Today brings us our first musical. I have a theory that most dramaturgs and literary managers are secretly terrified of musicals. There are many different kinds of plays that bend the rules of reality in many different ways. But each time that they do this, it represents a choice that the writer has made. They want their world to feel differently than the one we all live in and so they choose to have dragons appear (click on this link, it's crazy) or to have rivers run through houses or whatever. And we can judge the play in part on the strength or weakness of that particular and individual choice. But all musicals are defined by one very specific bend in reality. At any point, and really for any reason, a person will start to sing a song. And it's not that they can sing a song. Any one of us can sing a song at any point. It's that they will sing a song. I think this is kind of unnerving for a dramaturg; this lack of choice. It suggests the possibility of some future, fascist world with theaters devoted to all kinds of genres with all kinds of weird demands. Your play must have a dragon appear. Your play must have a river running straight through the middle of a house. Your play must feature a character with his face painted blue, speaking in Portuguese. If a genre can sprout up where it is mandatory that characters randomly and sporadically break into song, then what's stopping the blue-faced, Portuguese-speaking character genre from appearing? We're on the brink of chaos here, people.
For this reason, I've always felt like I don't quite understand musicals. I've seen and enjoyed many of them. I just can't get over the fact that it's a bizarre way to tell a story, too bizarre to justify its popularity. Plus, I have weird, frequently terrible taste in music. My Spotify playlist right now looks like a 14-year-old girl smoked meth and then decided to throw a party for herself. It makes me a little embarrassed that I'm the one assigned to judge these things and I admittedly tend to go on autopilot just a bit when I'm forced to read one. Luckily, today's contestant didn't require a whole lot of penetrating, critical analysis. Like a disproportionately large amount of musicals, this one was set in 1930s Hollywood, just before the inception of the Hays Production Code. Its plot revolves around the filming of a movie musical, thus allowing the play to neatly circumvent the whole "why are characters suddenly bursting into song" question by limiting its musical numbers to the ones characters sing as actors in the movie-within-the-play. This kinda seems like the coward's way out. If you're going to go for it, then go for it. Other than that, it features the usual star-crossed lovers subplot; some tired, Borscht Belt humor; and halfhearted jabs at a period of censorship that might be relevant to our world today, you just wouldn't know it reading this. The play's stale humor, its dusty themes and, above all, its membership in a genre whose popularity seems inexplicable to me made it feel like I was visiting an ancient and alien world that I could never understand. Reading a musical is like going through the Stargate.
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