Shakespeare as

John R. Severn

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of the Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Science

July 2015

Publications

Sections of this thesis have been published in the following articles:

John R. Severn, ‘Interrogating Escapism: Rethinking ’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare Bulletin 31:3 (2013): 453-83.

John R. Severn, ‘All Shook Up and the Unannounced Adaptation: Engaging with ’s Unstable Identities’. Theatre Journal 66:4 (2014): 541-57. CONTENTS Acknowledgments 4 Introduction: Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical 6 Defining terms 19 Jukebox musical 19 Existing popular 24 Version, adaptation, production 25 Situating the thesis in relation to the existing critical literature 28 Approaches to musical adaptations of Shakespeare 28 Themes in the critical literature on jukebox musicals 34 Nostalgia 35 50 Revoicing 54 Thesis structure 59 Chapter One: Setting jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare in their historical context: ballad , ‘’ spectacles and burlesques 63 Eighteenth-century ballad operas 67 The nineteenth century 86 Frederick Reynolds and ’s ‘operatic’ versions of Shakespeare 88 Nineteenth-century burlesques 107

Chapter Two: Reception, Structure and the Carnivalesque: Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company’s 1998 King Lear and the Works of the Troubadour Theater Company 122 King Lear 125 Production and Reception 125 placement in Shakespeare’s King Lear and the 1998 production: performance texture,surprise and the carnivalesque 132 Songs beyond Shakespeare’s 140 ‘My Belongs to Daddy’: the Fool and the musical diva 141 A medley of Daddy songs: ambiguity and taboo 148 Late songs of self-expression: a and a duet 152 1

The Troubies 154 Production and reception 154 ‘Fit’ or function? 162 Song placement 165 Managing the carnivalesque 170 Chapter Three: Interrogating Escapism: Rethinking Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost 178 The film and its critics 180 , , integration and the interrogative text 189 Performance competence and escapism 211 Chapter Four: Evoking Twelfth Night’s Unstable Identities, Part One: Play On! and its 228 Twelfth Night and the instability of identity 228 Play On! 232 Play On!’s destabilising effects 241 Play On!’s ghosts 250 Place and time in the reception of Play On! and its ghosts 261 Chapter Five: Evoking Twelfth Night’s Unstable Identities, Part Two: All Shook Up and the Unannounced Adaptation 267 All Shook Up and Twelfth Night 275 All Shook Up and other plays by Shakespeare 279 All Shook Up and 281 All Shook Up as an adaptation of The Man and Bye Bye Birdie 283 Parallels and to other works 285 All Shook Up, the unannounced adaptation and identity 288 Chapter Six: Jukebox-Musical Shakespeare in Miniature: The Scottish Sock Puppet Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet 311 The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre and Shakespeare 313 Duet for : comedy and pleasure 316 Duet and sonnet: mise en abyme in the Sock Puppets and Shakespeare 320 Further traces of existing song and mise en abyme 330

2

Recuperating a space for a non-heteronormative engagement with 332

Engaging with Romeo and Juliet’s ambiguous genre 337

The role of mediation in receiving the Sock Puppets’ Romeo & Juliet 345

Conclusion 355 Bibliography 364

3

My first acknowledgements are to my supervisors, the late Associate Professor Richard Madeleine, Dr Meg Mumford and Associate Professor William Walker. Sadly, Richard died at the end of my first year. Bill and Meg then stepped in as joint supervisors and made a difficult time easier. Thank you for that, as well as for rigorous comments, support, enthusiasm, dedication in continuing with feedback while on leave, and an approach to working together that made joint supervision from two disciplines, English and Theatre Studies, a stimulating pleasure. I would also like to acknowledge Associate Professor Dorottya Fabian, the Postgraduate Co-ordinator for the School of the Arts and Media for most of my candidature, who oversaw the change and who provided a welcoming forum for postgraduate research. The preparation for a PhD begins well before the thesis proposal takes shape, so thanks is due to my tutors at Rose Bruford College and the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute for providing me with the training to embark on this research, and for encouraging me to take my studies further. In particular I would like to thank my thesis supervisors at these two institutions, Dr Carol Morley at Rose Bruford and Dr Jaq Bessell at the Shakespeare Institute, not only for their excellent supervision but also for providing a model with their enthusiasm for academic approaches to musical and operatic adaptations of Shakespeare. Scripts, scores, promptbooks and recordings of jukebox musicals and their historical forebears are not easy to track down, and local print reviews, programmes and other ephemera are often difficult to find, but I have benefited from library assistance from a number of institutions in my searches. Firstly, I would like to thank the librarians at the University of New South Wales, particularly the Interlibrary Loans team. I am also grateful for the assistance and access to resources provided by the Fisher Library and the library of the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Sydney; the State Library of New South Wales; Burbank Public Library, Los Angeles; the Harvard Theatre Collection at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Library for the Performing Arts (especially its Billy Rose Theatre Division and Theatre on Film and Tape Archive); the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; and the British Library. I would also like to thank Bell Shakespeare for giving me access to their recordings of King Lear, and Charmaine Sleishman for organising viewings. I would not have been able to complete this thesis without the Australian Postgraduate Award. UNSW also provided me with a travel grant which allowed me to travel to the for archival research and to attend performances of A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream by the Troubadour Theater Company in Burbank, Los Angeles. My research has also grown in the welcoming atmosphere of the Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association at their conferences in Toowoomba and Perth. ANZSA helped cover my costs of attending the Toowoomba conference with a postgraduate grant, and UNSW did the same for the Perth conference. I benefited from feedback on a paper based on Chapter Five’s study of All Shook Up in Perth, and from discussions on jukebox-musical and operatic versions of Shakespeare among participants of the newly formed Shakespeare and Music group at Toowoomba. I would also like to thank Dr Michael Hooper from UNSW for inviting me to present a research paper in the Research Seminar series, and Dorottya Fabian and my fellow postgraduates at a fortnightly research workshop who provided feedback on a draft

4 presentation on All Shook Up. In addition, I benefited from a postgraduate workshop on queer description run by Associate Professor Lee Wallace of the University of Sydney and Professor Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania, where I was able to discuss passages from Chapter Four, on Play On! I have published journal articles based on work from this thesis on Love’s Labour’s Lost in Shakespeare Bulletin and on All Shook Up in Theatre Journal. As well as thanking the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, I particularly want to thank Pascale Aebischer, editor of Shakespeare Bulletin, and Joanne Tompkins, editor of Theatre Journal, for seeing the articles through the publication process so efficiently and encouraging me to refine the arguments in them, and, as a result, also in the thesis. One of the themes in the thesis is the pleasure that comes from collaborative reception. I am lucky to have had a posse of willing collaborators who have made life as well as theatrical reception a pleasure. I have enjoyed years of discussions of musicals, operas, plays and films with Colin Brodie-Smith, Craig Cross, Caroline Dale- Risk, Craig Ferguson, Kenneth Hogg, Johannes Lüdecke, Joan Mackay, Helen McIntosh, Gillian Wallace, Williams and Neill Yeoman, which have all fed into how I think and feel about performance. Helen unwittingly set off a whole chapter by introducing me to the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre while pre-PhD thoughts were brewing. Thanks also to Beth Drumm for mutually supportive lunches throughout the PhD process. A special thanks to James Dinsmore and Alison York, who first got me back on stage (only slightly against our will, papa!), which then led to Bunbury & Co., among other life-shaping adventures. As a result, I have been able to experience performing and producing burlesques and jukebox-musical adaptations (avant la lettre), as well as viewing them. In particular, producing and performing in James’ and Tim Tricker’s Gilbert & Sullivan Go Wilde, or The Importance of Being Constant in 1997 set off thinking on allusions, adaptations, structure, localism and topicality, and the destabilising effects on identity that jukebox-musical adaptations can provide that eventually developed into this thesis. James’ and Alison’s knowledge of the highways and backstreets of and popular culture and our shared delight in ‘airy persiflage’ have allowed me to experience the special quality and intensity of collaborative reception of burlesques and jukebox musicals. In their company, not fully grasping a performance dense with can be a pleasure when anticipating the conversations to follow. My family have been extremely supportive of my studies in a whole range of ways, both practical and emotional, all of which are very much appreciated. My mother first set off my love of Shakespeare with a trip to when I was at a suitably impressionable age, but may not have foreseen where that would lead! My father has provided assistance towards the end of the PhD process that I am very grateful for. My sister Valerie saved my sanity with a short visit to see me in Berlin at a very stressful time in the thesis. Finally, I would not be doing this PhD at all if it were not for James Phillips. ‘I would not wish/ Any companion in the world but you/ Nor can imagination form a shape,/ Besides yourself, to like of’. Among so much else, James has read all of my work and been a supportively sceptical sounding board for my ideas in exactly the way I wanted. Thank you for everything. 5

INTRODUCTION: SHAKESPEARE AS JUKEBOX MUSICAL

An overlooked strand of theatre history consists of a string of versions of

Shakespeare’s plays that make significant use of songs originally composed for other contexts. This thesis examines the latest flourishing of this phenomenon: Shakespeare’s plays as jukebox musicals. Beginning in the 1980s, several of Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted to the jukebox-musical format, music drama in which action and speech are supplemented by popular songs that already exist outside of the world of the music drama, and that are likely to be well-known to many audience members. These works have not yet received close and theoretically informed analysis within relevant fields,

Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies and musical studies in particular. Given the growing number of Shakespeare-based jukebox musicals and their popularity with audiences, there is now some urgency that this situation be rectified.

Existing criticism on jukebox musicals has tended to frame them as products focused on nostalgia, with a consequent regressive social politics. This thesis, by contrast, not only contextualises a number of Shakespeare-based versions – in various media and from Australia, the UK and the USA – in a longstanding historical performance tradition, but demonstrates that the form lends itself to political work, particularly in terms of identity politics and a valorisation of diversity. As much as this political work is valuable, to restrict oneself to censuring or defending the jukebox- musical format in political terms is to overlook its strengths in providing audiences with experiences of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy that are not readily to be found in more straightforward modern productions of the plays. Indeed, as the case studies in this thesis demonstrate, these two aspects are often linked. This thesis therefore develops a critical approach that allows jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare to be understood

6 and valued both for their political potential and for the experiences they offer to audiences as artistic responses to Shakespeare.

The lack of detailed studies of the way jukebox musicals function – and the fact that most jukebox musicals are not adaptations – currently obstructs an appreciation of their potential as vehicles for adaptation. Even for those familiar with the jukebox musical’s semiotic modus operandi, features of a jukebox musical that might be recognised as responses to aspects of Shakespeare’s plays are not always apparent on a straightforward comparison of the texts of the musical and the play it adapts. The freedom that jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare display with regard to their sources means that such responses are often displaced from one position in the play to another in the musical, from one character to a range of other characters, or from one signifying system to another. Nonetheless, that most jukebox-musical versions of

Shakespeare display little interest in fetishizing a fidelity to the text – or even the plots – of Shakespeare’s plays should not blind us to their engagement with other aspects of

Shakespeare’s works. This thesis demonstrates that an understanding of the jukebox musical format reveals its suitability for engaging with Shakespeare’s plays on a number of points.

First, the jukebox musical’s unusual aural texture provides an equivalent for the sometimes disconcerting shifts in the aural texture of Shakespeare’s plays, as his characters vary their modes of communication among different forms of verse, prose and song. If modern audiences are far less sensitised than the plays’ original audiences were to rhetorical and poetic conventions, to differences between spoken verse forms, and to transitions between verse and prose (and if many modern performers and companies are either poorly trained or uninterested in the nuances of verse speaking), ours is nonetheless still to some degree an aural culture. If our sensitivity to transitions

7 between modes of verbal communication is no longer acute at the level of artistic speech forms, the transition from speech to song is still an obvious one. It is also a nuanced and flexible one that can be varied across a spectrum ranging from

Sprechgesang (rhythmical, approximately pitched speech-song that never fully develops into song), through words spoken in a heightened style of conversational speech with instrumental underscoring that gradually move into song, to abrupt transitions from speech to full-scale with little or no preparation. As I discuss in some of the following case studies, such variations in speech-song transitions offer themselves up as dramatically meaningful in similar ways to variations between verse forms or transitions between prose and verse in Shakespeare’s plays. As in Shakespeare’s plays, meaning thus arises not only from the literal meaning of words, or even from the mode of communication in which they are expressed, but also from the relationships among different modes of communication within the work. Further, as the songs in jukebox musicals are existing ones with which many audience members will already be very familiar, even small changes in song can create meaning. In these cases, the literal meaning of the new words in their gains in significance through a recognition that a choice has been made to substitute those words for others. Variations in aural texture and detail thus become an important signifying system. Jukebox musicals therefore allow modern audiences to experience a visual-aural mode of performance of Shakespeare’s plays that is not readily available in other forms of drama, one in which the varied aural texture is one of the noticeable pleasures of the performance as well as a meaning-making tool that makes sometimes complex demands on audiences.

Second, the jukebox musical is well placed to provide a pleasurable sense of the instability of language and text inherent in Shakespeare’s wordplay, but that again is

8 difficult to bring out in modern productions beyond the practice of grasping the crotch and thrusting the pelvis to telegraph bawdy quibbles to the back rows. In jukebox musicals meaning often arises from the conjunction of a knowledge of the range of meanings available for the existing song in its context outside the musical, and its position in the narrative. While an existing song in a jukebox musical gains another level of meaning from its placement in a narrative, its former meanings are not erased.

Indeed, these former meanings in turn loop back to deepen the meaning of the narrative.

The result is a sense of semiotic density and instability, an awareness of the presence of multiple meanings that are apparently containable within the words and music of a song and yet exceed both. Whether this sense is perplexing, uncanny or a source of pleasure, it is rarely fully graspable, as the progress of the song gives limited space for reflection.

An audience member might clarify some of these multiple meanings and their wider significance only after the song is over, or even after the musical has ended. However, to focus on the clarification of strands of meaning is to overlook the experience that the song in performance offers those audience members for whom specific meanings are not immediately apparent: an awareness of semiotic density, an awareness that multiple meanings exist but are not immediately to be mastered. Audience members for performances of Shakespeare’s plays who are either very familiar with Shakespeare’s texts and the potential multiple meanings contained within his wordplay, or who fail to register those potential multiple meanings, are unlikely to experience this sense in the theatre. Jukebox musicals, displacing multiple meanings from the word to the song

(among other sites), can restore this sense of instability, this thickening of the performance texture, to otherwise well-known narratives.

Third, the sense of the instability of meaning in jukebox musicals can extend to characters. The unstable identities of characters may be enhanced by intertextual

9 references that often relate to the contexts in which the existing songs are otherwise known. In Chapters Four and Five I demonstrate how jukebox-musical versions of

Twelfth Night have realised this potential to provide audiences with an experience of the sense of the instability of identity associated with early-modern Violas, represented by a boy apprentice playing a female character who disguises herself as a man. In Chapter

Six I discuss how a version of Romeo and Juliet destabilises gender by playing with and by incorporating a richness of allusions, creating a sense of the unstable genders not only of early modern performances, but of nineteenth-century female

Romeos.

Fourth, like Shakespeare, jukebox musicals – and musicals in general – are capable of producing a vivid sense of multiple, sometimes contradictory, viewpoints within a dramatic world. Shakespeare’s ability to create a sense of multiplicity in the theatre, an awareness of multiple subjectivities, multiple viewpoints on a dramatic situation, is particularly evident in his use of asides. In these, he creates the effect of a range of subjectivities by having characters – with whom an audience may have developed a range of emotional engagements, and on whose actions they may have taken a range of moral positions – speak directly to the audience as if assuming a sympathetic hearing.1 The creation of the effect of multiple viewpoints and subjectivities is one of musical theatre’s more powerful tools, especially evident in

1 For the subjectivity effects created by direct audience address in Shakespeare’s asides, see Bridget Escolme, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005). On Shakespeare’s creation of a sense of multiplicity more generally, see Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford: , 2001); Brian Gibbons, Shakespeare and Multiplicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Literary Tradition: Essay Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (New York: St Martins Press, 1987), especially chapter 2, ‘Framing Perspectives’ (50-94); Jean E. Howard, Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 10 duets and ensemble numbers. That these permit multiple vocal lines to sound at the same time foregrounds the sense of simultaneous multiple viewpoints among characters, while the use of mise en abyme in song forms – discussed later in Chapter Six – also permits the audience to approach a dramatic situation through multiple viewpoints.

Even characters who sing the same words as each other create the sense of a nuanced difference in subjectivity when their musical lines differ. This sense of a simultaneous plurality of perspectives is exemplified in musicals by what Raymond Knapp, in the absence of consistent nomenclature, calls the ‘combination song’.2 In the combination song, two or more songs are sung simultaneously. The characters singing may be unaware of each other’s presence, or may appear to be talking past, rather than to, each other. As Knapp notes, the combination song ‘has proven effective and versatile in establishing relationships ranging from genuine compatibility … to the strikingly incompatible’.3 The combination song gives voice to multiple perspectives, multiple rhyme and metrical schemes and multiple melodies within the one song, creating multiple simultaneous dramatic spaces. The role of the combination song in responding to Twelfth Night’s theme of the instability of identity is discussed in Chapter Five in relation to All Shook Up. While the combination song exemplifies the musical’s ability to foreground a plurality of perspectives in space, the musical also regularly foregrounds a plurality of perspectives in time. This is usually achieved through the

2 Knapp has analysed this phenomenon more than any other writer, tracing its origins in the musical back to the double choruses of Gilbert and Sullivan. (The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 41, 148-49, 169, 213, 221, 258-59, 276; The American Musical and Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 58, 109, 200, 295, 323, 327; ‘“How Great Thy Charm, Thy Sway How Excellent!”: Tracing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Legacy in the American Musical’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, edited by David Eden and Meinhard Saremba (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 201-15 (207- 10)). The phenomenon is also referred to as a ‘’ (See, for example, Steve Swayne, How Sondheim Found his Sound (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 250-51). 3 Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, 41-42. 11 reprise, in which one or more characters sings a fragment or a version of a song sung previously, often in an altered format, demonstrating in the process a change in their view of the world. The vividness that the brief reappearance of familiar music brings to this practice of clarifying the present through citing the past thus draws attention to the possibility of change not only in material circumstances, but also in the human psyche: a key message of musicals is that individuals are capable of change.

This fourth point – the potential that musical theatre in general has to engage with, replicate and expand on Shakespeare’s invocation of multiple viewpoints and subjectivities – is perhaps the most politically charged of those sites at which

Shakespeare and the jukebox musical meet, and deserves consideration at this early stage. For some audience members, the musical format serves a wider function beyond the pleasures it offers in the interplay of music and words and the multiple perspectives of the musical’s various characters. The plurality of perspectives across both time and space that the musical format foregrounds, together with the sense – particularly strong in jukebox musicals – that meaning is contingent rather than fixed, invites audience members to extrapolate from the world of the musical a world capable of accommodating their own form of cultural difference, a difference that would have no reason to remain silent, but which would have its own place in a complex network of social meaning. If, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘music is pervaded by every minority, and yet composes an immense power’, musical theatre has certainly been embraced by minorities.4 It is therefore perhaps not surprising that several of the works considered here, particularly those discussed in Chapters Four, Five and Six, use the plurality of

4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (: Continuum, 2004), 330. 12 perspectives they contain to carve out a space for non-heteronormative engagements with Shakespeare’s plays.

As a number of commentators have testified, musicals have the capacity to act as a multivalent training ground not so much for identity politics (although an engagement with musicals is often a step along the road to adopting a minority identity), as for a philosophical position that affirms difference over identity. For example, Andrea Most has demonstrated how American Jews have mapped their own situations onto apparently non-Jewish narratives in the musical.5 Michael Borgstrom gives a personal testimony of the ways in which the diversity of perspectives for which the musical format finds space has provided ways for suburban ‘proto-queer youth’ to ‘identify (and even celebrate) cultural difference in contexts where queerness itself was not readily available as a personal or social option’.6 Novid Parsi, a same-sex-oriented, Iranian-

American adoptee and Jewish convert to Christianity, discusses the role of amateur musicals in his emerging sense of ethnic and sexual difference and identity, drawing attention to the acceptance of difference within the musical as a work and the limits on the acceptance of difference in the real world of East Texas, emphasized by racist casting practices there.7 Tim Miller, a performance artist and political activist in the fields of gay identity politics and immigration, claims that ‘musicals provided my earliest political education’, not only in relation to his own personal life but in relation to wider ‘systems of injustice’, through his exposure to a range of influential images of difference and resistance he found in musicals, and his awareness of the gap between

5 Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 6 Michael Borgstrom, ‘Suburban Queer: Reading Grease’, Journal of Homosexuality 58:2 (2011): 149-163. DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2011.539473 (153). 7 Novid Parsi, ‘The Stages of East Texas’, in Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater, ed. Robin Bernstein, with a foreword by Jill Dolan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 150- 68. 13 the apparently utopian world of musicals in which difference can be accommodated, and the lived reality of the United States.8 Michael Schiavi, discussing the Broadway cast as a form of ‘gay language lab’ for boys coming to terms with their sexuality, refers not only to ‘the intricate clauses and far-flung allusions that render much Broadway spectatorship a deliberately intertextual experience,’ but claims that such intertexuality ‘taught me that language might empower rather than endanger its user’.9 The possibility of change that the musical foregrounds through vocalization is of particular value for those who have yet to find a way of expressing their cultural difference: as Schiavi claims, the musical ‘divests speaking of its terrors and makes silence seem a spectacularly unfabulous burden’.10 For many of these commentators, the musical’s validation of diversity, its foregrounding of multiple viewpoints, and its embrace of fluid subject positions are more affirming and influential in creating an inclusive socio-political philosophy than the presence on stage of denotative examples of particular minorities. These testimonies resonate with the approaches to identity adopted by several of the jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare discussed in this thesis.

Finally, as I demonstrate in the chapters that follow, jukebox musicals are capable of shedding interpretive light on Shakespeare’s plays. However, they are less likely to propose an interpretation of a play than they are to offer themselves up to interpretation, the result of which may then lead an audience member to a fresh interpretation of a familiar play. While the jukebox-musical format shares qualities with other types of music theatre, it also has its own artistic tools, tools that are often

8 Tim Miller, ‘Oklahomo!: A Gay Performance Artist Vows that Musicals Shaped his Political Consciousness’, American Theatre 20:.9 (2003): 91-93 (91). 9 Michael R. Schiavi, ‘Opening Ancestral Windows: Post-Stonewall Men and Musical Theatre’, New England Theatre Journal, 13 (2002): 77-98 (84). 10 Schiavi, ‘Opening Ancestral Windows’, 93. 14 used not primarily to privilege a single meaning apparently inherent in the work, but to foreground meaning-making as an activity available and accessible to individual audience members.

Reception theorists from Hans-Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser to Jacques

Rancière have drawn attention to the role of the receiver, whether reader or audience member, in creating meaning, the details of which will vary from one receiver to another, and which may not conform to authorial or dramaturgical expectations.11 The presence of multiple ‘authorial’ roles in music theatre – lyricist, , ‘book’ writer, choreographer, orchestrator, director, designer, conductor, performer, among others – already militates against a single set of ‘authorial’ expectations, and against a coherent set of authorial motivations – artistic, social, commercial, political, reputational, contractual – for participating in the creative process. Jukebox musicals complicate this argument further, as the ‘authors’ of the songs used in a jukebox musical usually had no thought of their songs appearing in the narrative context of that musical and may not have consented to their work being used in that way. Jukebox musicals that are recognised as adaptations of existing works add a similar layer of perceived ‘authorship’ in their ‘source’ plots and characters. Indeed, the throwing into question of authorial intentions forms an almost intrinsic part of the jukebox musical (a

11 See, for example, Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, ML: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, eds, The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism (Baltimore, ML: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) (all focused primarily on readers’ responses to literature; Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, updated ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997) and Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009) extend this approach to theatrical works. 15 familiar defence of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare is that they might not be

Shakespeare, but he would have approved of them).12 Although a jukebox musical clearly requires a creative team to bring together the songs and the narrative, their role often plays a rather minor part in audiences’ reception of the work. The pleasures of jukebox musicals arise primarily from the unexpectedly fruitful meetings of songs and narratives in themselves, rather than from an appreciation of the skill and craftsmanship required to select appropriate songs and place them at telling points in a narrative, an aspect I explore in Chapter Two. The recognition of an unexpectedly appropriate fit between a well-known song and a dramatic situation, of new potential meanings when a song is sung by a particular character in a narrative context, and of new potential meanings in familiar narratives brought to light by the inclusion of a song, are all sources of pleasure. Jukebox musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays thus often deflect an appreciation of a single authorial genius on to an appreciation of how the plays function when brought into contact with other artistic artefacts in the form of popular

12 For example, Jeff Favre writes of the Troubadour Theater Company’s All’s Kool That Ends Kool: ‘given what we know about the Bard’s sense of humour, it’s a good bet he would love the comical twists to his work made by this of merry clowns, mimes, actors, acrobats, singers and comedians’ (‘One “Kool” Dude: Troupe Plays with Words, Spirit of Shakespeare’, Ventura County Star, 22 August 2002). Joel Beers writes of the same company’s Romeo Hall and Juliet Oates: ‘Shakespeare scholars might not approve, but one guesses the 16th-century writer who filled his plays with dick jokes, farts gags, drunks and whores would have the gayest of times’ (‘Dick Jokes, Fart Gags, Drunks, Whores’, OC Weekly, 6-12 July 2001). Andrew Stevenson writes of the Australian King Lear discussed in Chapter Two: ‘rarely will a production produce such personal responses. Expect some around you to walk out in disgust at the desecration of the text; others to rave at its idiosyncratic brilliance. But what would Shakespeare make of all this? He'd probably have a chuckle at the brazen theatricality, the manic intensity of this Lear’ (‘Bell Makes Clear the Madness of Lear’, Daily Telegraph, 23 October 1998). Andrew Riemer writes of the same production: ‘I think the Bard would have cheered Louise Fox [as the Fool] and Matthew Whittet’s amazing rubber-man contortions as Edgar, the banished nobleman turned Poor Tom, the bedlam beggar. Indeed, Kosky’s free-wheeling improvisations and iconoclasm reveal, at key points in the play, a genuinely Shakespearean temper’ (‘Shaking Up Shakespeare’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 October 1998).

16 songs. They are thus able to some extent to sidestep some of the questions of

Shakespearean authority with which W. B. Worthen suggests ‘modern Shakespearean theatre is inevitably involved’, without on the other hand setting themselves out as consciously resistant either to that authority or to contemporary interpretations or modes of production of Shakespeare’s plays.13

The discourse of integration in relation to American musical theatre and film

(discussed in more detail particularly in Chapter Three) has downplayed the multiplicity of ‘authorial’ voices in musicals in favour of an ideal of organic wholeness, proposing the integrated musical as a consistently readable text. Jukebox musicals, on the other hand, facilitate – and often actively encourage – a differential reception among audience members, most noticeably by incorporating existing popular songs that may or may not be recognised by individual audience members, and that invite a range of intertextual associations that unfold themselves at a pace that cannot be fully controlled by the production. When the dramatic narrative in which the songs are embedded is an adaptation of a canonical work such as one of the better-known plays of Shakespeare, with which audiences will have a greater or lesser degree of familiarity, the potential for a differential reception is even greater. Further, the dramatic, narrative or expressive use in a fictional world of songs that recognisably originate outside it draws attention to the textuality of the musical. While on one level these songs can create a bridge between fictional worlds and lived reality, suggesting that Shakespearean characters and their audiences share twentieth- or twenty-first century cultural knowledge, the interpolation into a dramatic narrative of songs that are often designed to stand as self- contained numbers can act as a form of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt. By drawing

13 W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39. 17 attention to fissures between narrative structures and modes of expression, jukebox- musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays can facilitate fresh approaches to

Shakespeare and popular song, to the past and the contemporary.

With the exception of the local tradition of ‘mash-ups’ by the Troubadour

Theater Company, based in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank (discussed in Chapter

Two), at present there is no widely recognised tradition of the Shakespearean jukebox musical. Indeed, as I discuss below, the term ‘jukebox musical’ is a recent and fluid one, and for audiences of the earlier works discussed in this thesis, the term – initially a highly loaded one – was not available as a framing device through which to receive the works. Even for audiences of the later works, the term is still neither so widespread nor so clearly defined that one can assume it to function as a widely applicable framing device for audience reception. Although this thesis brings together and examines a range of works as exemplars of the jukebox-musical mode of construction, audience members may have approached and received them primarily as examples of unusually constructed musicals, or indeed as unusual productions of one of Shakespeare’s plays, rather than specifically as jukebox musicals. Further, although these works are of interest to scholars of Shakespeare and adaptation, for institutional, cultural-geographic and marketing reasons it is likely that several of them are likely to have attracted audiences primarily for their musical format rather than for the fact that they are adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays.

Nonetheless, existing work on jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare, and indeed on musical versions of Shakespeare in general, has rarely engaged with them fully as examples of music drama with different (and arguably greater) semiotic demands and potential from spoken drama. Indeed, the fact that many jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare replace his early modern verse with modern vernacular prose,

18 cut aspects of the plot of the source play (often for reasons of time, as sung text takes longer to articulate than the spoken word), and are often produced in either blatantly commercial venues such as Broadway theatres or institutionally marginal ones such as school halls, all leaves them open variously to accusations of ‘dumbing down’, or praise for popularising Shakespeare’s plays. However, a full appreciation of musical theatre requires literacy in complex musico-dramatic semiotics, dance conventions and – given the intertextual nature of much musical theatre – a thorough knowledge of the history of the form. While many fans are fully equipped with this literacy, it is not always one which scholars of Shakespearean adaptations possess (or at least do not bring fully to the table in their discussions of musical adaptations). One of the arguments of this thesis is that jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays neither ‘dumb down’ their sources (although, as with any other art form, some will be less sophisticated or demanding than others), nor necessarily popularise them, but recreate them for audiences with a more or less well-developed literacy in musical theatre, who may in fact be numerically smaller than those trained in the basics of Shakespearean drama at school. To appreciate these works’ relationship to Shakespeare’s plays, it is often necessary to approach them first on their own – complex – terms, and only then look backwards to Shakespeare, rather than ‘reading’ them through the lens of Shakespeare.

Defining terms

Jukebox musical

The term ‘jukebox musical’ is a relatively recent one – Merriam-Webster’s dictionary gives a first, unspecified, recorded usage in 1993 – and is undergoing a shift from being a condescending insult in journalistic criticism to a more neutral term of art in discussions of the musical. The term gained currency in the American press

19 especially from 2005, a year that saw a number of Broadway stagings of musicals

(including All Shook Up, discussed in Chapter Five) that used existing popular songs for their scores. Although the musicals themselves were often successes with audiences, the term was generally used disparagingly by journalistic reviewers, sometimes interchangeably with the equally disparaging term ‘karaoke musical’, which has since lost currency.14 Ben Brantley’s assessment of , a musical incorporating

Beach Boys hits, in a discussion of that year’s Tony award nominees in the New York

Times illustrates the level of contempt directed at the jukebox-musical format in the mainstream press:

Good Vibrations – the show may well be remembered (and hailed) for hastening the death of the jukebox musical, a virtuous act of euthanasia if ever there was one. The ultimate bottom-scraping example of a low form of scavenger theater, this stitched-together beach blanket of a show purged every ray of sunshine from the happy songs of , as a young and firm-bodied cast modelled swimwear and drowned before our eyes.15 In an earlier review of Good Vibrations, Brantley had referred to Dodger Stage

Holdings, the musical’s production company, as ‘the Broadway Production company that’s done more damage to Western civilization than the Visigoths’.16 However, the animosity directed by Brantley and other Broadway-focused writers not only at what by most accounts was a poor example of the jukebox musical (it failed to find favour with audiences as well as critics), but at the jukebox-musical genre as a whole must be seen in the context of a tradition of Broadway musicals that privileges musico-dramatic integration. This tradition was widely felt to be threatened, first, during the late 1980s

14 For example, in his review of recent Broadway cast , Stephen Holder refers to ‘the much-despised “karaoke” musical’, while nonetheless finding some positive aspects of the genre. Stephen Holder, ‘Grand Broadway Voices, Yours for a Song’, New York Times, 16 June 2006. 15 Ben Brantley, ‘…And the Regrettables’, New York Times, 22 May 2005. 16 Ben Brantley, ‘To Everything There is a Purpose’, New York Times, 3 February 2005 [original capitalisation]. 20 and 1990s, by an ‘invasion’ of British through-composed (i.e. with no spoken dialogue) so-called ‘megamusicals’, and subsequently by jukebox musicals, another ‘invasion’ with a transatlantic taint, perceived as they were to be following in the wake of Mamma

Mia! (West End 1999, Broadway 2001), the successful British musical with a score of

ABBA hits.17 The standards of craftsmanship of these jukebox musicals, and the demands they made of their audiences, were deemed manifestly inferior when judged

(inappropriately, as I would argue) by the criteria of value usually applied to the integrated musical.18

Subsequently, the term has become relatively widely recognized and, in some contexts at least, has lost its derogatory connotations. While the Oxford English

Dictionary has not yet incorporated the term, the American Merriam-Webster

Dictionary introduced it in their 2008 update, defining it as ‘a musical that features popular songs from the past’. The British Collins English Dictionary has included it since 2013, with the definition ‘a musical play or film that is based around a series of well-known popular songs’.19 More specialised dictionaries expand the definition: for example, the entry in Blumenfeld’s Dictionary of Musical Theater: Opera, Operetta and

Musical Comedy reads: ‘A stage or screen musical whose score consists of the popular songs of a particular composer, performer or singing group, e.g. Mamma Mia (1999;

17 For extended discussions of the aesthetics of the megamusical, see Jessica Sternfield, The Megamusical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) and Miranda Lunskaer-Nielsen, Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 18 For an extended polemic that expressly sets the rise of the jukebox musical against the death (on Broadway at least) of the tradition of the well-crafted American integrated musical, see Michael John LaChiusa, ‘The Great Gray Way’, Opera News, August 2005: 30-35. The prediction and/or lamentation of the demise of the Broadway musical has almost become a minor early-twenty-first-century art-form in itself: see, for example, Mark Steyn, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now (New York: Routledge, 2000); Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen: The Last 25 Years of the Broadway Musical (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Barry Singer, Ever After: The Last Years of Musical Theater and Beyond (New York: Applause, 2004). 19 http://www.collinsdictionary.com/submission/6989/jukebox%20musical. 21 film 2008), (2005)’, while Matthew Hoch’s A Dictionary for the Modern

Singer gives an extended discussion:

Jukebox musical: also called a catalog show or anthology musical, the jukebox musical is a contemporary that features the greatest hits of a single artist or musical group. Essentially a string of well-known songs, a loose (and usually thin) plot strings the songs together into a sort of cohesive narrative. The genre appropriately derives its name from the fact that the original artist’s legacy exists through recorded singles (as one would hear on a jukebox) as opposed to written-down compositions. Well-known examples of the jukebox musical include Mamma Mia (1999/2001, ABBA), All Shook Up (2004, Elvis Presley), Movin’ Out (2004, ), and Lennon (2005, ). (2009) represents an interesting twist on the genre, congealing some of the most famous rock songs of the 1980s from a variety of solo artists and heavy metal groups.20 The boundaries of what constitute a jukebox musical are thus remarkably fluid. For example, while Blumenfeld and Hoch include the so-called biomusicals Jersey Boys and

Lennon as examples of jukebox musicals, in her monograph Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment, Millie Taylor contrasts the biomusical, which uses the songs of a writer, composer or performer to tell the life of that artist, with the jukebox musical, which features ‘the reconstitution of the songs within an entirely new plot’, a definition that would also seem to exclude the works discussed in this thesis, works that adapt existing plots.21 Taylor’s approach is not so much idiosyncratic as illustrative of the currently fluid boundaries of the term, boundaries that vary according to the different ways in which works are categorised (by shared modes of construction, type of music, subject matter).

