting point for exploring the signification of texts in musical theatre.

Raymond Knapp, in The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, highlighted the importance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore in demonstrating ‘the capacity of musical comedy to express a national identity’ to an American nation beginning to find its own identity.12 Knapp’s analysis of Pinafore identifies a series of issues the opera raises as well as establishing a tradition of treating England and English characters as comical in American musical theatre that survived for many years, both ‘celebrating and mocking English nationalist sentiments’.13 The issues the work raises include English society’s hierarchies, the satirical suggestion that naval abuses were a thing of the past, and the satire of personal freedoms. The portrayal of English seamanship was ‘self-deprecating’ despite it being the ‘locus of both English patriotic pride and contentious American engagement in the nineteenth century’. Moreover, the English characters are represented as ‘regimented, contented mannequins in sailor suits’.14

At the time Gilbert and Sullivan were collaborating there was a second wave of British imperialism stimulated by the recent establishment of Queen Victoria as Empress of India.15 Within that context older myths of what it is to be English can be identified in, for example, Yeomen of the Guard and newer constructions in Utopia Limited – so the comic operas could represent a document of the multiple and changing facets of Englishness during the period. In late Victorian England there was uncertainty about whether an English identity was being diluted by imperial expansion or by socialist and republican ideas.

Jingoism was a feature of the overt patriotism of the period that was satirically attacked in the comic operas and in other popular songs.16 Despite the satire, overt patriotism had also been common in songs and melodramas and ‘abounded in the 1870s’.17 However, Derek Scott also identifies what he calls Victorian notions of English qualities, which are generally those of the bourgeoisie and which he identifies in the comic operas. These are listed as ‘character’, ‘duty’, ‘prudence’ and ‘composure’.18 He speaks of the slow development of freedom through parliamentary democracy, the preference for pragmatism and practicality over the intellectual, the ‘dislike of excess, whether in emotion, manner or dress’,19 and mentions that respectability and decorum are prized, especially in women. Finally, however, there is another feature that appears in the comic operas; the quirky, topsy-turvy and often eccentric humour of Gilbert.

The musical language is also quintessentially of its time and place in its utilisation or even burlesquing of well-known genres within the contemporary culture, whether from the concert and opera traditions, or from the folk and popular traditions. Both Scott and Charles Hayter document a wide range of references to well-known musical styles within Sullivan’s score that undermine or parody more obvious interpretations. These include folk-song, ballad, madriga...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Musical Characterisation in HMS Pinafore and The Rocky Horror Show
• 2 Encoding the Voice: Show Boat, Guys and Dolls, and Musical Theatre Post-1960
• 3 Integration and Distance in Musical Theatre: The Case of Sweeney Todd
• 4 Layers of Representation and the Creation of Irony: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Merrily We Roll Along and The Last 5 Years
• 5 Alternatives to Linearity: Cabaret, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Assassins
• 6 Illusions of Realism in West Side Story and Actor-Musician Performances
• 7 Experiencing Live Musical Theatre Performance: La Cage Aux Folles and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
• 8 I’ve Heard that Song Before: The Jukebox Musical and Entertainment in Jersey Boys, Rock of Ages, Mamma Mia and We Will Rock You
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index