In the 1993 film My Life, father-to-be Bob Jones (Michael Keaton) has received a terminal diagnosis. Anxious that his son not be starved of paternal guidance, he records his accumulated wisdom on videotape. On the ‘important subject’ of music, he advises sticking to the classics of rock and R&B. ‘Your mother … will try to fill your head with show tunes’, he warns of his wife Gail (Nicole Kidman). ‘If she starts singing “Some enchanted evening…”, turn and run…’ Bob's words capture an enduring unease about musical theatre. Gendered feminine here against rock's strutting masculinity, this superficially appealing genre is not quite ‘proper’ – and certainly not music that a boy growing up without his father should be allowed to go near. While, later, Gail plays this very song to the baby in her womb – the Rodgers effect? – Bob listens at full blast to the William Tell overture (or, rather, The Lone Ranger theme).

Bob Jones's advice had, until recently, been followed carefully by academics: with notable exceptions, few serious books about musicals preceded the late 1990s; the simple lyricism and unashamed sentimentality of these shows had no place at university. Now, though, several scholars are ‘coming out’ as fans of the musical – and all that may, or may not, imply. Studies of specific shows, composers and sub-genres, as well as of social issues in and around the musical, appear with some regularity. Still, caught among fields of Theatre, Opera, and Popular Music Studies, this scholarship has been slow to develop a disciplinary foundation. Among recent studies, two authors have had that broader ambition: Raymond Knapp to survey the genre thematically, in his two companion volumes, and Scott McMillin to reveal its aesthetic underpinnings. While neither scholar seeks to write a comprehensive history of the musical, they agree that it is one of America's most important contributions to the arts, and set out to show why.

Scott McMillin (1934–2006) was an English professor at Cornell, better known for his studies and editions of Elizabethan drama than for his love of the musical. In The Musical as Drama, he attempts to demonstrate this maligned genre's worthiness as an art form (and as the location of academic enquiry) by uncovering its founding principles. The musical is not organised like opera or drama, he argues, but is a unique form with its own generic conventions. We should not ‘wonder if the musical is up to the standards of the university’, therefore, ‘but if the standards of the university are up to dealing with the musical’ (xi).

McMillin's title invokes, obviously enough, Joseph Kerman's Opera as Drama and, less directly, Wagner's Oper und Drama: two more essays that attempt to sum up their form. This should not suggest similarity in their arguments. In fact, McMillin's beef with music scholarship is precisely for approaching the musical as an ‘opera manqué’ (x), lacking in a sought-after ‘integration’. The latter term is never properly defined, though he employs it throughout, somewhat as a foil. But we know the broad idea: that different systems of meaning, particularly words and music, must work together in order to achieve dramatic success. Both music and drama critics, McMillin complains, have operated with a predilection for organic wholes, derived at mid-century by an unholy alliance of Wagner and the new criticism (in whose grasp he locates Kerman's 1956 study, along with Eric Bentley's The Playwright as Thinker, 1946, and Francis Fergusson's The Idea of a Theater, 1949). If these targets strike us as rather out of date, they are not McMillin's real concern. Rather, it is the effect of their thinking on the musical itself, which he feels has lost its path over the last few decades, that McMillin most urgently wants to challenge.Footnote ¹ If Kerman's bête noire was Puccini, McMillin's is Andrew Lloyd Webber (whom, apparently, it is still okay to love to hate).

Aided by Brecht, and in passing by Kierkegaard, McMillin argues that musicals, far from seeking a union of music and drama, depend on ‘the incongruity between book and number, between what I describe as two orders of time, the progressive time of plot and the repetitive time of music’ (x). Musicals, he believes, derive their powerful effect from the ‘doubleness’ that arises from the suspension of plot when it is time to sing. The numbers rarely advance the plot but they allow the characters to exist in a different modality, one in which interior emotions and motivations are revealed to anyone who will listen (though more crucially to the audience than to the other characters, who may be deaf to the music). ‘When a musical is working well’, McMillin argues, ‘I feel the crackle of difference, not the smoothness of unity, even when the numbers dovetail with the book’ (2). This is McMillin's most fundamental point (and he makes it often). It is, for him, what connects the best contemporary musicals back, through the tradition, to their roots in revues and operetta. Like Kerman's book, then, McMillin's has quite a simple central argument and a strong point of view.

Where many (including the composer and lyricist themselves) identify an important move towards integration in the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein in the 1940s, McMillin sees greater equality of the different elements within the existing convention – in short, ‘a better book’ (15). If earlier shows had mostly been flimsy comedies about forgettable (and interchangeable) characters – exceptions such as Show Boat (1927) duly noted – with Oklahoma! (1943) the musical began to tackle more serious subjects and to devote greater energy to character development. Book and music may be on the same level, then, and their creators true collaborators; but that does not make them integrated. Towards the end of his volume, McMillin introduces a more appropriate term for the relationship: cohesion – different elements that stick together but do not blend.

McMillin's theory is attractive, for it removes concern about the musical's lapse of realism at the moment of song; it proposes instead a kind of supra-realism which takes the characters – and their audience – over the rainbow to a land where dreams come true. If the book is the place for drama and dialogue, songs are the location of the innermost thoughts and imaginings which in regular life, and regular drama, may be implied but rarely articulated. This, McMillin suggests, is why musicals have been so important to so many people, particularly perhaps to those whose dreams have had to be suppressed. The theatre-goer is right, in other words, to feel a little uneasy at the moment when a character moves from speech to song: not because that gap reveals a limitation of the form, but because it is where the musical is most powerful – when the ‘subversive’ quality of this ‘illegitimate [form of] drama’ is revealed (6).