In a discussion of post-golden-age developments in the Broadway musical,

Ethan Mordden acknowledges this fluidity in the definition of the jukebox musical, a

20 Robert Blumental, Blumental’s Dictionary of Musical Theater: Opera, Operetta, Musical Comedy (Milwaukee, WI: Limelight, 2010), 171; Matthew Hoch, A Dictionary for the Modern Singer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 91. 21 Millie Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2013), 165. 22

‘term used variously’, and suggests that ‘it most often refers to a book show with a new storyline into which pre-existing songs are fitted’. 22 In comparison to other definitions

(especially those of Scott Warfield and Elizabeth Wollman, discussed further later in this introduction, which make the jukebox musical a subset of the ),

Mordden’s does not restrict the type of song used.23 Indeed, rather unusually, his central examples used to illustrate the term are musicals that use songs from earlier musicals; he then broadens this, stating that ‘some jukebox shows reach beyond classic

Broadway for their music’, citing All Shook Up approvingly as an example of the type that uses ‘old pop tunes’.24

My own view is that the fluidity of the term is useful in relation to what is a developing form: given that it was originally used pejoratively in an attempt to police the boundaries of acceptable musical theatre, there is no reason that those reclaiming it from that pejorative usage should feel a need to police its boundaries too strictly in turn.25 This thesis therefore harnesses the term without its originally pejorative connotations to focus primarily on a mode of construction, referring to a group of late- twentieth- or early-twenty-first-century dramatic works in which (at least some of) the

22 Ethan Mordden, Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 254. 23 Scott Warfield, ‘From to Rent: Is “Rock” a Four-Letter Word on Broadway?’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 235-49 (245-47); Elizabeth Wollman, ‘Rock Musical’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2263085. 24 Mordden, Anything Goes, 254-55. 25 A struggle to define (or police the use of) the term goes on in online blogs and discussion pages for fans of musicals. If on nothing else, a common ground of agreement is often disagreement with whatever the Wikipedia definition is at the time, a definition which itself is subject to disagreements among its contributors. See, for example, ‘What Exactly Defines a “Jukebox Musical”?’, Broadway World.Com, http://www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?thread=1077431&mobile=on; ‘The Definition of a Jukebox Musical’, The Producer’s Perspective, https://www.theproducersperspective.com/my_weblog/2008/01/the-definition.html; Kirk Woodward, ‘The Jukebox Musical’, http://rickontheater.blogspot.de/2011/10/jukebox- musical.html. 23 characters use (at least) spoken words and existing popular songs as part of a continuum of media of communication or modes of expression within the world of the drama.

Existing popular songs

‘Existing popular songs’ in this context usually means at least both the lyrics and the vocal melody, and usually also an instrumental accompaniment, of existing self- contained compositions for voice with wide circulation, often in recorded versions, outside the classical art song or folk song traditions. I concur with Mordden in including in the definition songs from earlier musicals, often the of their time, although I see these as rather less central to the definition than he does. However, the term also embraces , a longstanding practice stretching back to the medieval period, in which new lyrics replace in whole or in part the expected lyrics of existing song melodies. In the jukebox musicals considered in the following chapters, this practice ranges from the replacement of a single word or a very small number of words to more significant amounts of replacement, but none completely rewrites the lyrics.26

This definition of the jukebox musical expands Blumenfeld’s – in any case presumably designed to be illustrative rather than restrictive – from a work ‘whose score consists of the popular songs of a particular composer, performer or singing group’ to include works such as the production of King Lear discussed in Chapter Two, in which songs are linked by theme (fatherhood and patriarchy). This definition also

26 Mordden suggests a lineage between jukebox musicals and John Gay’s , The Beggar’s Opera (1728), as I also do in Chapter One. He adds, ‘but, remember, John Gay wrote new lyrics to old music; the jukebox score generally uses old lyrics with the old music they were written for’ (Anything Goes, 254). However, his generalisation does not exclude a full use of contrafactum in jukebox musicals; this openness would allow the term ‘jukebox musical’ to incorporate pieces such as Twelfth Night: The Musical (Perth, WA, 2012), in which characters sang newly written lyrics to song melodies from the 1940s. (Thanks to Sarah Courtis, Curtin University, Perth, for information on this production). 24 allows the points made in the thesis to be expanded to other adaptations of

Shakespeare’s plays beyond those examined in the case studies, such as The Donkey

Show (off-Broadway, 1999, subsequent international tours and a Boston revival in

2009), which uses 1970s numbers from a range of performers and writers, or Titus

Andronicus!: The Musical (Denver, CO., 2005, 2007) and A ‘’-inspired ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2013), the songs of which appear to be linked only by their appropriateness (or deliberate inappropriateness) to the dramatic moment.

Importantly, in a thesis on Shakespeare-based works, my definition also removes the focus on hierarchy in the creative process implicit in the Collins and Hoch definitions, in which the plot appears as of secondary importance, tailored to accommodate the songs, and expands Taylor’s and Mordden’s definitions to include works that adapt existing plots. At the same time it excludes from the field of survey works such as Baz

Luhrmann’s ’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), the of which is dominated by popular songs, including diegetic lip-synched numbers by Old Capulet and Mercutio in drag, but in which the characters themselves do not sing, and the Royal

Shakespeare Company’s 1991 production of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, which featured an onstage band and singer whose renditions of standards during scene changes provided commentary on the action, but who did not interact with the characters in the world of the drama.27

Version, adaptation, production

I use the terms ‘version’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘production’ relatively loosely in much of the thesis, preferring ‘version’ as an umbrella term to cover overt adaptations –

27 For a Lacanian reading of lip-synching in Luhrmann’s film, see Richard Burt, Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), 159-63. 25 musicals that are based on a play by Shakespeare, but that flag their difference from their source, usually in their titles – as well as stage or film works that are less overt in flagging their difference from Shakespeare’s plays in, for example, their titles and marketing, and that audiences may approach as relatively straightforward productions of a Shakespeare play with a set of expectations that do not include encountering existing songs as part of the dramatic apparatus. Once seen, these latter might or might not be treated by audiences as adaptations, corroborating Margaret Jane Kidnie’s recent work on adaptation as a provisional category.28 Others might treat them not as adaptations, but as falling somewhere towards the ‘rewrighting’ end of Alan Dessen’s spectrum of the adjustments required in ‘the process of turning a Renaissance printed text into a playscript for today’s actors and playgoers’, from the relatively minor changes he refers to as ‘rescripting’ to ‘rewrighting’, the textual interventions of which result in ‘a script with substantial differences from the original’.29 I engage more closely with theories of adaptation in relation to individual examples, particularly in Chapter Five.

I avoid the term ‘’ in relation either to Shakespeare’s plays or to the songs used in jukebox musicals, sharing Diana Henderson’s wariness of the notions of stability and transformation that the term implies:

The point is not that later artists have altered a static object, as the ‘thinginess’ of the critical term ‘appropriation’ (and often the artist’s own vocabularies) would suggest. They haven’t, because ‘it’ was never so stable and determinate in the first place: even the production of the First Folio […] was a group effort involving Shakespeare’s acting partners John Heminges and Henry Condell (performing on the writer’s behalf seven years after his death) as well as typesetters and printers.30

28 Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2009). 29 Alan C. Dessen, Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, The Director, and Modern Productions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 30 Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 26

In jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare, it is not only the Shakespearean play that is a less stable ‘source’ than it might appear: the songs are also unstable. Despite the emphasis placed apparently unproblematically on the ‘original’ versions of the songs in theoretical work on the jukebox musical, discussed more fully later in this introduction, the songs themselves often exist in multiple live and studio recordings by the same artist, as well as in cover versions by others, instrumental reworkings, piano or guitar transcriptions, and karaoke renditions with voice tracks removed, any of which might be the most familiar – or only – version known to a particular audience member. That there is no single ‘correct’ version of either the songs or the play through which a jukebox-musical should be approached is a factor in the multiple possibilities for reception that jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare invite.

Although I use ‘version’, ‘adaptation’ or ‘production’ rather than ‘collaboration’ in this thesis, I find Henderson’s concept of ‘diachronic collaboration’ productively provocative in relation to jukebox musicals. Henderson uses the term to describe the works discussed in her Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across

Time and Media – the results of what she calls ‘collaborations’ between a dead and living ‘collaborators’, in which writers, directors, actors and film makers rework or reshape Shakespeare’s plays.31 The sense of unwilling or unwitting (and sometimes unsuccessful) collaboration is often a feature of jukebox-musical versions of

Shakespeare’s plays; however, in these, the more obvious collaboration is between

Shakespeare’s plays and the songs rather than between Shakespeare and the musical’s creative team. In these works, multiple unwitting ‘collaborators’ – Shakespeare, the writers of the songs and/or the singers who made them famous, sometimes all of them dead – appear to work together to create meaning, often their juxtaposition alone being

31 Henderson, Collaborations with the Past, 11-12. 27 sufficient for new meanings to emerge. While not every juxtaposition of song and

Shakespeare successfully gives new insights into either the play, the song or the human condition, a feature of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare is that when a song does ‘collaborate’ successfully with Shakespeare, the result is not only the creation of new or unexpected meaning, but also the production of often intense feelings of pleasure simply at witnessing this unlikely, unwitting, yet successful ‘collaboration’.

Situating the thesis in relation to the existing critical literature

Approaches to musical adaptations of Shakespeare

In contrast to the large quantity of academic writing on (non-musical) film versions of Shakespeare’s plays that has dominated Shakespearean adaptation studies, musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in general have received little sustained critical attention as adaptations. While Kiss Me, Kate and, especially, West Side Story have been the subject of a number of studies, these musicals are landmarks in the development of the musical as an art form and have usually been approached as such, rather than primarily as adaptations of Shakespeare.32 Irene Dash’s Shakespeare and

32 For relatively recent work on Kiss Me, Kate, see Robert Lawson-Peebles, ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare: The Case of Kiss Me, Kate’, in Approaches to the American Musical, ed. Robert Lawson-Peebles (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 89-108; Irene G. Dash, ‘Double Vision: Kiss Me, Kate’, The Shakespeare Newsletter, Spring 2005: 3-4, 19, 22-31 revised as ‘Double Vision: Kiss Me, Kate and The Taming of the Shrew’, in her Shakespeare and the American Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 49-76; Dan Rebellato, ‘No Theatre Guild Attraction Are We: Kiss Me, Kate and the Politics of the Integrated Musical’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 19:1 (2009): 61-73, and my ‘A (White) Woman’s (Ironic) Places in Kiss Me, Kate and Post-war America’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 6:1 (2012): 173-86; for West Side Story, see, for example, Keith Garebian, The Making of ‘West Side Story’ (Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 1995); Wilfred Mellers, ‘West Side Story revisited’, in Approaches to the American Musical, ed. Lawson-Peebles, 127-36; Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, ‘A Puerto Rican Reading of the America of West Side Story’, in his José, Can You See?: Latinos On and Off Broadway (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 62-82; Frances Negrón-Muntaner, ‘Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses’, Social Text, 18:2 (2000): 83-106; Anthony Bushard, ‘From On the Waterfront to West Side Story’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 3:1 (2009), 61-75; Carol J. Oja, ‘West Side Story and The Music Man: Whiteness, Immigration, and Race in the US During the Late 1950s’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 3:1 (2009): 13-30; Nigel Simeone, Leonard Bernstein: ‘West Side Story’ 28 the American Musical is the only monograph devoted to musical adaptations of

Shakespeare. Dash’s thesis is that due to the structural properties of Shakespeare’s plays, musical adaptations of them (a numerically very minor strand in the history of musical theatre) have had a prominent role in the development of what she terms as the

‘organic’ musical (a concept she never fully clarifies, but which appears to overlap with the concept of the integrated musical).33 While her work is admirable in its provision of

‘thick’ descriptions of the musicals she – it is particularly strong in giving details of plot and mise en scène and in discussions of the working processes of the creative teams – she devotes little discussion to the role of music or song as a meaning-making tool in the reception of musical theatre. Neither does she engage with academic work that has interrogated the discourse of musico-dramatic integration, a discourse that has been contested in musical theatre and film scholarship for some time (discussed more fully in Chapter Three). Further, her polemical argument for the powerful influence of

Shakespeare’s plays on an increasingly sophisticated level of musico-dramatic integration is undercut by a lack of acknowledgment of high-profile musicals with no apparent links to Shakespeare – such as (1927) and Carousel (1945) – that have a greater claim to influence on the development of the form than the

Shakespearean adaptations she discusses.

(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Irene G. Dash, ‘The Challenge of Tragedy: West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet’, in Shakespeare and the American Musical, 77-121; Andrea Most, ‘West Side Story and the Vestiges of Theatrical Liberalism’, in Shakespeare/ Adaptation/ Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill Levenson, ed. Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 56-75; Elizabeth A. Wells, ‘West Side Story’: Cultural Perspectives on an American Musical (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011). 33 In his Shakespeare and Opera (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), Gary Schmidgall takes a similar structural approach in his discussion of the suitability of the perceived proto- operatic nature of Shakespeare’s plays for adaptation to opera. Schmidgall’s polemical argument is more problematic than Dash’s, in that he argues for the ‘musicality’ of Shakespeare’s verse as an inspiration for operatic adaptation (especially in ‘Worlds of Sound’, 17-25), but fails to acknowledge that most operatic adaptations are in languages other than English, and that often neither composer nor librettist had a knowledge of English and therefore had no direct access to the ‘musicality’ of the original verse. 29

Given the polemical nature of Dash’s writing, it is perhaps not surprising that her monograph makes no mention of adaptations of the plays in the form of the jukebox musical, often a noticeably ‘unintegrated’ form of drama. Frances Teague, on the other hand, devotes a substantial section of her monograph Shakespeare and the American

Popular Stage to ‘the Shakespearean Broadway Musical’, and discusses jukebox- musical adaptations such as Play On! and (briefly) Return to the Forbidden Planet alongside other Shakespeare-based musicals.34 While Teague’s work here is declaredly

Broadway-focused, it gives a useful contextualisation of the role of musical theatre in creating a popular Shakespeare for the United States. In a chapter in Richard Burt’s

Shakespeare after Mass Media, Teague also approaches Shakespeare-based New York musicals from an angle that resonates with several of the jukebox-musical versions discussed in this thesis, arguing that many of the twentieth-century Broadway musicals she explores used Shakespeare’s cultural respectability as a ‘beard’ or disguise that allowed them to explore issues race, gender and same-sex attraction (albeit in a coded fashion).35

Julie Sanders’ chapter on musicals in her monograph, Shakespeare and Music:

Afterlives and Borrowings, is a descriptive survey, and one that relies heavily on secondary sources, drawing on Teague for its coverage of Play On! and filtering its discussion of Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost through the findings of other scholars, particularly Kelli Marshall.36 Stephen Buhler likewise draws on Teague in his brief descriptive survey of Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals in his chapter on

34 Frances Teague, ‘The Shakespearean Broadway Musical’, in her Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 79-171. 35 Fran Teague, ‘Shakespeare, Beard of Avon’, in Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 221-41. 36 Julie Sanders, ‘Shakespeare with a Contemporary Musical Twist’, in her Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 73-95. 30

Shakespeare and popular music, in which, alongside several of the works discussed by

Dash, he briefly discusses Fools in Love (2005), a doo-wop jukebox musical version of

A Midsummer Night’s Dream aimed at children, and Play On!.37 However, Buhler’s survey is a relatively small part of his chapter, which focuses more on an analysis of popular music’s engagement with Shakespeare. His chapter ends with a question for further research that might be taken to mark the starting point for this thesis, followed by a manifesto for popular musical appropriations of Shakespeare that might, with some adjustment, be taken as a manifesto for jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare:

What results or remains when characters, devices, and themes from one play are brought into juxtaposition with their counterparts from another work – cultural contexts very different from Shakespeare’s own? A partial answer is suggested by Andrew James Hartley in his recent study of Shakespearean dramaturgy. Aligning himself with W. B. Worthen’s critiques of claims to produce Shakespeare ‘authentically’, Hartley asserts that ‘theatre, like jazz, authorizes itself. It is not wholly dependent on the text, that text’s author, or the period in which that text was produced . . . It is dependent on its own internal logics, its own integrity, and on the singular collaborative semiotic exchange that defines it’. […]The multiple of popular music (including its post-pop and mass-market manifestations) also operate within their own logics, their own integrity (or dreams of achieving it), their special collaborative exchanges with audience on a variety of semiotic levels. It is important to remember that popular music’s appropriations of Shakespeare do not, as some critics declare of ‘inauthentic’ stagings of his plays, ‘pander to those unworthy of the “real thing”, trivializing it, even corrupting it’. Rather, they help the plays connect with one of the many sources of Shakespeare’s own inspiration and dramatic impact: popular music itself.38

One of the aims of this thesis is to establish the nature of the ‘singular collaborative semiotic exchange’ that defines jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare, and to

37 Stephen M. Buhler, ‘Musical Shakespeares: Attending to Ophelia, Juliet, and Desdemona’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 150-74. 38 Buhler, ‘Musical Shakespeares’, 172. Buhler quotes Andrew James Harvey, The Shakespearean Dramaturg: A Theoretical and Practical Guide (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 61 and 7. 31 demonstrate the ways in which they can help audiences connect with aspects of

Shakespeare’s plays that are difficult to bring out in less ‘inauthentic’ productions.

Buhler concludes his discussion of musical Shakespeares by noting ‘Broadway’s somewhat limited comfort zone when it comes to pop Shakespeare’, as the source texts of Broadway and off-Broadway musical adaptations of Shakespeare are restricted to a very small number of plays.39 Indeed, Dash, Teague and Buhler overtly place the

Shakespeare-based musicals they discuss in an apparently national American tradition

(that is, in fact, a distinctly local Broadway one) that at a significant point in its development has privileged the concept of musico-dramatic integration, although, in contrast to Dash, Teague and Buhler are not overly concerned with this concept themselves. However, in a survey chapter on ‘Shakespeare and Musical Theatre’ in The

Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, Teague briefly and tantalizingly alludes to ‘foreign musicals’ based on Shakespeare.40 No broad-ranging work yet considers American Shakespeare-based musicals in any depth alongside popular non-

Anglophone works that expressly eschew strict musico-dramatic integration, scenic realism, psychological-realist conceptions of character or iconic casting, and that do not restrict themselves to the small number of plays adapted for Broadway musicals. These might include Shakespeare-based adaptations, the Italian musical Giulietta e Romeo (2007), in which the scenography incorporates animated three-dimensional projected images and in which all the roles are doubled and largely played by teenage actors, Metal Macbeth (2006, filmed 2007, dir. Hidenori Inoue), a futuristic Japanese heavy-metal musical set in 2206 and based on Shakespeare’s

39 Buhler, ‘Musical Shakespeares’, 156. 40 Fran Teague, ‘Shakespeare and Musical Theatre’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 185-99, (196). 32 tragedy, or the long tradition in Japan’s Takarazuka Revue of all-female musical adaptations of Shakespeare, dating back to Death of Ophelia in 1926, and which includes more recent musicals such as Puck (after A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1992,

2014), , in Kowloon, Epiphany (based on Twelfth

Night), Romeo and Juliet ’99, Yume Shakespeare (based on A Midsummer Night’s

Dream), Say It Again (based on The Two Gentlemen of Verona) and The Winter’s Tale

(all part of the Revue’s ‘Shakespeare Year’ in 1999), Akatsuki no rooma ([Rome at

Dawn], based on Julius Caesar, 2006), The Two Noble Kinsmen (2009), Roméo et

Juliette: de la haine à l’amour (an adaptation of the French musical by Gérard

Presgurvic, 2010, 2011), and Hamlet! (2013).41 Such work might provide a counter- narrative to Dash’s polemic, suggesting that Shakespeare’s works are at least as well- suited to musical adaptations that do not prize psychological-realist conceptions of character or musico-dramatic integration over the creative use of disjunctive modes of performance. Indeed, such contextualising work might challenge Dash’s views of the essentially integrated nature of some of her case studies, while also drawing attention to

41 For Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare with numerous discussions of song-and-dance sequences, see Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, eds., Bollywood Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti discuss ‘the traditionally heterogeneous form of manufacture of the Hindi film whereby “prefabricated parts”, such as song and dance sequences, are brought together to create a final product’, a description that resonates with the mode of construction of jukebox musicals, in ‘Introduction: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance’, in Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, ed. Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1-62 (4). Yukari Yoshihara gives an overview of the 1999 Takarazuka Revue ‘Shakespeare Year’ as well as more detailed discussion of their Julius Caesar adaptation and the stage version of Metal Macbeth in ‘Popular Shakespeare in Japan’, Shakespeare Survey, 60 (2007): 130-40; Yilin Chen gives an extended analysis of Epiphany, the Takarazuka adaptation of Twelfth Night in ‘Gender and Homosexuality in Takarazuka Theatre: Twelfth Night and Epiphany’, Performing Ethos: An International Journal of Ethics in Theatre and Performance, 1:1 (2010): 53-67; Ohtani Tomoko compares the 1950 and the 1990 Takarazuka Revue adaptations of Romeo and Juliet in ‘Juliet’s Girlfriends: The Takarazuka Revue Company and the Shôjo Culture’, in Performing Shakespeare in Japan, ed. Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 159-71. Although the Takarazuka Revue usually retains original-language titles in their original Roman or Cyrillic script for works adapted from non- Japanese sources and sometimes use non-Japanese titles for other works, their works are performed in Japanese. 33

Shakespeare’s own disjunctions, shifts in style and register and combinations of apparently incongruous genres.42 Viewing jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare in this global context (and in a historical context, as discussed in Chapter One) might move them closer towards the centre of the field of musical adaptations, a field that is less dominated by concerns with musico-dramatic integration than a Broadway-focused approach might suggest.

While this thesis restricts itself to Anglophone works, it examines works from outside the Broadway tradition as well as works that have been performed either on or off-Broadway and in London’s West End. Embracing the jukebox musical’s capacity to accommodate a multiplicity of viewpoints and to facilitate a differential reception, this thesis approaches examples of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare as works that gain – or offer – their multiple potential meanings according to the context in which they are performed. Rather than focusing on an example of a jukebox musical in a single high-profile production (for example, the Broadway production), the chapters that follow also include discussions of revivals and regional and touring productions, providing insights into the works’ potentials that are sometimes missing in discussions of single productions.

Themes in the critical literature on jukebox musicals

Although the existence of jukebox musicals has at least been acknowledged in some recent survey-style works on the history and theory of the stage musical, few of these consider the form in any depth, and most have tended to make generalising statements that speculate on the rise of the form rather than to analyse the aesthetics and

42 For example, for discussions that see a deliberate avoidance of musico-dramatic integration in aspects of Kiss Me, Kate as part of its political and artistic meaning-making apparatus, see Rebellato, ‘No Theatre Guild Attraction Are We’ and Severn, ‘A (White) Woman’s (Ironic) Places’. 34 semiotic potential specific to it. Given the scarcity of detailed, sympathetic discussions of jukebox musicals in readily available works beyond academic journals, those works that do briefly assess the form – such as The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical and The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, contributions to which are discussed below – have a disproportionately strong influence on the discourse attending jukebox musicals in relation to the amount of space they devote to the subject.43 Beyond these survey-style works, a small number of critics have explored individual jukebox musicals, including jukebox-musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, in ways that might productively be applied to think through adaptation to the jukebox-musical format as an artistic practice. Three sometimes overlapping themes have either arisen repeatedly in critical literature or are emerging as ways of thinking about the jukebox musical format: nostalgia, postmodernism, and ‘revoicing’. This section sets out the approaches to these themes in current work on the jukebox musical, and introduces some responses to them that will frame the general approach to jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare taken in this thesis. Critical writing on specific jukebox- musical versions of Shakespeare is covered in more depth in the appropriate chapters.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is both the most dominant and most problematic feature in the discourse surrounding the jukebox musical, and – as will become clear later in this section – is the area in which this thesis distances itself most strongly from the current

43 See, for example, Nathan Hurwitz, A History of US Musical Theatre: No Business Like It (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 222-24; David Savran, ‘Class and Culture’, in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 239-50 (248); Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 639-40; Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L Wollman, ‘After the “Golden Age”’, in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, 111-24 (120-21); Warfield, ‘From Hair to Rent’, 245-46. 35 critical literature. Existing songs by definition belong to a past before the staging of the jukebox musical that they appear in. To stress this ‘pastness’, however, as the Collins dictionary definition does, is to frame the jukebox musical’s relationship to its songs in a way that is not always helpful or clarifying. While nostalgia may well play a part in the reception of some jukebox musicals for some audience members, much of this discourse reflects what Linda Hutcheon refers to as ‘the reductive belief that any recall of the past must, by definition, be sentimental nostalgia or antiquarianism’.44 Even where nostalgia does play a role in the reception process, it need not be viewed as intrinsically positive or negative, politically progressive or regressive: as Michel

Foucault has commented,

it’s a good thing to have nostalgia toward some periods on the condition that it’s a way to have a thoughtful and positive relation to your own present. But if nostalgia is a reason to be aggressive and uncomprehending toward the present, it has to be excluded.45

One might expand this further: ‘a thoughtful and positive relation to your present’ need not mean an approving acceptance of the conditions of the present, but entails at least an outlook which acknowledges the openness of the present to change; being ‘aggressive and uncomprehending toward the present’ might include a desire to retreat from the present instead of attempting to engage with and change it. Nonetheless, nostalgia in relation to the jukebox musical is often seen as politically conservative. For example,

Jessica Sternfield and Elizabeth Wollman, quoting musical theatre historian John Bush

Jones, restrict an understanding of nostalgia to the latter of Foucault’s formulations of nostalgia: ‘[Jones] notes the precondition for widespread nostalgia – a collective desire

44 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 19. 45 Rux Martin, ‘Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault, October 25, 1982’, in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutto (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 9-15 (12). 36 to return to a “younger, more innocent, less jaded” time – is “severe discontent with the present”’.46 For Sternfield and Wollman:

the sounds of the past trigger nostalgia, and thus an emotional connection. This is the driving logic behind the ‘jukebox musical’, a subgenre that has become ubiquitous since the turn of the twenty-first century. Instead of offering new songs evocative of past styles, jukebox musicals string together existing songs by a popular artist or group with the aid of a unifying (often frivolous) plot. Audiences of jukebox musicals tend to enter the theater familiar not only with the era but also with the songs themselves. As a result, the lure of familiarity is strong, gasps of recognition are frequent, and singing along during performances is common.47

While commentators such as Michael John LaChiusa, Larry Stempel and Scott Warfield credit the rise of jukebox musicals on Broadway in the first decade of the twenty-first century to the phenomenal success of Mamma Mia!, Sternfield and Wollman link ‘the jukebox musical’s own golden age’ to the attacks on the World Trade Center in

September 2001, arguing that the increase in the numbers of jukebox musicals

(implicitly on Broadway) occurred ‘during a period of monumental uncertainty that caused a surge of collective nostalgia’.48 Nathan Hurwitz, in contrast, charts a longer rise in the popularity of the jukebox musical from the early 1990s, and links this to the difficulties experienced by producers and directors in finding writers available to create musicals with new scores, the writers who in previous decades might have expected to write for Broadway having been lured to California to write for television, following the cable television boom that began in the 1980s.49 The years immediately after the World

46 Sternfeld and Wollman, ‘After the “Golden Age”’, 120, quoting John Bush Jones, Our Musicals Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theater (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 305-06. 47 Sternfield and Wollman, ‘After the “Golden Age”’, 121. 48 LaChiusa, ‘The Great Gray Way’, 34; Stempel, Showtime, 639; Warfield, ‘From Hair to Rent’, 246-47; Sternfield and Wollman, ‘After the “Golden Age”’, 121. 49 Hurwitz, A History of US Musical Theatre, 222-23. 37

Trade Center attacks certainly saw changed attitudes to attendance at Broadway plays and musicals: audiences now buy tickets at much shorter notice, while advance ticket sales – and the investible ready funds they produce – have dropped significantly, with the result that ticket price are more expensive.50 One might equally well link the ‘lure of familiarity’ of the jukebox musical to high ticket prices, rather than to nostalgia, seeing a parallel in the recent rise in star billing in theatrical marketing: audiences are assumed to prefer a perceived guarantee of quality at the expense of taking risks on the unknown when faced with costly outlays. These suggested reasons are of course not mutually exclusive, but none acknowledges the potential range of motivations across the members of the creative team. The socioeconomic conditions under which the form has suddenly flourished on Broadway do provide reasons for unease, but this unease should not allow one to cloud one’s judgment of the works themselves, given that conflating these works with their socioeconomic conditions risks losing sight of what they might provide in terms of an alternative to these conditions.

Several other commentators link the jukebox musical to nostalgia. As mentioned briefly above, both Scott Warfield and Elizabeth Wollman place the jukebox musical within the sub-genre of the rock musical, rather problematically, given that few works otherwise widely described as jukebox musicals incorporate genuine .51 For Wollman, the jukebox musical ‘reflect[s] audiences’ tastes for nostalgia’.52

For Warfield, the rock musical is often characterised by nostalgia: the jukebox musical

50 For a discussion on the effects of the September 11 attacks on Broadway advertising, marketing and publicity, see Ben Hodges, ‘Top Billing: Theatrical Advertising – A Conversation with Barbara Eliran’, in The Commercial Theater Institute Guide to Producing Plays and Musicals, Frederic B. Vogel and Ben Hodges, with forewords by Gerald Schoenfeld and Jed Bernstein (New York: Applause, 2006), 336-51. 51 Warfield, ‘From Hair to Rent’, 245-47; Elizabeth Wollman, ‘Rock Musical’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2263085. 52 Wollman, ‘Rock Musical’. 38 is a ‘nostalgia-driven genre’, but so are many other rock musicals with original scores:

‘instead of the real thing, Broadway has offered up a diluted pop sound and even an air of nostalgia that appeals to typically older theatre-goers but still draws some younger customers into theatres’.53 Kelly Kessler, discussing jukebox-musical films, writes that the songs of Moulin Rouge! (2001) provide a ‘sense of nostalgic reminiscence and ’.54 David Savran, considering the musical in terms of class and culture and restricting his discussions to Broadway musicals, also posits the jukebox musical as an intrinsically nostalgic commodity marketed to and consumed by ‘affluent tourists’.55

However, in contrast to Sternfield and Wollman’s emphasis on the collective, he views this nostalgia as narcissistic:

But in all cases, the allure of the jukebox musical is largely nostalgic – one goes to Mamma Mia! in part to dance in the aisles and so relive one’s youth or indulge in a fantasy reconstruction of the 1970s. The power of nostalgia suggests to me that the jukebox musical produces a different kind of star: you – for it provides a certain type of narcissistic gratification by evoking memories of ‘Dancing Queen’ or ‘Money, Money, Money’ and in the process making your own past a part of the performance. Unlike the old-fashioned , such as , which is haunted by its own past, the jukebox musical is haunted by yours.56

An alternative way of approaching Savran’s point is not in terms of individualism or narcissism, but in terms of community. Unusually in the field, Millie Taylor analyses her own reactions to a jukebox musical, rather than speculating on the motives or emotions of audiences en masse from which the writer often implicitly distances him- or herself. While Taylor lists nostalgia as playing a part in her reception of the musical, she does not give it a particular prominence, focusing instead on the feeling of

53 Warfield, ‘From Hair to Rent’, 246. 54 Kelly Kessler, Destabilizing the Musical: Music, Masculinity and Mayhem (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 198. 55 Savran, ‘Class and Culture’, 248. 56 Savran, ‘Class and Culture’, 248. 39 community that the musical engendered. She describes her ‘real sense of joy’ in attending a performance of Jersey Boys, despite not having a personal emotional investment in the songs used and being ‘as guilty as anyone of denigrating [jukebox biomusicals]’.57 For Taylor, this joy

resulted from a shared experience of emotional contagion and communitas with my fellow audience members, produced through recognition of the musical materials which activated personal associations and nostalgia, mimetic response to audience members and performers, and the physical activity of participation.58

In this account, Savran’s ‘making your own past a part of the performance’ does not lead to narcissistic gratification, but contributes to a joyful sense of being-with-others.

In fact, in shows in which audiences are encouraged, invited, instructed or permitted to dance, moments of audience dancing are usually carefully managed in order that those songs that carry the plot can be given attention. Audience members who simply wish to dance at their own self-centred whim are likely to be given short shrift by fellow audience members, or – as direct audience address is often a feature of jukebox musicals – by the performers. Further, given the layout of most theatres, more audience members dance in the restricted space of their seating rows – or in the case of the Troubadour Theatre Company’s finales, on stage – than in the aisles as Savran suggests. As Taylor notes, audience members have a kinetic engagement not only with the show, but also their fellow audience members. While moments in which some or all of the audience dances can create a feeling of exuberant community among theatregoers, this generally entails an acknowledgment and negotiation of personal and communal space in the vibrant present that is unusual in theatregoing. Far from being narcissistic and focused on the past, attendance at many jukebox musicals requires more

57 Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment, 154. 58 Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment, 154. 40 active consideration of one’s present relationship to the auditorium space and of one’s relations with others – often strangers – than more conventional stage performances.

Audience participation is discussed further in Chapter Two.

Nostalgia has also been a theme in approaches to jukebox-musical versions of

Shakespeare, whether or not these are discussed as musicals, jukebox or otherwise.

Kevin Wetmore, for example, discusses Return to the Forbidden Planet and the

Troubadour Theater Company’s works in terms of nostalgia for the era of the songs.59

The academic reception of Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost has been particularly marked by discussions of nostalgia, a phenomenon linked by some critics with postmodernism, as I discuss in the following section. For Katherine Eggert,

Michael Friedman, Gayle Holste, Kelli Marshall, Courtney Lehmann and Ramona

Wray, the film deserves a negative critique on at least two grounds: on the one hand, as a perceived attempt at a nostalgic recreation of the 1930s film musical, it already engages with a conservative agenda; on the other, its attempt at such a nostalgic recreation is a failure.60 Fixed views on what nostalgia does and what form it should

59 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr, ‘“Are You Shakespearienced?”: Rock Music and the Production of Shakespeare’, in Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. and Robert York, Shakespeare and Youth Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 117-45. 60 Katherine Eggert, ‘Sure Can Sing and Dance: Minstrelsy, System, and the Post- postcoloniality of Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night’, in Shakespeare the Movie, II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video and DVD, ed. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 72-88; Michael D. Friedman, ‘“I Won’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me”: Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the American Film Musical’, Literature Film Quarterly 32:2 (2004): 134-43; Gayle Holste, ‘Branagh’s Labour’s Lost: Too Much, Too Little, Too Late’, Literature Film Quarterly, 30:3 (2002): 228-30; Courtney Lehmann, ‘Faux Show: Falling into History in Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 69-88; Kelli Marshall, ‘“It Doth Forget to Do the Thing It Should”: Kenneth Branagh, Love’s Labour’s Lost and (Mis)Interpreting the Musical Genre’, Literature Film Quarterly, 33:2 (2005): 83-91; Ramona Wray, ‘Nostalgia for Navarre: The Melancholic of Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Literature Film Quarterly, 30:3 (2002): 171-78; Ramona Wray, ‘The Singing Shakespearean: Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Politics of Genre’, in Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres and Cultures, ed. Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche and Nigel Wheale (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 151-71. 41 take (strangely, delivered by critics who are often suspicious of it) are problematic when they obstruct alternative approaches to a work. Discussions that link nostalgia to the appeal of the jukebox musical must be more nuanced, if only because it is precisely those musicals – such as the Beach Boys-based Good Vibrations excoriated by Ben

Brantley – that most clearly engage in a project of reassuring feel-good nostalgia that are among those that have been rejected by audiences as well as by professional critics.

In fact, jukebox musicals often consciously problematize their audiences’ engagements with the past. The sense of a stable and coherent past can be undermined by foregrounding, rather than eliding, the problems of unreliable memory and multiple perspectives even in the biomusical, a subgenre in which one might expect to find nostalgia for a stable and coherent past consciously invoked, given that its mise-en- scène often contributes to a recognisable and coherent sense of time and space, the timeframe of the narrative more or less matches the period in which the songs first became popular, and the songs, often staged as diegetic numbers, are delivered in an of the original performers’ style. In Jersey Boys, for example, one of the most prominent of the jukebox biomusicals, different sections of the story are told from the viewpoint of different characters, with clear discrepancies between narratives of what is apparently the same story. A disruption of the sense of a stable past is in fact a recurring feature of jukebox musicals, one that is based on a disjunction between the period of their songs’ first popularity and the timeframe of the narrative – Mamma Mia!, for example, cited by Savran as a production that encourages audiences ‘to indulge in a fantasy recreation of the 1970s’, in fact undercuts a straightforward sense of nostalgia through its use of 1970s and 1980s songs in a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century setting.

The conscious obstruction of stable links between the past and the present is particularly prominent in jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays, which by their nature

42 already complicate a sense of a stable past by bringing together in the one narrative at least two time periods, the early modern and the modern. Among other examples discussed in more detail in later chapters of this thesis, Play On! is set in New York’s

Harlem in the 1940s and uses music from that decade, but is consciously anachronistic in being set largely in the Cotton Club, which closed in 1935, and using scenery that draws on Romare Bearden’s from the 1960s. Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost juxtaposes Shakespearean dialogue with a late 1930s setting and songs, but in one number incorporates choreography and mise en scène that noticeably and jarringly draw on later decades, producing a disturbing sense of temporal rupture. Kelli Marshall proposes this number, in an argument taken up approvingly by Julie Sanders (who exclaims, ‘this would never have taken place in an RKO musical!’), as evidence of the film’s incompetence in providing a nostalgic recreation of past styles, rather than as a provocation that throws nostalgia into question.61

Douglas Green views Love’s Labour’s Lost more favourably, but still sees it in terms of nostalgia.62 Although he does not explore the issue further, his account raises one of the difficulties in approaching jukebox musicals as reliant on nostalgia while attempting to discuss them as works with a coherent, intrinsic meaning: that nostalgia is unstable in its referents, and opens up differential reception potentials for individual audience members. Most commentators have framed the perceived nostalgia in Love’s

Labour’s Lost as nostalgia for the period of the songs and the musicals with which the film engages. However, while Green discusses Branagh’s film in terms of the 1930s film musical, he contextualises his own engagement with such films through a nostalgic

61 Marshall, ‘“It Doth Forget to do the Thing it Should”’, 87; Sanders, Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings, 85. 62 Douglas E. Green, ‘Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Return of the Hollywood Musical: Song of the Living Dead’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 26:1 (2008): 77-96. 43 recreation of his first encounters with them: on television, presumably in the 1970s, and in colour at art-house and campus screenings in the 1980s.63

Further problems arise when nostalgia is seen as monolithic in its effects and appeal. For example, Sternfield and Wollman’s statement that ‘the sounds of the past trigger nostalgia and thus an emotional connection’ presents a number of issues. First, what constitutes ‘the sounds of the past’ varies significantly from person to person.

