Living Large and Feeling Big in Musical Theatre Performance and Reception

SMT 10 (1) pp. 3–6 Intellect Limited 2016

EDITORIAL

KATHRYN EDNEY AND LAURA MacDONALD Regis College and University of Portsmouth

‘All Kinds of Music is Pouring Out of Me’: Living large and feeling big in musical theatre performance and reception

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This editorial provides an overview of, and the history behind, the special issue of editorial Studies in Musical Theatre entitled ‘All Kinds of Music is Pouring Out of Me: musical theatre Living Large and Feeling Big in Musical Theatre Performance and Reception’. performative scale historiography

This special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre is rooted in a working session that we organized and curated for the 2013 annual conference of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). In the original call for papers for that session, we reflected on the eponymous character in Sweet Charity (1966), who, on realizing that she is loved, sings ‘Now I’m a brass band’. This shift from dialogue to song not only self-reflexively transforms Charity into something larger than herself, but it also summons an ensemble of dancers onto the stage, expanding the visual and auditory experiences for

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the audience. It is an archetypical ‘big moment’ in a theatrical genre filled with such big moments … and big characters, big sets, big sounds and big produc- ers. The list of what is ‘big’ when applied to musical theatre is a long and rich one, and yet what that ‘bigness’ means is rarely explicated. The well-attended ASTR working session comprised papers from a range of scholars: Amanda Boyle, Maya Cantu, Mark Cosdon, Dan Dinero, Garrett Eisler, Kurt Edwards, Stuart Hecht, Valerie Joyce, Julie Noonan, Brian Valencia, Kellee van Aken and Stacy Wolf. Our conversations during that session focused on defining what we mean by large, big, small, and intimate when we talk about musicals. Notably, nothing was said about finding a ‘happy medium’, although our establishing framework – ‘living large and feeling big’ – may well have precluded such considerations from participants. Yet it is also true that much of the rhetoric about musical theatre is tied to the idea that song and dance are the logical outlets for characters whose emotions grow too large to be expressed or contained by dialogue. The inability for characters to keep within containers and the messy bigness of emotions found within musical theatre is, depending on their tolerance for the mess, what alternately attracts or repels spectators. This discussion was not, of course, the first time that issues of size and scale have been addressed by scholars of musical theatre. Wayne Koestenbaum, for example, has investigated the reception of opera – and by extension musical theatre – through gay men’s opera fandom, paying particular attention to the largeness of diva characters and performers. John Clum has similarly explored gay men’s musical theatre spectatorship, considering the big emotions, big sound and big personalities of Broadway divas; however, the diva’s excesses are just one possible approach to the largeness inherent in musical theatre. For his part, Raymond Knapp, within the very specific context of the largeness of the United States, has investigated the persistence of identity formation as a process that musical theatre facilitates for its creators, characters and audiences. In contrast, Elizabeth Wollman considered the largeness of rock music as an element of musical theatre and Jessica Sternfeld discussed megamusicals’ spectacle and epic narratives. Together, this wide-ranging scholarship and the discussion during the ASTR session convinced us of the need for a more focused exploration of the issue of ‘bigness’ in musical theatre, an exploration that builds on the work of all of these scholars. The editors of Studies in Musical Theatre agreed, and we are grateful for their willingness to allocate an issue to the topic. As the range of articles found in this issue demonstrates, unpacking what we mean by ‘big’ in reference to musical theatre requires multiple theoretical and historical approaches. Each author in this special issue explores different facets of what it means to be ‘big’ in musical theatre. Taken as a whole, this issue thus investigates what the expansive nature of musical theatre accomplishes by placing such seemingly simple terms as ‘big’ and ‘small’ at the centre of the analysis, rather than simply taking the words as obviously understood givens. Probing musical theatre’s big moments and achievements, this issue seeks to use a ‘historiography of bigness’ to understand the history of musical theatre in ways that do not rely on a narrative predicated on the peaks and valleys of success and failure. Therefore, these articles are forging new connections between estab- lished approaches to musical theatre, and collectively growing the field and pointing in exciting directions for research. In a twist on the idea of ‘largeness’, Brian Valencia defines ‘loudness’ within musical theatre. Using an interdisciplinary approach, his essay focuses on the idea of the crescendo and the ways in which aural intensity builds within the