So far, so good – and McMillin continues to examine several songs in situ, considering their interconnection with (but not their integration into) the dialogue that surrounds them. Where he gets into rather hotter water, I think, is with ‘The Voice of the Musical’ in Chapter 3. Here he attempts to explain why musical motifs may be shared among characters even though the dramatic significance of this exchange is opaque or even contradictory. They are singing, he says, “‘the voice of the musical” – a voice that is not exactly their own but in which their voices can join’. There is a nod to Carolyn Abbate, but McMillin's idea of ‘a melodic and harmonic world into which various characters enter at various times, not so much because they are like one another psychologically … but because they belong to the same aesthetic design’ (68) is quite unlike hers. Where Abbate's voices occasionally interrupt and attempt to tell the story, McMillin's may be present constantly but have nothing in particular to say. What he means is not ‘voice’ in anything like the sense we have come to understand it, but rather sound, or tinta as Verdi put it: a common rhythm, a recurring melodic profile, a distinctive timbre. ‘Each well-composed musical has a style of its own, a characteristic sound, and there is a drive among the singing characters to join this voice’ (69). This surely is much closer to Edward T. Cone's centred ‘composer's voice’ than it is to Abbate's post-structuralist ones.Footnote ²

In Chapter 4, McMillin extends his theory to explore how this voice lies behind ‘a drive for ensemble performance in the musical that sets this form of drama apart from realistic prose drama and its focus on the psychology of individualism’ (75). This is an interesting observation: that, for musical reasons alone, these shows will tend to be concerned with collective issues over personal ones. The community ensemble was already well established by the time of Rodgers and Hammerstein, in whose hands it became almost too generic: McMillin gives the wonderful example of ‘This Was a Real Nice Hayride’, which was cut from Oklahoma!, only to turn up as ‘This Was a Real Nice Clambake’ in Carousel. But it was also Rodgers and Hammerstein who learned to combine this predilection for group singing with the plot. Hence, they typically open quietly and allow the community to emerge through the drama, rather than beginning with a big song-and-dance. (Raymond Knapp explores some similar ideas in The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, Chapter 6, ‘American Mythologies’.)

The ensemble convention, McMillin argues, can even override the story. In the Act I finale of Sondheim's A Little Night Music (a rare case when the plot is advanced in a musical number), the various couples may conduct different arguments simultaneously, but the fact that they all sing the same song shows that a harmonious solution will be arrived at in the long run. Both Candide and West Side Story end with singing communities (if ambivalent ones), although their sources in Voltaire and Shakespeare hardly propose them. In this, they fall in line with the musical as a genre, where their satire and tragedy have otherwise torn it apart. (McMillin wants it both ways with Bernstein, for he later argues, responding to other moments, that these shows ‘shattered the community spirit of ensemble’ (93) – one of several unresolved tensions that result from distributing his analysis of a given show across the relevant chapters.)

McMillin's theory of the two orders of time has to take account, in Chapter 5, of what we have come to know as ‘diegetic’ or ‘phenomenal’ songs – particularly as so many musicals feature a show-within-the-show (Show Boat, Cabaret, Phantom of the Opera, the list goes on). This does not take long. ‘A pause [in progressive, book time] is a pause even when the characters in the book hear it as a pause’ (105). In other words, there is no fundamental difference between songs written into the book and those ‘out-of-the-blue’ numbers (as he calls them) sandwiched in later by the lyricist and composer; either way, they are taking a break from the plot. Even a tune such as ‘Can't Help Lovin’ Dat Man' from Show Boat, which is deeply embedded in the story, is ‘still an insert, a number with time of its own, and utterly detachable’ (108). This may be true in terms of our immediate experience of the song (both inside and outside the theatre), but it surely does matter when, as in this case, the drama would fall apart without diegetic singing. (Another highlight of Knapp's National Identity is his analysis of this song as a ‘partial fusion of Tin Pan Alley and blues’ (191) which is both an active player in, and a mirror of, the show's story of miscegenation.)

McMillin's point may be more easily grasped the other way around. In effect, he suggests that all numbers in musicals occupy the condition of stage songs in opera: seemingly apart from the narrative, they may nevertheless interact with the drama in interesting ways. It does not fundamentally change matters, therefore, if music becomes bound up in the story (still less, does it evidence the musical's ‘integration’). On the contrary, this practice foregrounds the generic convention that numbers will intervene, perhaps even making the show about that convention. An interesting sub-set of these musicals features a ‘number to be completed’: diegetic songs whose competent realisation becomes a motivating factor of the plot. The crowning number of this group is ‘My Ship’ from Weill's Lady in the Dark, which must be recovered from repressed childhood memories by a traumatised woman in therapy. In McMillin's reading, then, stage songs represent a heightened instance of the musical's entirely conventional interruption of dialogue for song.