Dates of composition or the first phase of a song’s popularity are not related intrinsically to a song’s currency. This is particularly so in an age of easily accessible and affordable recording and play-back technology. Popular music from decades before features on current iPod playlists, prompting links to the daily commute rather than to the past. What might be a barely-remembered number from decades before for one audience member might be a recent discovery in a for another. Further, those longing nostalgically for a return to the social norms and structures of a particular period are not necessarily likely to find them evoked in the popular music of that time.

Indeed, nostalgia for a period cannot be straightforwardly attributed to people who like songs from that period, given that the point of many songs is to evoke alternative worlds. An approach that folds songs back seamlessly into the hegemonic structures of their time of first production does them an injustice.

Second, given Sternfield and Wollman’s definition of nostalgia, their assertion that the sounds of the past provoke nostalgia and Savran’s suggestion that one goes to a jukebox musical to ‘relive one’s youth’ appear to be naively nostalgic in themselves: for many, reliving one’s youth is the last thing one would wish for, and the sounds of the past may well provoke unwelcome reminders of isolation rather than nostalgia. For such audience members, the sense of community experienced by Taylor might serve to

63 Green, ‘Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, 78. 44 underline the joys of living in the present, rather than representing an imaginary return to their youth. If songs produce ‘an emotional connection’, that emotional connection is not inevitably a positive one. On the other hand, as Millie Taylor has pointed out in her description of attending a production of Jersey Boys, familiarity with a song does not necessarily entail a personal connection to it:

although I knew many of the songs, they didn’t feel part of my history or identity, yet, nevertheless, as a member of the audience group I felt the contagion and was uplifted and transported to stand and clap along and was thoroughly entertained by the excellent performances.64

While Simon Frith has discussed the role of for many young people in identity formation, Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s music critic, is presumably only the most prominent of many listeners who are late adult converts to pop music from an earlier focus on (or Broadway shows, or opera) in their youth, and who approach pop music primarily as a genre of music rather than as key tool in identity formation.65 Familiarity with songs cannot therefore be relied upon to provoke predictable emotional or nostalgic responses in an audience. Indeed, if the target audience of a jukebox musical is those for whom ‘the lure of familiarity is strong’, the songs are as likely to be part of that audience’s present mental soundscape as of their past and therefore less likely to trigger nostalgia than would be the case for audiences who had strong relationships with the songs in the past, but who no longer listen to them regularly in the present.

Finally, familiarity with a musical’s songs is not an aspect of reception restricted to jukebox musicals. The practice of releasing concept albums prior to staging meant

64 Millie Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment, 154 65 Simon Frith, Popular Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p.273-74; Alex Ross, ‘Listen to This’, in The New Yorker, 16 February 2004, reprinted as ‘Listen to This: Crossing the Border from Classical to Pop’, in Alex Ross, Listen to This (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 3-21. 45 that the songs of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, while newly composed, were very likely to have been familiar to many of their first audience members, while the saturation coverage on UK commercial television and radio of songs from and Phantom of the Opera meant that a familiarity with at least the commercially packaged ‘hit’ songs was a boost to ticket sales. Even among less aggressively marketed commercial productions, a familiarity with the songs of a musical can be part of the attraction of attending the staged work: revivals of musicals for which a cast album already exists are a case in point. Indeed, this draws attention to a clear difference between jukebox musicals and revivals of ‘golden-age’ Broadway shows. Audiences approach these revivals already familiar with the songs, and often with spoken lines, and expect to find them in very specific places in a predictable narrative, an expectation boosted by the well-known reputation of rights holders, such as the Rogers and Hammerstein organisation, for carefully controlling amendments at least to the book and songs. Indeed, although Bruce Kirle argues persuasively for musicals’ status as ‘works in process’, unstable, fluid texts, the ‘originals’ of which change over the course of their initial run and often undergo changes in revival, musical theatre audiences (and some academic critics) tend to view ‘golden-age’ musicals as peculiarly static.66 While fans avidly compare different interpretations of a role (a comparison of the various Roses in the history of revivals of being almost a rite of passage in certain circles), they do not expect the book or the songs to change. Bud

Coleman, for example, discussing two late-twentieth-century revivals of ‘golden-age’

Broadway musicals that made changes to the narrative of the initial runs, complains that

66 Bruce Kirle, Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Post-golden age musicals, such as , Merrily We Roll Along, Company, Rags have undergone sometimes significant changes in revival with fewer objections from fans or critics, the later versions sometimes achieving the status of the ‘definitive’ version. 46

‘they did not have titles that distinguished them from their original incarnations’.67 He then takes a moral turn to conclude that ‘it is ahistorical and unethical to present a work to audiences under its old title when it contains significant alterations to its original form’.68 Audiences for jukebox musicals, on the other hand, while familiar with the songs of a particular singer or genre, must approach the musicals with an expectation of finding them in unfamiliar contexts and combinations; indeed, they may not even know exactly which songs to expect. The lure of familiarity is at least balanced by the lure of the new, by a curiosity as to the unfamiliar territory on which the familiar will encountered.

Rather than showing symptoms of ‘a collective desire to return to a “younger, more innocent, less jaded” time’, as Sternfield and Wollman suggest, one might equally characterize audiences for jukebox musicals as possessing an openness to change in the present, and a willingness to reassess their relationship with the past. If ‘the lure of familiarity is strong’, it is also likely to be accompanied by a willingness to see what can be done with the familiar by others, and an openness to finding new interpretations for familiar material oneself. Audiences for jukebox musicals know that they are not buying tickets for a tribute band or a concert. They know that a jukebox musical based around the songs of Elvis Presley cannot provide them with the distinctive vocal sound that makes a group of songs by disparate songwriters seem like a coherent œuvre. The lure of an absent presence is not in itself likely to be sufficiently enticing to merit the price of a Broadway ticket. Similarly, audiences for jukebox-musical versions of

Shakespeare’s plays that overtly frame themselves as adaptations incorporating existing songs are unlikely to be lured there by an uncomplicated craving for the familiar,

67 Bud Coleman, ‘New Horizons: The Musical at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 284-301, (294). 68 Coleman, ‘New Horizons’, 294. 47 accompanied by a strong belief that there is a ‘correct’ way to play or interpret

Shakespeare. On the other hand, jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare that do not frame themselves as musicals might well attract audiences with such desires and beliefs, for whom the incorporation of popular songs into a production of Shakespeare is a step too far. In reality, of course, audiences are likely to be diverse in their desires and beliefs: even among audiences for overt adaptations who expect to find the familiar reworked, some may be more drawn by the familiar than by the reworking, and vice versa. However, in contrast to much existing critical writing, this thesis takes as its starting point that an appreciation of the jukebox musical entails at least an openness to seeing familiar things – perhaps even extremely well-loved things around which one has built one’s identity – reworked, repurposed, placed in new contexts and revealed in new lights.

If, following Sternfield and Wollman, Savran and Warfield, the jukebox musical were to be characterised by nostalgia, one might expect jukebox musicals based on

Shakespeare’s plays to be particularly nostalgic, whether in terms of the ‘obsessive valorization of the past’ or ‘the desire for a stable present [that] manifests itself through a nostalgia for a certain sort of history’ that Susan Bennett identified as a marker of nostalgic productions of Shakespeare in the 1980s and ’90s, in terms of appeals to

Shakespeare’s cultural authority in a world of present uncertainties, or simply in terms of presenting plots and lines that are reassuringly familiar.69 However, as I argue in the case studies that follow, jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays frequently destabilise the present as much as they destabilise the past. Further, adding nuance to

Worthen’s claim, mentioned above, that ‘modern Shakespearean theatre is invariably

69 Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 65 and 75. 48 involved with questions of authority’, any straightforwardly nostalgic approach to

Shakespeare’s cultural authority in jukebox-musical versions of his plays is undercut by the very obvious presence of other forms of cultural authority in terms of the songs used, and by the fact that many of these versions do not use Shakespeare’s language.70

Such works do not even necessarily draw on Shakespeare’s name as a form of cultural authority in their marketing: as I discuss in Chapter Five, All Shook Up actively avoids announcing itself as an adaptation of Shakespeare. Indeed, jukebox-musical versions in general appear to have little interest in either buttressing or demolishing Shakespeare’s cultural authority; while not obviously nostalgic, they are also unlike the ‘radical’ 1980s productions and ‘“vandalised” Shakespeares’ that Bennett suggests might succeed in avoiding nostalgia.71 Finally, jukebox-musical versions of the plays do not restrict themselves to the reassuringly familiar: none of All’s Well That Ends Well, Love’s

Labour’s Lost, Titus Andronicus, or The Winter’s Tale is central to either the contemporary performance or the educational canon, even at undergraduate level, yet they have all been turned into jukebox musicals that do not rely on an audience’s familiarity with the source play (All’s Kool That Ends Kool (Troubadour Theater

Company, 2002), Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, Titus Andronicus! The Musical, A

Wither’s Tale (Troubadour Theater Company, 2010)). Indeed, this raises the primary research question of this thesis: if jukebox musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays are not in general strongly driven by nostalgia for a stable past, or by a noticeable desire either to buttress or to resist Shakespearean cultural authority, do not always require a familiarity with the Shakespearean source play, and often remove Shakespeare’s

70 Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, 39. 71 Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, 27 and 12. 49 language, to what aspects of Shakespeare’s work do they respond, what form does that response take, and to what uses can such a response be put?

Postmodernism

Eggert, Lehmann and Wray set their negative discussions of nostalgia in Love’s

Labour’s Lost within the framework of postmodernism, implicitly or expressly as understood through the critique of that movement associated with Fredric Jameson, a critique that sees postmodernism as characterized by a ‘crisis in historicity’.72

Postmodern artworks in this view do not represent the ‘real’ past, but serve up cultural myths and stereotypes about the past; nostalgia does not recreate the past, but effaces it.

Penny Gay, on the other hand, separates nostalgia and postmodernism in her discussions of the film. Arguing that ‘Branagh’s film can be usefully read through the prism of postmodernist aesthetic theory’, she suggests that:

Branagh operates with a knowingness about the genre of cinema, particularly that of and musicals, that is the very opposite of simplistically nostalgic – and that assumes both actors and audience are willing to take an aesthetic journey that is unconventional by modern standards.73

Here Gay rightly proposes postmodernism as a useful tool through which to approach

Love’s Labour’s Lost, rather than suggesting that the film itself is a conscious example of postmodern art: indeed, Branagh is reported as claiming in an interview that ‘there was never any desire to or be post-modern or ironic’ in the approach of the film’s creative team to adapting Shakespeare’s play.74 Gay uses her postmodernist lens

72 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 22. 73 Penny Gay, ‘“A Romantic Musical Comedy” for the Fin-de-Siècle: Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Sydney Studies in English, 36 (2010): 1-21 (1). 74 Rob Blackwelder, ‘Much Ado About Branagh’s Bard-Adapted Musical: Shakespeare’s Greatest Modern Benefactor Talks About Turning Love’s Labour’s Lost Into a Song-and-Dance 50 to conclude that the film provides access to an audience experience latent in

Shakespeare’s playtexts, but difficult to bring out in productions with a psychological- realist approach to action and character, or with a coherently antiquarian or modernised approach to staging and text:

Its nostalgia is laced with historic awareness. In capturing the energy of live performance yet framing it as artificial, ‘unrealistic’, it allows us to see the human performers underneath the mask and enjoy and honour their work. Shakespearean play-texts, in particular the comedies, make a point of offering the audience exactly the same opportunity.75

This conclusion resonates with some of the findings discussed in connection with other works discussed later in this thesis.

In contrast to Eggert, Lehmann and Wray, Gay draws her conception of postmodernism from Linda Hutcheon’s work, which she contrasts with ‘an influential strand of theorising about postmodernism that is deeply suspicious of joy, or indeed of pleasure in any form (except, perhaps, the intellectual pleasure of knowing more than your neighbours)’, and which she identifies in a footnote with ‘Jameson’s doom-laden perspective on contemporary creativity’.76 Viewing Hutcheon’s conception of postmodernism as a more useful interpretive tool than the negative approach to the film’s perceived postmodernism adopted by other academic writers, Gay draws on

Hutcheon for a description of postmodernism that might usefully be applied to other works that trouble the boundaries of lived reality and art by incorporating existing songs into a narrative context. This is postmodernism as

a new model for mapping the borderland between art and the world, a model that works from a position within both and yet not totally within

Spectacular’, interview for SplicedWire conducted 24 May 2000, http://splicedwire.com/00features/branagh.html. 75 Gay, ‘“A Romantic Musical Comedy”’, 20 76 Gay, ‘“A Romantic Musical Comedy”’, 20. 51

either, a model that is profoundly implicated in, yet still capable of criticizing, that which it seeks to describe.77

That the jukebox musical maps the borderland between art and lived experience in different ways from other forms of musical theatre is illustrated by Millie Taylor’s comments on the way songs function in narrative contexts:

the songs function differently in a jukebox musical than in an ‘integrated’ musical in that rather than simply amplifying and expanding on their context, they leap from it and make connections with other parts of the audience’s lived experience.78

These connections might account for the frequent ‘gasps of recognition’ that Sternfield and Wollman associate with ‘the lure of familiarity’. If, as Sternfield and Wollman suggest, audiences attend jukebox musicals because they crave the familiar, they are unlikely to gasp with recognition when they find it. A more nuanced approach that sees audiences as at least open to change rather than primarily seeking the familiar might account for such gasps as a pleasurable symptom of semiotic overload: a recognition not of the songs, but of the connections that they make with the plot situation in which they find themselves and with the audience member’s lived experience. Jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays add a potential further layer of complexity in the recognition of the connections that the source play makes with the song. As I discuss at several points throughout the thesis, but particularly in Chapters Four, Five and Six, jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays often add even further layers of intertextual recognition to other artistic works or aspects of lived reality. Gasping

(which certainly happens) can be a result not of recognising the songs, or even recognising the connections that they make, but of recognising an explosion of semiotic complexity relating both to the musical and one’s lived reality that cannot be fully

77 Gay, ‘“A Romantic Musical Comedy”’, 2, quoting Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 19. 78 Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment, 162. 52 unravelled during the performance of the song, a recognition that meanings are there to be grasped even as they are not immediately graspable.

Gay’s points about the borderline between the artwork and lived reality, and the usefulness of a Hutcheon-inflected conception of postmodernism as a tool in approaching Love’s Labour’s Lost are well taken and can be applied beyond Branagh’s film to the other works studied in this thesis. If I do not take the discussion of postmodernism further in the following chapters, this is partly because, Gay’s point having been made in connection with one jukebox-musical version of Shakespeare, a repeated application of it throughout my own analysis risks becoming redundant.

Further, while in Gay’s hands Hutcheon’s brand of postmodernism is an effective tool in providing an alternative discourse through which to discuss an individual work that had been approached negatively through another brand of postmodernism, Taylor’s writing suggests that similar points can be made with regard to other works without referring to postmodernism as an interpretive framework. More importantly, however, I prefer to view jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare as participating in a minor artistic mode with some historical continuity, rather than to focus on their relative novelty. To frame an analysis of jukebox-versions of Shakespeare with a set of theories so strongly linked to a particular time period, and one that is framed as a ‘new model for framing the borderland between art and the world’ is to risk obstructing an understanding of them as part of a longstanding artistic practice with its own particular strengths in engaging with Shakespeare’s plays. Chapter One sets out this historical context.

53

Revoicing

One promising tool with which to approach jukebox musicals beyond the question of nostalgia is what Malcolm Womack calls ‘revoicing’.79 In an article focused on the stage production of Mamma Mia!, one of the earliest academic engagements with the jukebox musical, Womack argues that that musical subverts the meanings of the original ABBA songs it uses – a meaning that he argues is frequently patriarchal and anti-feminist – by allocating songs that are associated with a particular gender of singer in performances by ABBA to characters of a different gender in

Mamma Mia!.

Womack’s argument for the ‘original’ meaning of the ABBA songs is not entirely convincing. Amongst other things, he places too much weight on lyrics as a signifier of songs at the expense of performance aspects (at the same time as he occasionally misreads those lyrics), and, crucially, does not address the instability of what the ‘original’ version of the ABBA song, and thus its ‘original meaning’, might be.

The multiple potential signifying aspects of an ABBA song (and thus its ‘meaning’) vary in prominence according to whether it is represented by disembodied voices on a single, LP record, CD or radio played at home, performed live at a concert, recorded in a television broadcast or as a music video, or played as a dance track in a crowded disco; in several of these contexts the lyrics are not the most prominent signifier. While

I find Womack’s argument for revoicing persuasive and useful as an analytical tool for jukebox musicals in general, I find some of his discussion of particular instances of apparent anti-feminism in ABBA’s songs to be overstated, undervaluing both the role of the performer in creating meaning, and the hierarchies in particular types of performer

79 Malcolm Womack, ‘Thank You for the Music: Catherine Johnson’s Feminist Revoicings in Mamma Mia!’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 3:2 (2009): 201-11. Although Womack uses the term ‘revoicing’ in the title of his article, he does not use the term in the article itself. 54 in the construction of stardom. That the two women in ABBA, Agnetha Fältskog and

Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad, were the lead singers in the majority of the band’s numbers already places them above Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson in the hierarchy of performer stardom, a fact enhanced by blocking and choreography in stage performances in which the women were almost always placed centre stage, had relative freedom to dance and otherwise move around unencumbered by musical instruments (in comparison to the men) and by camerawork and editing in music videos, in which the women were frequently isolated in two- or one-shots, often close-ups of the face or head, thus eclipsing the men in the band. First-person lyrics that position the female singer as ‘unexceptional at best and mousey at worst, incapable of action or self- improvement, and only given purpose by the intervention of a benevolent man’ are thus at least complicated, if not undercut, by the prominence given to the women in performance.80 Womack’s central argument for the patriarchal values of ‘Thank You for the Music’ (a song he characterises as a manifestation of ‘a desperate appreciation for one’s songwriter husband’) in particular seems overstated.81 First, it relies on the listener being aware that the music and lyrics for the song were written by Björn

Ulvaeus and sung by his then wife Agnetha Fältskog; second, it relies on an equation of these lyrics and written music with the ‘music’ for which thanks is being given, discounting Agnetha’s performance ‘talent’ that the song specifically equates to

‘music’; third, it relies on an interpretation that sees Agnetha as singing to Björn in their private personas, which is simply not borne out by lyrics which expressly do not address the thanks for the music to a specific person, but to ‘whoever it was’.

80 Womack, ‘“Thank You for the Music”’, 204. 81 Womack, ‘“Thank You for the Music”’, 204. 55

Nonetheless, if Womack’s argument is problematic in terms of the subversion of an ‘original’ meaning, his concept of revoicing is a useful one. One might refine his argument: the technique of revoicing can reveal – often apparently for the first time – potential socio-political ramifications in familiar songs. At the same time, by drawing attention to other potential socio-political meanings in the same words and music, revoicing does not so much subvert the ‘original’ meaning as reveal both the inherent instability of text and language, and the collaborative roles of the audience member and the performer-as-author in musical meaning-making beyond score and lyric.

George Rodosthenous (apparently independently) draws on a similar but extended concept to Womack’s gender-based revoicing in his recent analysis of the jukebox-musical film Across the Universe (dir. Julie Taymor, 2007), focusing on

‘gendered and geographical relocations’ of songs used in that film, with a greater emphasis on aspects of performativity than Womack.82 An important feature of both Womack’s and Rodosthenous’s arguments is that the effects of revoicing or relocating a song are facilitated or reinforced by the placement of the song in a narrative that provides contextual prompts to the song’s interpretation. At first glance, this appears to resonate with the way that Sheldon Epps, one of the creators of Play On!

(discussed in Chapter Four), views the effect of placing songs in a narrative context:

Epps refers to his role of ‘conceiver’ as ‘gathering ’ existing material – buried treasures mostly – and finding ways of making you listen to it as if it’s new’.83

However, Rodosthenous usefully complicates the idea that jukebox musicals allow one to hear a familiar song as if it were new:

82 George Rodosthenous, ‘Relocating the Song: Julie Taymor’s Jukebox Musical, Across the Universe (2007)’, in Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance, ed. Dominic Symonds and Millie Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 41-53, (51). 83 Alvin Klein, ‘The Duke and I’, New York Times, 30 March 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/30/nyregion/the-duke-and-i.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm. 56

The audience experience of the songs in jukebox formats seems curiously situated between the presence of the now (watching the current musical) and the absence of something that previously existed (remembering the Beatles’ originals). Thus the reading of the musical contains the ghosts of those past incarnations, the original renditions of the songs that exist in our memories. The dramaturgy of this work assumes that the audience will not hear and see the new versions with fresh ears and eyes, but instead will have an active role in interpreting them as they are reused and reexamined in a new narrative. This works as a palimpsest in which there are reverberations between what we hear and our ‘historical’ involvement with the original song. Since most people will be familiar with the original renditions of these songs, audiences discover in the relocation of the songs a double-reading, an intertextual ‘ghosting’ of the original songs that brings out a dialogue between one incarnation and the next.84

Here Rodosthenous avoids Womack’s suggestion that songs might contain an identifiable ‘original’ meaning, and leaves open the possibility that audience members will have a range of different engagements with the original renditions.

Womack and Rodosthenous focus on jukebox musicals with newly written plots.

For jukebox musicals based on Shakespeare’s plays, the placement of existing songs at strategic points in the plot not only sheds new light on the songs, but also invites an active interpretation of what to some audience members are well-known plays, an interpretation that is not restricted to the version being watched, but that invites a reconsideration of previously held assumptions about the play. As I discuss in relation to specific examples in the chapters that follow, the revoicing of familiar songs can facilitate this reconsideration. Other forms of revoicing beyond gender and geography occur in works examined in this thesis: for example, when songs that are known as vehicles for a solo voice are staged as ensemble numbers. A further, related, effect occurs in All Shook Up when a song is sung by a performer of the same gender as the singer who made the song famous, but when the gender of its addressee is different from the gender of the assumed addressee of the more famous version.

84 Rodosthenous, ‘Relocating the Song’, 42-43. 57

Nonetheless, revoicing has limits to its effectiveness, for it relies on both a familiarity with a version of a song that matches up with the ‘original’ version that is being revoiced, and on an openness to new interpretations. An example of these limits can be seen in some of the critical response to the film of Mamma Mia! Although

Womack conceives of revoicing in the stage version of Mamma Mia! primarily in terms of gender, he briefly glances towards the expected age of the singer as a further potential site for meaningful revoicing, a feature he might have taken further, given the fact that several of the songs in the musical, originally sung by female lead singers and male backing singers in their twenties, are revoiced and sung by middle-aged women, expressing solidarity and friendship but also sexual desire.85 Indeed, the age- appropriateness of song and performer was a feature of some of the negative criticism of the film version of the musical, suggesting that, while revoicing might well be capable of revealing and changing previous unexamined assumptions, it also risks reinforcing them. For some critics who approached the film in negative terms, age was as confronting a feature as gender, in terms not only of the revoiced songs in which middle-aged women sang (in some critics’ eyes, embarrassingly inappropriately) of sexual desire, but of the film as a whole. Unusually for commercial cinema, the film featured three middle-aged women in central roles, filmed them in close-up without obviously attempting to signs of aging and allocated them a far larger proportion of songs than their male colleagues. However, age- and gender-based revoicing did not inevitably lead to a reassessment of reviewers’ attitudes towards middle-aged women or to the opportunities available to them in commercial films, but in some cases simply led to an expression of open prejudice. David Noh, for example, writing in Film Journal

International, opines: ‘at times, during certain star close-ups, one positively yearns for

85 Womack, ‘Thank You For the Music’, 209. 58 the bad old days of Doris Day gauze-and-grease on the lens’, and concludes that ‘more emphasis should have been placed on the guys and less on those brassy cougars’.86

Rodosthenous provides a further caveat to the universal effectiveness of revoicing in jukebox musicals: ‘expectations of how the songs were previously sung may blind audiences, and stop them from accepting the dramaturgical interpolation of the songs into the new context, and the treatment of the material as a “new” piece of work’.87

This may in fact go some way to explaining the different assessments of jukebox musicals by journalistic critics, who attend through professional duty and who may have a familiarity with the songs but no particular desire to see them in a narrative context, and fans of the songs who actively choose to see them in new contexts.

Thesis structure

The following chapters therefore engage with their objects of study as musicals, applying and developing theoretical tools applicable to the fields of musical theatre and film, as well as engaging with critical work on Shakespeare’s plays. My choice of works for extended discussion is designed to show some of the range of effects, approaches and engagements with Shakespeare’s plays of which jukebox musicals are capable. My choice of examples has partly been dictated by availability of access to source material. For example, I have been unable to attend a performance of The

Donkey Show and have been unable to obtain permission to view scripts or recordings.88

86 David Noh, Review of Mamma Mia!, Film Journal International, 111:9 (2008): 64. 87 Rodosthenous, ‘Relocating the Song’, 43. 88 Accessing source material for jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare can be difficult, in part due to the question of rights to the songs. Some jukebox musicals (such as All Shook Up) were commissioned by the rights holders. However, the creators of other jukebox musicals have not always obtained the rights to the songs. While they are prepared to perform these works live, they are perhaps understandably reluctant to distribute or permit access to recordings or scripts, or to broadcast them in other media: for example, the difficulty in obtaining music clearances has also been cited as a reason for not broadcasting televised versions of the Troubadour Theater Company’s shows (Don Shirley, ‘A Laugh-Meter Reader: Matt Walker 59

While most of the critical work on jukebox musicals has focused on high-profile examples that are not adaptations of Shakespeare, I have aimed to show a spread of works from different parts of the Anglophone world, across a range of media and performance contexts.

Chapter One sets jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare in context as a late- twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century flourishing of an adaptive practice with a long history, exploring some historical precursors of jukebox-musical versions of

Shakespeare’s plays in the form of the eighteenth-century ballad opera, Frederick

Reynolds and Henry Bishop’s early-nineteenth-century ‘operas’, and the late nineteenth-century . This chapter analyses the hermeneutic potential of the productions’ songs in themselves and also considers how songs create meaning in relation to other aspects of a dramatic production.

Chapter Two considers the modes of construction that allow the meeting of existing songs and a Shakespearean play to function as a coherent performance work, whether or not it frames itself as a jukebox musical, or whether audiences receive it as such. It describes and analyses the reception of Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland

Theatre Company’s King Lear and the works of the Los Angeles-based Troubadour

Theater Company, the use and distribution of songs in these productions, and the way in which they contribute to invocations of the carnivalesque.

Chapter Three begins a series of case studies of individual works, with a particular focus on interpretation and reception strategies. In a departure from the widespread critical readings of Kenneth Branagh’s cinematic adaptation of Love’s

Labour’s Lost as a failed attempt to recreate the 1930s Hollywood film musical, this

leads his company in musical spoofs that link literature and movies with Top 40. Case in point: Twelfth Dog Night’, , 2 January 2004). 60 chapter takes a hermeneutic, rather than evaluative, approach in centralising the fragmented elements of pastiche which destabilise the film’s readability as a unified text. The chapter resists monologic ‘readings’ of the film, and instead places value on its discontinuities, which create an interrogative text and invite the viewer to engage with the concept of escapism.

Contemporary manifestations of Twelfth Night's unstable identities in Play On! and All Shook Up are then examined in Chapters Four and Five respectively. I demonstrate that, in their different ways, these jukebox-musical adaptations go some way to recuperating the experiences of a sense of shifting identity offered by early modern productions in which cross-dressed female characters were played by boy apprentices. They therefore contrast with many modern productions that approach

Shakespeare’s play with a psychological-realist conception of character and in which female characters are played by adult women. Chapter Four demonstrates how a number of productions of Play On! destabilise perceptions of identity by ‘ghosting’ onstage characters with a range of other fictional characters and personalities from musical and African-American history. In contrast to criticism that sees Play On! as erasing sexual diversity by cutting the character of Antonio, the chapter argues for a reception of Play On! that undermines fixed categories of sexual identity.

Chapter Five demonstrates that All Shook Up challenges current definitions of what constitutes an adaptation. I argue that this musical engages with Twelfth Night by playing with its own status as an unannounced adaptation: by inviting audiences to recognize All Shook Up’s status as an adaptation – not only of Twelfth Night but of multiple other works – as the musical unfolds itself, All Shook Up reveals the queer potential of adaptation, its potential to destabilize categories of identity. All Shook Up harnesses this queer potential and expands on Twelfth Night’s unstable identities in

61 order to destabilize various forms of modern identity markers, including gender, sexuality, race, class, region and age. All Shook Up thus makes a claim for the adaptation as an art form in itself with its own particular aesthetic and political strengths and values.

Chapter Six subjects the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet

YouTube videos, a micro-example of the jukebox-, to a sustained close reading that reveals how the use of multiple allusions creates a semiotic density that responds to formal aspects of Shakespeare’s play, open ups the possibility for contemporary audiences to experience the fluctuating sense of gender and sexuality that has been a feature of Romeo and Juliet’s performance history, and recuperates the uncanny mixture of genres in Romeo and Juliet that has been the subject of sustained critical discussion, but that is less often experienced in the theatre, often due to textual cuts. The chapter draws on aspects of the YouTube viewing experience to argue that the interpretive demands of jukebox-musicals versions of Shakespeare turn these works into catalysts for inclusive interpretive communities.

A conclusion then draws together the arguments in earlier chapters, proposes possible reception strategies for jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare and suggests further areas for research.

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CHAPTER ONE

SETTING JUKEBOX-MUSICAL VERSIONS OF SHAKESPEARE IN THEIR HISTORICAL CONTEXT: BALLAD OPERAS, ‘OPERA’ SPECTACLES AND BURLESQUES

The discussions of the increased presence of jukebox musicals on Broadway around 2005 suggest that the use of existing popular songs in music drama was of very recent origin, a sign of the collapse of creativity in the face of the desire for profit.

Similarly, as discussed in the introduction, academic approaches to jukebox-musical adaptations through the framework of postmodernism link these adaptations and their mode of creation to a recent historical timeframe. The works themselves are clearly contemporary, early examples for the West End and Broadway stages arising only in the

1980s, and distinguish themselves from the historical works discussed in this chapter by drawing on songs made famous through recording technology. However, the compositional practice used to create jukebox musicals and the reception strategies it encourages have a long history. This chapter demonstrates that, rather than being a symptom of creative exhaustion, jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare form part of a minor strand of Shakespeare adaptations within a broader theatrical tradition of reusing songs of various genres to create dramatic meaning. Individual examples of these earlier adaptations are occasionally given passing mention as oddities in the history of Shakespearean production or adaptation, their complexity often misunderstood by critics who treat published texts of these versions as if they were spoken plays and fail to take into account the significance of the songs. Further, these adaptations suffer in critical assessments from being relatively few in number: while these productions might appear as curiosities in a linear narrative of developments in the production of Shakespeare’s plays, when placed within the range of performance styles current in their period they appear relatively mainstream. Although their interpretive demands are unusual in terms of Shakespearean productions, their audiences are very

63 likely to have been well acquainted with their modus operandi. This chapter is thus both backward- and forward-looking: it clarifies the work of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays by exploring some shared practices and features of reception in earlier works, and uses some of the tools appropriate for interpreting jukebox musicals to clarify the work of these forebears. As will become clear in later chapters, the approaches taken by jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare to the use of existing songs and the ends to which this use is put are by no means uniform. By exploring some of the jukebox musical’s historical forebears, I aim to contextualise the variety of approaches and effects that makes the jukebox musical a usefully flexible form through which to engage with a range of Shakespeare’s plays.

Despite the apparent novelty of Broadway jukebox musicals, both Broadway and the Hollywood musical have long histories of reusing existing music. Even during the so-called ‘golden age’ of the integrated musical, the songs in Robert Wright and

George Forrest’s series of Broadway musicals from the 1940s to the 1970s were based on the melodies of a particular composer, usually, but not exclusively, from the classical tradition.1 As I discuss in Chapter Three, the practice of recycling songs from stage musicals or earlier film musicals in new plots was a regular feature of the film musicals of the 1930s and 40s. This practice extended even beyond the 1940s, when the discourse of musico-dramatic integration became prominent: Singin’ in the Rain (dir.

Gene Kelly and Stanley Donan, 1952), for example, recycled and recontextualised

1 Wright and Forrest’s musicals include (1944, the music of ), Gypsy Lady (1946, songs from two musicals by ), Magdalena (1948, the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos), (1953, the music of ), (1965, the music of ), and Timbuktu! (1978, a resetting of Kismet in fourteenth-century Mali for an African-American cast, with additional songs based on African folk melodies). Wright and Forrest’s Shakespeare-related musical, Kean (1961), based on the life of the celebrated Shakespearean actor (1787-1833), is somewhat of an exception in their output, featuring an original score and lyrics. 64 songs from MGM musicals from 1929 to 1939 in its depiction of the shift from silent to sound films. While the use of existing songs with a diegetic function is now relatively commonplace in film as a means of creating period ‘colour’, Thoroughly Modern Millie

(dir. George Roy Hill, 1967), for example, gave a non-diegetic function to popular songs from the 1910s and 20s alongside newly composed numbers. Nonetheless, the use in jukebox musicals of relatively recent popular music, as opposed to Wright and

Forrest’s classical music and Thoroughly Modern Millie’s ‘period’ songs, can obscure the links in compositional practice between them and these earlier works, while the strength of the discourse of musico-dramatic integration as a criterion of value for the musical has contributed to a general cultural amnesia with regard to the recycling of music in musicals.

In fact, the practice of using existing songs in music drama can be traced to the medieval period: the first recorded instance is Adam de la Halle’s Li gieus de Robin et

Marion (modern French Le Jeu de Robin et Marion [The Play of Robin and Marion]), dating from 1282-83. Written in the Picard dialect of Old French and with existing songs sung by the characters that advance or comment on the plot in much the same way as modern music theatre, the play was created for Comte Robert II d’Artois and first performed in the Angevin court of Charles d’Anjou at Naples. That Adam was a respected composer as well as a poet is significant in his decision to use existing songs instead of music composed specifically for the play. Given the discourse of nostalgia

(in terms of a longing for an imagined past) that often accompanies the jukebox musical, it is tempting to see Adam’s play – set in the French countryside, incorporating songs from France, and performed for a court of northern French nobles far from home on the Italian peninsula – in terms of the original meaning of nostalgia, in the sense of a longing for home.

65

The practice of relying on audiences to create meaning from the recognition of existing songs in a dramatic context was a widespread European phenomenon over the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries that is largely overlooked today, and was one in which

English-language theatre participated from the outset.2 Early modern English plays often incorporated songs that contributed to both and meaning, some apparently newly composed, some setting new words to existing song melodies, and some incorporating both the music and lyrics of existing songs. Shakespeare’s plays include around a hundred songs.3 However, in contrast to most modern forms of music theatre in which songs are used as an accepted and unremarked means of communication within the dramatic world, these songs serve a diegetic purpose, in that characters are aware that they (or others) are engaged in the act of singing within the world of the play.4 Shakespeare’s plays incorporated existing ballads: indeed, in act 4, scene 4 of The Winter’s Tale he not only incorporates an existing ballad tune, but draws attention to the ballad practice of contrafactum, the setting of new words to an existing melody that invites a set of intertextual allusions.5 The presence of songs from Thomas

2 Judith Le Blanc and Herbert Schneider’s edited collection, Pratiques du et de la parodie d’opéra en Europe (XVIe – XIXe siècles)/ Timbre-Praxis und Opernparodie im Europa des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2014) is a recent exception to this critical sidelining, setting out the practice as European-wide and longlasting in a series of essays on examples in Italian, Spanish, Dutch, German, British and French theatre from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. 3 For an extensive treatment of music in Shakespeare’s plays, and songs in particular, see David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, Arden Critical Companions (London: Thompson Learning, 2006), especially Chapter Four, ‘Song’, 141-198. 4 See Tiffany Stern, ‘“I Have Both the Note and Ditty About Me”: Songs on the Early Modern Page and Stage’ Common Knowledge, 17:2 (2011): 306-320 for a discussion of the relationship in the early modern theatre between songs, text, rehearsals and performance (which in some circumstances included singing from a paper text, thus emphasising the diegetic nature of the song). 5 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher, Arden Shakespeare 3rd Series (London: Methuen, 2010), 4.4.288-313. For a discussion of the role of existing melodies in inviting an intertexual reception of the lyrics of early modern ballads concerning executions, see Una McIlvenna, ‘The Power of Music: The Significance of Contrafactum in Execution Ballads’, forthcoming in Past and Present (with thanks to Dr McIlvenna for allowing me to read the article prior to publication). 66

Middleton’s The Witch in the Folio Macbeth suggests that the incorporation of existing songs into Shakespeare’s plays began with their earliest revivals. In the following, I discuss versions of Shakespeare’s plays that incorporate existing song from three historical moments in which this method of dramatic construction flourished more than usually strongly: the eighteenth century, in the form of the ballad opera; and the nineteenth century, in Frederick Reynolds and Henry Bishop’s ‘operas’, and in British and American burlesques.6 Through an analysis of aspects of some of these versions, I set them up as forerunners of the jukebox musical’s practices of layering meaning at the level of the song; of using intertextual awareness to create atmosphere and local colour; of revoicing, especially in order to engage with questions of gender; of including a multiplicity of viewpoints within the dramatic world; and of careful negotiation of the transition from speech to existing song.