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formal structures and history of musical theatre. Continuing with a focus on ‘big sounds’, and coupling those sounds with ‘big characters’, Julie Noonan argues that the rock star figure within rock musicals such as Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2010) creates very particular connections between the audience and what is happening on the stage. Kirsty Sedgman considers the apparent incompatibility between large and small, spectacle and intimacy. Considering comments made on YouTube in response to recorded performances, she explores the ways in which audiences are able to find a sense of intimate connection with performances and performers not in spite of Broadway spectacle, but because of it. Building on the work of Jessica Sternfeld, and also considering the mean- ing of spectacle, Kelsey Blair focuses on the act one finales of two Broadway megamusicals – ‘Defying Gravity’ from Wicked (2003) and ‘One Day More’ from Les Misérables (1987). Using affect theory, she queries the ways in which these big numbers signal big change, and the impact such empowering numbers have on audiences. Megan Stahl compares and contrasts the concepts of theatrical empathy with historical empathy through two case studies of the fact-based musicals Parade (1998) and The Scottsboro Boys (2010). Both musicals confront major moments within the racial history of the United States, and her article examines the way in which the expansive emotional rhetoric of musical theatre functions when dealing with explosive historical events. Shifting from large historical trauma to the more intimate scale of personal trauma, Rachel Joseph examines the ways in which Dancer in the Dark (2000) uses the rhetoric bigness of theatre and film musicals to express what is normally inexpressible. While, in part, Joseph’s article examines the non-diva qualities of Björk’s character in Dancer in the Dark – the character is self-effacing to the point of suicide/erasure – Michelle Dvoskin in her article ‘Embracing excess: The queer feminist power of musical theatre diva roles’, focuses instead on larger-than-life female characters who live to be the centre of attention. In particular, Dvoskin teases apart the differences between ‘diva characters’ and ‘diva roles’, and what that says about the largeness, or small- ness, allowed female performers and their characters in musical theatre. Shifting from song and the aural representations of emotional scale, Brian Herrera examines the ‘choreographic dramaturgy’ of Michael Bennett’s work in A Chorus Line (1975). As a musical that focuses on small character moments and that deliberately hides its big star, A Chorus Line forces us to rethink notions of theatrical scale. The main section of this special issue concludes on a very American note with Chase Bringardner’s essay on Finian’s Rainbow (1947). Bringardner applies the idea of what it means to be large in terms of Yip Harburg and Burton Lane’s artistic and social justice ambitions for their musical, and how the big concepts of racial and social justice manifest themselves through the larger-than-life character of Senator Bill ‘Billboard’ Rawkins. Finally, furthering explorations of character on the musical stage, Sherrill Gow in the Re:Act section questions the broadly accepted idea that characters sing because speech is insufficient to the emotional occasion. As a scholar- practitioner, Gow draws on her experiences as a director to discuss the different ways in which performers can approach the complex task of expressing a character’s state of emotional largeness, especially in those transitional moments between speech and song. The field of musical theatre studies is continuing to expand, and is attracting a diverse body of scholars. And musicals – in the United States in particular –

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are undergoing yet another in a series of mini-renaissance moments as the NBC and Fox television networks are now regularly broadcasting live versions of classic musicals, including The Wiz and Grease. Perhaps more significantly, in advance of Easter 2016, the Fox Network produced and broadcast a live jukebox musical version of the Passion of Christ, which culminated in a staged street procession of hundreds of people carrying a twenty-foot illuminated cross in New Orleans. That responses to the production were mixed was likely in part a result of the inability of television to properly contain such a large musical spectacle. However, as the essays in this special issue make clear, it is one thing to note the ways in which musicals are too big, and another thing entirely to examine what that bigness means, and why the size matters.

REFERENCES Clum, John (1999), Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Knapp, Raymond (2005), The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— (2006), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Koestenbaum, Wayne (1993), The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, New York: Da Capo Press. Sternfeld, Jessica (2006), The Megamusical, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wollman, Elizabeth L. (2006), The Theatre Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical: From Hair to Hedwig, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

SUGGESTED CITATION Edney, K. and MacDonald, L. (2016), ‘“All Kinds of Music is Pouring Out of Me”: Living large and feeling big in musical theatre performance and reception’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 10: 1, pp. 3–6, doi: 10.1386/ smt.10.1.3_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Laura MacDonald is Lecturer in Musical Theatre at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Studies in Musical Theatre, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Theatre Journal and Theatre Survey, and she is preparing a monograph investigating the making and marketing of long-running Broadway musicals. E-mail: [email protected]

Kathryn Edney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and serves as Graduate Program Director for the MA in Heritage Studies for a Global Society at Regis College (Weston, MA). She has published articles and book chapters on race and the American musical, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Popular Culture. E-mail: [email protected]

Kathryn Edney and Laura MacDonald have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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