Like the ‘voice of the musical’, McMillin's analysis of the narrative power of the orchestra in Chapter 6 is rather a blunt tool. The musicians are there for the audience, not the characters, who cannot even hear them. If Aunt Eller could hear the orchestra that has joined Curly in ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning’ (which begins Oklahoma! a cappella) she ‘would drive it off the farm for scaring the animals’ (126). And yet, for us, ‘It seems natural for two dozen musicians to be chiming in when some cowboy is yodeling about a fine morning, and when no one questions such an absurdity, a basic convention of musical theatre must be operating’ (127). This convention is that the orchestra knows everything – all the tunes, all the links, all the plot twists (but do not, I would add, quiz the brass players, reading the newspaper in the pit). Through underscoring, the band can reveal things to the audience before they have become apparent to the characters, or at least before they articulate them; it can also set up an expectation of a song whose gradual intimation and final realisation itself becomes the drama. Though one would have thought these practices would be painful evidence for McMillin of attempts at integration, he discusses them instead as remnants of melodrama and legitimate in the musical. In fact, he is brilliant at analysing stretches of underscoring and faltering song in South Pacific, Show Boat and Carousel. ‘One could say that characterization and plot are being advanced by the song, as integration theory would have it, but that is not exact enough. The song is characterization and plot’ (138).

Yet how this evidences the orchestra's omniscience is not entirely clear to me. If we are going to assign agency where there is none – all involved are following the dictates of a score or a script – small interventions in McMillin's analysis could rewrite the band's role as that of a participant in a dialogue with the characters. To be sure, the music often seems to nudge the characters towards action in these ‘melodramatic’ half-sung, half-spoken scenes; but it also sometimes reacts to them, as if surprised. Like the ‘voice of the musical’, orchestral omniscience is a normalising concept which in effect rules out interpretative possibilities by determining them to lie beyond the bounds of convention. (McMillin's discussion of the slippery and exceptional is limited to those moments when, through design or necessity, musicians play on stage.)

The ideas become more puzzling in Chapter 7, in which the orchestra's omniscience is compared to the fallibility of the characters. Or is it the singers? McMillin often seems to conflate performer with role here, and infallibility with virtuosity. ‘The presence of an orchestra that knows everything emphasizes the fallibility of everyone else, everyone who is a character in the plot or a dancer or a singer, but it especially emphasizes the fallibility of dancers and singers in their numbers’ (149). Can performers not sing well if the characters they are portraying are making mistakes in their lives? What McMillin means, I think, although he never quite says it, is that the vulnerability of the actor who must perform numbers mirrors the vulnerability of the character s/he represents; they are both ‘putting it out there’ though they do not know how well it will go over. Thus:

In other words, musical numbers give the performers/characters a chance to show what they are made of, but also to fall flat on their faces. Deprived of the gaps between song and speech in integrated musicals – gaps in which audiences express their approval or withhold it – the performers/characters are swept along by the continuous music and drama and have little power to intervene.

Just as problematic for McMillin, then, are the meddlesome characters in shows who have super-human knowledge. A few examples to the contrary, God does not belong on the musical stage: ‘He doesn't fit the form, because He possesses the attribute already possessed by the orchestra, omniscience’ (151). As for narrators, Stephen Sondheim has the right idea: in Act II of Into the Woods, his is ruled the one dispensable character and thrown as a sacrifice to the Giantess; he and his kin often turn out to be far from omniscient, in fact. These days, however, over-the-top sets and effects have themselves come to rival the orchestra as a source of authority over the performers, McMillin complains, polemically:

Such effects as the crashing chandelier in Phantom of the Opera, or the helicopter taking off in Miss Saigon, belong in a theme park not a theatre, he argues. It is hard to avoid a sense of generational difference here, although McMillin's is far from the worst case among writers of nostalgia for the ‘golden days’. I am reminded of the French critics of the interwar years (intimates from my research) who were forever bemoaning the importation of American special effects into the – Gallic? – music hall. Except that now the flashy imports come mainly from Britain, along with many of the musicals now heard on Broadway: a second British invasion. McMillin fondly recalls by contrast the old ‘in-one’ system, in which singers performed a number in front of the traveller curtain during a set change, ‘keeping the musical in touch with its vaudeville roots’ (157).

McMillin hopes to clinch his case with a comparison of Phantom of the Opera and Sweeney Todd: two largely sung musicals based on recent versions of ‘lurid and melodramatic [old] tales of urban violence’; both were originally produced, on huge and ambitious sets, by the venerable American director Hal Prince. Though he is tolerant of other positions, McMillin finds Phantom ‘pretentious and overblown’; it does not stop at parodying opera in several diegetic scenes but finally becomes quasi-operatic itself, ceasing to return from music to dialogue once the Phantom's own opera is performed. Given the large orchestra with ‘total knowledge of the show’, spectacular staging effects, and even the Phantom's own ability to disappear or shoot fireballs (if not finally to shape his own destiny), the piece is ‘loaded with systems of omniscience’, he complains (167). Whenever the Phantom's protégée Christine acts – to unmask him, or to kiss him – the drama ‘dissolves into technology’ (168) and the Phantom disappears; such turning points need musical markers in the form of numbers, McMillin believes, not this ‘truly unified effect between the orchestra and the stagehands’ (169). What has happened, he argues, is that the musical has been taken over by the conventions of film, in which locations and perspectives change frequently, but ‘invisible technology’ stitches them together, as if seamlessly. McMillin has no problem with film musicals themselves, but their place is on the screen, he insists, not on the stage, which is for the ‘vulnerability of performance’ (177). This is one of the prime ways in which he thinks recent, so-called ‘mega-musicals’ have gone wrong.