Eighteenth-century ballad operas

The practice of making significant structural, often non-diegetic, use of existing songs in dramatic works in English first flourished in the eighteenth century in the so- called ballad opera. This genre was influenced by the French comédies en vaudevilles, popular entertainments at the annual fairs in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century that attempted to circumvent the national monopolies on spoken drama and opera of the Comédie-Française and the Opéra respectively by combining

6 British folk operas in the very late nineteenth century and early twentieth century also incorporated existing songs. Two operatic versions of Shakespeare’s plays appeared as part of this movement: Gustav Holst’s At the Boar’s Head, which set the tavern scenes from Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 to folk song and dance tunes, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Sir John in Love, which incorporated existing folk and art song into an operatic adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor. These are both through-composed operas without spoken dialogue, and so are beyond the scope of this thesis; however, they share some of the practices and require some of the reception competencies of jukebox musicals and their other historical forebears. 67 spoken dialogue (or at times, written dialogue on posters), pantomime, dance and new lyrics set to existing song tunes.7 Following John Gay’s enormously popular The

Beggar’s Opera (1728), which almost immediately provoked an explosion of works with a similar construction of spoken dialogue combined with new song lyrics sung to existing melodies, the heyday of the composition of new ballad operas lasted until 1737 when the Licencing Act came into force, requiring that all plays be passed by the Lord

Chamberlain before performance.8 While new ballad operas in the style of The

Beggar’s Opera more or less stopped being composed after 1737, revivals of existing ballad operas remained popular throughout the eighteenth century, and The Beggar’s

Opera itself still functioned as a star vehicle into the nineteenth century. Like the term

‘jukebox musical’, ‘ballad opera’ as a name for works with a shared compositional practice only developed some time after the genre became relatively widespread. The creators and publishers of ballad operas used a range of terms to designate their works: the Oxford University-based Ballad Operas Online states that ‘the term “ballad opera” did not take hold until 1731, and the designation “opera” was more commonly used in volume titles until 1737’.9 For example, of the two ballad operas based on

Shakespeare’s plays, The Cobler of Preston’s Opera (1732) is presented as an ‘opera’, and A Cure for a Scold (1735) as a ‘ballad farce’ in its London version. 10 Despite both

7 For the impact of French theatrical influence on British ballad operas, despite the prevailing British anti-French sentiment, see Vanessa L. Rogers, ‘John Gay, Ballad Opera and the Théâtres de la Foire’, Eighteenth-century Music, 11:2 (2014): 173-213. 8 See Edward M. Gagey, Ballad Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937, reissued New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968) for a monograph-length treatment of the ballad opera as a genre. Walter H. Rubsamen, ed., The Ballad Opera: A Collection of 171 Original Texts of Musical Plays Printed in Photo-facsimile. 28 vols. (New York: Garland, 1974) is an invaluable resource, providing facsimiles of eighteenth-century ballads in twenty-eight thematically arranged volumes. Ballad Operas Online, managed by Oxford University, provides a searchable online database of text and music: http://www.odl.ox.ac.uk/balladoperas/. 9 ‘What is a Ballad Opera?’, Ballad Operas Online, http://www.odl.ox.ac.uk/balladoperas/what.php. 10 Anon., The Cobler of Preston. An Opera, as it is Acted at the New Booth in with Great Applause (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1732). In order to avoid confusion with Charles 68 the genre’s now-familiar name and the fact that it is often associated with a resistance

(often parodic) to the role of Italian opera in London’s cultural life, this form of often topically satirical and politically subversive music theatre used well-known existing songs from a number of sources, including nursery rhymes, folk songs and operatic arias as well as ballads, thus mixing high and low styles of music in the same work.11

Berta Joncus argues that

what put the ‘ballad’ into ballad opera was not a specific repertory but rather a set of practices: straight tone and chest resonance, the direct exhortation to listen with which a street ballad singer – a hawker of news and moral instruction – accosted passers-by, and the recycling of a melody whose earlier verses would be known to audiences. This last practice was what gave Gay’s airs their satirical bite: anticipating the

Johnson’s farce, The Cobler of Preston, on which the opera is closely based, I refer to the opera in the body of the text of this thesis as The Cobler of Preston’s Opera, the title that appears on the inner title page on page three of the published text, and that is used as a running title throughout the volume. A Cure for a Scold appears in two published versions: a London version (not dated, but likely 1735, the year of its first performance) and a Dublin version in two imprints (1738). The Dublin imprints share the same text, which differs slightly from the London version in terms of dialogue and song lyrics and substitutes a new number for the London version’s final chorus. The Dublin versions do not give the work a generic descriptor, and sometimes omit the names of the tunes to which the songs are to be sung. Except when stated otherwise, I generally use the London version when quoting A Cure for a Scold: unless noted to the contrary, the also appear in the Dublin versions. James Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold, a Ballad Farce of Two Acts (Founded Upon Shakespear’s The Taming of a Shrew) as it is Acted by His Majesty’s Company of Comedians at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane (London: L Gilliver, n.d.); James Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold as it is Now Acting at the Theatres in London and Dublin, with Universal Applause (Dublin: S. Powell for A. Bradley, 1738); James Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold as it is Now Acting at the Theatres in London and Dublin, with Universal Applause (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1738). 11 The London and Dublin versions of A Cure for a Scold use an art song by Handel ‘’Twas when the seas were roaring’ for Manly’s song ‘If Death, unkind to Beauty’, and the London version ends with an ensemble sung to a chorus number from Handel’s opera ‘Poro’. The use of Handel’s operas as sources for the songs in ballad operas has been a focus of recent study, but other opera composers’ works were also used: airs 6, 41, 45 and 60 of The Beggar’s Opera, for example, are by Henry Purcell. See Berta Joncus, ‘Handel at Drury Lane: Ballad Opera and the Production of Kitty Clive’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 131:2 (2006): 179-226, Table One (181-192) for details of the use of operatic arias and art songs by Handel in ballad operas. For a discussion of the layered intertextual meanings arising from the use of Handel’s arias in Henry Fielding’s ballad operas, see Pierre Degott, ‘Handel and Fielding: The Beginnings of Modern Musical Theatre’, Études Anglaises, 66:2 (2013): 195-213. 69

listener’s recollection of earlier settings, his verses twisted them into new, barbed readings.12

As Joncus suggests, the use of contrafactum was the norm, with new words written for existing melodies, a number of which appear repeatedly in ballad operas. The texts of many ballad operas were published around the time of their performance. Helpfully, these usually specify the tunes to which their songs are to be sung as a heading to the printed song text; some also print the music for the songs, either alongside the lyrics, or in an appendix.

Many ballad operas were adaptations of existing plays or other narrative works from the British or continental European repertoire. While Michael Dobson briefly discusses A Cure for a Scold – the Prologue to which expressly sets it out as an adaptation of ‘Shakespear’s Shrew’ – as a marker in the consolidation of Shakespeare’s reputation as ‘national poet’, it is perhaps surprising that the ballad opera genre did not contribute more adaptations of Shakespeare, and that those that exist appeared relatively late in the explosion of ballad opera composition in the years following The Beggar’s

Opera.13

Both ballad-opera versions of Shakespeare draw on The Taming of the Shrew:

The Cobler of Preston’s Opera (1732), an anonymous reworking of Charles Johnson’s

1716 anti-Jacobite farce, The Cobler of Preston, based on the Shrew’s Christopher Sly induction, and James Worsdale’s A Cure for a Scold (1735), based on the central taming storyline. A further anonymous ballad opera, The Intriguing Courtiers, or The Modish

Gallants refers to itself parenthetically as ‘(after the manner of Shakespear.)’, but is not

12 Berta Joncus, ‘“The of Every Female Folly”: Lavinia Fenton, Kitty Clive, and the Genesis of Ballad Opera’, in Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Tiffany Potter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 25-51 (33). 13 Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1600-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 112-13. 70 an adaptation of one of his plays: the reference to Shakespeare as a model may aim to justify a moment when the plot veers into implausibility in a (failed) gender reversal of the bed trick in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. 14 Shakespeare himself, or at least his ghost, appears in a further apparent ballad opera (unusually, the text does not specify the tunes to which the songs are to be sung, and the prologue suggests that the work might not have been staged): three Oxford students persuade Don

Sancho to raise the ghosts of Shakespeare and Dryden, among others, in Don Sancho, or

The Students Whim by Elizabeth Boyd.15 Dobson sees this as ‘an oblique comment on the Westminster cathedral project’ to erect a statue of Shakespeare.16

The Cobler of Preston’s Opera was performed in Dublin by the child actors of the Lilliputian theatre company of the Italian rope dancer and impresario, Signora

Violante, with a young Peg Woffington in the cast.17 No records have been found to indicate how many performances it received. Apart from the introduction of songs, the opera follows Johnson’s farce very closely, although it tends to downplay Johnson’s anti-Jacobism. 18 As the use of songs in The Cobler of Preston’s Opera tends to be less

14 Anon., The Intriguing Courtiers, or The Modish Gallants (After the Manner of Shakespear.), 2nd edition with additions (London: W. James, 1732) in Rubsamen, The Ballad Opera, vol. 18, Court Intrigue and Scandal, n.p. The husband who arranged the bed trick describes it while ‘in a melancholy Posture’ at the beginning of act 5 (44 [internal pagination]). 15 Elizabeth Boyd, Don Sancho, or The Students Whim (London: Elizabeth Boyd, 1739), in Rubsamen, The Ballad Opera, vol. 10, Magical Transformation and Necromancy, n.p. 16 Dobson, The Making of the National Poet, 152. 17 Anon., The Cobler of Preston, 2. For an account of Signora Violante’s varied career, including her involvement in children’s productions of ballad operas, see Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, , Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, 16 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973-1993), vol.15, pp.180-83. For a detailed description of her Dublin career from 1729-32, see Grainne McArdle, ‘Signora Violante and Her Troupe of Dancers, 1729-1732’, Eighteenth Century Ireland/ Iris an dá chultúr, 20 (2005): 55-78. McArdle draws attention to Violante’s links to the Parisian fairground theatres in which comédies en vaudeville were performed: The Cobler of Preston’s Opera might thus have been influenced by these French models as well as by the London model of The Beggar’s Opera. 18 The opera cuts Johnson’s prologue that frames the farce as clearly anti-Jacobite, and gives Sly a new opening speech that does not include Johnson’s line ‘I must be a Rebel and I will be a Rebel’. It also cuts the line ‘I’ll be a Rebel’ in Sly’s drunken speech at the end of act 1, which is otherwise incorporated more or less intact, a scripted belch replacing political satire with 71 sophisticated than in A Cure for a Scold, which also engages with and reworks its source(s) beyond the addition of songs, I take this latter work as an example of

Shakespearean ballad opera.

A Cure received five performances in London in 1735, one of which was a command performance by the of Wales, with a short revival in 1750; while not unsuccessful in London, it was more successful in Dublin, where it was performed at least fourteen times in its first run (1737/8) and where it was revived annually until

1743.19 To put this in context, John Greene and Gladys Clark note that most pieces on the Dublin stage received only one performance.20 ‘A successful play was one that was performed at least three times and thereby earned for its author the net profit of at least one benefit performance, a very successful play was one performed ten or more times during the season’.21 Even if Tori Haring-Smith is correct to claim that ‘the play was

physical comedy. The opera was produced between the two great Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, and these cuts may have been made simply because the farce’s anti-Jacobite specificity was by then dated: for example, the allusion in the title to the Jacobite defeat in November 1715 at the battle of Preston, extremely topical when Johnson’s farce opened only a few months later, would have lost its immediacy by 1732. Charles Johnson, The Cobler of Preston, as it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane by His Majesty’s Servants, 2nd ed. (London: W. Wilkins, 1716), Prologue (n.p.), 1, 23; Anon., The Cobler of Preston, 3, 18. 19 Highfill et al. note of the initial Drury Lane production, ‘the piece was popular enough to yield a third night for the author’s benefit, and to be revived twice, on 20 March and 5 May’. ‘James Worsdale’, Biographical Dictionary, vol. 16, 275-78. The latter occasion was a command performance for Frederick, Prince of Wales, in which Worsdale played Manly. The nineteenth-century historian John Doran notes that ‘as at a time when dissension between [the Prince of Wales] and his royal mother ran highest, the piece commanded may have had some “intention” in it’: John Doran, Lives of the Queens of England [sic] of the House of Hanover, 2 vols (New York: Redfield, 1855), vol. 1, 283. Tori Haring-Smith notes a short revival of two performances at Covent Garden on 17 March and 26 April 1750, with a married couple, Mary and John Dunstall playing Peg and Manly: From Farce to Metadrama: A Stage History of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, 1594-1983 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 177. It is not clear whether this was the original London version, the revised Dublin version, or some other version. A. C. Elias in his notes to ’s Memoirs describes A Cure as a ‘hit afterpiece in Dublin that season (played at least 14 times by May 19)’: Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, ed. A. C. Elias, Jr. 2 vols. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), vol. 2, 611. John C. Greene and Gladys L. H. Clark list annual Dublin revivals of A Cure until 1743: The Dublin Stage, 1720-1745: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1993), 450. 20 Greene and Clark, The Dublin Stage, 72-77. 21 Greene and Clark, The Dublin Stage, 75-76. 72 not popular on the London stage’, Dana Aspinall’s claim that ‘the play enjoyed only a limited popularity’ appears difficult to justify: there is no need to discount its popularity with audiences in Dublin, by the standards of which it was extremely successful.22

Further, an adapted and reduced version of A Cure for a Scold may have continued to be performed in the English provinces: strolling players in Yarmouth in 1752 performed

All’s Well That Ends Well followed by an afterpiece entitled Sawney the Scot; or A Cure for a Scold, which Sybil Rosenfeld suggests was probably Worsdale’s ballad opera.23

In contrast to The Cobler of Preston’s Opera, which, like Johnson’s farce, makes no mention of Shakespeare, A Cure for a Scold declares its relationship to Shakespeare on the title page of the London edition: ‘A CURE for a SCOLD. A Ballad FARCE of Two

ACTS (Founded upon SHAKESPEAR’S taming of a Shrew)’. Further, the Prologue in all three published editions sets out the opera’s relationship to Shakespeare, and sets up the adaption of Shakespeare as a patriotic activity:

Long has our Stage with Foreign Wit been cloy’d And British authors annually employ’d To alter, mend, transpose, translate and fit Moliere’s great Scenes for an English Pit, Like botching Taylors, whose whole Merit lies In changing Suits to different Shapes and Size. Our Fops and Stages shine, to our Disgrace, Gay with French Wit, and gaudy with French Lace. Britain in both an Excellence hath shown, And boasts more rich Materials of her own. To prove this true, see Shakespear’s Shrew revive, A Lesson, to instruct us how to wive: If simple, from her Faults how best to shame her, Or, if we catch a Fury, how to tame her. ’Tis Shakespeare speaks, let ev’ry Ear attend,

22 Haring-Smith, From Farce to Metadrama, 15; Dana Aspinall, ‘The Play and the Critics’, in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays, ed. Dana E. Aspinall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3-38 (24). 23 Sybil Marion Rosenfeld, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660-1765 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 83. 73

The Good we’re sure to please - - - - the Bad may mend.24 Despite the Prologue’s invocation of Shakespeare, A Cure for a Scold layers its sources; if it sets itself out as an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, it at least as clearly responds to Sauny the Scot, John Lacey’s 1667 adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, using variations of Lacey’s names for two of Shakespeare’s characters (Peg/Margaret for

Lacey’s Margaret/Peg and Shakespeare’s Katharina, and Gainlove for Lacey’s Winlove and Shakespeare’s Lucentio). It also incorporates the scene from Sauny the Scot in which that play’s Petruchio (the opera’s Manly) sends for a ‘tooth-doctor’ to pull one of

Peg’s teeth when he pretends to think that toothache is the reason for her refusal to speak. 25

It is this ‘grim incident’ that Tiffany Stern and Ann Thompson focus on in their brief discussions of A Cure. 26 Lynda Boose then takes up Thompson’s brief reference as an example of ‘woman-battering’ that, ‘although not part of Shakespeare’s script, repeatedly leaks back in from the margins and turns up in subsequent productions and adaptations’.27 However, no-one gets near Peg/Margaret’s teeth: in both Sauny and A

24 Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold, London version, Prologue, n.p. The same prologue, with very slight differences in spelling and punctuation, appears in the two Dublin imprints. 25 John Lacey, Sauny the Scot, or, The Taming of the Shrew (London: Whitlock, 1698), Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com.342891790.erf.sbb.spk- berlin.de/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:98514:2. 26 ‘grim incident’: Tiffany Stern, ‘Shakespeare in Drama’, in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 141-57 (144); ‘John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot […] inserts an additional scene in which the husband pretends to think that his wife’s refusal to speak to him is due to toothache and sends for a surgeon to have her teeth drawn. This episode is repeated with relish in the eighteenth century in James Worsdale’s adaptation, A Cure for a Scold’, William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Ann Thompson, updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18. Oddly, Dana E. Aspinall notes the links between Sauny and A Cure, but states that A Cure ‘eliminates the final scenes involving Petruchio’s threat of tooth-pulling’: ‘The Play and the Critics’, 23. 27 Lynda E. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, edited by Ivo Kamps with a foreword by Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1995), 239-79 (257-58). While Boose discusses this incident in the context of the violent silencing of women, the threat here is in fact intended to trick the silent Peg into speaking again. 74

Cure she deals with her husband’s threat relatively easily without breaking her self- imposed silence – on being asked ‘Pray, Madam, open your Mouth so that I may see which Tooth it is’, she silently strikes the barber-cum-‘tooth doctor’, who then leaves the scene.28

Given the problematic gender politics of The Taming of the Shrew, it is perhaps not surprising that modern critics have focused on issues of gender relations in the brief attention that they lend to A Cure for a Scold. However, while some of the language and action of this threatened tooth-pulling scene replicate those in Sauny, A Cure for a

Scold as a whole reworks its sources quite considerably. Although it is not immediately apparent on reading the text, the result is that A Cure’s approach to gender relations has a complexity that differs from that of either Shakespeare’s or Lacey’s plays. A large part of that complexity comes from the use of songs, both in terms of who gets to sing, and how much, and of what is sung. In a work that features both spoken language and songs, sung passages tend to have significantly more impact than spoken ones: the distribution of songs among a mixed cast therefore has an effect on the sense of gendered balance in the onstage world, perhaps more so than the number of roles for each gender.29 Further, while many of the songs concern gender relations, the combination of new words and existing music does not create a single meaning but sets up a form of double entendre – the use of existing song tunes at times providing added nuance to the sung words, and at other times undercutting their meaning and authority.30

28 Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold, London version, 51; John Lacey, Sauny the Scot, 43. Wording the same in both versions. 29 Otto Nicolai performs a similar rebalancing act in Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, his 1849 operatic adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, allocating a large amount of music to the women, and restricting some male roles to speaking parts only. See my ‘Beyond in Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor: Otto Nicolai’s Revolutionary Wives’, Music & Letters 96:1 (2015): 28-53, especially 36-42. 30 For analysis of verbal as well as musical double entendres as features of a ballad opera adaptation’s engagement with its source play (here Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui), see 75

In comparison to its sources, A Cure for a Scold moves towards a more even gender balance among its characters. Shakespeare’s central taming plot has thirteen male speaking roles (and other non-speaking servant roles) and Sauny the Scot twelve.

Both have three female characters, one of whom (the Widow) only appears briefly at the end of the play. A Cure for a Scold reduces the number of male speaking roles to eight and cuts the Widow, but provides Flora (the Bianca analogue) with a maid, Lucy, who does not appear in either Shakespeare or Lacey. Lucy is not simply an appendage to her mistress, but is an independent character with two solo numbers and scenes in which she appears without Flora. As Elizabeth Schafer notes, ‘ironically, The Taming of the

Shrew gives far more lines to Petruchio than it does to the shrewish, supposedly talkative woman Katherina’. Sauny the Scot likewise provides more lines for Petruchio than it does for Margaret. However in A Cure for a Scold the proportion of lines given to Manly is reduced quite significantly. Further, the allocation of songs works towards a more equitable balance of gender relations: of the twenty-three songs, ten are solo numbers for female characters and ten for male characters, and a further two are duets for Peg and Manly. Manly in fact only sings two solo numbers, the same number as

Lucy, with the result that his viewpoint is reduced in impact compared to Peg and Flora, who each have four solo numbers.31 While the London version ends with a chorus led by Manly, the Dublin version replaces this with a number headed ‘The Ballad’ that consists of nine verses with refrain. The text gives no instructions as to who sings the

Vanessa L. Rogers and Berta Joncus, ‘Ballad Opera and British double entendre: Henry Fielding’s The Mock Doctor’, in Le Blanc and Schneider, eds., Pratiques du timbre, 101-140. 31 The full distribution of the numbers, apart from the finale, is as follows: Archer: 5; Peg: 4 + 2 duets; Flora: 4; Manly: 2 + 2 duets; Lucy: 2; Heartwell: 2; Sir William Worthy (the Baptista analogue): 1. The Physician, the Barber, Peter (a servant), and – extremely unusually for one party to a romantic coupling – Gainlove are all non-singing roles, apart from the finale. As in Sauny the Scot, Archer, the Grumio analogue, is a central character, from whose viewpoint as a servant much of the action is viewed and commented upon. 76 ballad or to which tune it is sung. However the nine verses with refrain suggest a vaudeville final, derived from French comédies en vaudevilles, in which all the principal characters sing a verse, each providing an individual response to the moral of the comedy, alternating with an ensemble refrain line. The seven singing principals of A

Cure might have taken a verse each, while the content of two of the verses make them appropriate to be sung by the Physician and by Gainlove, otherwise non-singing roles.32

Instead of privileging Manly with the last word, the Dublin version would thus have allowed a range of voices and viewpoints on the moral of the opera to be heard.

Beyond creating variations in impact, the songs perform a complex function in the play that is easily missed when the printed text is approached as if it functioned in the same way as the text of a spoken play.33 As I shall demonstrate, in its relatively sophisticated technique of layering and destabilising meaning through the manipulation of existing songs, A Cure for a Scold illustrates how the incorporation of new lyrics set to existing song tunes allows ballad opera adaptations to critique both their sources and contemporary society, including on the subject of gender relations.

In the approach to the second number, for example, Heartwell (the Hortensio analogue), in love with Flora, has just been told that he cannot marry her until her elder sister is married. He voices his hopes of finding a man willing to marry Peg for her money, thus allowing Heartwell to marry Flora for love (in the event, Heartwell’s love

32 See Clifford Barnes, ‘Vaudeville’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/29082; M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, ‘Vaudeville final’, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O006248. 33 An approach such as Rachel Hiles’ that views the songs in A Cure for a Scold not as an integral part of the opera’s meaning, but as ‘airs included as interludes in the play’ that stand ‘safely outside the plot’ is particularly like to misread the opera’s complexity of meaning. Rachel E. Hiles, ‘Disability and the Characterization of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 29:4 (2009), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/996/1180. 77 is not reciprocated, and Flora elopes with Gainlove in order to avoid marrying

Heartwell). He then sings:

A Woman, tho never so ugly and old, So crooked, so curst, and so crabbed a Scold, Finds plenty of Lovers, for plenty of Gold: For Marriages now are no more than a Trade, And Mortals will drudge to be handsomely paid. On Sea, or Shore, To swell their Store, Men dig in a Mine or tug at an Oar, Or wed, which is worse – O! what Asses we’re made?34

The words are ostensibly a critique of men who marry for money. However, that the words are sung to the tune of ‘The White Joke’ adds another layer of criticism. ‘The

White Joke’ and another song named ‘The Black Joke’ were used as tunes in several ballad operas.35 ‘Joke’, eighteenth-century slang for the female genitalia, operated by synecdoche as a term for a prostitute.36 The words when sung to this tune are thus more than simply a critique of men who marry for money rather than love: they invite audience members to configure such men as prostitutes, an implied rebuke to sexual double standards in contemporary life, and a critique of Manly and his source,

Shakespeare’s (and Lacey’s) Petruchio, who famously comes ‘to wive it wealthily in

Padua’.37

34 Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold, London version, 3. 35 For an extended discussion of these ‘Joke’ songs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including their use in ballad operas, see Paul Dennant, ‘The “Barbarous Old English Jig”; The “Black Joke” in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal, 10:3 (2013): 298-318. 36 Edgar V. Roberts, ‘An Unrecorded Meaning of “Joke” (or “Joak”) in England’, American Speech, 37:2 (1962): 137-140 established the use of the word to refer to the female genitalia; Dennant demonstrates its synecdochic extension to mean ‘prostitute’: ‘The “Barbarous Old English Jig”’, 302-304. Nonetheless, although he does not articulate the extension, Roberts provides evidence for the association of ‘joke’ with prostitution, quoting, for example, the ‘Second Whore’ in Henry Fielding’s The Letter Writers (1731), who requests that fiddlers ‘Play the White Joke; that’s my favourite’ (139). 37 For a similar use of an existing song tune in The Beggar’s Opera to undermine new lyrics in order to provide an implied rebuke to sexual double standards, see Joncus, ‘“The Assemblage of Every Female Folly”’, 33. 78

A number later in the opera demonstrates the dangers for modern critics of assuming that one can point to a fixed meaning in ballad opera songs; at the same time it also suggests the difficulties for modern critics in coming to any certain conclusion about the range of available meanings in ballad operas, given the lack of information available about performance matters beyond the written text. In act 2, Manly’s servant

Archer (the Grumio/ Sauny analogue) sings:

Of all the Methods most in Vogue For keeping Women quiet, ’Tis best to let their Sleep be short, And stint them in their Diet: For fasting keeps their Bodies fine, And makes their Spirits small, By Hunger, Wives, like Hawks are taught To know their Keeper’s Call. Oh, Marriage is a sad Scene, They’re mad that venture in it. Where Pleasure seldom shows her Face, Repentance in a Minute.38

The words are clearly misogynist. However, they are sung to the tune of ‘Oh London is a fine town’, a satirical song that describes the abuses of power of the Lord Mayor of

London against its citizens in terms that both decry the abuses and mock the mayor. A sample verse and refrain gives the tone and subject matter:

My Lord-Mayor rides along the Street Like unto a Law-maker With Forty Catch-poles at his Arse, To Prosecute the Baker; And when he comes to the Baker’s Stall And finds his Bread too light, He sends it home to his own House, To Feast both Lord and Knight [Refrain: Oh London is a fine town And a gallant city, ’Tis governed by the Scarlet Gown,

38 Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold, 38. 79

Come listen to my Ditty.] 39

The lack of information with regard to performance aspects beyond music and lyrics, such as gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, vocal and mode of audience address makes it impossible for us to tell whether Archer’s words were meant to represent his own beliefs, or whether, for example, he ventriloquised his master for the first eight lines and then added his own ironic comment on his master’s marriage in the last four. Manly has just left the stage, and Archer is alone when he sings this; we have no reactions from other characters to help us interpret the scene. However, even if the performer playing Archer delivered all of the lyrics as if he wholeheartedly believed in the methods they recommend, the music’s association with ‘Oh London is a fine town’ makes available a commentary that sets up those methods as an abuse of power, and that implicitly mocks the abuser. It is therefore difficult to agree with Dana

Aspinall, who uses this song as an example of one of the opera’s ‘songs that supplement and advocate the brutal measures with which Manly threatens Margaret’.40 Archer’s words might advocate brutal measures, but the music at least potentially undermines his message. Further, Archer might be slyly and knowingly commenting on Manly’s abuse

39 ‘Oh, London is a Fine Town’, in Thomas d’Urfey, Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy, 6 vols (London: W. Pearson, 1719), vol 4, 40-43 (41). I have amended the lineation here to match that of Archer’s song. Pills to Purge Melancholy does not indicate a refrain; however, the first lines of the first verse appear to have been used as a refrain, which would fit with the last four lines of Archer’s song: that later printed versions, such as that contained in The Hive, or versions with new verses such as ‘A Touch of the Times’, indicate a refrain by a brief reference such as ‘Oh, London is a fine town, etc.’ or even simply ‘Oh, London is, etc.’ without setting it out in full suggests that it was very well known. Anon., The Hive: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Songs, 4 vols., (London, J. Walthoe, 1732), vol. 4, 173-177; Anon., A Touch of the Times: A New Ballad (Edinburgh, [1740]), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, http://find.galegroup.com.483860689.erf.sbb.spk- berlin.de/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=sbbpk&tabID=T0 01&docId=CB127690349&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLev el=FASCIMILE. That the tune was also used in other ballad operas, most prominently The Beggar’s Opera, in which it provided the tune for ‘Our Polly is a Sad Slut’, provides further potential layers of intertextual meaning. 40 Aspinall, ‘The Play and the Critics’, 23. 80 of power, inviting audience members to collude with him in a veiled critique of his master: the meaning of the song as a whole depends on the previous knowledge, socio- political sympathies and decoding ability of the individual audience member, as well as on performance aspects beyond music and lyrics, such as gesture and facial expression.

A Cure for a Scold also uses the multiple layers of meaning offered by incorporating existing song tunes to engage with contemporary political life. As well as being a vehicle for political satire or veiled criticism, the ballad opera genre participated in the complex eighteenth-century project of creating a British cultural nationhood.41

One means by which it contributed to this project was by highlighting the multiple strands of British identity as expressed through song, with airs from Britain’s constituent countries used alongside each other in the same work. Although the concept of Britishness in a political sense was clearly related to the creation of the new kingdom of Great Britain following the Acts of Union of 1706 and 1707 between Scotland and

England, Ireland – linked with Great Britain through a personal union of the crowns – was also often included in concepts of cultural Britishness in musical contexts. Joncus, for example notes that in March 1728, in the wake of The Beggar’s Opera, the ‘,

Mrs Seedo, organised for her own benefit “a BRITISH CONCERT, consisting of

English, Scotch and Irish Ballads”’.42 This mixture of British and Irish tunes was advertised as an attraction of ballad operas: The Intriguing Courtiers, for example, advertises its ballad opera interlude as ‘Consisting of Variety [sic] of new SONGS, Set

41 For a discussion of the role of ballad opera in the project of creating a British nationality, see Suzanne Aspden, ‘Ballads and Britons: Imagined Community and the Continuity of “English” Opera’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 122:1 (1997): 24-51. Stefan Putigny’s 2012 PhD thesis for King’s College London, ‘Song Cultures and National Identities in Eighteenth- century Britain, c.1707-c.1800’ explores the complexities of English and Scottish song cultures in eighteenth-century Britain. Putigny’s theseis is available at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/13519654/Studentthesis-Stefan_Putigny_2012.pdf 42 Joncus, ‘“The Assemblage of Every Female Folly”’, 30. 81 to several English, Irish and Scots Ballad-tunes and Country-Dances’.43 Britishness – sometimes understood in geographical, archipelagic terms, sometimes in political terms relating to only one of the two kingdoms of the archipelago – was available to be conceived as characterised by fluidity and multiplicity, the kingdom of Great Britain itself being acknowledged as composed of multiple nationalities, and, as Linda Colley has argued, British identity beginning to be recognised as ‘layered’, simultaneously

British and English, Scottish, Welsh.44

An example of the sense of multiplicity in questions of nationality combined with a complex relationship between the song and the plot is illustrated in A Cure for a

Scold when two servants comment on Manly’s treatment of Peg. Peg has not eaten for two days ‘out of peevishness’, as she confesses.45 Now that she wants to eat, Manly sends food away. Peter comments that he has never seen the like – ‘he kills her in her own Humour’. He then calls upon Archer for a drinking song: ‘Let’s drink Success for him to the Honour of English Husbands’ [italics in original].46 However, the song that follows is sung to a Scottish ballad tune, ‘Bessy Bell’, subtly shifting the emphasis on

‘English’ to a layered idea of Britishness. Further, although the words of the drinking song in the opera are more or less banal, the song adds further ironic layers of potential meaning to the preceding scene in which Peter predicts Peg’s death through the withholding of food: ‘Bessy Bell’ tells of Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, ‘twa bonnie lassies’ in Perthshire who build themselves a secluded bower to live in in order to escape the plague, but die of it nonetheless, caught, according to tradition, from the

43 Anon, The Intriguing Courtiers, title page. 44 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1701-1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp.12-13. 45 Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold (London version), 34. 46 Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold (London version), 35. 82 young gentleman, in love with both of them, who supplies them with food.47 Thus, the unusually specific marker of nationality in ‘English’ is not simply overlaid with a

Scottish song, but draws attention to the complementary nature of the song and the preceding scene: a Scottish lover kills his beloved(s) by providing food, while an

English husband looks likely to kill his wife by withholding food. Here music does not so much undermine the words sung to it as it sets up a musical simile to the scene that

Archer and Peter assume is happening offstage between Manly and Peg: unsung words provide a commentary on unseen action.

Other aspects beyond the songs suggest further dangers in reading A Cure for a

Scold as one might read a printed play text. For example, the presence of star performers, particularly in the female roles, further complicates a straightforward reading of the gender politics of A Cure. Amongst others, the original London production featured Charles Macklin as Manly, Kitty Clive as Peg and Hannah

Pritchard as Flora.48 Kitty Clive was a particularly forceful personality both on stage and off, which Joncus argues influenced the reception of the characters she played.

Joncus writes of Clive’s performance in two ballad operas with misogynistic portrayals of women: ‘Clive’s stage triumphs in these punitive representations attest to her ability to eclipse the playbook with her own self-projection’.49 As she argues, ‘only by reading ballad operas through the lens of the principal player, as eighteenth-century audiences did, can we recapture the dynamics that made them so popular’.50 For one thing, the

47 ‘Bessy Bell and Mary Gray’ is Child Ballad number 201. See Frances James Child, ed., English and Scottish Ballads, vol. 3 (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1860), 126-27 for a discussion of the traditional background of the song. 48 Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold, London version, ‘Dramatis Personae’, n.p. The Barber was played by Thomas Hallam, whom Macklin accidentally killed later that year in a dispute over a wig. 49 Joncus, ‘“The Assemblage of Every Female Folly”’, 35. For more on Kitty Clive and ballad opera, see Joncus, ‘Handel at Drury Lane’. 50 Joncus, ‘“The Assemblage of Every Female Folly”’, 44; for a detailed history of the ‘Polly Row’ of 1736-37, Clive’s successful and very public struggle with a theatrical manager to be 83 actress playing Peg clearly differentiates herself and other modern women from those depicted in the play in a metatheatrical epilogue (‘Thank Heav’n! I’m not the Thing I represented’).51 In the London version, this allows the actress, apparently in her own persona, to contradict the lines with which, in the character of Peg, she has just finished the play proper (‘By Manly [the Petruchio analogue] taught, let Husbands bear the sway,/ ’Tis Man’s to rule, ’tis Woman’s to obey’), claiming instead that from one end of

London to the other ‘You’ll find the Scene revers’d, and ev’ry Dame,/ Like old Alcides

- - - making Monsters tame’.52 While the Dublin version retains the epilogue, it replaces the final chorus of the London version with a series of verses satirising marriage, among other aspects of the human condition, and cuts Peg’s final lines about obedience.53 Further proto-feminist framing may have attended at least some of the

Dublin performances. The Anglo-Irish poet Laetitia Pilkington claimed to have written

‘a flaming prologue […] in Honour of my own Countrywomen’ for the Dublin production of A Cure for a Scold in 1737, but unfortunately does not provide the text for this; the two Dublin editions reprint the Prologue contained in the London edition.54

For those who grasp these multiple layers of meaning, however fleetingly, as the songs are performed, the opera gains in depth and nuance in its relationship to its source plays(s), to its songs, and to contemporary society. For those who miss them – or who only process the complex layers of meaning after the theatre event – the opera still functions as a drama, and its songs still provide pleasure. Nonetheless, the force and

allowed to keep one of the roles that she had created, see Berta Joncus, ‘“In Wit Superior, as in Fighting”: Kitty Clive and the Conquest of a Rival Queen’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 74:1 (2011): 23-42. 51 Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold, London version, 60. 52 Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold, London version, 60. 53 Worsdale, A Cure for a Scold, Dublin version: Powell imprint, 38-40; Faulkner imprint, 40- 43. 54 Pilkington, Memoirs, 222. 84 of Peg’s spoken epilogue are essential to ensure that all audience members receive an unambiguous message distancing the performers from the play, and contradicting the ‘moral’ of the play proper in the London version. As I discuss in

Chapter Five, jukebox musicals also recognise the limits to the usefulness of the semiotic complexity of incorporated songs, and use spoken dialogue when it is important that a political point be put across to audience members simultaneously and unambiguously.