McMillin views Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, by contrast, as an innovation within the tradition. Though it, too, is quite largely through-composed, Sondheim allows the plot to play out musically and dramatically without the intervention of technology. At crucial moments, music takes over as it should, giving voice to emotions that would otherwise go understated; allowing the audience inside the characters' heads. When Sweeney Todd is about to employ his cutthroat razor on Judge Turpin, he pauses to sing of ‘Pretty Women’, a sentiment – and number – in which his would-be victim joins him, disarmingly. Later, in his ‘Epiphany’, the barber's murderous intentions become indiscriminate. But this terrifying song, a dramatic highlight, is immediately balanced and undermined by spoken dialogue. ‘That's all very well…’, says Mrs. Lovett. And soon enough they are singing of the varieties of meat pies she will be able to make with the corpses: ‘comic cannibalism in 3/4’ (172). Music and dialogue do not just support one another; shifts between them are revelatory and give new directions to the plot.

That Sondheim is a wittier and more versatile composer than Lloyd Webber, if a less facile tunesmith, few would surely deny. But whether McMillin's comparison of their handling of the musical's conventions (as he has identified them) is sufficient to crown the one and hang the other, I am less sure; the very idea of the overlapping ‘systems of omniscience’ in recent musicals is a curious one. There's an old-fashioned Marxist critique – alienation of the conditions of production – lurking not very deep beneath the surface here. And in the final chapter, ‘What Kind of Drama is This?’, McMillin does indeed wax lyrical about the political potential of the genre. Like Brecht's Epic Theatre, musicals in their ‘disunification’ do not seek to hide their identity as works for the stage, still less so when they are self-conscious about their conventions:

Yet, if McMillin is so interested in this jostling energy, why does he award music so much unfettered power?: the orchestra is omniscient; the musical itself has a voice which characters seek to join – both in a sense proxies for the ‘genius’ composer. As recent opera scholars have demonstrated time and time again, even the most ‘integrated’ of music dramas have their fissures, which are open for interpretation and may reveal social or political force: McMillin takes Wagner at his word, not on his practice. (He also ignores almost entirely earlier opera, with which the musical surely shares many of its conventions, a topic too big to explore here.) Why, then, should musicals in particular require the contrasting modes of speech and song, book and lyric, in order to hold any charge? Even if in practice the ‘Disneyfication’ of Broadway has had a neutralising effect, this does not mean that the ‘integrated’ musical lacks radical potential. Indeed, versions of Brechtian distancing or estrangement could surely be found aplenty in the various hybrid forms we now see on stage. If Phantom of the Opera, for one, is an integrated, realist drama, it is an odd form of realism indeed – one whose flights of fancy many seem to find very powerful food for the imagination. And, like it or not, it is at such shows that people today often have their most powerful musical and theatrical experiences. Exploring why audiences invest such faith in them would surely be more fruitful than dismissing megamusicals as inauthentic – and conservative – as McMillin's whole book, in the final analysis, seems orientated to do.Footnote ³

Certainly Andrew Lloyd Webber – as quoted by Raymond Knapp – is unapologetic about breaking with convention: ‘I find a snag with the musical. I find worrying that awkward moment when … [you sense] the impending approach of music … I like to write something where the music and words can get uninterrupted attention without jolts from one style to another.’Footnote ⁴ Like McMillin, Knapp ends his two-volume set on The American Musical with Sondheim's and Lloyd Webber's ‘Operatic Ambitions’, along with those of Leonard Bernstein. More than pointing to the musical's future, however, these composers' projects enable Knapp to sum up key elements from its past. After its ‘first maturity’ in the early twentieth century, Knapp argues in Personal Identity, the genre has had three powerful influences: European operetta, (musical) film and finally opera. The three pieces with which he concludes, then, do not only aspire to opera's prestige and, to some extent, imitate its musical style. They also encapsulate, at a more nuanced level, a narrative of the genre's history: ‘moving from Bernstein's operetta-based Candide, through Sondheim's cinematic Sweeney Todd, to Lloyd Webber's more purely operatic Evita’ (317).

Setting aside Candide for the moment, it is ironic that McMillin's model of the contemporary observance of convention, Sweeney Todd, is Knapp's final example of the form's indebtedness to cinema. What is more, Knapp links this aesthetic, via the composers of classic Hollywood film music, to its origins in Wagner's music dramas. Not only do motifs (several derived from the Dies Irae) recur frequently and meaningfully in Sweeney Todd, they often do so in the form of underscoring, as the characters converse above them. Knapp's analysis of these motifs, and their dramatic and psychological relevance, stands out even in books that are full of musical insights. (And he, unlike many, has little interest in demonstrations of ‘organicism’ for their own sake.) In common with McMillin, Knapp recognises the show's ‘pattern of first scaring the hell out of its audience and then rescuing the situation through humor’ (333). But he also observes how Sondheim's techniques for maintaining suspense derive from horror films; and that the reassurance provided by the ‘scare–rescue’ pattern is finally withdrawn as fate drives the story inexorably towards ‘operatic’ tragedy.