Finally, although Worsdale’s reputation has never been good, aspects of his extremely unconventional life put his engagement with The Taming of the Shrew into context, including his problematizing of some of the approaches to gender relations in that play and in Sauny the Scot. Worsdale – an artist, actor and deputy Master of the

Revels in Ireland, a playwright and publisher of impoverished writers’ works as his own, as well as a rake and a womaniser – not only performed female roles on stage, but lived in London for a period disguised as the widow of a recruiting sergeant from Sligo in order to infiltrate the circle of blackmailers responsible for having his patron, Sir

Edward Walpole, accused of homosexual rape, successfully bringing them to ground.55

Worsdale’s womanising also landed him in trouble with assertive women. For example,

Laetitia Pilkington quotes a profanity-ridden letter from Worsdale with a hilarious postscript:

55 For further information on Worsdale, Netta Murray Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes: Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998) provides extensive coverage of the Walpole affair; F. M. O’Donoghue, rev. Arianne Burnette, ‘James Worsdale’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29979 and ‘James Worsdale’, in Highfill et al., Biographical Dictionary, vol. 16, 275-78 provide more biographical detail; Anon, ‘The Streets of Dublin, No. VI’, The Irish Quarterly Review, 3:10 (1853): 259-298 (260-61) and W. J. Lawrence, ‘Early Irish Ballad Opera and Comic Opera’, The Musical Quarterly, 8:3 (1922): 397-412 (405-406) provide further anecdotes of Worsdale’s life. 85

P.S. By God, I cannot stir out, for my Landlady has beat me through the Town with a hot Shoulder of Mutton, which she snatched from the Fire, Spit and all, only for catching me a little familiar with her Daughter.56

Alongside his libertine ways, Worsdale appears to have respected women’s need for at least financial independence in a society that granted them little of it. Significantly, in view of the subject matter of A Cure for a Scold, Worsdale’s will left the following legacies to the composer Thomas Arne and his wife Cecilia:

Unto Dr. Arne I bequeath my honesty of heart but fear his heart is too case hard’ned to harbour any social virtue; I have try’d and proved him unworthy of any man’s friendship. Unto his wife Celia Arne most unhumanly treated by the said Dr Arne I bequeath 20 pounds for her whole and sole use independent of her cruel and unworthy husband the said Dr. Arne, whose ingratitude words are wanting to Express. 57

Further, at least five legacies in Worsdale’s will are to his illegitimate children, four sons and a daughter. Each child receives a cash legacy of £200: he specifies that the legacy to his daughter Elizabeth Smith is to be paid ‘independent of her mother’.58 That

Worsdale’s behaviour suggests at least a more complex approach to gender relations than a straightforward endorsement of patriarchal social structures is of a piece with the complex reception possibilities offered by A Cure for a Scold.

The nineteenth century

The nineteenth century saw the practice of adapting Shakespeare’s plays to various forms of music theatre at its peak, with operatic adaptations flourishing across

56 Pilkington, Memoirs, 115. Later in her Memoirs Pilkington suggests that A Cure for a Scold may have been ghost-written by her husband (vol. 2, 222). Elias discusses the question of the authorship of A Cure for a Scold in his notes to Pilkington’s Memoirs at 611-13, concluding that Worsdale may have collaborated with in writing the London version, and that Matthew Pilkington may have helped with revisions for the Dublin version. 57 Quoted in Todd Gilman, The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne (Lanham, MD: University of Delaware Press, 2013), 296. 58 Quoted in Highfill et al., Biographical Dictionary, 277. 86

Europe, Frederick Reynolds and Henry Bishop’s spectacular operatic versions appearing on the Covent Garden stage, and burlesques of Shakespeare’s plays proving popular, if ephemeral, entertainment in both Britain and the United States.59 Many of these burlesques and travesties incorporated existing songs, while Reynolds and

Bishop’s versions included Bishop’s of songs by other composers, as well as his own work composed specifically for those productions. While Reynolds and

Bishop’s first Shakespearean opera is separated from A Cure for a Scold by more than ninety years, during that period audiences continued to be presented with theatre pieces that used existing songs, providing a continuity in reception demands and strategies from ballad operas to the nineteenth-century operatic spectacular. Although the creation of new ballad operas based on the model of The Beggar’s Opera largely ceased by

1737, it is perhaps more useful to see the form as evolving – or modernising, as Roger

Fiske describes it – and surviving rather than dying out.60 Both Fiske and Madeline

Smith Atkins describe the ways that aspects of the ballad opera continued to thrive in works that nonetheless diverged from the model of The Beggar’s Opera. New, richer, orchestral forces were used as the harpsichord continuo of the earlier ballad opera fell out of favour; some ballad operas were adapted to a through-sung format (i.e. without spoken dialogue); operatic arias and an operatic style of singing were incorporated into existing ballad operas, either alongside or instead of ballad-style songs and singing techniques; in new works that incorporated existing songs, a move towards pastoral rather than satiric themes occurred, featuring musical evocations of pastoral life as

59 Although I focus here on Reynolds’ collaborations with Bishop, in 1828 Reynolds also collaborated in a similar way with John Braham and Thomas S. Cooke to create a version of The Taming of the Shrew that included songs by Mercadante, Rossini and Sir John Stevenson. See Margaret Ross Griffel, Opera in English: A Dictionary, 2nd ed (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 481. 60 Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 397. 87

‘local colour’; newly composed songs began appearing alongside existing ones.61

Several of these features appear in Reynolds and Bishop’s works, suggesting that they can be placed on a continuum of theatrical practices stretching back to the age of the ballad opera.

Frederick Reynolds and Henry Bishop’s ‘operatic’ versions of Shakespeare

Modern criticism has not been kind to the Shakespearean collaborations of the prolific playwright Frederic Reynolds and Henry Bishop, the composer and Director of

Music at Covent Garden in the mid-1810s to mid-1820s. Its sometimes sneering tone appears to derive from George Odell’s descriptions in his two-volume tirade,

Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. Odell’s descriptions in turn draw on John

Genest’s appalled remarks in his Some Account of the English Stage, written very shortly after Reynolds and Bishop’s productions were staged. However, modern critics have all stopped short of referring to them, as Odell does, as ‘bastard art’ or, in Genest’s terms, ‘literary murder’.62 While Odell’s ability to maintain his indignant outrage

61 Fiske, English Theatre Music, 396-411; Madeline Smith Atkins, The Beggar’s ‘Children’: How John Gay Changed the Course of England’s Musical Theatre (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006). 62 George C. D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1920), vol. 2, 148; John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1600 to 1830, 10 vols. (Bath: Thomas Rodd, 1832), vol. 8, 46. Some examples from modern critical writing that use metaphors of violence and morality to describe Reynolds and Bishop’s collaborations are: ‘Songs from other plays by Shakespeare were dragged in with complete impropriety’: William Shakespeare, , ed. John Dover Wilson, 2nd ed. (1962, repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); ‘It was in the year which saw the publication of Linley’s anthology that the most fearsome despoiler of Shakespeare began his work. This was Henry Rowley Bishop, a highly gifted musician, composer, musical director and general deranger of other men’s work, whether literary or musical […] Bishop was the leading member of a group of astute and often able music-directors who misused Shakespeare to their own ends in the early decades of the nineteenth century’: Charles Cudworth, ‘Song and Part-Song Settings of Shakespeare’s Lyrics, 1660-1960’, in Shakespeare and Music, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll (London: Macmillan, 1964), 51-87 (75-76); ‘Henry Rowley Bishop, a prolific composer and arranger is remembered today chiefly for “Lo, here the gentle 88 across two volumes at anything other than a pure Shakespearean text performed on a bare stage is in itself remarkable, it does not make for balanced analysis, or even accurate reporting of facts.63 Reynolds and Bishop’s versions certainly sit uncomfortably with strands of early nineteenth-century criticism. Their versions, displaying a willingness to amend or expand Shakespeare, and clearly constructed of existing material, do not sit well with Romantic ideas of Shakespeare’s individual genius. Further, for those who followed Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays

(1817) and looked for unified, psychologically coherent characters as a marker of a good production of Shakespeare (if indeed Shakespeare had to be staged at all), productions in which characters undergo regular shifts in performance modes are likely to have seemed misguided. For those same character-focused critics, Reynolds and

lark” [a strange statement, as Bishop’s “Home, Sweet Home” is surely far better known] for soprano and obbligato flute, which he took from Venus and Adonis (l.853ff) and inserted forcibly into Reynolds’ extravaganza that passed under the title of The Comedy of Errors. […] Many found Reynolds’ enormities just the thing to save a silly, incredible play’: William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. Charles Whitworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 63-64; ‘Frederick Reynolds’s operatic versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest ‘with Alterations and Additions’ are notorious for interpolating from one play to the other […] the published text of Reynolds’s version of The Tempest [there is in fact no such published text] does not include the words plundered from the other plays for the numerous songs […]’: Valerie L. Gager, Shakespeare and Dickens: The Dynamics of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52 [here Gager references Odell at the same time as she appears to misread him with regard to the text of Reynolds’ play]; ‘There [Covent Garden] in the next 14 years, [Bishop] supervised the composition and performance of dramatic musical works of all kinds, from original operas to collections of songs interpolated in mangled versions of Shakespeare’s plays’: Nicholas Temperley and Bruce Carr, ‘Bishop, Sir Henry R.’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40027. 63 For example, Odell states that in the ‘maulings of Frederick Reynolds’…‘Bishop seems to have been largely a selector, rather than composer of the songs rendered’ (Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, vol. 2, 131.). This in fact significantly overstates the use of existing songs. For instance, in The Comedy of Errors, as noted above, Bishop wrote original music for at least eleven or twelve of the sixteen or seventeen songs in the production, as well as the overture. Song composers are not consistently attributed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but Bishop composed the music for at least ten out of the nineteen songs; the published piano-vocal score for (described on the title page as ‘the whole of the music in As You Like It’) contains only three songs by Arne, the rest being original compositions by Bishop. Frederick Reynolds, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (London: John Miller, 1816); Henry Bishop, As You Like It, piano-vocal score (London: Goulding D’Almaine & Co., n.d.). 89

Bishop’s attention to a sense of atmosphere and place, not only in terms of scenic spectacle, but also, as discussed below, in terms of music, is likewise likely to have appeared as a mistaken emphasis in performance. However, modern critics have no need to follow unquestioningly the lead of contemporary critics, especially when those critics acknowledge a gap between their negative reactions and the popularity of these works amongst general audiences. Roberta Montemorra Marvin notes a similar discrepancy between professional critics and general audiences in the reception of nineteenth-century London productions of three of Verdi’s operas, , and : ‘These operas met with popular approval, although some found the plots of Il trovatore and La traviata vexing. The critics, however, neither liked nor understood them. Many commentators were baffled by the implausibility and complexity of the stories; others deemed the music without melody and imagination and the orchestra noisy’.64 Whereas Shakespeare studies have tended to view Reynolds and

Bishop’s versions through the eyes (and often tin ears) of drama critics, discounting their popularity among general audiences and ignoring the views of professional music critics, reception studies of major operas of the nineteenth century have taken a more nuanced approach to the divide between professional critics and general audiences.

Unfortunately, the strange hybrid form of Reynolds and Bishop’s versions means that these works are generally overlooked in opera studies. While an analysis of Reynolds and Bishop’s versions (as far as possible, given the lack of textual evidence for some of them) reveals them as forerunners of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare, theoretical frameworks appropriate to the jukebox musical can also be applied to clarify

64 Roberta Montemorra Marvin, ‘Victorian Opera Burlesqued: A Glimpse into Mid-Victorian Theatrical Culture’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 15:1 (2003): 33-66 (33). 90 some of Reynold’s and Bishop’s choices, creating a more textured view of these once prominent but now critically sidelined productions.

There was little contemporary consensus on the genre status of Reynolds and

Bishop’s versions, some viewing them as plays with added songs, while others, including Genest, refer to them as operas. Frustratingly, Genest repeatedly classifies them as operas, yet consistently judges them as if they were spoken plays – Odell concedes that ‘I rather suspect Genest had no ear for music’.65 One drama reviewer identifies a problem discussed more fully in Chapter Three: reception depends not only on a work’s genre, but on an audience’s expectation of its genre, which is often dependent on how the work is presented in advance:

Inviting the town to a comedy, when an operatic treat was thus irregularly prepared, seemed to us a little like the practice which is said to exist in the disturbed districts, of selling a straw and giving the buyer that which might have been expected to cost something gratis.66

However, this appears to have been less of an issue for general audiences than for professional critics. It is easy to understand the genre confusion: unlike the songs brought into earlier productions of Shakespeare that do not require unusual vocal ranges or specially trained voices, some of the songs in Bishop’s settings set new words to existing operatic arias, and some of his own contributions in these versions require an operatically trained voice for successful performance. For example, the demanding coloratura passages in ‘Lo, Here the Gentle Lark’, sung by Adriana in The Comedy of

Errors, have made it a favourite concert showpiece for operatic from the time of its composition until modern times, appearing in the repertoires of, among others,

65 Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, vol. 2, 75. For examples of Genest’s habit of referring to Reynolds and Bishop’s works as operas see, Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, vol. 9, 46, 59, 99, 234, 302-10, etc. 66 Anon., ‘The Drama’, The New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register, 1 January 1820, 71-73 (73). 91

Nellie Melba, Amelita Galli-Curci, Joan Sutherland, Kiri Te Kanawa and Miss Piggy

(somewhat outshone by Jean-Pierre Rampal, her accompanist on the flute). Casting necessities thus also associated Reynolds and Bishop’s versions with opera: for instance, Adriana in The Comedy of Errors and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream were played by Catherine (Kitty) Stephens, later the Duchess of Essex, a trained and successful operatic soprano who in 1812 had sung the role of Cherubino in the first

British (partial) staging of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, and subsequently the roles of

Zerlina and Susanna in the first British English-language productions of Mozart’s Don

Giovanni in 1817 (entitled The Libertine) and The Marriage of Figaro in March, 1819, only months before The Comedy of Errors opened in December of that year.67 Further,

Stephens had also played Polly in The Beggar’s Opera in 1813: in productions that used spoken dialogue and existing songs, Stephens’ association with ballad opera may also have guided reception. Indeed, Reynolds and Bishop’s versions are more similar to ballad operas and many modern musicals in their distribution of spoken word and song than they are to opera: for example, there are no songs at all in the whole first scene of

The Comedy of Errors. If I refer to these versions here as ‘operas’, I do so for convenience and as a means of drawing attention to the performance skills that they demanded, not as an attempt to gloss over their unsettled genre status.

Reynolds and Bishop’s versions represented the return of some of Shakespeare’s plays to the British stage after decades of absence, and coincided with the rise of scenic spectacle. Although I concentrate here on their use of songs, the productions were

67 Only the first two acts of this first British Italian-language production of Le nozze di Figaro were performed. For more details on Stephens, see Rachel E. Cowgill, ‘Stephens, Catherine [Kitty] married name Catherine Capel-Coningsby, countess of Essex] (1794–1882)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., Jan 2008 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26378, and Highfill et al. ‘Catherine Stephens’, Biographical Dictionary, vol. 14, 261. 92 notable for their lavish stage spectacle and special effects, which formed a large part of their pleasures for audiences. In the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Gary Jay

Williams argues that visual spectacle contributed to a ‘scenic language of empire’ that

‘reproduced a discourse of conquest and exploitation’, particularly in the scene of the surrender of the Indian boy at the end of act 2, and that resonated with British debates over the Earl of Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon marbles to Britain in the pageant of

‘The Triumphs of Theseus’ that ends the production.68 Reynolds’ own account of his motivation in adapting the plays and their reception are worth quoting at length for their resonance with the reception of jukebox musicals and their focus on the incorporation of songs rather than on scenic spectacle:

So many of Shakspeare’s fine comedies having been performed no more than once in two, or three seasons, and others having been withdrawn from the stage, I thought, as in the instance of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, that they might be again restored to it (with the assistance of a few alterations, and the addition of music), advantageously to the managers, and without injury to the immortal bard. The introduction too of Shakspeare’s own lyrical compositions into these pieces, – as most of them had never been sung on the stage – gave a most promising appearance to this rich Shakspearean treat; for such it may surely be called, as the additions were almost exclusively selected from his own ‘native woodnotes wild’. Yet, I was censured as an interpolator, and the manager, pronounced a mountebank, because, he allowed Shakspeare’s comedies to be converted into operas. But, as our inspired poet’s partiality for music is so evident (by his introduction of it, not only in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, in As You Like It, and in The Tempest, but, in most of his tragic, and comic plays) we have reason to presume, that, since I did not mar the regular disposition of his fable, Shakspeare would have regarded this musical , this restoration of his sonnets, rather, as an embellishment to, than, as a mutilation of, his piece.

As proof, that, these beautiful comedies, on their revival in this manner, were no longer to be found devoid of attraction, I trust, that I may be

68 Gary Jay Williams, ‘The Scenic Language of Empire: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1816’, Theatre Survey 34:1 (1993): 47-59 (56). 93

allowed to enumerate the number of nights they were performed, during the first, and second, seasons of their appearance:-69

He then sets out the number of nights played by his versions of A Midsummer Night’s

Dream, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merry

Wives of Windsor, all of which were revived in second seasons that ran as long as their first. Like the response to many jukebox musicals, the response to these productions was divided between professional critical disdain and acclaim from popular audiences.70

As Reynolds mentions, many of the songs in these versions have lyrics by

Shakespeare, drawn from the plays, sonnets, narrative poems, and The Passionate

Pilgrim (although some lyrics drawn from that work are now attributed to other poets).71

Some of these Shakespearean lyrics appear in new musical settings by Bishop, some in reworkings by Bishop of existing settings by other composers, some in unaltered existing settings by other composers, and some replacing the lyrics of existing songs or

69 Frederick Reynolds, The Life and Times of Frederick Reynolds, vol. 2, (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 409-411. 70 Although is ephemeral and likely to disappear without trace, the popularity of the various versions can be gauged to some degree from the amount of musical merchandising that they produced, as well as by the number of performances. For example, the British Library holds sheet music arrangements of three songs from The Tempest (1820), seven from As You Like It (1824), nineteen from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1816), twenty-eight from The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1821), forty-six from The Comedy of Errors (1819) (plus two early- twentieth-century arrangements for marching band) and forty-seven for Twelfth Night (1821). As well as arrangements for voices, voice and piano and solo piano, these last two produced adaptations for harp solo, harp and piano duet, piano duet, piano and flute, piano and clarinet, and flute and clarinet duet. Songs from Reynolds and Bishop’s versions also appeared in compilations: the popularity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, is suggested by the inclusion of the lyrics of nine of the production’s nineteen songs in the magazine The Pocket Melodist, which also featured an engraving of ‘Miss C Matthews as 2nd Fairy in the Midsummer Nights Dream’ as its endpiece. The nine songs from the Dream take up a significant proportion of the magazine, which features lyrics to twenty-six songs from current operas, concerts and other musical entertainments. In contrast to the Dream’s nine songs, three of these contribute two songs each, and the rest a single song. The Pocket Melodist, or Dramatic Muse (London: J. Duncombe, n.d.) 38-43 and endpiece. Internal evidence suggests a date of January 1816. 71 Reynolds was not the first to include songs from one Shakespeare play in the production of another one. For instance, ‘When Daisies Pied’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost was introduced into As You Like It in 1740 and remained a feature of that play in performance well into the nineteenth century, sung either by Celia or by Rosalind, depending on the singing ability of the actresses. See Cynthia Marshall, ‘As You Like It’: Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 210. 94 arias by other composers such as Mozart and Rossini. In addition, these versions also include existing songs by, for example, Handel, with non-Shakespearean lyrics. As many of the Shakespearean lyrics used either derive from free-standing poems or from diegetic songs in other plays, they are usually not so strongly tied to plot and character in their original settings that they cannot be transferred relatively easily into new dramatic situations without also bringing with them strong layers of intertextual meaning. While these versions do not rely strongly on the ability of audiences to make intertextual links at the level of plot and character, the interpolation of songs not only provides a musical embellishment to the plays but also creates meaning and responds to aspects of Shakespeare’s plays as song interpolation does in jukebox musicals.

In many cases, those songs that feature Shakespeare’s own lyrics are used as diegetic numbers whether or not those lyrics originally formed part of diegetic songs, and are flagged as such by characters announcing that they are going to sing, or being invited to sing; nonetheless, characters often use these numbers to comment on the plot.

Diegetic numbers are relatively easy to incorporate into spoken drama; an announcement that someone is about to sing, followed by a short instrumental introduction are all that is required in order to ‘naturalise’ the transition from speech to song. Non-diegetic numbers, especially those using existing music, require more careful handling if the transition between modes of performance is not to appear disturbingly jarring, but neither diegetic nor non-diegetic numbers could be described as being ‘inserted forcibly’ into Reynolds and Bishop’s productions, as Charles Whitworth suggests.72 An example from A Midsummer Night’s Dream demonstrates one method by which Reynolds introduced non-diegetic songs into Shakespeare, and the ways in which existing songs might have contributed to a sense of atmosphere and place.

72 William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. Whitworth, 63. 95

Compare Hermia’s speech on waking at the end of act 2, scene 2 in Shakespeare’s play with the equivalent in Reynolds’ version:

Shakespeare, 2.2.151-62 Reynolds, 27.

HERMIA. Help me, Lysander, help me! HERMIA. Help me, Lysander, help me! Do thy best Do thy best, To pluck this crawling serpent from my To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast! bosom. Ay me, for pity! What a dream was here! Ah me, for pity! What a dream was here! Lysander, look how I do quake with fear Lysander, look how I do quake with horror. Methought a serpent ate my heart away, Methought a serpent ate my heart away, And you sat smiling at his cruel prey. And you sate smiling at him. Ha! Lysander, Lysander! What, removed? Lysander, Lysander! What remov’d? Lysander, lord! Lord! What, out of hearing? Gone? No sound, no word? Alack, where are you? Speak and if you Alack, where are you? Speak, and if you hear hear me – Speak, of all loves! I swoon almost with [Bird symphony] fear. He cannot for these harbingers of No? Then I well perceive you are not morning – cease, sylvan songsters, cease! nigh. while your tuneful notes thus vibrate Either death or you I’ll find immediately. through the wood, in vain I call upon my lost, lost love! SONG Hermia – [HANDEL] Hush, ye pretty warbling choir! Your thrilling strains Awake my pains, And kindle warm desire. Cease your song and take your flight Bring back my Lover to my sight. [Exit.

Hermia’s speech in Shakespeare comes at the end of a scene in which the four lovers speak in rhymed couplets, rhyme adding to the scene’s comedy. Reynolds amends the second line of each pair of couplets throughout the lovers’ scene. At first glance,

96

Reynolds’ decision to remove the rhyme and disturb the blank verse by adding non- metrical syllables appears simply perverse. However, if this is one of Reynolds’ ‘acts of vandalism’, as Odell puts it, it is vandalism with a practical purpose73 In the context of a musical version, his decision appears a sound, pragmatic one, and one that resonates with the solutions found by creators of modern musicals to the problem of the transition from speech to song (discussed more fully in Chapter Four). A shift from speech to non-diegetic song usually implies an increase in emotional intensity that justifies that shift. One way in which to ‘naturalise’ a sense of increasing emotional intensity while moving towards song is by gradually increasing aural intensity for the audience.

Hermia’s song is the aria, ‘Hush, ye pretty warbling quire’ (with minimal adjustments to the lyrics), sung by the nymph Galatea in Handel’s opera, Acis and Galatea (1718, rev.

1732, rev. 1739), a very popular pastoral opera that was frequently revived in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As existing songs are likely to ‘leap from’ the surrounding dramatic texture, as Millie Taylor puts it, the transition between speech and song needs to be handled particularly carefully.74 Removing Shakespeare’s rhymes and making the blank verse irregular allows for a clear trajectory between unrhymed,

73 Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, vol. 2, 75. While Odell takes his cues for outrage from Genest, the latter is difficult to please in the matter of amending Shakespeare’s text: for instance, he scolds Reynolds for following the Folio text and not later editors, complaining that in Reynolds’ Dream, ‘Theseus says “But earthlier happy” – Dr Johnson observes that this is a harsh expression, and proposes, as Pope had done before, “earlier happy” – Steevens says we might read “earthly happier”, an amendment that Reynolds should have followed’. On the other hand, he takes exception to Reynolds’ introduction of modern turns of speech in newly written passages: in the introduction to the final spectacular pageant, Reynolds ‘mak[es] Theseus say: “Next for our pageant/ Which but for thy request – but that its fair/ Director is Hippolita, We willingly ourselves/ Would not be witness of it; since ’tis to celebrate/ Our own poor triumphs!” – the modern regal style of We for I is here most improperly introduced – Shakespeare knew better what was right’. It is difficult to imagine many audience members becoming quite so indignant, without the benefit of Reynolds’ printed text and an edition of Shakespeare’s play in front of them. On the other hand, Genest approved of Reynolds’ decision to curtail the lovers’ dialogue in the scene under discussion, ‘as great part of it is written in a manner unworthy of Shakespeare’. Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, vol. 8, 545-47. 74 Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2013), 162 97 rhythmically irregular verse through heightened prose in which assonance and alliteration are combined with orchestral underscoring, to full scale accompanied song with rhyming lyrics. The shift in Hermia’s mode of performance is thus negotiated over an extended period, a frequent marker of non-diegetic, expressive song in modern musicals.

The lyrics vary only slightly between Galatea’s and Hermia’s versions,

Reynolds toning down Galatea’s sexuality a notch: while Galatea sings of kindling

‘fierce desire’, Hermia sings only of ‘warm desire’.75 That Hermia sings an operatic aria does not simply reflect her emotional state: the aria also enhances the sense of place and atmosphere. Handel’s aria is in 3/8 time, a musical signifier of the pastoral. A high-pitched trilling accompaniment evokes birdsong, appropriate in Hermia’s first number on arriving in the wood, carrying over the orchestral sound effects from the

‘Bird Symphony’ that underscore Hermia’s heightened prose. As her previous song before leaving court was ‘By the simplicity of Venus’ doves!’, the repeated use of bird imagery in song enhances the sense of a coherent character. Further, for those familiar with Handel’s opera, the aria imports some of Acis and Galatea’s classical and pastoral atmosphere, tinged with the supernatural (Galatea is a semi-divine nymph), thus reinforcing the pastoral, classical and supernatural combination found in the Dream’s wood outside Athens, and amply displayed in scenery and stage effects.

Rather than being used primarily as expressive (or expressionist) vehicles in which characters’ nuanced emotions are communicated to the audience, songs in

Reynolds and Bishop’s versions more often serve as aural reinforcements to the sense of

75 Georg Friedrich Händel, Acis and Galatea. Full score. Georg Friedrich Händels Werke, Band 3 (Leipzig: Deutsche Händelgesellschaft, 1859), 19-23. The lyrics to Acis and Galatea are by John Gay, providing a nice link between Gay’s practice of borrowing in The Beggar’s Opera and Reynolds and Bishop’s work. 98 atmosphere and place created visually in the scenic spectacle, and as aural guides to relationships among characters. In As You Like It, for example, seven of the fourteen numbers are in 6/8 time, the archetypal musical marker of the pastoral (even more so than Hermia’s 3/8 time); of the first six numbers, five are in 6/8 time, aurally reinforcing the pastoral setting from the outset. Cœlia [sic] and Rosalind’s closeness is set up in the first number, a duet, ‘Whilst inconstant fortune smiled’; here Rosalind’s suitability for adopting male disguise is prefigured by her unusually low pitch range, descending to an A below middle C, the lowest she is required to sing in the whole opera. Their closeness is underlined particularly in their trio with Touchstone, ‘Crabbed

Age and Youth Cannot Live Together’. While all three sing simultaneously, the women sing one set of lyrics while Touchstone sings another: the musical harmonies suggest companionship, but the allocation of the lyrics suggests a meeting of minds only between two of the three. Only in Rosalind’s ‘Ah me! What Eyes Hath Love Put in My

Head?’, newly composed by Bishop, does the music express (extremely effectively) a character’s emotional state in a detailed way that is tied closely to character and dramatic situation, to the extent that it stands out as unusual in the texture of the opera.

Rosalind here realises that she is falling in love. The number has the rare time signature of 8/8; the irregular rhythms and rests that interrupt the flow of the lyrics suggest

Rosalind’s breathlessness and irregular, racing heartbeat.76 In the early part of the song her vocal line has a very limited range of pitch, moving stepwise with few large jumps between pitches, accompanied especially at the beginning by unstable harmonies, to the

76 Bishop, As You Like It, vocal score, 15. Music in 8/8 has eight quaver beats to the bar that can be grouped flexibly by the composer. Here they are grouped as │1.12.12.12.1│1.12.12.12.1│1.12.12.12.1│, etc. In fact, although the number retains an 8/8 time signature throughout, the beat settles down relatively soon into what is effectively standard 4/4 time, i.e. with four crotchet beats to the bar, grouped │1234│1234│1234│, as Rosalind’s emotional state stabilises. 99 extent that much of the song feels almost like accompanied recitative. Love, for

Rosalind in the circumstances in which she finds herself, is emotionally and physically unsettling, and not a cause for joy. That this newly composed song stands out as unusual in its ability to depict Rosalind’s emotional and physical state so effectively and in a way that is completely tied to the character and her dramatic situation does not so much reveal the dramatic limits of using existing songs as suggest that we look to them for functions other than the detailed depiction of individualised emotional states.

More examples of music enhancing a sense of local colour can be gleaned from reviews of Reynolds and Bishop’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which also demonstrate how differences in disciplinary discourses provide differing assessments of hybrid works such as these and jukebox-musical versions. In the January 1822 issue of

The London Magazine, the anonymous drama reviewer gave a negative review of the piece, in contrast to the reception given by the ‘good-natured gallery’. Indeed,

Reynolds’ adaptation, as an adaptation, was unlikely ever to please the reviewer: ‘let him not attempt to darn Shakespeare’s Plays that need no mending’.77 Although happy to judge the music as ‘flashy and perishable’ in a footnote, he or she flaunts a dislike of operatic singing and lack of expertise in judging it: ‘Miss Hallande sings very loud, and well, we make no doubt, as great applause followed on the heels, or the final cadential shakes, of several vocal difficulties, which, with Johnson, we wished were impossibilities’.78 The following month, however, the music reviewer of the same magazine gave an extremely positive account of the music, suggesting that works such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona might serve as a form of way-station to ‘what opera

77 Anon., ‘The Drama’, London Magazine, 5:25, January 1822: 90-95 (93). 78 Anon, ‘The Drama’, 95. Here he appears to allude to Samuel Johnson’s famous definition of Italian opera as ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment, that always has been combated, and always has prevailed’. 100 should be’, indicating ‘the exhaustion of the taste for musical pantomimes, or melodrames, half dialogue, half song’. While the music itself is not easily categorised, the reviewer is open to new forms, and notes Bishop’s revoicing of existing solo songs for multiple voices: one number ‘ceases with an allegro brillante that resembles a polacca, and yet is not a polacca, but a nameless something of superior interest’, while

‘Bishop has next harmonised Dr. Arne’s fine song, “If O’er the Cruel Tyrant” for four voices, but to other words’. At a number of points, the reviewer discusses the numbers in terms of Italian song forms, and notes that the finale ‘is so good an imitation of

Rossini’s mannerism, that Mr. Bishop probably intended the likeness’. The Two

Gentlemen of Verona is unusual among Reynolds and Bishop’s works for its concentrated Italianate idiom: songs here, as in their Dream, enhance the scenography by creating a sense of aural local colour, a local colour that is not British.79 While modern Shakespearean critics have approached Reynolds and Bishop’s works as aberrations in the history of staging Shakespeare, they might equally be considered as an innovative form of ‘way-station to what opera should be’ – a forerunner of the

French style of spectacular through-sung grand opéra of the 1830s in which musical local colour was prized – in their detailed and spectacular scenography and their use of music to enhance a sense of place, if not in their use of a mixture of speech and song.

The revoicing of solo numbers for multiple voices was also mentioned by the reviewer for The Times in connection with The Comedy of Errors:

Mr. Bishop, the composer to the theatre, has added a few airs, and harmonized several others that before only existed in the simple form of melody; he deserves praise for all that he has done, whether the taste of the selection or the spirit of the composition is considered. of the poetry has been less fortunate, and not a few absurdities have crept in

79 It is probably no coincidence that Reynolds’ later collaboration on The Taming of the Shrew with Braham and Cooke also used Rossini’s music, as well as Saverio Mercadante’s, the Italian music reflecting the Paduan setting. Griffel, Opera in English, 481. 101

through the medium, which a little care might have avoided. What can be more absurd, for instance, than to put songs into the mouth of an Ephesian that relate solely to English customs or English superstitions?80

The reviewer here is correct in noticing that in The Comedy of Errors Bishop is less concerned to use songs to create a coherent sense of place than in his other collaborations with Reynolds. Another form of revoicing was raised in a review of the same play in The New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register, which found that ‘the arrangement which sometimes gave a man’s song to Miss Stephens struck us as rather objectionable, however admirably that young lady might acquit herself’.81 Indeed, the lyrics of two of the songs sung by Kitty Stephens, playing Adriana, are usually associated with a male approach to love: ‘Come Live With Me, and Be My Love’, from

The Passionate Pilgrim and ‘Take, Oh Take Those Lips Away’, sung by ‘a boy’ in

Measure for Measure.

Both of these reviews need to be taken in the context of Reynolds and Bishop’s wider approach to gender in The Comedy of Errors, an approach that appears to draw on the exchange in Shakespeare’s act 2, scene 1, in which Luciana seems to defend gender- based double standards and Adriana deplores them:

ADRIANA. Neither my husband nor the slave return’d, That in such haste I sent to seek his master! Sure, Luciana, it is two o'clock. LUCIANA. Perhaps some merchant hath invited him, And from the mart he’s somewhere gone to dinner. Good sister, let us dine and never fret: A man is master of his liberty: Time is their master, and, when they see time, They’ll go or come: if so, be patient, sister. ADRIANA. Why should their liberty than ours be more? LUCIANA. Because their business still lies out o’ door. ADRIANA. Look, when I serve him so, he takes it ill. LUCIANA. O, know he is the bridle of your will.

80 Review of The Comedy of Errors, The Times, 13 December 1819, 3. 81 Anon., ‘The Drama’, The New Monthly Magazine, 73. 102

ADRIANA. There’s none but asses will be bridled so (2.1.1-14).82

Reynolds and Bishop expand the sense of a society organised on the basis of gendered spaces in a number of ways, but primarily in order to depict men’s lives as self- indulgent, fun and free-ranging in time and space, and women’s as constrained. Indeed, in Reynolds and Bishop’s version, The Comedy of Errors is primarily about the marriage problems of Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana, with the audience’s sympathy weighted towards Adriana. As Antipholus of Syracuse and the two Dromios do not sing and none of the songs concerns the confusions around the sets of identical twins, the problems of a marriage in which one party has considerably more freedom than the other stand out in aural contrast to the mistaken identity plot, which provides a non-singing background against which the marriage issues play themselves out. While

Shakespeare’s Antipholus of Ephesus appears first in act 3, scene 1, some time after

Adriana has complained about his lateness, Reynolds writes a new scene before we meet Adriana, in which her husband is depicted drinking with his friends, well aware that she expects him home. When his friends mock him as henpecked, he chooses to stay on drinking with them. The ‘business’ that Luciana imagines keeps men out of doors has already been revealed as self-indulgent debauchery. Further male fun and freedom is seen in act 3, which ends with a spectacular hunting scene for Antipholus of

Ephesus’s friends: ‘A River surrounded by Mountains, whose tops are covered by snow.- Across the River is a rustic Bridge.- Horns heard without – and Balthazar,

Cerimon, and others, are seen crossing the Bridge dressed as Hunters’.83 The scene

82 Quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1968). Reynolds’ version includes this passage almost verbatim, with very few changes to clarify meaning (e.g., ‘Why should their liberty be more than ours’, ‘None, but an idiot, would be bridled so’). Reynolds, The Comedy of Errors, 16. 83 Reynolds, The Comedy of Errors, 44. 103 closes with a prediction of fireside revelry. Later, in act 4, Antipholus of Ephesus is entertained by his friends at a banquet in Balthazar’s house. Men’s lives here are depicted as widely free-ranging and characterised by homosocial camaraderie.