Though Evita is similarly saturated with music, Lloyd Webber does not achieve this with the same motivic means. Rather, he is content to reuse melodies wholesale, even assigning them altogether contrasting texts. ‘Thus’, Knapp writes, summing up a common view, ‘the ideal Broadway fusion of words and music seems to bifurcate between these two composers, the one emphasizing words over (inadequate) music [Sondheim's articulate fragments], and the other emphasizing music over (inadequate) words [Lloyd Webber's tuneful nonsense]’ (344–5). Knapp himself is more sympathetic to Lloyd Webber than are most writers, showing how Evita's musical repetitions may have an overlooked dramatic import: they establish connections where there would seem to be none, and ‘create the sense of a musically based narrative’ (345). Where some have complained that the show effectively celebrates fascism, Knapp describes how a critical voice is written into the musical in the character Che, who frequently seeks to shatter the stylish illusions created by Eva Peron. If some in the audience are still taken in by her, this may be exactly the point: the show restages the propaganda that was able to sway public opinion, this time in musical terms; but it also leaves room for dissent. His conclusion that Lloyd Webber moves ‘most decisively away from the musical as a genre’ (349), then, is in line with McMillin's; but for Knapp this is not a reason to reproach the composer.

This is typical of Knapp's catholic approach. While McMillin defines and defends a certain vision of the genre, Knapp's books are at once more historical in orientation and more inclusive in composition. His first volume, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, focuses on well-known stage shows; but the second, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, wholeheartedly embraces not only film adaptations but also screen originals (including animated features and a celebrated musical episode of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The organisation of the two texts is fairly straightforward. After some background on the genre's antecedents and development, Knapp considers how recurrent themes of the musical (‘American Mythologies’, ‘Exoticism’, ‘Relationships’) play out in a handful of key works. These chapters are gathered into broader sections (‘Defining America’, ‘Personal Themes’), which are in turn divided across two meta-themes, National Identity and Personal Identity (as I term the books for short). As their titles suggest, Knapp's texts focus respectively on how musicals have reflected and shaped the United States as a nation, and how they have portrayed and affected individuals and groups within it. While his approach is not strictly chronological (and both volumes span the twentieth century), he does tend to craft historical narratives, both within chapters and across them. So great is Knapp's ambition, in fact, that the volumes resist easy summary, particularly as he channels his argument primarily through close readings. In the below, I follow his example by devoting most of my attention to a few key chapters, specifically those that bear most on the preceding discussion of McMillin.

A founding premise of Knapp's Personal Identity is that, beyond their stylistic influence, the examples of operetta and musical film reorientated musicals towards personal themes above national and political ones. These two ‘Personal Genres’ are explored historically in Part 1, before they are absorbed into the ‘Personal Themes’ of ‘Fairy Tales and Fantasy’, ‘Idealism and Inspiration’, ‘Gender and Sexuality’ and ‘Relationships’ in the four chapters of Part 2. Far from policing boundaries among these genres, however, Knapp is interested in how the musical, operetta and musical film merge into each other, such that their separate identities become themes for discussion more than they are definite types. The first chapter of Personal Identity, on Viennese Operetta, is masterful in this respect. It begins with Léhar's The Merry Widow, a huge success in the first decade of the twentieth century, and then pursues its ‘long series of reverberations’ (3, 18) in works such as Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) and Rick Besoyan's Little Mary Sunshine (1959), before concluding with Sondheim's A Little Night Music (1973). (The string of assonances by which Knapp tries to connect their titles is as unconvincing as it is unnecessary, however, as is his own alliteration – their ‘sexually suggestive symmetry’ (20).) This chapter also pays due – but unusual – attention to the films of operettas that both revived and updated the genre for American audiences of several generations, from the early sound era to television. When Knapp finally arrives at Bernstein's stage work Candide at the end of his volume, then, it is at a self-defined operetta that at once pulls away from and gives into the form's generic expectations, echoing a pattern of American innovation in the genre.

In Candide, the effervescent, almost frivolous, music tells a different story from the catalogue of human misery that makes up the book. In a sense, then, it falls into line with the musical tradition as McMillin defines it: escaping from the plot into song, the characters reflect on their predicaments, more or less philosophically. McMillin nevertheless complains that the piece is over-reliant on narrative, but Knapp's concern is more fundamental: he wonders if it is possible to make a light-hearted operetta out of such a biting satire, finding the pervasive gaiety in the face of hideous suffering dramatically unconvincing. Putting this down to tonal music's own inclination to resolve its tensions (and that of popular music in particular), as well as to generic convention, does not seem quite enough to me: tragedies, too, have been resolutely tonal. Perhaps Knapp, who finds Voltaire's Candide ‘one of the most unpleasant classic texts available’ (318), is reading it a bit too literally. Bernstein's music, in both its uplifting spirit and its sometimes acerbic wit, actually conjures the text as a whole rather well: not only Pangloss's stubborn philosophical belief (and Candide's naïve insistence) that ‘Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’; but also the author's satirical intent in portraying – and betraying – their optimism. Knapp wants to be able to believe the music, but its deception (which he identifies) may be a deliberate strategy, not a dramatic failing, or a side effect of musical grammar. Certainly, though, Bernstein's ‘operetta’ is a long way from Lehár's.