Songs add to this sense of a homosocial world. In contrast to Reynolds and

Bishop’s other works, men and women never sing together until the finale, led by

Adriana and Luciana. In contrast, multiple duets and ensembles for single-sex groupings reinforce the gendered structure of the play’s society. Adriana and Luciana, for example, sing Sir John Stevenson’s duet setting of ‘Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred?’ with words from , and a duet version, largely in thirds, of ‘As It

Fell Upon A Day’ (attributed in the score to Shakespeare’s sonnets, but actually from

The Passionate Pilgrim and now attributed to Richard Barnfield), while Antipholus of

Ephesus and his friend Cerimon sing ‘St Withold Footed the World’ from King Lear as a two-voice canon, the latter two duets with music by Bishop. Glees – ensemble pieces for male voices, usually with a single voice per line, usually sung a capella with the top line taken by a counter-, and often with a complex musical texture – feature in a number of Reynolds and Bishop’s versions, but are particularly prominent in The

Comedy of Errors. As noted in the review above, that Bishop sets existing solo songs as glees for multiple voices (in one number, ‘Blow, blow thou wintry wind’, combining two songs, one by Arne and one by Stevenson, into a single glee) draws particular attention to their refashioning into an ensemble in the play. Glee singing was a popular form of entertainment from around 1750 to 1850, and often took place in male clubs specifically formed to commission and sing glees. The vocal interplay of glees was particularly complex and required a degree of trust and familiarity among the singers.

Indeed, one criticism aimed at Reynolds and Bishop’s Two Gentlemen of Verona is that

Julia, disguised as Sebastian, takes the top line in a glee with men she has just met. The

104 criticism is not the implausibility of cross-gendered disguise, but of her ability to sing the part at sight: ‘how can it be reconciled even to poetical possibility, that an utter stranger (which Julia absolutely is) both to the music and to the words, should swim so toppingly off in her share of each’.84 While the musical texture of the glees represent male camaraderie in the world of the opera, their form also imports a recognised form of male bonding in the world of the audience into the world of the play.

Whereas the same-sex vocal ensembles and the additional scenes written by

Reynolds present a society divided by gender, in which men have significantly more freedom and fun than women, the fact that Adriana sings two existing songs that are usually associated with a male viewpoint denaturalises this division, holding it up as arbitrary and therefore changeable. In act 3, scene 2, Adriana sings ‘Come live with me and be my love’ from The Passionate Pilgrim (now ascribed to Christopher Marlowe rather than Shakespeare), with a second verse taken from Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Come live with me and be my dear’ and in act 4, scene 2 ‘Take, oh take these lips away’, sung by a boy in Measure for Measure.85 The former in particular is both meaningful and poignant in its revoicing. Adriana tells Luciana that it was that song that first won her husband’s love. Here the opera provides us with the image of an unusually assertive young woman, by early nineteenth-century standards: Adriana has wooed instead of being wooed, and has suggested living together as lovers without mention of marriage.

What is especially poignant in the choice of this song for this dramatic context is its image of a couple spending their lives in each other’s company while ranging the countryside:

Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasure prove

84 Anon, ‘The Drama’, London Magazine, 94. Question mark missing in original. 85 Both these songs have music by Bishop: unusually, it is the existing lyrics rather than a combination of lyrics and music that are revoiced here. 105

That hill and valley, den and field, And all the craggy mountains yield.86

However, in The Comedy of Errors it is men, in the company of other men, who prove the pleasure that craggy mountains yield, while Adriana waits at home in the company of her sister. Song lyrics in one scene thus join with scenic spectacle in another to create meaning. What is potentially disturbing here for nineteenth-century audiences is not simply the revoicing of a song usually associated with a male viewpoint, or even that that song demonstrates an unseemly assertiveness in a young woman: the song suggests that men and women might have the same desires, implying that the solution to a problematic marriage might not be to tie a husband more closely to home, but to allow a wife the freedom to enjoy life with him beyond the home. This is made potentially more compelling for the original audiences as The Comedy of Errors does not concern itself with local colour in the way that other versions of Shakespeare by Reynolds and

Bishop do, but, as The Times’ reviewer notes, imports aspects of English life into the comedy. Nineteenth-century partnerships in which men and women shared the freedom to work and travel the world together did exist, even if they were rare: in an ironic twist for the composer of ‘Home! Sweet Home!’, Bishop’s wife Anna, an operatic soprano whom he had married in 1831, left him in 1839 for the harpist and composer Nicolas-

Charles Bochsa, with whom she travelled through Europe, North and South America and Australia until Bochsa’s death in Sydney in 1856. Further roaming followed in the company of her second husband, including three weeks spent shipwrecked on a desert island; nonetheless, social disaster did not follow and she was welcomed into London society when she sang there in 1846.87

86 Reynolds, The Comedy of Errors, 35. 87 Even more ironically, Bishop’s last professional performance, aged 73, included a rendition of her first husband’s ‘Home! Sweet Home!’ For a biography of Anna Bishop, see Richard Michael Davis, Anna Bishop: The Adventures of an Intrepid Prima Donna (Sydney: Currency 106

Nineteenth-century burlesques

Shortly after Reynolds and Bishop’s versions were staged at Covent Garden, burlesques – comic works in which the conventions of serious stage works are parodied

– became a popular feature of less illustrious nineteenth-century British and American stages. These burlesques featured puns and speech in rhymed couplets, almost always reworked an existing plot, usually incorporated satirical topical references and existing songs either with the original or new lyrics, and often featured women en travestie.

These were all features that burlesques shared with pantomime and the fairy extravaganza, an extremely popular genre for Regency and Victorian audiences that is now almost lost to sight.88 Burlesques thus not only related to the work or genre whose conventions they parodied, but formed part of a continuum of popular performative genres that shared common features and required similar reception competencies in their audiences, particularly with respect to intertextual allusions, multiple meanings and local topical satire. Pantomimes and fairy extravaganzas both drew on fairy tales for their plots, fairy extravaganzas often adapting French literary fairytales by Madame d’Aulnoy and Charles Perrault, and generally aiming for an ‘elegance’ that differentiated them from pantomime.89 Burlesques, on the other hand, drew their plots

Press, 1996). See also Nicholas Temperley, ‘Bishop, Anna’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/03144. A fascinating travelogue, published anonymously but clearly at least partly by Bochsa or Anna Bishop, describes her freedom in travelling through Mexico with Bochsa in 1849: Anon., The Travels of Anna Bishop in Mexico, 1849 (Pennsylvania: Charles Deal, 1852). 88 For a detailed discussion of pantomime performance, both modern and historical, with a chapter on the genre’s use of existing songs, see Millie Taylor, British Pantomime Performance (Bristol: Intellect, 2007), especially 161-174; for the now lost genre of the fairy extravaganza, see Paul Buczkowski, ‘J. R. Planché, Frederick Robson and the Fairy Extravaganza’, Marvels and Tales, 15:1 (2001): 42-65, with an accompanying script, J. R. Planché’s The Yellow Dwarf and the King of the Gold Mines, at 69-103. The conventions of the fairy extravaganza were themselves burlesqued in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe: see Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Genre, Gender, Parody (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), especially Chapter Seven, ‘Transforming the Fairy Genres: Women on Top in Iolanthe’, 187-221. 89 Buczkowski, ‘The Fairy Extravaganza’, 41-45. 107 from works deemed more serious, including mythology, history, literature and drama.

Fredric Woodbridge Wilson notes that ‘whereas pantomime entertained all classes and all ages, the burlesque and extravaganza tended to appeal to a relatively educated and sophisticated audience’.90

That a work was burlesqued was a sign of its popularity, and also perhaps a recognition of challenges that it posed to reception, challenges to be worked through communally rather than seen as a reason for rejection of the work: Marvin describes

Victorian London as ‘a culture that valued parody as a means of both enjoying popular artworks and of coming to terms with controversial ones’.91 Of the various works that burlesques drew on, operas and Shakespeare’s plays were favourite sources for much of the nineteenth century: Wilson notes that ‘burlesques followed the appearance of almost every major opera’.92 In the latter part of the nineteenth century, burlesques of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas, themselves often of genre conventions, also became very popular.93

90 Fredric Woodbridge Wilson, with Deane L. Root, ‘English Theatrical Burlesque’, in Erich Schwandt, et al., ‘Burlesque’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/04381. Similarly, Buczkowski notes that, ‘although Planché wrote [his fairy extravaganzas] primarily for the middle class, he tried to reflect the sophistication and polish of the aristocratic salon in which Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's tales had taken shape’: ‘The Fairy Extravaganza’, 43. 91 Marvin, ‘Verdian Opera Burlesqued’, 33. 92 Wilson, with Root, ‘English Theatrical Burlesque’. See Marvin, ‘Verdian Opera Burlesqued’ for a discussion of nineteenth-century operatic burlesques of Verdi’s Ernani, Il trovatore and La traviata on the London stage. 93 While titles of these nineteenth-century productions survive, scripts of these productions are even more difficult to trace than Shakespearean burlesques. Susan Kattwinkel provides a transcript of surviving fragments of the songs from The Pie-Rats of Penn Yann (c.1881), a burlesque of The Pirates of Penzance presented on Broadway by the impresario Tony Pastor, alongside scripts of two Shakespeare burlesques, Romeo and Juliet, or the Beautiful Blonde Who Dyed for Love and a burlesque Macbeth, and burlesques of opera and serious plays: Tony Pastor Presents: Afterpieces from the Vaudeville Stage (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 177-86. 108

Stanley Wells divides the Shakespearean burlesques that flourished in Britain in the nineteenth century into four periods and styles.94 The first period, overlapping with

Reynolds and Bishop’s stage versions, ran from 1810 until 1835, following John

Poole’s Hamlet Travestie (1810): burlesques in this period were almost all designed primarily to be read rather than performed, and often contained copious pseudo- scholarly apparatus.95 The second period, from 1834 to 1847, produced burlesques for the stage, often ephemeral works by little-known writers.96 In what Wells refers to as the ‘High Period’, from 1849 to 1859, burlesques were written by authors with established reputations as comic writers for the stage, and were staged in professional theatres.97 The later period, from 1860 to 1882, saw a shift back to works designed primarily to be read, or to be performed by amateurs.98 American burlesques went through a similar development, with slightly later dates.99

In contrast to Reynolds and Bishop’s work, Shakespearean burlesques have been well and sympathetically served by modern criticism. Alongside Stanley Wells’ six- volume collection of Shakespearean burlesques, with introductions to each volume chronicling developments in the form, Richard Schoch’s excellent monograph, Not

Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century covers theatrical burlesques in depth, including nuanced discussions of the social classes who attended

94 Stanley Wells, Nineteenth-century Shakespearean Burlesques, 5 vols (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1978). 95 Wells, ‘Introduction’, Nineteenth-century Shakespearean Burlesques, vol. 1, John Poole and his Imitators, ix-xxvii. 96 Wells ‘Introduction’, Nineteenth-century Shakespearean Burlesques, vol. 2, Maurice Dowling (1834) to Charles Beckington (1847), ix-xvii. 97 Wells, ‘Introduction’, Nineteenth-century Shakespearean Burlesques, vol. 3, The High Period: Francis Talfourd (1849) to Andrew Halliday (1859), ix-xxii. 98 Wells, ‘Introduction’, Nineteenth-century Shakespearean Burlesques, vol. 4, The Fourth Phase: F. C. Burnand, W. S. Gilbert and Others (1860-1882), ix-xxv. 99 Wells, Nineteenth-century Shakespearean Burlesques, vol. 5, American Shakespeare Travesties (1852-1888), ix-xiv. 109 specific theatrical burlesques.100 Several articles help situate burlesques historically.

For example, Jonathan Bate discusses the Shakespearean parodies in The Gentleman’s

Magazine from 1792 to 1805, forerunners of the Shakespearean burlesque, arguing that these are rarely designed as attacks on Shakespeare, although they may be attacks on contemporary engagements with Shakespeare, an argument that Schoch suggests can also be applied to many theatrical burlesques.101 Daniel Pollack-Pelzner proposes that burlesques of Hamlet reflect a continuous but critically marginalised theatrical tradition of exteriorised Hamlets, known ‘not for moody introspection but for manic action’. 102

He suggests that this provides an alternative reception history to that which, drawing on

Hazlitt and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s character criticism, privileges the rise of novelistic, psychological-realist conceptions of Hamlet’s character in the nineteenth century. He concludes that paying attention to burlesques can provide a new understanding of the nineteenth century and our approach to it: ‘the story of Hamlet’s inwardness is not just a story that the nineteenth century tells about Shakespeare: it is also a story that we tell about the nineteenth century’.103 Frances Teague also focuses on a burlesque Hamlet, arguing for a late example, Mr Hamlet of Broadway (1908), as the first Broadway musical version of Shakespeare. Teague sees a thematic continuity between burlesques and the Broadway musical: ‘like earlier burlesques, the

Shakespearian musical will insist that Shakespeare’s work must include sexual and racial identity’.104

100 Richard W. Schoch, Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 101 Jonathan Bate, ‘Parodies of Shakespeare’, Journal of Popular Culture, 19:1 (1985): 75-89. 102 Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, ‘Shakespeare Burlesque and the Performing Self’, Victorian Studies 54:3 (2012): 401-09 (404). 103 Pollack-Pelzner, ‘Shakespeare Burlesque’, 404. 104 Frances Teague, ‘Mr Hamlet of Broadway’, Shakespeare Survey, 57 (2004), 249-257 (256). 110

Schoch’s work on Shakespearean burlesques, particularly his discussions of puns and topical or local allusions and their relation to meaning, is both pertinent and provocative in relation to Shakespearean jukebox musicals. Schoch writes:

The acknowledged incompleteness of burlesque language – its topicalities, puns, and revisions – do not obstruct or impede the spectator from accessing an otherwise intelligible performance text; rather, those incomprehensions enable spectators to undertake interpretive acts. The bafflement of meaning thus provides the burlesque with its own critical metalanguage, enabling it to move beyond what would seem to be an interpretive stalemate and towards acts of cultural engagement.105

Here the attention Schoch draws to the way burlesques ostentatiously avoid privileging a single meaning apparently inherent in the work, but instead foreground meaning- making as an activity available and accessible to audience members resonates strongly with my arguments in later chapters for the way that jukebox-musical versions of

Shakespeare function.

However, Schoch appears to overplay the incomprehensibility of Shakespearean burlesques. Discussing the frequent topical references that make approaching the written texts of Shakespearean burlesques difficult for a modern scholar, he claims that

‘the topicalities of Shakespeare burlesques, even for their original audiences, have never been fully intelligible’, and would have proved difficult to grasp for ‘spectators from the provinces (to say nothing of those from outside Britain)’.106 As a result, ‘there was no moment of original spectatorial mastery which later generations of critics must struggle heroically to recover’.107 He concedes that, ‘to be sure, some topical references were indeed understood by some spectators (it would be ludicrous to argue that audiences understood nothing)’, but continues, ‘on the other hand, topicalities, because they were

105 Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 33. 106 Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 38-39. 107 Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 39. 111 self-disintegrating, asserted that no text was ever completely transparent and that no spectator (or scholar) was ever a perfect interpreter’. That a topicality is ‘self- disintegrating’ does not mean that it is ungraspable or uninterpretable in the moment of its currency. Further, Schoch’s description only partially matches the experience of attending similar works today.

While extended Shakespearean burlesques are not extinct, they are nonetheless comparative rarities. However, in Britain at least, the Gilbert and Sullivan burlesque is still alive and well and living in the fringes of theatrical festivals such as the Edinburgh

Festival and the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton (and latterly

Harrogate), where audiences can be expected to have a high degree of familiarity with the works burlesqued as well as a high degree of theatrical literacy. These burlesques continue the dense theatrical texture of puns, re-used songs, topical and local references, and satires on well-known performers and performance styles found in nineteenth- century burlesques, and might be expected to provide similar audience experiences to those works. British pantomimes are likewise an ongoing feature of theatrical life, with a strong tradition of specific interpretive demands and strategies to deal with the barrage of puns, double entendres, and local and topical allusions. In Burbank, Los Angeles, the Troubadour Theater Company’s works (discussed further in Chapter Two) provide similar levels of punning, and a high concentration of extremely local and constantly changing topical, ephemeral, references. Audiences familiar with the interpretive requirements of these productions maintain a high degree of alertness for multiple meanings, allusions and in-jokes, presumably in the same way that nineteenth-century audiences familiar with the modus operandi of pantomimes and extravaganzas did when attending Shakespearean burlesques.

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It is certainly true that one of the pleasures of attending this type of production is the awareness, drawn from others’ laughter, that meanings are being grasped by others which one has missed oneself. However, a further pleasure, which Schoch does not take into account, is the communal (re)construction of meaning – or at least a discussion of the reason for others’ laughter – among audience members, during interval or post- show drinks, while travelling home, and in conversations for days afterwards. The virtual exchanges on YouTube discussion boards in which allusions and puns are clarified among viewers of the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s Shakespeare productions (discussed in Chapter Six) might be thought of as the internet equivalent of post-show drinks, as might the messages on discussion boards and fan sites for other modern pun- and allusion-heavy shows such as the American animated series Family

Guy and the Australian comedy Kath and Kim. Schoch’s statement that ‘no spectator

[…] was ever a perfect interpreter’ may well be correct, but that is not to say that ‘there was no moment of original spectatorial mastery’, or at least a sense that spectatorial mastery had been achieved, even if that sense of mastery might arise after (or in the gaps within) the performance event. To experience such works is not to feel that mastery is impossible or undesirable. The awareness that one is never a perfect interpreter of these works oneself is not the end point: there is a pleasure in recognising the value of one’s own imperfect interpretations and those of one’s friends, that, when pieced together and argued through, can provide a sense of communal spectatorial mastery that does not privilege a single meaning apparently inherent in the work, but that acknowledges the potential for multiple meanings and values the existence of multiple viewpoints on a single event.

While Shakespearean burlesques have been quite extensively covered by modern criticism, their use of existing songs is one area that has had relatively little

113 attention paid to it. I therefore end this historical section with a brief discussion of a late nineteenth-century American example of a Shakespearean burlesque, John Kendrick

Bangs’ Katharine (1888).108 Katharine burlesques the plot of The Taming of the Shrew without the Induction, and incorporates versions of songs from Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. Wells notes that it is unusual among Shakespearean burlesques both for its length (it spans five acts) and for being the only nineteenth-century burlesque of The

Shrew that Wells is aware of. Katharine was also unusual in terms of its staging: its first performance was at the Metropolitan Opera where it played ‘for one consecutive night’ at a cost of $5000, performed by young army officers ‘as a charitable performance to endow hospital beds for militiamen’. Wells notes that the young man who played the title role modelled himself on Ada Rehan’s recent performance in the role.109

As Ruddigore, Gilbert and Sullivan’s latest comic opera, had only opened in

New York the year before, and The Yeoman of the Guard was still in the process of creation, the use of Gilbert and Sullivan songs brought Katharine right up to the minute.

These contemporary popular songs combined with visual references to modern-day

America to ensure that the gender conflict of The Taming of the Shrew was given contemporary American relevance, even if Katharine’s setting is ostensibly still Padua.

For example, Petrucio (sic) hires uniformed messenger boys from ‘the ADT’, the

American District Telegraph company, to forcibly place Katharine on his horse. Verbal

108 John Kendrick Bangs, Katharine: A Travesty (1888) in Stanley Wells, Nineteenth-century Shakespeare Burlesques, vol. 5, 219-303. 109 Wells, Nineteenth-century Shakespeare Burlesques, vol. 5, xii-xiii. For a discussion of Ada Rehan’s ‘fiery, imperious character’ as Katharina, see Elizabeth Schafer, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’: Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15-18. Incidentally, the 1887 production that Rehan starred in contained a legacy of Reynolds and Bishop’s works: it incorporated one of Bishop’s songs, ‘Should he upbraid’, written for their version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, at the beginning of act 5, scene 2, beginning a trend for using that song in that position. Schafer, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, 17, 220. 114 topical references reinforce this sense of modernity. For instance, when Katharine threatens to hit Petrucio, he replies ‘All right, Sullivan, I’ll take care’, to which

Katharine replies, ‘Sullivan, sayst thou?’110 The primary reference here is to the champion boxer John L. Sullivan (1858-1918), known as the Boston Strong Boy, but a secondary reference to Sir Arthur Sullivan is clearly available in the context of a burlesque that borrows his music: the juxtaposition of these two different personalities with the same name and the possibility that one might confuse the two (and that one might draw parallels between Katharine and a famous male boxer) adds to the punning humour of the piece as well as to its modernity.

Unfortunately, the published text contains very few indications of the music to which the songs were sung. These indications are restricted to self-referential moments, such as when Petrucio asks the orchestra to play ‘It never would be missed’ before he sings the ‘Little List’ song from The Mikado, or when Lucentio ‘tunes up and begins to sing “A wandering minstrel, I”’ (also from The Mikado), only to have Bianca tell him,

‘Kindly musician, give us a rest;/ That tune’s more or less of a nut from the chest’.111

However, in many cases it is clear which songs from Gilbert and Sullivan are being parodied. Music must have had a significant impact in performance, appropriately enough given the venue of the first production: that production featured a mixed choir of seventy-five singers alongside the soldier performers, and each act ends with a chorus, including versions of ‘The Threatened Cloud Has Passed Away’, the rousing act-1 finale of The Mikado in act 1 and ‘When the Foeman Bears His Steel’, for the chorus of policemen in The Pirates of Penzance in act 2.112

110 Bangs, Katharine, 252. 111 Bangs, Katharine, 258, 296. 112 Bangs, Katharine, 235-36, 256. 115

Comedy and meaning arise partly from the revoicing of songs for number and gender. For example, in an early number for Lucentio and Tranio, ‘Two little dudes from Pisa, we’, the combination of American slang and the revoicing of the trio from

The Mikado ‘Three little maids from school’ for two men instead of three women provides some of the humour.113 However, meaning also arises from revoicing.

Katharine opens act 2 with what appears to be a .114 Other than Mad

Margaret’s participation in the ‘Matter’ trio from Ruddigore, women in Gilbert and

Sullivan do not usually sing patter songs, songs that demonstrate skill and agility in the performer more than they depict the emotional life of the character. Here revoicing sets

Katharine out as someone of an independent and agile cast of mind, in contrast to

Bianca, whose outward conformism to an apparently submissive form of femininity is set out in her strong links to Gilbert and Sullivan’s ingénues, particularly Ruddigore’s

Rose Maybud and the eponymous Patience. Not only is Bianca linked to Rose by others (the chorus sings ‘Bianca’s as fair as the month of May’, presumably to the tune of ‘Fair is Rose as bright May day’), but she demonstrates her apparent conformity by singing ‘The Etiquette Song’, beginning ‘If etiquette permitted me’, a parody of Rose’s etiquette song, ‘If somebody there chanced to be’.115

Predating by almost a century Charles Marowitz’s Shrew, his 1973 tragic -style reworking of Shakespeare’s play, in its expansion and intensification of

Petruchio’s thuggishness, Katharine delivers its message through comedy, a large part of which lies in its confrontation with misogyny and its exposure of the mechanics of female oppression. Instead of following nineteenth-century fashion and presenting

113 Bangs, Katharine, 224-25. 114 Bangs, Katharine, 237. I have been unable to match this song with music from the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire. 115 Bangs, Katharine, 227-28, 257. 116

Petrucio as a ‘loveable rogue’ figure, a high-spirited gentleman who pretends to take a cruel line only for Katharine’s ultimate benefit, Katharine’s Petrucio is presented more or less as a psychopath possessed of male institutional and financial privilege.116

Petrucio introduces himself to Katharine’s father, Baptista, in a song, ‘I am the very embodiment/ Of a most outrageous temperament’, a version of the Lord Chancellor’s song ‘The Law is the true embodiment’ from Iolanthe.117 After introducing himself over two stanzas, he lists a series of crimes that he claims ‘arise from temper alone’:

I murdered my cook, the coffee was cold; I scalped my scullion who went and told, I stabbed my coachman for daring to jest, I lynched a valet for wearing my vest. I struck my mother, and thrashed my dad, For daring to say that they thought me bad. Indeed, dear sir, I grieve to state, I’m a most reprehensible reprobate.118

In setting out his crimes as the result of temper, Petrucio puts Katharine’s tantrums firmly in the shade. However, he finishes the song with a suggestion that not just temper but a taste for cruel violence might lie behind his crimes:

Wife-beating’s a crime that I’ve never yet tried, But we’ll see how it works on my tempersome bride. I’m longing, dear sir, I grieve to state, To be that kind of a reprobate.119

Spousal abuse is here firmly categorised as a violent crime: victim blaming is not on this adaptation’s agenda.

Apparently unperturbed by Petrucio’s revelations, Baptista consents to his request to marry his daughter. Here not only do we have an abusive and collusive

116 For a discussion of nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century Petruchios, see Schafer, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, 12-30. 117 Bangs, Katharine, 246-47. 118 Bangs, Katharine, 246-47. 119 Bangs, Katharine, 247. 117 patriarchy depicted in the form of a father and a husband to be: the use of the Lord

Chancellor’s song also associates the abuse of women with political institutional power

(reinforced subsequently when Petrucio sings a version of the Mikado’s song). Later,

Petrucio’s access to money and his ability to hire others’ labour (indirectly, through a corporation) to assist in his subjugation of Katharine implicates the capitalist system in an unfairly gendered division of power: ‘I have means to enforce the laws I enact. ’Tis the power of wealth’.120 Petrucio’s power is demonstrated by him placing a ducat into a slot, whereupon a trapdoor opens and a chorus of messengers immediately runs in ready to do his bidding. Capitalism knows no moral beyond the ability to pay, and implicates those labouring under it in its amorality in relation to fellow humans. An individual, particularly one without money of her own, cannot easily escape its reach: as Katharine exclaims, ‘Oh, horror! The minions of corporate power/ I cannot resist’.121 Katharine thus displays more progressive credentials than many later engagements with

Shakespeare’s plays (including jukebox-musical versions) that focus on modern issues of inequality based on aspects of personal identity without tackling or even gesturing towards the political and economic system that underpins and produces inequality.

However, as with many modern jukebox musicals, the political effects of this burlesque are not straightforward. Here and elsewhere, that discourse on social and political issues is negotiated through comic song lightens the tone of discussion. On the one hand, this might have the effect of making serious and potentially challenging subject matter approachable for those not especially politically engaged; on the other, particularly for those deeply invested in the status quo, it might so trivialise progressive

120 Bangs, Katharine, 270. 121 Bangs, Katharine, 272. 118 arguments on social issues as to render them as comic as the songs and comic action that provide a vehicle for them.

Petrucio appears to come prepared for outbursts of temper: shortly before he meets Katharine he opens his valise and reveals his personal portable weaponry, in what appears to be a spoken first cousin to Samuel’s sung distribution of the tools of the pirates’ trade in the finale of The Pirates of Penzance:

First, here’s my cannon and my shot, A mitrailleuse, a coal that’s hot; A Colt’s revolver and a club’ll Do quite a deal to repress the trouble. Then, if she tries to use her fists, I’ll clap these bangles on her wrists, And Grumio stands out on the green With a can of nitro-glycerine Prepared, the minute he hears me cry, To blow the whole business into the sky. These implements are in addition to the whip that, while not indicated in Shakespeare’s text, was more or less obligatory until well into the twentieth century, following its introduction in David Garrick’s afterpiece adaptation, Catherine and Petruchio

(1754).122 While this list is comic in its exaggeration, it is unlikely to have been entirely so for the first-night audience, given that the performance was given to raise money for hospital beds for soldiers.

As I discuss in Chapter Five, the texture of works that are obviously constructed from existing material makes them well placed to demonstrate the constructed nature of identity. Immediately after her patter song, Katherine displays an awareness that a woman’s identity as a shrew comes not (or not only) from her own actions, but from the discourse of others:

122 For the regular incorporation of a whip in productions of The Taming of the Shrew following its introduction in Catherine and Petruchio, see Schafer, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, 11, where she notes that Petruchio was still cracking his whip as late as 1982. 119

Please understand, Bianca, I Am cast in this play for the shrew, And take no impudence from you.123

However, by the end of the evening, Katharine has realised that scripts do not need to be followed. In a reversal of Shakespeare’s final scene, Katharine, Bianca (by now married to Lucentio) and the Widow (by now married to Hortensio, and here given a name, Laura) all resist their husbands’ demands. Katharine at first refuses to come when called, sending a message through Grumio that she will come when she pleases.

Petrucio is so confused by this that he is thrown out of his rhyming couplets into cross rhyme:

I didn’t think the play Was brought to a finish in just this way. I fully understood when I took this part, That Kate should be subdued and tamed. I suppose the author thought it smart To have me thus in public shamed.124

Lucentio is likewise perturbed by the women’s changing of the script:

I thought the libretto called for submission: There’s been a conspiracy in the intermission.125

When Kate does appear, flanked by Bianca and Laura, she brandishes Petrucio’s whip, at which Petrucio cowers on his knees. Power here is not an intrinsically gendered affair, but a question of who holds the instruments of power.

Finally, in place of Shakespeare’s Katharina’s ‘I am ashamed that women are so simple’ speech, the subject of so much critical debate as to its sincerity or irony,

Katharine gives a speech that is a model of clarity in its denunciation of ‘taming’.

Katharine predicts that her decision not to follow the script allotted to her will pave the

123 Bangs, Katharine, 237. 124 Bangs, Katharine, 299. 125 Bangs, Katharine, 299. 120 way for others, and ends with an offer not of submission, but of a division of the responsibility for managing the household:

Will Shakespeare, or Bacon, or whoever wrote the play Called Taming of the Shrew – a mad affray – Doubtless studied deeply the shrews of his day. Abuse with them may have been the means Of making things pleasant behind the scenes; But to say that Cupid can be knouted into line, That aggravation is the cure for tempers such as mine, That boorish behavior alone inspires respect, And makes a woman honor the groom-elect – Why I deny that the moral’s fair. What has happened here, will happen elsewhere. And to Bacon or Shakespeare I would publicly say That the modern shrew isn’t built that way. Now if Petrucio to this fact will agree The management of home he may divide with me.

Petrucio accepts, and ends with a moral before the final chorus

Sweet Katharine, of your remarks I recognize the force. Don’t strive to tame a woman as you would a horse.

Here Katharine’s journey towards rewriting the script assigned to her functions as a mise en abyme of the burlesque’s willingness to rewrite Shakespeare’s scripts and

Gilbert’s lyrics; it also serves as a model for modern Americans – men and women, soldiers and civilians – who might choose to rewrite the social scripts assigned to them.

Approaching these earlier works with attention to their use of existing songs thus reveals links between apparently diverse forms of historical engagements with

Shakespeare’s plays; it also brings out a complexity in individual works that has often been missed in critical literature and that contributes to a nuanced tradition of adaptation as a form of criticism and interpretation. Viewing jukebox-musical versions of

Shakespeare as part of a diachronic continuum of engagements with Shakespeare as well as part of a synchronic continuum of modern jukebox musicals draws attention to

121 shared thematic concerns, in particular issues surrounding gender and other forms of identity. It also points to shared requirements of a specific set of reception competencies in their audiences, and their strategies of inviting interpretation rather than attempting to present a readily graspable meaning. An understanding of jukebox musicals, in particular their practice of revoicing, thus illuminates earlier engagements with Shakespeare’s plays, while an understanding of these historical forebears gives weight to some of the practices and approaches of jukebox-musical versions of the plays. The following chapters consider case studies of jukebox-musical versions of

Shakespeare, revealing their range and diversity but also bringing out a number of shared practices and concerns, many of which are also features of these ballad operas, operatic spectacles and burlesques.

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CHAPTER TWO

RECEPTION, STRUCTURE AND THE CARNIVALESQUE: BELL SHAKESPEARE AND THE QUEENSLAND THEATRE COMPANY’S 1998 KING LEAR, AND THE WORKS OF THE TROUBADOUR THEATER COMPANY:

This chapter develops a theme begun in the previous chapter’s discussion of

Reynolds and Bishop’s Comedy of Errors, namely the relationship of the song to a production’s wider structure. It takes as its primary examples a co-production by Bell

Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company of King Lear, directed by Barrie

Kosky, that toured Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney in 1998, and the series of Shakespeare-based works by the Troubadour Theater Company (known locally as

‘the Troubies’, and referred to as such for the rest of this chapter) that began with 12th

Dog Night in 1999 in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank and that has continued with at least one production a year since then.1 Although I draw on other examples of the

Troubies’ works, I focus particularly on their 2013 production of A Midsummer

Saturday Night’s Fever Dream, five performances of which I attended at the Falcon

Theatre, Burbank.2 While later chapters each deal with a single example of a jukebox-

1 To date, the Troubies have produced the following jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays, using music from specific sources: 12th Dog Night (1999: Twelfth Night/ Three Dog Night); A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream (2000/1, revised 2013: A Midsummer Night’s Dream/ music from the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever); Romeo Hall and Juliet Oates (2001: Romeo and Juliet/ Hall and Oates); All’s Kool That Ends Kool (2002: All’s Well That Ends Well/ Kool and the Gang); Fleetwood Macbeth (2003; revised 2011: Macbeth/ ); The Comedy of (2005: The Comedy of Errors/ Aerosmith); Hamlet, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince of Denmark (2005: Hamlet/ Prince); Much Adoobie Brothers About Nothing (2006: Much Ado About Nothing/ The Doobie Brothers); OthE.L.O. (2007: /); As Like It (2008: As You Like It/ U2); A Wither’s [sic] Tale (2010: A Winter’s Tale/ Bill Withers); Two Gentlemen of Chicago (2012: The Two Gentlemen of Verona/ Chicago). No new Shakespeare production was performed in 2014, although the 2013 version of A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream went on tour in California. Steven Stanley notes that director Matt Walker ‘apologises in the pre-show announcements for the misplaced apostrophe’ in the title of A Wither’s Tale: Steven Stanley, ‘A Wither’s Tale’, StageSceneLA, 26 August 2010, http://www.stagescenela.com/2010/08/a- withers-tale/. 2 I attended the evening performance of Friday 5 July, and the matinee and evening performances of Saturday 6 and Sunday 7 July 2013. In my discussions of A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream, undated references indicate that the aspect under discussion 123 musical version of Shakespeare, usually with a primary focus on the interpretation of the whole work, this chapter focuses on the modes of construction that allow the meeting of existing songs and a Shakespearean play to function as a coherent performance work. A further focus is on the description of the wide range of effects achievable by the use of existing songs in the context of a Shakespearean plot. One such effect is an invocation – to a greater or lesser degree – of the carnivalesque. This chapter therefore also explores the ways in which productions have offered, withheld, controlled and released aspects of the carnivalesque.

Both the Australian King Lear and the first of the Troubies’ productions were performed at the very end of the twentieth century, before the term ‘jukebox musical’ was coined. While King Lear was criticised on a number of grounds, it was still usually discussed as a production of Shakespeare rather than as a musical or other form of adaptation. Although, for some, the lack of a redemptive ending represented a betrayal of Shakespeare’s text, the inclusion of songs did so only rarely. Audiences for the

Troubies’ works are in an unusual position in having had the opportunity to familiarise themselves with multiple examples of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare before the concept of the jukebox musical had become more widespread. As a result, a form of local criticism has arisen, in which their works are judged for the closeness of ‘fit’ between song and dramatic context, rather than on specific meanings that might arise from that fit. Recently, commentators have begun to discuss the Troubies’ works in terms of jukebox musicals. At the same time, they have begun to review other locally performed jukebox musicals in the context of the Troubies’ works. This chapter

occurred in all five performances. I base my analysis of King Lear on viewings of two video recordings held by Bell Shakespeare of a performance of the production in Sydney, one with a full stage shot from a fixed camera, the other with close ups from several cameras. I am grateful to Bell Shakespeare for allowing me access to view these recordings. 124 therefore begins the discussions of its examples by engaging with the question of how audiences have received them.

In the following section, I analyse the 1998 King Lear’s use of an eclectic mixture of songs, focusing particularly on two ways in which it structures that use. On the one hand, it draws on Shakespeare’s own dramatic structure to incorporate existing songs in a way that reflects the performance texture of Shakespeare’s play and enhances the theme of madness, both performed and experienced. On the other, it engages with the structural devices and conventions of musical theatre to create both the conditions in which the Fool might plausibly critique power, and the vehicle for that criticism, and to provide a poignant insight into Cordelia’s viewpoint late in the play. I then discuss the way in which a combination of invoking and withholding aspects of the carnivalesque contributes to the sense of bleakness felt by several reviewers. In the subsequent section, I consider the ways in which the Troubies handle the challenges of structuring works in which the choice of songs appears to be guided more by the effect created by the combination of the title of a Shakespearean play and the source of the songs rather than by the obvious suitability of the songs for inclusion in that play. I then discuss the way in which the release of communal festive celebration is achieved at the end of A

Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream by a careful management of aspects of the carnivalesque from a point before the beginning of the production itself.

King Lear

Production and Reception

The 1998 King Lear was co-produced in prestigious theatre venues – the

Playhouse, Canberra; the Atheneum, Melbourne; the Queensland Performing Arts

Complex, Brisbane; and the Sydney Opera House – by Bell Shakespeare and the

125

Queensland Theatre Company, two respected companies with primarily naturalistic performance aesthetics and a history of framing their works as productions – rather than adaptations – of Shakespeare. Although, as a self-contained piece of theatre, the production framed itself clearly as non-naturalistic from the outset, publicity material did not frame it as anything other than a production of Shakespeare’s play, setting up expectations that King Lear would not differ substantially from the companies’ earlier engagements with Shakespeare.3 In contrast to these earlier engagements, King Lear drew on a range of expressionist and Brechtian techniques that departed from the predominantly naturalistic acting styles of the two co-producing companies.4 These often required a willingness and ability of the audience to ‘read’ the stage in a non- naturalistic way that paid attention to form as well as verbal content both within and across scenes. For example, early scenes took the form of tableaux in which blocking symbolised power relationships in a form of Brechtian Arrangement, and apparently distantly related scenes were planned so that blocking, costumes or other theatrical sign systems drew attention to similarities and differences between characters and dramatic situations, another form of Brechtian dramaturgy.5 Thus Edgar’s faeces-smeared mouth

3 Rachel Fensham analyses one poster for the play that does not suggest an adaptation in To Watch Theatre: Essays on Genre and Corporeality (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009), 73. A further graphic, used for posters and other publicity material, that carries only the words ‘The Bell Shakespeare Company. John BELL as King LEAR directed by Barrie KOSKY’ is viewable at http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Theater/artifact/16876/. 4 The physical aspects of the production as well as its reception have been discussed in some detail by Adrian Kiernander and Rachel Fensham. However, both these writers focus primarily on the role of the performing body in the production, with only passing reference to its incorporation of songs. See Adrian Kiernander, ‘The Unclassic Body in the Theatre of John Bell’, in Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance, ed. Peta Tait (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 124-35 (especially 130-31); Rachel Fensham, To Watch Theatre: Essays on Genre and Corporeality (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009), especially 73-104. 5 Brecht discusses this use of ‘rhyming’ scenes in relation to the actor in his Messingkauf Dialogues: ‘The last scene estranges the first (just as the first estranges the last, which constitutes the real impact of the play). The actor adopts procedures that produce V-effects’ Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks, edited by Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman, trans. by Charlotte Ryland et al. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 67. 126 and underpants in his disguise as Poor Tom were mirrored in his brother Edmund’s bloodstained mouth and underpants as he sat on the throne in the last scene, with, as

Richard Madeleine puts it, ‘both his tongue and other boneless organ bitten off by his lovers [Goneril and Regan], in what was presumably over-competitive foreplay’.6 In addition, gestures, movement and spoken delivery were often stylised, narrowing the gap between speech and song, everyday movement and dance.

The production notoriously split audiences. While it was a sell-out success in

Sydney, it provoked sometimes extremely negative reactions, particularly in Melbourne and Brisbane. Public expressions of objections to the play ran from the journalistic reviews of professional critics, through letters of complaint from audience members in newspaper letters columns, to a physical attack by a Brisbane audience member who grabbed the actor, Tom Clooney, who played one of Lear’s knights, after the show and stabbed at him with an umbrella ‘while screaming accusations of filth-mongering’.7

John Bell, the founder of Bell Shakespeare and the actor who played Lear in the production, writes that ‘a lot of people walked out, especially in Brisbane where some of the actors were abused at the stage door. Sometimes people yelled “Rubbish” and booed at the curtain call’.8 Queensland Performing Arts Complex, the receiving house in which King Lear was performed in Brisbane, overtly distanced itself from the production, presumably to divert requests for refunds: Richard Fotheringham notes that, for the Brisbane performances, ‘the ushers were issued with cards to give to patrons

6 Richard Madeleine, ‘As Unstable as the King but Never Daft(?): Texts and Variant Readings of King Lear’, Sydney Studies in Literature 28 (2002), 3-20 (16). 7 Kim Sweetman and Amy Ewen, ‘Lear Drives Audiences to Violence’, Daily Telegraph, 9 October 1998. 8 John Bell, The Time of My Life (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002), 264. For a monograph study of John Bell’s engagement with the production of Shakespeare in Australia, and of a specifically Australian Shakespeare, see Adrian Kiernander, John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre (Leiden: Brill/ Rodopi, 2015). 127 bearing a disclaimer from the venue management and including a number to ring to complain’.9 However, he argues that performance conditions local to Brisbane might explain some of the particularly negative reaction there: Twelfth Night, Romeo and

Juliet and A Winter’s Tale, the three Shakespearean plays produced by the Queensland

Theatre Company before King Lear, were all sponsored by the Heritage Building

Society, with marketing for the productions ‘suggesting their company’s “Heritage” advertising strategy and high-art prestige’.10 The overt linking of Shakespeare with

‘heritage’ in the previous productions of the Queensland Theatre Company may therefore account for some of the vocally negative reception of the resolutely non- heritage King Lear in Brisbane compared to other Australian cities.

Recurring themes in negative receptions of the production were complaints about its graphic sexual and violent imagery, its perceived intention to shock and offend for the sake of it, and its failure to meet interpretive expectations of Shakespeare’s play

– specifically an expectation that the play would centre on Lear and end with a message of redemption. Some examples of negative criticism on these grounds are: ‘Kosky, it seems to me, has ignored one essential element of this strange, meandering play: that at its heart stands a fundamental concern with human nature, with people, their stupidity as well as their nobility, with desires that destroy but may also redeem’. 11 ‘An act of dereliction by an undereducated director’.12 ‘I am haunted by images of violence and inhuman acts … [I] feel grief that, instead of a lasting feeling of compassion, pathos and an appreciation of family obligation, I am left with horrid images of blood, human

9 Richard Fotheringham, ‘Shakespeare in Queensland: A Cultural-economic Approach’, in O Brave New World: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage, ed. John Golder and Richard Madeleine (Sydney: Currency Press, 2001), 218-35 (219). 10 Fotheringham, ‘Shakespeare in Queensland’, 219. 11 Andrew Riemer, ‘Shaking Up Shakespeare’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 October 1998. 12 Peter Craven, ‘Kinky Lear’, Eureka Street, October 1998. 128 waste, cruelty and an overwhelming feeling of bleakness’.13 ‘[T]he players dress in costumes and perform acts that go beyond the bawdy to depravity. The blinding of the king [sic] probes new depths of sickening horror. … On opening night, I was not surprised that a number of people walked out. They made a proper protest against the use of tawdry and offensive theatrical tricks in the name of art’.14 ‘I was not shocked by the Queensland Theatre Company’s avant-garde production of King Lear but saddened.

It upset me that the producer … placed more emphasis on its vicious cruelty than on scenes of remorse and compassion’.15 ‘The director’s two primary aims of the director

[sic] seemed to be to prove his erudition and to shock parts of his audience. Lear’s band of acolytes were a pack of dogs endowed with massive phalluses. Kosky was questioned on the relevance and taste of this inclusion by a respectful older gentleman at

[a forum organized by Bell Shakespeare to debate whether Shakespeare was a literary or theatrical writer]. Kosky finished his justification by flippantly declaring that “there’s nothing wrong with cocks onstage – or offstage for that matter”. This moment was indicative of Kosky's broader mission to offend the sensibilities of the more conservative parts of his audience’.16 However, negative reviews specifically relating to the use of songs were extremely unusual, and the prominent inclusion of existing songs did not appear to disturb a sense that the production was fundamentally a production of

King Lear, rather than, for example, a form of musical theatre.

Peter Craven’s extended, excoriating and barely coherent review for the Jesuit magazine Eureka Street is a rare example of the production being discussed in terms of a musical:

13 K. Williams, letter to Courier-Mail, 30 September 1998. 14 Sir Theodor Bray, letter to Courier-Mail, 30 September 1998 15 H. Brier, letter to Courier-Mail, 6 October 1998. 16 Douglas McQueen-Thomson, ‘The Best of Our Time: King Brat Does King Lear’, Arena Magazine, December 1998-January 1999. 129

[…] one of the other peculiar things about this production – which really could be retitled King Lear: The Musical – is that the text is cut, not inefficiently, to what might have been a 90 or 100-minute playing time had not the rest of the time – a fair immensity of it – been filled with Kosky's interpolations … it’s hard to be fair to the residual vividness of this little cartoon opera amid all the mincing and prancing.17

Craven’s extreme negativity throughout the review is consistently directed towards

Kosky, who is held responsible for every negative aspect of the production, and in particular on the perceived influence of Kosky’s sexuality on directorial choices.

Perhaps inevitably, the stereotypical link between male homosexuality, ‘mincing and prancing’ and the musical means that this review stands out for its insistence on the production as musical theatre.

Where other reviewers, both positive and negative, focus on the horror of the production, Craven attacks it on the grounds of triviality, invoking a range of anti-gay stereotypes: the emasculating influence of homosexuality (this is a ‘Lear without balls or soul or heart’); the gay man as misogynist (‘It’s possible to muster arguments about

Lear’s sexual disgust, but this interpretation seems to be more about the director’s. It’s callow, camp misogyny’ – [unfortunately, it is unclear exactly what Craven is referring to here, but it appears related to Louise Fox’s performance as the Fool]); and the individual gay man, characterized by childishness and camp and unable to understand adult heterosexual life and culture, who is made to represent all homosexuals:

Of course there are excitements, but the real rabbit out of the hat is Kosky making such a bunny of himself. King Lear is, after all, one of the more adult plays ever written. It is also a profoundly heterosexual play; it presents the darkest of all matters between men and women. Without any hint of molestation, it presents the commonplace of a father with an excessive and blind love for his daughter. It should be a source of gay shame – it is certainly a reason to wonder – that a director of Kosky’s talents should have no imaginative understanding of this and

17 Craven, ‘Kinky Lear’. 130

that he should take a play as savage as Lear, as full of tears and rage and sex and cruelty, and reduce it to such camp fluff and folderol.18

Nonetheless, Craven’s characterisation of the production as ‘a cartoon opera’ filled with

‘mincing and prancing’ stands alone. Even among otherwise negative reviews, the incorporation of existing songs was not one of the grounds of complaint.

Indeed, even reviews and articles that otherwise faulted the production for its horror or lack of redemption found the use of songs to be one of the production’s successes. For Fiona Scott Norman, writing for Bulletin with Newsweek, ‘some scenes and characters are reinvented so ingeniously that they are luminous – Louise Fox’s

Fool, a grotesque all-singing all-dancing Little Orphan Annie, is a prime example’, while for Andrew Stevenson, writing for the Daily Telegraph, ‘the linkage of songs in a classic post-modernist montage works much better [in comparison to what is not made clear], injecting a sense of frivolity and a contemporary connection with the play’s enduring themes’.19 Andrew Riemer, reviewing the production for the Sydney Morning

Herald, and taking a generally literary rather than theatrical approach, writes that

[Kosky] may also have taken the cue for turning Lear’s Fool into a tap- dancing Shirley Temple dolly from the dying king’s cryptic remark: “And my poor fool is hang’d” (omitted in this production) which many scholars think might be a reference to Cordelia – in the archaic sense of the word “fool” as darling or favourite. That ambiguity in Lear’s dying words may have been the reason the wonderful Louise Fox performs a show-stopping routine of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” […] I think the Bard would have cheered Louise Fox and Matthew Whittet’s amazing rubber-man contortions as Edgar, the banished nobleman turned Poor Tom, the bedlam beggar.20

18 Craven, ‘Kinky Lear’. One might argue, alternatively, that a homosexual director is well placed to direct a play about the rejection of a loving child by its parent. 19 Fiona Scott-Norman, ‘Guts, Gore, Gonads’, Bulletin with Newsweek, 22 September 1998; Andrew Stevenson, ‘Bell Makes Clear the Madness of Lear’, Daily Telegraph, 23 October 1998. 20 Andrew Riemer, ‘Shaking Up Shakespeare’. The newspaper emphasised Riemer’s literary credentials in a footer to the review: ‘Andrew Riemer is a writer, the Herald’s chief book reviewer, a former associate professor of English at the University of Sydney and one of the editors of the Challis Shakespeare’. 131

In Gabriella Coslovich’s article for The Age – in which she refers to the ‘impudence’ of

Kosky, ‘stubbled, pierced and late. He’s just got up, although it’s well past noon’– she writes:

the fool, an integral character in the play, is a Shirley-Temple look-alike who performs an unforgettable medley, a twisted ode to daddies that draws on the tunes of Cole Porter to Queen, Boney M to Abba. Think Babes in Toyland meets Chicago – on LSD.21

While Ken Longworth, the Newcastle Herald’s theatre critic, found the production difficult to follow due to cuts in the text and left at the interval, he nonetheless managed to extract meaning from the incorporation of songs:

Kosky’s Lear is performed like a burlesque show, complete with a discordant pianist (aptly played by Kosky). The King’s Fool is here played by a woman in Shirley Temple get-up. She enters singing ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ to pound home the message that Lear has been dudded by his daughters.22

Although I disagree with his interpretation (as I discuss below, the number has its ambiguities, but one of its clearer functions is ‘pounding home the message that Lear’ has ‘dudded’ Cordelia rather than being dudded himself), that he saw the inclusion of this song as creating meaning in a production that he otherwise rejected for its lack of clarity is not insignificant.

Song placement in Shakespeare’s King Lear and the 1998 production: performance texture, surprise and the carnivalesque

In this and the following section, I argue that songs in the production served at least two purposes. One group, placed where songs or verses occur in Shakespeare’s text, produced a surprising sense of the surreal that might be argued to reflect an early modern performance texture. A second group functioned as a more or less overt

21 Gabriella Coslovich, ‘Wild Leap for Lear’, The Age, 31 August 1998. 22 Ken Longworth, ‘Injury and Insult’, Newcastle Herald, 22 October 1998. 132 critique of Lear’s behaviour. As the reviews suggest, the inclusion of songs went alongside significant and obvious textual cuts. These resulted in several of

Shakespeare’s characters being removed entirely, including Cornwall, Albany,

Burgundy and the King of France, along with a range of more minor characters.23 The absence of Lear’s sons-in-law made clearer the parallels between Lear and his daughters and Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund, resulting in a production strongly concerned with family dynamics, particularly father-child relations. As we shall see, songs reinforced the focus on these relations. The overall effect of the cuts, combined with the reordering of scenes and the replacement of reported action with onstage action towards the end, was a particularly bleak and unredemptive version of the play. For example, opportunities for bravura acting for Lear in the last scene were reduced: Lear’s

‘Howl, howl, howl!’ (5.3.255) was cut, and the pietà-style symbolism that

Shakespeare’s text invites as the aged Lear staggers in carrying Cordelia’s corpse was not available, Cordelia having been murdered on stage, her body left lying on the ground. Indeed, the deaths of all three of Lear’s daughters, each of which occurs off stage in Shakespeare’s text, were staged in the final scene in this production in excruciating detail. Cordelia was murdered by Goneril, strangled with a plastic bag, following a long struggle during which the cries and gasps of both actresses were amplified by body microphones. Goneril then killed Regan in the same way, before stabbing herself to a bloody death. As well as having a particularly bleak ending, the production did not shy away from depicting or expanding upon the horrors implied by

23 John Bell’s marked-up copy of the New Penguin Shakespeare edition, which conflates the Quarto and Folio texts, for the 1998 production is held in Bell Shakespeare’s administration office in Sydney. Textual references to King Lear here are therefore to William Shakespeare, King Lear, edited by G. K. Hunter, revised ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). 133 the text: instead of Cornwall and Regan gouging out Gloucester’s eyes, Goneril and

Regan sucked them out and ate them.

However, the production was far from entirely bleak and horror-filled, especially in the first half (the interval occurred after the blinding of Gloucester in act 3, scene 7), in which music and song played a prominent part, enlivening the performance texture and also injecting a note of comedy. Moreover, songs provided a similar function to some of the cut text. For instance, a large proportion of the Fool’s lines were cut, especially those likely to be obscure for modern audiences due to their archaic vocabulary and references to early modern folk wisdom, to the extent that only forty lines remained out of the Fool’s one hundred lines in act 1, scene 4.24 Nonetheless, the

Fool’s ability to criticise Lear was not lost. Some of these lines were replaced by songs, the first of which used musical theatre conventions to establish the Fool as a character entitled and expected to transcend social norms, and thus able to critique the king.

While several soliloquies remained, audience asides were cut. Again, however, although Cordelia was denied her two asides, at 1.1.62 and 1.1.75b-78, her viewpoint was expressed with great impact in a duet with the Fool inserted into act 4, scene 6, after Edgar’s ‘Bear free and patient thoughts’ (4.6.79).

If the incorporation of a number of existing songs, often alongside dance routines, was a surprise for many audience members, it was of course hardly an innovation. The Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear is ‘wont to be so full of songs’

(1.4.167), a feature that may have showcased the talents of Robert Armin, the comic actor likely to have created the role of the Fool. Catherine Henze suggests that Armin’s talents included ‘scripted improvisation’ in song, the ability to surprise audiences by

24 In this scene, lines 87-126, 128-129a, 149-166, 184-196 and 312 to the end of the scene were cut. 134 inserting apparently spontaneous sung passages.25 Indeed, Shakespeare’s King Lear is particularly rich in songs. By Henze’s count, only The Tempest, Twelfth Night (ten songs each) and Henry IV, part 2 (seven songs) from Shakespeare's output contain a greater number.26 With four songs for the Fool, one song for Edgar in his role as Poor

Tom, and a shared song for the Fool and Edgar/Poor Tom, Lear is unusually rich in songs among Shakespeare’s tragedies – only Hamlet has as many songs as Lear, with five songs for Ophelia and one for the Clown – and even more unusual in that all the songs are for characters who would have been played by adult men.27 It is likely that at

25 On Armin, see H. F. Lippincott, ‘King Lear and the Fools of Robert Armin’, Shakespeare Quarterly 26:3 (1975), 243-53; David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), especially 136-63 and 182-91; Catherine A. Henze, ‘“Wise Enough to Play the Fool”: Robert Armin and Shakespeare’s Sung Songs of Scripted Improvisation’, Comparative Drama 47:4 (2013): 419- 49. 26 See Catherine Henze’s table of songs in Shakespeare’s plays (‘“Wise Enough to Play the Fool”’, 440-42), with the caveat that it is not always possible to establish conclusively whether a particular set of lines was designed to be sung in performance: there may well have been more sung fragments of songs in early performances. In his Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), Ross W. Duffin, for example, tends to assume that most lines that might represent quotations from song lyrics would have been sung in early performances, although this does not tie in with the Folio’s use of indentation, lineation and stage direction practice to indicate at least some sung passages. In an appendix to his New Penguin Shakespeare edition of the play, G. K. Hunter weighs up the likelihood of various non-blank verse lines in King Lear being either sung or rhythmically intoned (William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. G. K. Hunter, 337-43) and does not differ widely from Henze in his tentative conclusions. Although Henze also gives the number of lines allocated to songs in the text, it is unwise to rely on these as a measure of the relative amount of sung text in the plays, as in some cases the Folio or Quartos provide no song text (for example, ‘Here the Lady sings a Welsh song’, William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan, Arden 3rd Series (London: Thompson Learning, 2002), 3.1.240, SD) and in others it is not clear whether a single line represents a song fragment or acts as a cue for the whole of an existing song to be sung (for example, Edgar’s ‘Come o’er the burn, Bessy, to me’ in King Lear, 3.6.25). In general, the raw number of songs is arguably a better guide to their impact, corresponding to the number of times the otherwise spoken texture of the play is interrupted. An exception might be Justice Silence’s drunken interjections of five songs over the course of fifty-six lines in Henry IV, part 2 and an additional interjection twenty-seven lines later. These might be received as one comically incongruous interjection (5.3.17-73) in which Silence lives up neither to his name nor his previous behaviour, and one dramatically frustrating interjection that holds up Pistol’s already prolix delivery of the news of the king’s death (5.3.100) (William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, part 2, ed. A. R. Humphreys, Arden Shakespeare 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1966)). 27 Henze’s table of the songs in Shakespeare’s plays and their allocation to characters shows no sung songs in Titus Andronicus; two songs for Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet; one song for Lucius (a young boy character) in Julius Caesar; five songs for Ophelia and one for the Clown in Hamlet; two songs for Iago, one for Desdemona and one for Emilia in Othello; no songs in 135 least some of these songs were existing songs already known to audiences, or were set to existing song tunes: while we are reasonably confident of existing contemporary song tunes for only two of the songs in King Lear – the Fool’s ‘Then they for sudden joy did weep’ (1.4.171-73) and Edgar’s ‘Come o’er the burn, Bessy, to me’ (3.6.25), it is likely that more were sung to existing tunes now lost.28 F. W. Sternfeld, in his study of music in Shakespearean tragedy, distinguishes two types of song: tragic song, used to supplement tragic speech, and comic song performed in a tragic context, which

‘deprives them of their wholly comic character and makes them part of the general artistic design’.29 Unlike the tragic songs for Ophelia and Desdemona, the songs in

Shakespeare’s Lear are comic. However, in line with Sternfeld’s analysis, they do not simply provide , but form part of the general artistic design, alongside the

Fool’s proverbs and folk wisdom, allowing the Fool to critique Lear’s actions (albeit obliquely) and acting as an enhancement to Edgar’s disguise as a madman.

Sternfeld points out Shakespeare’s careful craftsmanship in the incorporation of songs into spoken scenes. Noting that the songs are found in passages of prose within comic scenes, themselves inset into passages of blank verse, he argues that this provides layers of surprise within the performance texture. He writes:

Shakespeare’s artistry in the comic scenes resembles a prism whose many facets surprise and delight the onlooker: the shock of the unexpected is followed by the delight of discovery. The puns and jokes, trivial and lewd as they may be, throw an ironic but also deeply moving light upon the central tragic frame. We no sooner come to accept their jocular prose when we suffer another sea-change, for in the hands of a great dramatic poet the occasional infusion of song partakes of magic. This effect of verse within prose, of surprise within surprise, is comparable to the dramatic illusion of the play within the play.30

Macbeth until the incorporation of songs for the witches in a revival; one song for a boy in ; no songs in either Coriolanus or Timon of Athens. 28 See F. W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 175-92. 29 Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 9. 30 Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 159. 136

By cutting these songs, directors lose elements of surprise and artistry. However, as

Sternfeld notes, ‘this compounding of the tragic and comic genres is one aspect which critics of Shakespeare’s tragedies have found difficult to accept’.31 Indeed, the Fool’s violation of the unity of tone resulted in his role being excised in stage versions from

Nahum Tate’s 1681 Restoration version of the play until William Charles Macready restored the character in his 1838 production.32 The Fool and his songs were thus one of the last aspects of Shakespeare’s text to return to the stage after David Garrick began the process of hybridising Tate’s and Shakespeare’s versions in 1756. Edgar’s songs were clearly problematic even as late as the end of the nineteenth century: cut these in his 1892 production.33 By incorporating existing popular songs – sometimes replacing Shakespeare’s songs, sometimes setting Shakespeare’s song lyrics to tunes well-known to modern audiences, and sometimes incorporating songs where

Shakespeare’s play contains none – the 1998 production reintroduced an element of surprise into what is now a very well-known play, arguably recreating to some extent the elements of surprise nested within the performance texture of early modern stagings.

The production featured songs for the Fool and Edgar at almost every place where these occur, embedded in prose, in Shakespeare’s text, and also set to well- known tunes short passages of prose or of non-blank verse (also embedded in prose) usually assumed to have been rhythmically intoned or spoken by the Fool or Edgar. 34

For example, the Fool sang ‘Then they for sudden joy did weep’ (1.4.171-73) to the

Habanera (‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’) from Bizet’s Carmen, complete with

31 Sternfeld, Music in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, 8-9. 32 For the history of the Fool in performance, see J. S. Bratton, Plays in Performance: ‘King Lear’: William Shakespeare (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), 8-14. 33 Bratton, Plays in Performance, 151. 34 As the Fool and Kent were cut for the storm scene in act 3, scene 2, the Fool’s song ‘He that has and a little tiny wit’ (3.2.74-77) was cut. 137 flamenco footwork and flying skirt, while Edgar sang ‘Be thy mouth or black or white’

(3.6.65-72) to a minor-key version of ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’, later using the same tune to sing his prose lines ‘Both stile and gate, horse-way and footpath’ (4.1.55), his reply to the blinded Gloucester’s ‘Knowest thou the way to Dover?’ (4.1.54). Other songs in Shakespeare’s text were replaced entirely by well-known songs. There was a concentration of such replacement songs in act 3, scene 6, the scene of the mock trial in absentia of Goneril and Regan. Edgar’s ‘Come o’er the burn, Bessy, to me’ and the

Fool’s response ‘Her boat hath a leak’ (3.6.25-28) were replaced by a fragment of Al

Jolson’s ‘Mammy’, sung by Edgar, with the word ‘Mammy’ replaced by ‘Daddy’, while

Edgar’s ‘Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?’ (3.6.41-44) was replaced by a manic

‘la la la’ chorus of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ sung by Edgar, Lear, Kent and the Fool from inside a large box with holes in it that allowed heads and limbs to protrude so that legs appeared above hands or heads, and limbs belonging to one character appeared to belong to another. A shorter version of this chorus appeared, after Lear’s question ‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’ (3.6.76-77), this time accompanied by Irish stepdance moves à la Riverdance.

This manic ‘Ode to Joy’ appeared repeatedly throughout the mock trial – for example, an extended version was interpolated at 3.6.20, also sung by the four characters from inside the box. The display of the apparently grotesque body in the mixed-up heads and limbs and the absence of verbal sense and logic in the ‘la la la’ lyrics were part of the scene’s invocation of aspects of the carnivalesque – those aspects that either characterise carnival, a socially transformative moment of communal celebration in which everyday rules are reversed, or are a condition for its creation. The carnivalesque’s focus on what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as ‘the lower bodily strata’ and the grotesque body was present from the outset of this scene, as Edgar, dressed as Poor

138

Tom only in soiled underpants, contorted himself into what appeared to be a human spider, tasted his own faeces and smeared his face with them.35 However, as Bakhtin theorises in connection with dramatic works associated with carnival, ‘the boundaries between the play and life are intentionally erased’.36 One result of this, according to

Bakhtin, is that ‘the absence of clearly established footlights is characteristic of all popular-festive forms’.37 In contrast, King Lear maintained a rigid separation of performance and audience spaces in this scene and in the production as a whole, with a darkened auditorium and a seated audience. Moreover, it emphasised both its overt theatricality and the division between these spaces by marking the frame of the proscenium arch with lit light bulbs. The upper part of the proscenium arch was further emphasised by the presence of a scalloped curtain. The extent to which a scripted theatre performance can ever attain the status of participatory carnival is questionable, but the result of the clear demarcations between audience and performers, between ‘the play and life’, was that the aspects of the carnivalesque that the scene invoked did not elicit the sense of energetic renewal found in the communal festive laughter of participants in a carnivalised society. Instead of provoking carnival, they remained observable aspects of the carnivalesque.

That this was so need not be considered a failure of the production: the scene is a complex one in which the audience observe Lear’s disintegrating mental condition alongside Edgar’s performance of madness. If the narrative is to be understood, it is arguably more important for audiences to observe this scene carefully than participate in it. Nonetheless, careful observation is not emotionally neutral. To observe what

35 For Bakhtin on the relationship between the carnivalesque, the grotesque body and the lower bodily strata, see M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984), 303-436. 36 Bakthin, Rabelais and his World, 258. 37 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 265; see also 7, 245, 257 for similar statements. 139 appears to be a successful carnivalisation of the onstage world while feeling the lack of carnivalisation in the theatre as a whole can lead to a sense of emotional distance and exclusion not inappropriate in a play that takes rejection and exclusion as its theme, enhancing a sense of bleakness already present in the narrative.

Perhaps fittingly, given the Fool’s status, Edgar’s assumed madness and Lear’s state of mind, the use of existing songs from apparently unconnected sources in this scene cannot easily be fitted into a commentary on or a contestation of Shakespeare’s text, or the dramatic situation, or the songs used. As Erin Minear argues in relation to the potential resonances available to early modern audiences in Edgar’s ‘Come o’er the burn, Bessy, to me’ (originally a love song and later converted to a monarchical and spiritual theme in which ‘Bessy’ is Queen Elizabeth and ‘me’ is revealed to be Christ) and the Fool’s response, the songs do not so much create a commentary as provide ‘a powerful example of the almost surreal permutations possible to a song’. 38 Here the use of well-known modern songs made this sense of the surreal accessible to a modern audience.

Songs beyond Shakespeare’s

To some extent, then, the production’s incorporation of songs reflected

Shakespeare’s structural craftsmanship, and produced effects of surprise and differences in the performance texture broadly similar to those likely to have been part of the early modern experience of the play. However, the production also interpolated song and dance routines into Shakespeare’s text to an extent that justifies the production’s inclusion in this thesis as a jukebox-musical version of King Lear, even if it did not

38 Erin K. Minear, ‘“A Verse to this Note”: Shakespeare’s Haunted Songs’, The Upstart Crow 29 (2010): 11-25 (13-14). For further discussion of early modern versions of ‘Come o’er the burn, Bessy, to me’ see Sternfeld, Music in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, 167-171. 140 present itself in publicity and marketing as a musical. These additional songs included a concentration of production numbers for the Fool and Lear’s knights early in the play and a duet for Cordelia and the Fool interpolated into a much later scene, from which those characters are absent in Shakespeare’s play. As we shall see, to those open to their meaning-making potential, these songs did provide an oblique commentary in themselves, adding further layers to the production’s concerns with father-child relationships and patriarchal structures both within Shakespeare’s play and in wider society.

‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’: the Fool and the musical diva

The first appearance of song occurred in act 1, scene 4, set in Goneril’s house.

A trumpet fanfare and loud offstage barking preceded Lear’s entrance with his quarrelsome knights, who began a scene of riotous chaos, running and tumbling noisily over the set, naked to the waist apart from white caps, with black and white trousers resembling the pelts of Dalmatian dogs, and large, black, floppy prosthetic penises.

Given Lear’s dog-related insults in this scene – ‘How now! Where’s that mongrel?’

(1.4.48) and ‘You whoreson dog! You slave! You cur!’ (1.4.79-80), one possible interpretation of it is to see the costume as symbolic: Lear’s treatment of his knights effectively dehumanises them, turning them into a rowdy pack of dogs.

The chaotic stage picture provided a sharp contrast with the scene after the entrance of the Fool. Having been sent for by Lear, the Fool entered singing ‘My Heart

Belongs to Daddy’, Cole Porter’s 1938 innuendo-laden paean to the sugar daddy, following a short piano introduction played by Kosky in one of the theatre boxes.

Louise Fox as the Fool was costumed as a grotesque Shirley Temple figure in a blonde wig and what was later revealed as a short pale-yellow patterned dress that, lit by a red follow spot, appeared red in this number. Although she performed ‘My Heart Belongs

141 to Daddy’ out front rather than towards Lear, the visual link provided by Lear’s red coat and the Fool’s seemingly red dress in an otherwise blue-lit scene suggested that Lear was the ‘Daddy’ in question. While Lear remained static downstage left after the Fool’s entrance, his knights reacted enthusiastically to the Fool’s song, which quickly developed into an energetic, disciplined production number. Four knights raised the

Fool to shoulder height for a verse, giving an enthusiastic whoop as they did so.

Throughout the number they framed the centre-stage Fool-as-diva, the sole female performer surrounded by male dancer-chorus boys in the manner of one of Jerry

Herman’s eponymous mature heroines, Dolly, Mame or Mabel, rather than Shirley

Temple.

As the number moved into a dance routine, the knights and the Fool repeated

‘Daddy!’ with an increasingly frenzied delivery, leading to the Fool’s spoken interjection of Lear’s earlier lines to Cordelia, ‘Nothing will come of nothing – speak again’, an apparent taunting of Lear for his treatment of Cordelia. The number reached a frenzy of Daddy-worship as sentence structure broke down in the final bars: six iterations of ‘Daddy he treats me so’ from the knights were followed by seven iterations of ‘Daddy’, culminating in a final explosive ‘DADDY!!!! He treats me so well’ for the

Fool and the knights, the final complete line rendered ironic by the reminder of Lear’s treatment of Cordelia.

Exactly what type of ‘Daddy’ the song referred to was ambiguous. One clear interpretation was of course that the Fool’s interjection of Cordelia’s line referred to

Lear and Cordelia’s father-daughter relationship. However, the song – frequently covered by singers outside of its original dramatic context – is full of sexual double entendres and has a history of performance that relates it to the concept of the sugar daddy rather than the biological father. The song is ostensibly about the singer ‘saving

142 herself’ (‘I don’t follow through’) for her sugar daddy, whom she is ‘gonna marry’, however much she enjoys the attentions of other men. Part of the comedy of the song is in the way that these double entendres imply the extent of the attentions she is prepared to receive – apparently up to and including cunnilingus – from these men. The song in fact never makes clear whether sex is part of her arrangement with her sugar daddy, or simply abstention from sex with other men. The song was first sung by Mary Martin in the 1938 Broadway musical Leave It To Me!, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter and book by Bella and Sam Spewack (the team who later created Kiss Me, Kate) . Here

Martin’s character finds herself stranded at a station in Siberia wearing only a short fur coat, muff, hat, high heels and underwear and sings the song while performing a faux striptease for the benefit of five Siberian travellers.39 In a move typical of Cole Porter songs, the lyrics of ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ put the onus on audiences to locate double entendres, which, if recognised, can be received as bawdy meanings archly delivered under the guise of innocence, or as a sign of the singing character’s innocence in her apparent obliviousness to these bawdy meanings.40 As Frederick Ahl points out in his work on puns, ‘writers protect themselves during political and moral censorship by making it dangerous or embarrassing for others to prove their subversion. They

39 A production still is available at http://www.google.de/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjacksonupperco.files.wordpress.com% 2F2013%2F10%2Fcorbis- u1916793.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjacksonupperco.com%2Ftag%2Fleave-it-to- me%2F&h=480&w=612&tbnid=jJXsU- )nOf873xM%3A&zoom=1&docid=EyC9fFlLqYNflM&ei=st9ZVbSGHcaNsgH2w4H4Bw&tb m=isch&iact=rc&uact=3&dur=955&page=1&start=0&ndsp=21&ved=0CCMQrQMwAQ). The audience for Martin’s striptease (one of whom is a young ) appear to be Siberian travellers only from the waist up – the dress trousers and tap shoes below their fur-trimmed parkas strongly suggest that they moonlight as Broadway chorus boys. 40 For discussions and examples of Porter’s manipulation of the double entendre in other musicals, see John Clum, Something for the Boys: Musical Theatre and Gay Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 72; Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 278; and my ‘A (White) Woman’s (Ironic) Places in Kiss Me, Kate and Postwar America’, Studies in Musical Theatre 6:2 (2012): 173-86 (177-80). 143 leave the readers helpless to explain what they have noticed without appearing to indict themselves for suggesting the taboo meaning’.41 This deniability of double entendres allowed several of Porter’s bawdier lyrics to pass the cinema industry’s self-censorship in the transition to film. When Martin reprised the number in the 1946 Cole Porter biopic, Night and Day (dir. Michael Curtiz), the express mention of ‘go to Hell – I mean

Hades’ in the introduction had to be removed, but her line ‘If I invite a boy some night/

To dine on my fine Finnan haddie,/ I just adore him asking for more’ survived intact.

In Leave It To Me! and many cover versions, the song’s introduction makes clear that the ‘Daddy’ in question is ‘a sweet millionaire’ rather than a biological father.

However, this introduction was cut in King Lear. Although the linking of the Fool and

Lear by costume colour suggested that Lear was the Daddy referred to, until the Fool’s interjection of Cordelia’s lines, the lyrics and the out-front performance delivery did not clarify whether the Fool was addressing Lear as her own ‘sugar daddy’ or ventriloquising one or more of Lear’s daughters. Phillipa Kelly in fact read the Fool as serving ‘as Lear’s implied fourth daughter’.42 As the number was otherwise so centred on the Fool, the appearance of Cordelia’s lines at the end of the song did not entirely close down ambiguities.