But more than either operetta's or opera's, it is film's influence on the musical that Knapp pursues most assiduously. Musicals and film musicals have had, he argues, a ‘symbiotic relationship’ (4), giving the form ‘a double life, between Broadway and Hollywood’ (65); hence his ‘revisionist desire to consider film musicals not as a separate genre but rather as a subgroup within the American musical’ (352). Yet Knapp does not recognise cinema as an important influence behind the progressive ‘integration’ of the musical across the century. On the contrary, he believes that film puts in high relief the performative side of the genre. Not only does the more realistic backdrop make it even more startling when someone bursts into song, but the camera focuses attention on the actors in their numbers much more precisely than does a spotlight. By encouraging viewers to get lost in the world of the performers, screen musicals are more musical even than stage musicals (and in every sense of the word).

To be sure, Knapp is as interested as McMillin in the musical's ‘doubleness’, although he considers it very differently, in terms of camp. ‘To some extent, all musicals, whether on stage or in film, become camp the moment they become musical…’, he says (7).Footnote ⁵ Although gay readings are rightly prominent, Knapp does not mean simply that the musical is a homosexual space. Rather, camp is taken in its broader, original sense, of extravagant, overblown or artificial; that which teeters, theatrically speaking, between melodrama and farce. It is a useful concept and an important analytical tool for Knapp, even if it does not receive the sustained theoretical examination it needs. In film, in particular, he says:

Knapp even coins a phrase for the paradoxical phenomenon of numbers in film: ‘Musically Enhanced Reality Mode’. You know you are entering MERM when the musical accompaniment begins (even less locatable in film than the orchestra in the theatre); a visual device such as fading to a dream may also signal a move to interiority. As such, MERM constitutes a very different form of realism – one that ‘creates a vehicle for personal identity formation and expression’ (69). It is key to our identification with the characters, even as its status as (over-the-top) performance would seem to detract from their credibility.

This paradox is even felt in animated musicals (whose discussion is a valuable addition to Personal Identity). Of Disney's Snow White, for example, Knapp considers how ‘centrally performance contributes to our sense that the central character is actually there, as a truly animated soul’ (pun intended, I think). She ‘perform[s] herself through song’, he says, ‘channeling the most basic way that musicals provide their characters – and us in the audience – with the materials to perform personal identity’ (131). This extended notion of performance (with shades of Judith Butler) is central to Knapp's argument. So powerful when we are young, he believes, musicals instruct us how to be in the world: actors perform their identities on stage and on screen, particularly in song, as we learn to perform ours in daily life. ‘Indeed, it is the nature of their persuasive power that makes musicals an important site for exploring many aspects of personal identity, since … musicals provide material for performance … not only by the cast [but by] the audience [according] to their own needs’ (205). Singing and dancing in front of the mirror turn out to have intense psychological – developmental – importance, which extends far outside the adolescent bedroom.

In the single chapter devoted entirely to ‘The Movie Musical’, then, Knapp is concerned to ‘explore the dynamic between MERM and filmic realism … with eye and ear directed to the emergent personal dimension of this dynamic’ (68). Music, he argues, became problematic the moment soundies arrived: it intruded gratuitously in a form increasingly committed to ‘naturalness’, yet the opportunity to capture performances on film was too good to be missed. Knapp approaches the history of the film musical indirectly, through two movies that in some sense represent it: Singin' in the Rain (1952), which is of course located on and around a film set; and the lesser known, all-black Stormy Weather (1943), whose flimsy biography of a fictional performer (played by Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, whom he seems to resemble) documents some of the screen musical's participants and, particularly, its absentees. Where Singin' in the Rain revels in its MERM, the entertainment giants in Stormy Weather (Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, the Nicholas Brothers and many more) refuse to participate in the mode, Knapp argues: their numbers are ‘all performed as songs rather than as feeling’, and ‘no one steps out of the film's real world’ of performance on stage (93). This signals African Americans' problematical relationship with the musical, which has appropriated black styles at the same time as it has perpetuated stereotypes. In Stormy Weather, Knapp convincingly argues, the numbers progressively undermine their context, as the derivative narrative and minstrel tropes are displaced by jazz – a style of music and of dance that has the ability to ‘refashion something tainted into something more palatable, and thereby bring it under control’ (92). Yet Knapp's pairing of Stormy Weather with Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) rings a little hollow. Viewing this satirical film as a musical is an interesting idea, and the connections Knapp establishes with the earlier film are clear enough. But Bamboozled's range is so much wider – dealing explicitly with early minstrelsy through to contemporary movies and music videos – that viewing it as a parody of a forties musical risks missing the point. This is one instance when Knapp's very broad definition of the genre may obscure more than it reveals.

In a sense, Knapp's second volume peaks too early in his fascinating readings of two recent films. Moulin Rouge (2001) and Chicago (2002), he argues, are ‘meta-movie-musical[s] about the relationship between MERM and real life, but from nearly opposite perspectives’ (103). The films are superficially similar in cutting between various forms of ‘reality’ and of imagination. But where in Moulin Rouge numbers are the space of idealistic dreams and even of redemption, in Chicago they are the most cynical acts of all: the main characters are concerned with achieving fame and fortune on stage regardless of its real-world consequences. In Moulin Rouge, songs reveal truths inside; in Chicago (for the most part) they obfuscate it – and that is the point. (It might be argued, though, that in both cases the numbers represent fantasies, albeit ones that sometimes come true: the difference is whether these dreams are nasty or nice; some people are rotten to the core.)

More specifically, Knapp argues that the very playfulness of Moulin Rouge's pastiche, which overlays popular songs on well-known narratives, ‘seems to model for us the ways in which we live out what we see on stage and screen’ (103). In other words, it shows how we ourselves may perform – may constitute our subjectivities through performing – fragments of what is around us. Reading Ewan McGregor's Christian as a latter-day Orpheus, Knapp suggests that he is able to transform the ordinary (a song lyric) into the extraordinary (MERM) and thus to redeem Nicole Kidman's bad girl Satine by showing her his love; by the end, he says, she too has ‘become Orpheus, empowered by song and empowering those who hear her’ (109). Several strands come together in Knapp's description of the film's

And it is this last possibility – of flipping between different perspectives without having to decide – that is most interesting (and most in line with my own experience).

In Chicago, Knapp suggests, a similar doubleness is more apparent in the film than in the Broadway original. This is in part because the movie explicitly locates most of the numbers in the characters' imaginations, but also because of the relative modesty of the performers' talents: when Renée Zellweger's Roxie Hart enters MERM the effect is indeed magical (or artificial, depending on how you look at it). Chicago's frank glorification of vice, in which performing – for an audience, or for a jury – allows guilty women to escape murder charges, is also part of the show's camp dimension: it valorises presentation over content. In contrast to Moulin Rouge, then, ‘it is the mode of enhancement rather than what is being enhanced that is the whole point of the process’. But the effect is rendered doubly double in the film, Knapp argues, by intercutting strong doses of ‘reality’, ‘so that MERM both pulls away from reality and reinforces it’ (114). Far from smoothing over difference in the musical, as McMillin maintains, then, films may emphasise it.

The ‘doubleness’ Knapp recognises in such filmic devices can, it seems to me, be just as powerful as that McMillin locates only in the fissures between dialogue and song. In these cases, too, the drama is prised apart in such a way that it can be a vehicle of imagination (as in both films) and it can be a vehicle of satire (as in Chicago, perhaps more powerfully even on screen than on stage). For cinema is not as integrated a form as McMillin would have it; it too is fractured and multi-layered, if potentially manipulative, as any film theorist will tell you. The risk of disengaging one's mind in movie musicals such as these is all too real, of course, but the theatre-goer is hardly immune from this condition; film as a medium is far from inherently apolitical.

But Knapp's sense of ‘doubleness’ in the musical does not stop there. It allows for ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ readings, ‘children's’ and ‘adult’ readings, among many more. Thus the apparently unlikely location of the film The Wizard of Oz (1939) hides not just a gay subtext – over the rainbow, even the most ferocious beast is a ‘dandy-lion’ who was ‘born to be a sissy’ – but a political one: an America crawling out of depression faces the tyrannical power of the Wicked Witch whose Winkie army has a ‘pronounced Russian aspect’ in their dress as well as in their music (134). Knapp adds readings of the film as drug-induced surrealism and, less well known, as a representation of Dorothy's near-death experience. In all these ways, then, Knapp at once challenges McMillin's theories and (implicitly) builds on them: he agrees on the musical's double-encoding and even on some of the cultural work it may perform, but he recognises more kinds of difference than that which is generated in the gap between speech and song.

Knapp's range is extraordinary, his ear (and eye) attentive, his readings mostly persuasive. It is impossible here to sum up his every argument, or even to give much of an idea of their scope. I need, though, to register a few general comments about his approach, less to identify the singular failings of this mammoth endeavour than to indicate that there is still plenty left to do. My greatest reservation is that Knapp limits his close attention to the conventional musico-dramatic sources: the score, the book and now recordings. Other matters are considered, of course, but usually in terms of a much looser ‘context’ (a.k.a. History Lite). In particular, the reception of shows is quite frequently invoked, but rarely with much precision and never sufficiently documented. This would not be a problem, if Knapp did not make what the music has meant to people such an important part of his argument, even the book's ostensible raison d'être. Yet he proceeds primarily by assertion: this must have been what they thought.

I even become a bit uncomfortable when Knapp sums up, with little or no evidence presented, the views of large groups. Thus we may read, in the space of a few sentences, of a tendency ‘especially for “straight” audiences’ to condone as passé conventions accepted by ‘mainstream audiences of an earlier generation’, whose critical acumen it is also ‘common among later gays’ to underestimate (41). Similarly, ‘The plucky heroine of American operetta [on film] in the 1930s … appealed tremendously to two fetishized tastes: heterosexual men addicted to damsel-in-distress narratives … and homosexual men attracted to campy melodrama and the over-wrought performances they engendered’ (123). Even if we assume that these groups do not represent all the films' male viewers, can these types really be as discrete as Knapp implies? Besides, who are or were these men? What trace of them is there? Far from the performance of personal identity, such statements, unencumbered by documentation, seem perilously close to stereotypes.Footnote ⁶

These problems are, if anything, more acutely felt in Knapp's National Identity, simply because the shift in scale (from person to nation) ups the stakes. This book, which I can consider here only briefly, observes a similar broad structure to its sibling: Part 1 provides an historical introduction to ‘European Roots’ and ‘Early American Developments’, as I have mentioned, ending with an excellent analytical typology of ‘American Song through Tin Pan Alley’ (which alone is worth the cover price); Part 2 comprises three chapters on ‘Defining America’; and Part 3 three more on ‘Managing America's Others’. Throughout, these themes most often function in musicals by means of what Knapp calls the ‘marriage trope’, in which a less-than-wholly-straightforward relationship provides the narrative foreground for the bigger issues at stake: immigration and assimilation, race and ethnicity, and so on. Canonical shows are to the fore here, with the likes of Guys and Dolls (1950), Show Boat (1927) and Cabaret (1966) given extended readings; but there are also a few that are less expected, such as Mark Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock (1938) and Sondheim's Assassins (1991).

Though their orientation is diverse, most of Knapp's readings fall into a similar pattern. He typically begins by laying out some historical and cultural background, then details the show's inception and first production. He continues by parsing the musical's plot, music and dramatic themes; and finally deals with a few songs in more detail. Many of these essays are little gems, worthy of reading and re-reading independent of their context in the book. Yet in describing how the musical has aspired to represent and sometimes even resolve the issues facing a young nation, Knapp rarely stops to sift the evidence of what the nation itself made of the solutions. Of course, there are some practical and theoretical limitations here. Most people do not record their thoughts in any fashion that we can retrieve; those who do tend to be privileged; and even they may struggle to translate their feelings, or be disinclined to do so for all manner of reasons. No one wants to dispense with the imaginative critic, least of all one as sensitive and wide-ranging as Knapp. But, at the same time, a study of the musical in relation to national identity would seem to suppose input from other than the scholars and composers he cites. What is more, for pieces that exist in multiple, highly variable versions; that are performed by amateurs more than by professionals; and with which people identity so powerfully, Knapp's readings are peculiarly work-based: surely the business of ‘becoming American’ is transacted more in the paired-down performance of the school hall than it is in the creators' (or the critics') heads.Footnote ⁷

Knapp is perhaps trying to get around this problem in a rather tortuous passage at the very beginning of ‘Defining America’ (Part 2 of National Identity). American audiences, he argues, react to musicals in terms of their own understanding of what that national identity means (whether the characters are, ostensibly, located in America or not, in the present or in the past):

In other words, a musical's Americanness can be located in the work itself, so there is no need to dirty one's hands in the archive. Not only are press reactions mentioned only occasionally (and then usually scantily and without references) but even more basic indicators, such as run lengths, profits or losses, and revivals, are often lacking. The result is a tour de force of culturally informed criticism, but it is not the social history that it often seems to promise, still less one in which musicals are demonstrated to have had any active role in shaping values or politics. Knapp is finally more concerned with the vision of the musicals' creators than he is with its audience, except in the most general terms (or as a surrogate for his own readings).Footnote ⁸

These shortcomings may be explained in part by the sheer range of the project and by the many constituencies Knapp has tried to please. In the Preface to National Identity, he expresses his desire ‘to reach three somewhat distinct readerships: students (as a textbook), lovers of musicals more generally, and academics’ (xv). It is a tall order, and he tends to shift between ‘beginner’ and ‘advanced’ modes more than he truly combines them, explaining the sonata principle for non-musicians one moment, engaging in relatively detailed analysis the next. This may account also for Knapp's tendency to pile up information on the sentence and paragraph level, unsure what he can safely leave out:

Such head-spinning passages are not typical of a book that is often eloquent, but nor are they as exceptional as the reader would wish. Particularly where matters of plot are concerned, Knapp's compunction about leaving anything out can be overwhelming; as an interpreter, his sheer virtuosity sometimes gets the better of him – and us.

Where Knapp's mind for detail comes into its own, however, is in the books' apparatus and, particularly, their brilliant website. The chapters each have annotated bibliographies with, often plentiful, suggestions of other works to consider in terms of their respective themes. The back matter supplements this, for each show considered, with lists of available books (i.e. libretti), scores and audio/video; the original running order; and a plot summary where one does not appear in the text (Personal Identity relocates some of this online). Most important, a website hosted by UCLA's library makes available several hundred audio examples, which are cued in the margins of the book. This is an astonishing resource and surely the way forward for books on music (assuming, that is, that it will be adequately maintained and updated for new technology). The only slight disappointment is that Knapp was not able to provide any video clips from the productions and, particularly, the films he discusses (although the hit rate on YouTube is pretty astounding).

None of this should be taken to signal that Knapp's volumes are anything less than a huge contribution and achievement. His two volumes will surely become the foundation of any serious collection on the musical – books whose themed chapters and individual readings will keep me, among many others, coming back. If the whole set would be a bold choice for the classroom, it is equally hard to imagine many syllabi on musical theatre that did not include at least a chapter or two. (And an abridged version, as a single paperback, could well become a classic.) But nor, I would argue, should McMillin be forgotten. His volume may be best read in descriptive rather than prescriptive terms, and its application limited to appropriate works. But for those, McMillin has much to teach about ways of viewing – and producing – musicals that do not try so hard to fill in the gaps. Between them, these three books certainly put the academic study of the musical on a surer footing. If the ground remains a bit slippery, this is only appropriate – the authors would surely agree – for a genre that is tired of being trodden on.