If a musical number at this point was unexpected, the formal blocking and stylised, rhythmical gestures and vocal delivery of the first three scenes and the physicality of the dog-knights meant that the presence of song and dance was not entirely incongruous. The number itself set up frames – in its blocking, choreography, costume, out-front delivery, consistent vocal registration and broad New-York accent, and the instrumental introduction that preceded the Fool’s entrance on stage – that

41 Frederick Ahl, ‘Ars est caelare artem (Art in Puns and Anagrams Engraved)’ in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 17-43 (23). 42 Philippa Kelly, The King and I (London: Continuum, 2011), 98. 144 allowed it to be received as having a recognisable musico-dramatic function: an

‘extravagant woman’ leading lady number of the sort familiar from Jerry Herman’s

Broadway musicals and with its roots in European operetta, in which narrative development takes second place to the celebration of the diva-as-diva. Indeed, the choice of this innuendo-laden number to introduce the Fool and Fox’s performance in it might be argued to replicate to some extent the performance texture of early modern theatrical fools. These performer-characters were distinguished from other characters by costume, and used means of communication including songs, both existing and newly composed, bawdy puns and double entendres. Their authority as both a performer and as a character willing to go beyond the accepted social scripts prescribed for a hierarchical society derived in part from the performer’s willingness and ability to extemporise (or to appear to extemporise) beyond the play script and to joke directly with the audience.43 The Herman-style musical-theatre diva is likewise a performer- character who does not so much reject social convention as transcend it, and whose ability and willingness to stop the show defies a theory of musico-dramatic integration that would restrict her to being merely a character in a plot, whose difference from the onstage masses is signalled through a flamboyant costume that contrasts with more or less uniform chorus costumes, and whose authority is conveyed through a powerful physical and (usually) vocal presence. That presence is, somewhat paradoxically, connoted through a relative lack of kinetic and vocal display – the diva walks while

43 For monograph-length studies of fools in literature and life, see Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1922) and Sandra Billington, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984). For a discussion of Robert Armin, the performer likely to have played Lear’s Fool in early productions, see Lippincott, ‘King Lear and the Fools of Robert Armin’, and Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, especially 136-63 and 182-91. For a valuable and detailed study of Armin’s song performance practice, ‘scripted improvisations’, and his influence on Shakespeare’s playwriting, see Henze, ‘“Wise Enough to Play the Fool”. 145 chorus boys dance, the diva is lifted while chorus boys lift, the diva here delivers her culminating zinger, Cordelia’s reply to Lear, as a spoken line in a pause in ensemble singing. The social-convention-transcending authority, itself an early modern theatrical convention, which enabled Shakespeare’s fools to talk back to power is no longer a commonplace in a world without professional fools. Here that authority was reinscribed in Fox’s performance as the social-convention-transcending diva, herself a modern theatrical convention. This initial presentation of the Fool then framed the subsequent, complex, reception demands that surrounded the character.

A short passage of dialogue followed in which Fox spoke using what one might assume was her everyday Australian accent, but in a little-girl , and in which

Lear, following Shakespeare’s text, referred to the Fool twice as ‘boy’ (1.4.131, 135) and once as ‘lad’ (1.4.137). Fox’s Fool was thus the site of a number of discontinuities

(or aspects that might be received as discontinuities) in theatrical meaning-making systems that obstructed an easy reception of the Fool as a unified, coherent subject.

These discontinuities were already partly apparent in the competing signifiers of the

Fool’s maturity in the first number: not only did the thirty-year-old Fox’s adult body belie the childishness signalled by her costume, hair styling and make up, but her vocal belt delivery and exaggerated New York accent (‘My haat belowangs tuh Deddy’) and approaches to sexuality did not match her Shirley Temple appearance. Even if audiences familiar with early modern drama might perceive no difficulty in the disjunction between masculine pronouns and female body, receiving the Fool as a relative of another early modern fool, Androgyno, the hermaphrodite fool from Ben

Jonson’s Volpone, the disjunctions between linguistic references to a child and the adult body of the referent still remained. However, as R. A. Foakes notes of the original production (assuming that Robert Armin, as is likely, created the role of the Fool), ‘it

146 may be worth noting that Armin was almost forty when he first performed as the Fool, a role in which Lear frequently addresses him as “boy”’.44 One might therefore argue that these obstructions to receiving Fox’s Fool as a coherent, unified subject – reinforced in the dialogue scene by her shifts to an Australian accent and to a little-girl voice delivered in head register – reflect and intensify the performance texture of the original staging of King Lear.

Shakespeare’s ‘That lord that counselled thee/ To give away thy land’ (1.4.138-

45) followed, sung to what appeared to be music specially composed for the production.45 Here Fox changed accent and registration again, singing using a plummy, upper-class English accent with faux-operatic vibrato, and the double entendres of her first number gave way to overt, playful sexuality.46 As the song began, the dog-knights lay on their backs on the floor, as if displaying canine submission and trust, while holding their prosthetic penises. By hitting these, Fox provoked hoots of different musical pitches from the knights, allowing her to play them like a (musical) organ. The number culminated with a high note from one of the knights on the last word of the final line – ‘the other found out – there’ – as the Fool pulled, rather than hit, his penis. The first number had already suggested an aspect of the carnivalesque – what Bakhtin calls

‘the carnivalistic logic of “a world upside down”’ in the way it contrasted the quarrelsome chaos of the knights’ behaviour when under the command of Lear and their

44 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 51. 45 I did not recognise the tune to which the Fool sang this song, and have been unable to establish whether this was written specifically for the production. 46 The contrast between Porter’s double entendres in ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ and the overt sexuality of this number might be argued to be in keeping with Porter’s own practice: Porter structured the stage version of Kiss Me, Kate around contrasting numbers characterised on the one hand by bawdy double entendres and on the other by open expressions of sexuality. See my article, ‘A (White) Woman’s (Ironic) Places’ for an analysis of this structure. 147 focused, collaborative discipline in their service of the Fool. 47 For those not offended by its overt sexuality, this second number consolidated that sense of a world upside- down – doglike submission to a fool in the presence of the king, and living bodies turned into a – that provided the characters with a vivid, lively, good-natured and funny carnival-like release from the world of Lear’s dominance. In their invocation of a carnivalesque ‘world-upside-down’ these numbers also paved the way for those aspects of the carnivalesque in act 3, scene 6 discussed above.

A medley of Daddy songs: ambiguity and taboo

A further extended number in this scene consolidated the theme of parent-child relationships that framed the remainder of the play, but did not use musical theatre conventions to frame itself as having a reassuringly recognisable dramatic function.

After having called Lear a fool and confirmed this with the line ‘All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with’ (1.4.147-48), the Fool – without waiting for a reply from Lear – sang an amended nursery rhyme, unaccompanied and in a childish voice, while performing childishly mocking gestures: ‘I’m the king of the castle/ And you’re the dirty rascal./ Where’s your youngest daughter?/ Sent her off to slaughter’.

As an instrumental accompaniment began, she then launched into a stunning medley consisting of short bursts from popular songs relating to parent-child relationships, amended to focus specifically on the father-child relationship. Beginning with ‘Oh my dadda, to me he was so wonderful/ Oh my dadda, to me he was so good’ [a version of

Eddie Fisher’s ‘Oh My Papa’], sung with rapid, rhythmic staccato in the manner of a schoolyard skipping or counting rhyme instead of Fisher’s slow, smooth waltz, she then moved through a wide range of extracts from other songs: ABBA’s

47 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevksy’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 133 148

‘Mamma Mia’ (amended to ‘Daddy, Daddy, here we go again/ My, my, how can I resist you?/ Daddy, Daddy, does it show again,/ My, my, how much I’d like to kiss you?’),

Boney M’s ‘Daddy Cool’, the central section from Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’

(‘Daddy [for ‘Mama’], ooh,/ Didn’t mean to make you cry/ If I’m not back this time tomorrow/ Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters’), Al Jonson’s ‘Mammy’ (with the title word replaced by ‘Daddy’) and ’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’. The transitions from one part of the medley to the next were accompanied by rapid shifts between deep chest registration and high head voice, changes in accent among

Australian, British and American English, and a range of stereotyped popular choreographic gestures from air guitar to jazz hands. The rapid changes in songs and styles of delivery were dazzling, leaving little time for detailed reflection. It is perhaps unlikely that all the songs would be recognised by many audience members. While almost all of the songs were immediately clear to me on first viewing, I needed six replays of the video recording – an option unavailable to audiences of live performance

– to recognise the extract from ‘Oh My Papa’. For me, at least, changes in rhythm, speed and articulation made the recognition of a known existing song more difficult than changes in lyrics. However, the overall impression was likely to be that of a barrage of parent-related popular songs, amended in some cases so that all the songs referred to fathers, with suggestions of sexualised relationships and separation.

In contrast to ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’, the medley did not replicate familiar aspects of musical theatre. In terms of form, the medley was characterised by the excessive piling up of snatches of existing songs with no coherent narrative, verse structure or consistent rhyme scheme. In terms of delivery, the use of widely differing accents, registrations and choreographic gestures obstructed the sense of a fixed subject position in the singer (not to mention the conflicting signs of maturity and the

149 conflicting discourse of gender attached to the Fool). In terms of content, a range of different names (Dadda, Daddy, Papa) was used for the apparent addressee(s). For an audience member to assign a clear musico-dramatic function to the number – to receive it, for example, as a diegetic medley of existing songs performed by the Fool, as a performance showcase for Fox, or as a ‘book’ number, in traditional musical-theatre terms, in a world in which song had apparently already been established as an accepted mode of communication – was to take responsibility for setting up particular sets of frames that would guide an interpretive response, frames that the song itself did not prescribe. Instead, it opened up the question of its own narrative and dramatic status, a question that internal musical or dramatic gestures and structures did not answer.

Rather than looking for a single narrative function, one might approach the medley as offering itself up as a complex set of conversations through which audiences might engage with the play and the production, a form of ‘interrogative text’ that I discuss further in the next chapter. At one level, the obviously amended maternal references in ‘Mamma Mia’, ‘Mammy’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ might draw attention to the lack of the maternal in the play, as well as, more straightforwardly, mocking

Lear’s position as a father who has rejected his youngest daughter and is in the process of alienating his elder two. That the medley consisted of existing songs performed in a way that did not conflate singer and subject obstructed a connection between song and an expression of personal belief or emotion. At the same time it invited a reception of the song medley as one that functioned in two ways. In the world of the play, it is a means by which the Fool can mock Lear with a body of popular culture, perhaps reflecting Shakespeare’s Fool’s use of popular folk wisdom and proverbs, but it also gestures beyond this world, revealing and critiquing the infantilising tendencies of popular culture in its mixture of sentimentalised innocence and sexuality.

150

However audiences received the medley, they were likely to link the amended

‘Mamma Mia!’ lyrics – especially ‘Daddy, Daddy! Does it show again, how much I’d like to kiss you?’ – to the line ‘yes, I’m gonna marry Daddy’ in the first number. When

Cordelia, absent from the stage from act 1, scene 1, finally reappears in act 4, scene 6, she is visibly pregnant. The audience is simply left to make connections to these lines, or not. These lines most obviously suggest some form of unconsummated sexual desire: whether this is towards a biological father or some other father figure such as a sugar daddy is not clear. They do not in themselves imply a sexual interest in a biological father towards a daughter. The lines are not delivered by Cordelia, nor are they verifiably attributable to her. Nonetheless, several commentators understood the production in terms of incest.48 The cutting of France and Burgundy, and the distance in time between these early songs and Cordelia’s reappearance might explain a willingness to link her pregnancy to Lear: song lyrics from a previous act may have left only a general impression of sex and father-figures. However, the surprise caused by

Cordelia’s unexplained pregnancy almost demands a reconsideration of the Fool’s songs in act 1, scene 4. The double entendres of ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ and the ambiguous narrative and dramatic status of the medley thus might set up a trap for unwary audience members uncomfortable with confronting sex in Shakespeare. Ahl’s comment that puns ‘leave the readers helpless to explain what they have noticed without

48 Peter Craven suggests that Kosky has misunderstood Shakespeare’s Lear’s behaviour towards Cordelia, which is ‘without a hint of molestation’: ‘Kinky Lear’. Douglas McQueen-Thompson performs a strange sleight-of-hand in which he turns the apparent theme of incest into a metaphor of what he sees as Kosky’s self-indulgent attempts to shock the establishment: ‘This incestuous interest reveals far more about the position of Barrie Kosky as enfant terrible of the arts than assisting his King Lear interpretation. The tale was of Kosky as child both seducing and repelling his intellectual progenitors’, ‘King Brat Does King Lear’. Rachel Fensham talks of Lear’s ‘incestuous embrace’ of Cordelia: To Watch Theatre, 100; Anne Nugent unversalises what she sees as the message of the Fool’s medley: ‘the incestuous strand that runs below the surface in father-daughter relationships. Kosky’s Lear makes the sexual underpinnings of the human psyche explicit’: ‘Theatre: Lear of Living Dangerously’, The Australian, 24 August 1998. 151 appearing to indict themselves for suggesting the taboo meaning’ might partly explain some viewers’ discomfort with the production: to voice an understanding that

Cordelia’s unexplained pregnancy is the result of incest is to declare a set of particularly taboo sexualised assumptions about the double entendres of ‘My Heart Belongs to

Daddy’ and the lyrics of the medley, assumptions that are never verifiable.

Late songs of self-expression: a reprise and a duet

The Fool’s first scene then closed with a large production-number reprise of ‘My

Heart Belongs to Daddy’, this time with the Fool in a much more active role, performing a solo tap routine. The number closed with a kick-line for the Fool and the knights, now joined by Kent, leaving Lear isolated and reinforcing the sense of a carnivalesque world-upside-down. Ironically, this world-upside-down, presided over by a Fool, was characterised by discipline, camaraderie and co-operation. The songs in this section thus set up at least two other scenes: the carnivalesque mock trial in act 3, scene

6 and Cordelia’s reappearance in act 4, scene 6. The concentration of songs in the first part of the production, reflecting a relatively common structure of Broadway musicals, then framed the way that songs would be received in the second part of the production.

The whole of this second part of King Lear was set in what appeared to be a waiting room through which characters drifted or sat waiting, alongside unnamed performers wearing large, grotesque head masks, allowing characters to be present without interacting with others in scenes in which they are absent in Shakespeare’s play. While in the first part, the unverifiable subject positions of the Fool’s songs and Edgar’s songs in his assumed guise meant that song was not clearly a vehicle for the expression of a character’s own emotions, songs in the second part were more clearly related to the singers’ emotions and experiences. Thus, in the manner of the golden age Broadway musical, a post-interval reprise of ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ signalled a

152 transformation over time. That the song had been so memorably performed twice in production numbers in act 1, scene 4 while Lear remained silent made its reprise in act

4, scene 6 both poignant and meaningful: in that scene, Lear, who had not otherwise been allocated a solo song, sang a short, unaccompanied reprise of ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ after his lines, ‘Come, come, I am a king; masters, know you that?’ (4.6.199), a self-mocking sign of his changing self-awareness.

In the midst of the scenes of disintegration and degradation in the second part of the production, Cordelia and the Fool found each other in the waiting room, and, without spoken dialogue, staged a scene of strength and coherence. As they recognised each other, upbeat electronic music and disco lighting introduced ‘Guilty’, a duet originally sung by and Barry Gibb. Lyrics here emphasised the loneliness of the two characters (‘we stand alone’) but also their loyalty to each other

(‘we are devotion’) and determination to ‘battle on’. In contrast to the hunched, bowed, crawling or seated postures of most of the characters in this second part, the expansive choreography for this number, performed on an axis from upstage right to downstage left with arms flung open and upright postures, and with confident backwards travelling steps, suggested uncowed characters open to the world and prepared to own the stage space. As Cordelia’s asides in act 1, scene 1 had been cut, this duet provided an unexpected insight into her viewpoint. It also suggested a coherent, empathic personality in the Fool that had not been present in her scenes with Lear. Further, the line ‘Out on the street anybody you meet got a heartache of their own’ signalled an awareness in the singers of even more individual points of view. In fact, the presence of other potential viewpoints was signalled throughout the first part of the production, even if these were not strongly voiced: a smaller replica proscenium arch, also lit with bulbs, was set at skewed angles within the stage space towards upstage left, creating a sense of

153 mise en abyme. If asides were cut, this replica arch acted as visual reminder that the onstage action might be viewed from a number of angles, a significant feature in a production that resisted aligning itself with Lear’s apparently solipsistic view of the events of much of the play. By postponing Cordelia’s expression of her inner feelings to a position in the play so close to her death, and by giving a high degree of impact to this moment by staging it in song and movement, the production arguably increased the emotional impact of her murder by her sister, adding to the bleakness of the tragedy.

Songs here thus provided two structural functions that at times overlapped.

First, songs were placed where songs or other changes in verse occur in Shakespeare’s play, replicating a sense of surprise at nested changes in performance texture, and providing a sense of the surreal appropriate to feigned madness and mental disintegration in the dramatic narrative. Second, a number of songs were concentrated in the early part of the play. These engaged with the conventions of musical theatre first to repackage the Fool as a character recognisable to modern audiences as one able to transcend social convention and thus to criticise authority, and second to provide the vehicle for that criticism. These songs then set up effects in the second part that potentially enhanced the poignancy and bleakness of the tragedy, but may also have created a sense of discomfort for some audience members faced with their own taboo interpretations.

The Troubies

Production and reception

A notable difference between the Troubies’ works and the Australian King Lear is their overt presentation as something other than a production of Shakespeare’s text.

By the time the Troubies performed their first jukebox musical, 12th Dog Night, in 1999

154 they had already built up a history of performing in small, suburban, sometimes outdoor theatrical spaces using non-naturalistic performance styles – notably commedia dell’arte, slapstick and clowning – which they had applied in adaptations of

Shakespeare’s plays in Shrew! (1996), Spamlet (1997) and Clowns’ Labour’s Lost

(1998) that incorporated a very small number of existing songs.49 While neither King

Lear’s title nor its publicity material hinted that sections of Shakespeare’s text would be replaced by songs, the titles of the Troubies’ shows signal clearly that they are not productions of Shakespeare’s plays, but versions that incorporate songs associated with particular performers. Further, the images on their posters and flyers portray

Shakespeare himself as a willing participant in the musical adaptation process: for example, cartoonised hybrids of Shakespeare, his head modelled on the Droeshout engraving from the first Folio, and Bono, Bill Withers, John Travolta, Prince and Jeff

Lynne appear on the posters for As U2 Like It, A Wither’s Tale, A Midsummer Saturday

Night’s Fever Dream, Hamlet, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince of Denmark and

OthE.L.O. respectively. 50

Even to those unfamiliar with the Troubies, the titles of their Shakespeare-based works to date all strongly suggest adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays using existing popular music from specific sources, while the use of portmanteau words and other linguistic play frames them as relatively light-hearted. As Kevin Wetmore notes, in his study of the Troubies’ works up to 2005 in the context of youth culture,

49 Shrew featured ‘one song played on acoustic guitar from Grease, “You’re the One that I Want”, that Lucentio sang to Bianca’ (Tim Parks, ‘Abbamemnon: Can You Hear the Fun, Fernando?’, interview with Matt Walker, Rage Monthly, July 2014). Spamlet featured ‘Lithium’ by Nirvana, and ‘Hamlet and Ophelia sang “I like New York in June (How About You?)”’ (David Lefkowitz, ‘Troubadour Co. Offers Holiday Two-fers for Bard and Boogie Twelfth Dog Night’, Playbill, 12 December 1999, http://www.playbill.com/news/article/troubador-co.-offers-holiday-two-fers-for-bard-boogie- twelfth-dog-night-86211). 50 A complete list of the Troubies’ past works, together with images of the posters from many of these productions, can be found at http://www.troubie.com/public/past_shows.html. 155

the actual linkage [between a Shakespearean play and a pop group in the titles of the Troubies’ works] is not made because of the appropriateness of the specific music for the play … Instead, the connection is made by the compatibility of the work and the title of the band, allowing the two to form a punning title.51

Audiences for the Troubies’ Shakespearean shows are thus unlikely to be shocked, disappointed or offended to find themselves attending something other than a familiar version of a play by Shakespeare staged with a naturalistic style of acting in which spoken dialogue is the primary means of communication in the onstage world.

However, the (self-imposed) restriction on source materials poses challenges to the

Troubies’ works that the Australian King Lear, with its eclectic choice of songs, did not face.

While the Troubies have surprised and delighted audiences and reviewers from the beginning of their series, the length of time that they have been performing jukebox- musical versions – not only of Shakespeare, but of Christmas-related stories, classical

Greek drama and Lewis Carroll – means that a form of local criticism has arisen as audience and reviewer expectations have developed.52 In the absence of ‘jukebox

51 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., ‘“Are You Shakespearienced?”: Rock Music and the Production of Shakespeare’, in Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. and Robert York, Shakespeare and Youth Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 117-145 (135). 52 The Troubies have performed the following jukebox-musical versions of Christmas-related stories: A Christmas (2002: ’ A Christmas Carol/ Carole King); It’s a Stevie Wonderful Life (2003 and 2008: the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life/ Stevie Wonder); Santa Claus is Comin’ to (2004: the 1970 animated television film Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town/ various Motown groups); Little Drummer Bowie (2005: the 1968 animated television film The Little Drummer Boy/ ); Jackson Frost (2006: the 1979 animated television film Jack Frost/ the Jackson Five); A Charlie James Brown Christmas (2007: the 1965 animated television film A Charlie Brown Christmas/ James Brown); Frosty the Snow Manilow (2009: the 1969 animated television film Frosty the Snowman/ Barry Manilow); The First Joel (2010: the biblical nativity story/ Billy Joel); A Christmas West Side Story (2011/ the 1983 film A Christmas Story/ West Side Story soundtrack); Rudolph the Red-nosed ReinDOORS (2012; the 1964 animated television film Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer/ The Doors); Walkin’ in a Winter One-hit Wonderland (2013: a loosely Christmas-based ‘clip show’ of previous Troubie works centring round the character of the Winter Warlock/ a range of ‘one- hit wonders’); The Snow Queen (2014: Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen/ Queen). Their jukebox-musical versions of classical drama are: Oedipus the King, Mama! (2009: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King/ Elvis Presley); For the Birds (2011: Aristophanes’ The Birds and songs from bird-themed sources, including The Eagles, Sheryl Crowe, and Paul McCartney and 156 musical’ as a term to describe the Troubies’ earlier works, reviewers sometimes classed them as parodies.53 However, the Troubies’ works do not sit particularly comfortably with this classification: while theorists of parody differ with regard to whether a comic approach to the work parodied is essential to the definition of a parody, there is general consensus that parodies require the audience to hold both the parody and that which is parodied in their mind with at least a comparative purpose.54 Peter Rabinowitz distinguishes between the ‘authorial audience’, a hypothetical actual audience, and the

‘narrative audience’, those characters who believe in the world view of the stage events.55 He then defines parody as a category of ‘literary recycling’ where ‘the authorial audience knows the original while the narrative audience does not’.56

However, with the Troubies’ works, a recognition that a play by Shakespeare is being combined with songs from a rock or pop group or singer is usually all that is required of an audience, rather than a knowledge of that play. Even apparent parodies of very specific scenes can still function as comic for those audience members unfamiliar with

Wings); Abbamemnon (2014: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon/ ABBA). Their Lewis Carroll works (with Carroll’s Alice character replaced by Alice, the housekeeper from television’s The Brady Bunch) both use a range of one-hit wonders: Alice in One-hit Wonderland (2007) and Alice in One-hit Wonderland II: Through the Looking Glass (2008). 53 See, for example, Paul Hodgins, ‘Fractured Dream delivers parody’, Orange County Register, 25 August 2000; Paul Hodgins, ‘Romeo Hall needs the bugs worked out: A talented troupe stumbles with this year’s Shakespearean parody’, Orange County Register, 4 July 2001; Jana J. Monji, ‘Romeo Becomes a Bawdy Comedy’, Los Angeles Times, 10 January 2002 (‘This love story parody played earlier at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre’); 54 For Margaret Rose (Parody/Metafiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1979) and Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)), both a comic and a critical approach to the work parodied is a defining feature of parody; for Linda Hutcheon (A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985)) neither a comic nor a critical approach is a defining feature. For Simon Dentith (Parody (London: Routledge, 2000)), comic and critical approaches are at least a likely feature, and at least some form of polemical approach to the parodied work is a defining feature. 55 Peter J. Rabinowitz, ‘“What’s Hecuba To Us?”: The Audience’s Experience of Literary Borrowing’, in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 241-63 (244- 45). 56 Rabinowitz, ‘“What’s Hecuba to Us”’, 247. 157 the original. For example, Fleetwood Macbeth’s variations on ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ – ‘Is this a gagger (Mick Jagger, lollygagger, swagger, on-the-ragger) I see before me?’, followed by an appropriately costumed person walking across the stage – can produce laughter through their rhyming repetitions and comic costumes (and indeed a reference to the carnivalesque lower bodily stratum in ‘on-the-ragger’) even for those who do not recognise the original line.57 This is of course not to say that a knowledge of the Shakespearean play does not add to the enjoyment of the show: as Evan Henerson notes, ‘the clowning antics of Matt Walker and Company are probably best suited for adults and big kids. And for the Shakespeare-savvy, of course, who figure to get the biggest boot out of the Bard’s misfortunes’.58

Rabinowitz proposes a further a category of ‘literary recyclings’, works which:

depend on the authorial audience’s knowledge that there is a previous source. This does not always mean, however, that the authorial audience has actually experienced the original work. There is a class of works which can be called ‘retellings’ which present the authorial audience with a new version of a work it knows exists but has never read’ [or, presumably, seen staged].59

This category is perhaps the starting point for an understanding of the Troubies’ approach to Shakespeare in formal terms. As we have noted already, the titles of their

Shakespearean works rely for their comic effect on an audience’s ability to recognise the title of the Shakespearean play and the name of the song source; non-verbal references, such as the use of the Droeshout engraving in poster artwork, assist in the recognition of Shakespeare’s presence even in the less obviously familiar works. Some

57 Fleetwood Macbeth example quoted in Steven Stanley, ‘Fleetwood Macbeth’, Stage Scene LA, 8 July 2011, http://www.stagescenela.com/2011/07/fleetwood-macbeth/. I discuss the Troubies’ invocation of the carnivalesque below. Menstruation as a component of the carnivalesque celebration of the lower bodily stratum is rare: Bakhtin makes no mention of it at all. 58 Evan Henerson, ‘For This Hamlet, The Question is 2B or Not 2B’, Los Angeles Daily News, 12 August 2005. 59 Rabinowitz, ‘“What’s Hecuba To Us?’”, 247. 158 posters also add explicatory text: on top of the poster for The Comedy of Aerosmith, for example, a banner text reads ‘Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors with the of

Aerosmith’.60 That the Troubies’ works are not truly parodies – that it is not essential that the viewers be familiar with the Shakespearean play in question – gives the company a degree of flexibility in the works they stage: a lesser-known work such as

All’s Well That Ends Well is not off limits, providing its title can be harnessed to the name of a band to produce an enticingly punning new title.

Other reviewers and commentators have treated the Troubies’ works as sui generis, presenting them as difficult to pin down, explaining them to readers in ways that refer to other genres or styles of theatre without placing them within those genres or styles, or describing them in terms of a metaphoric process of creation (often relating to the concept of the pop mash-up, a song made up of other pre-recorded songs blended together).61 The absence of a wider jukebox-musical tradition in which to set the works has also allowed them to be seen as a local phenomenon. Evan Henerson in a review of

It’s a Stevie Wonderful Life for the Daily News, for example, writes ‘but hats off especially to Walker for keeping this loony brand of theatre a local tradition’.62 Indeed,

60 Troubadour Theater Company, ‘Past Shows’, http://www.troubie.com/public/past_shows.html. 61 See, for example, Jeff Favre, ‘One “Kool” Dude: Troupe Plays with Words, Spirit of Shakespeare’, Ventura County Star, 22 August 2002 (‘What the Troubadour Theater Company does on stage is best explained by a cast member who, apparently improvising, said “No-one knows where Shakespeare ends and we pick up”’); Steven Leigh Morris, ‘Troubies Spin Shakespeare Like a Copper Penny’, LA Weekly, 2 September 2008 (‘Troubadour Theater Company is performing its very loose musical-carnival variation on [As You Like It], and has evolved its own commedia genre to the point where its shows no longer wear down their welcome by glibness – or perhaps they’ve just figured out the kind of tautness that these sorts of adaptations require’); Lynne Heffley, ‘Alas Poor Hamlet, He’s a Laughingstock’, Los Angeles Times, 12 August 2005 (‘Ah, the Troubadour Theatre Company. Those mad clowns whose raison d’être is to mangle and mash Shakespearean classics into a comic stew, seasoned with iconic pop music and served with a sizable side of ham’); Renée Camus, ‘Troubadour Theatre Mashes Up ABBA and Greek Tragedy in Abbamemnon’, ReelLifeWithJane (blog), 15 June 2014. 62 Evan Henerson, ‘I Just Called to Say I Love It’s a Stevie Wonderful Life’, Los Angeles Daily News, 12 December 2005. 159 this local phenomenon has grown beyond the Troubies, as other adaptations that incorporate existing pop music have begun appearing relatively regularly in Los

Angeles suburbs, particularly in dinner-theatre venues. Some of these are largely comic

– Are You There God? It’s Me, Karen Carpenter (2012: Judy Blume’s novel Are You

There God? It’s Me, Margaret/ Karen Carpenter), Prairie-oke! (2014, the television series Little House on the Prairie/ pop music from a range of sources) and I Totally

Know What You Did Last (Donna) Summer (2015, the slasher I Know What

You Did Last Summer (1997, dir. Jim Gillespie)/ ), all for the Cavern

Club Theatre, based in the Casita del Campo restaurant in the suburb of Silver Lake.

Others – such as Romeo and Juliet: Love is a Battlefield (2015, Romeo and Juliet/ Pat

Benatar), for Rockwell Table and Stage in the suburb of Vermont – are more serious.

More recently, professional reviewers and amateur commentators have begun setting the Troubies’ works in the context of jukebox musicals: for example, in an online review in 2011 Sarah Taylor Ellis wrote: ‘Troubadour Theater Company’s

Fleetwood Macbeth may leave you wondering: why can’t all jukebox musicals be this self-consciously smart and playful?’.63 The following year, Don Shirley, a long-time reviewer of the Troubies, reviewed Two Gentlemen of Chicago alongside another musical, referring to them as ‘both jukebox musicals of a sort, in that they use other people’s familiar tunes’.64 Theatre bloggers also began discussing the Troubies’ works in relation to jukebox musicals at around the same time. In 2011, Michael Yampolsky, referring to the comedy of Fleetwood Macbeth writes, ‘(Note to self: when the time

63 Sarah Taylor Ellis, ‘Fleetwood Macbeth’, Edge Media Network, 2 August 2011, http://www.edgemedianetwork.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&sc=theatre&sc3=performanc e&id=122912&pf=1. 64 Don Shirley, ‘Should Producers Fact-Check Their Non-Fiction Plays? Two New Jukebox Musicals with Trouser Roles’, @ThisStageMagazine, 26 March 2012, http://thisstage.la/2012/03/should-producers-fact-check-their-non-fiction-plays-two-new- jukebox-musicals-with-trouser-roles/. 160 finally does come that some uninspired producer mounts a legitimate Fleetwood Mac jukebox musical, please shoot me)’.65 In 2014, Renée Camus discusses Abbamemnon as a jukebox musical and compares it to Mamma Mia!, noting that in Abbamemnon

‘they’ve rewritten many of the lyrics to fit the story, so it’s necessary to pay attention, which is sometimes difficult with music you know so well’.66 It remains to be seen whether setting the Troubies in the context of a growing awareness of a wider jukebox musical ‘genre’ will affect the sense of the Troubies’ works as a local phenomenon, or whether a local sense – derived from the Troubies’ shows – of what jukebox musicals can achieve will affect reviews of other jukebox musicals. While Taylor Ellis,

Yampolsky and Camus differentiate the Troubies’ works from actual or imagined

Broadway-style jukebox musicals, Shirley reviewed Hello My Baby – a non-

Shakespearean jukebox musical with a newly written plot created for the Rubicon

Theatre in Ventura, another Los Angeles suburb – in the context of the Troubies’

Shakespeare works, discussing it in terms of Shakespearean conventions. Likewise,

Steven Stanley has reviewed local Los Angeles-based jukebox musical adaptations in the context of the Troubies, including Romeo and Juliet: Love is a Battlefield and I

Totally Know What You Did Last (Donna) Summer.67 On the other hand, he made no mention of the Troubies in his review of The Last Goodbye – another jukebox-musical version of Romeo and Juliet this time with the songs of – for the Old

Globe in San Diego.68

65 Michael Yampolsky, ‘Bardmageddon: Fleetwood Macbeth’, Toucan Play This Game (blog), 17 July 2011. 66 Camus, ‘Troubadour Theatre Mashes Up ABBA and Greek Tragedy’. 67 Steven Stanley, ‘Romeo and Juliet: Love is a Battlefield’, Stage Scene LA, 27 February 2015, http://www.stagescenela.com/2015/02/romeo-juliet-love-is-a-battlefield/. 68 Steven Stanley, ‘The Last Goodbye’, Stage Scene LA, 6 October 2013, http://www.stagescenela.com/2013/10/the-last-goodbye/. The Old Globe was also the home of the original production of Play On!, discussed in Chapter Four. 161

‘Fit’ or function?

The Troubies’ first Shakespeare work to match a play and a band, 12th Dog

Night, was largely treated by critics as a one-off piece of fun. However, by the time of their third production, Romeo Hall and Juliet Oates, expectations of a sense of fit between song and dramatic situation had arisen. For example, in a generally positive review of that show, Joel Beer noted that ‘Romeo serenades Juliet with ‘Sara Smile’ which, of course, makes no sense’.69 In his positive reviews of the previous two shows,

Paul Hodgins had declined to analyse the mechanics of their success, writing of 12th

Dog Night, ‘How does it work? Don’t ask. You have to see it to believe it’ and of A

Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream, ‘How does it work? Don’t ask. Is it funny? Bring a change of underwear’.70 However, in his less enthusiastic review of

Romeo Hall and Juliet Oates he compares that show with the previous two:

in past years, the combination [of Shakespeare and pop music] has allowed for some truly ingenious and apropos combinations. Here the fit is less than ideal (surprisingly, since young love, the subject of the play, was a near obsession for the Philly-based crooners), and the problem is compounded by the sheer difficulty of performing Hall and Oates’s tricky multilayered songs. … In the end we’re left with the nagging feeling that the songs aren’t really crucial to the show, as they have been in previous years.71

Reviewers of subsequent shows have also commented on the looseness or tightness of fit of the songs to the dramatic context, but seldom on their dramatic function or meaning-making potential.72

69 Joel Beers, ‘Dick Jokes, Fart Gags, Drunks, Whores’, OC Weekly, 12 July 2001. 70 Paul Hodgins, ‘Three Dog Night Takes a Bow for the Bard’, Orange County Register, 1 August 1999; Hodgins, ‘Fractured Dream delivers parody’. 71 Hodgins, ‘Romeo Hall needs the bugs worked out’. 72 See, for example, Henerson, ‘I Just Called To Say’ (‘The songs are always recognisable and peculiarly in context’); Henerson, ‘For This Hamlet’ (‘As an adaptation, Hamlet/Prince is as smooth a hybrid as its title suggests. There are reportedly 21 songs sung or written by Prince nestled into or around the two-hour tale. Mostly, they fit the plot, albeit with some tweaking’); Don Shirley, ‘Celebrate Good Times with Kool and the Gang in All’s Kool That Ends Kool’, Los Angeles Times, 22 May 2002 (‘Although connections between the songs and the action aren’t exactly airtight, the cast and the four-piece band on the side of the stage cover the Kool 162

However, at least one reviewer has understood the songs not just in terms of fit, but in terms of their dramatic function and their potential to comment or expand on

Shakespeare’s text. In a review of OthE.L.O., Darcie Flansburg notes the efficiency of songs in setting scenes that in Shakespeare involve ‘commentary on the time period, which is not necessary to fill the plot, making cuts almost necessary to engage a modern-day audience. The music numbers actually made for better exposé’.73 I discuss the function of A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream as dramatic exposition below. She also notes the potential for songs to allow productions ‘to go beyond

[Shakespeare’s] text’, arguing that by restricting Emilia’s monologue – a ‘testament to what women had to put up with in the home at the time’ – to Shakespeare’s text, the

Troubies missed an opportunity to expand on a problematic aspect of the play for modern audiences, although she felt that Breanna Pine, as Emilia, ‘spoke these words with great conviction’.74

That the Troubies did not ‘go beyond’ Emilia’s monologue – itself a moment of critique within the play – at the point when it was delivered is representative of their approach to Shakespeare’s text in their other works. Serious moments in the plays are taken seriously and are allowed to speak for themselves in Shakespeare’s language without the incorporation of songs. Even serious plot points which might be thought

repertoire well’); James Petrillo, ‘Hilarious Take on Shakespeare’, Burbank Leader, 15 August 2007 (‘If you’re a rabid fan of E.L.O., you won’t be disappointed with the “set list.” There’s “Turn To Stone” transformed into an intricately choreographed duet, as well as “Livin’ Thing,” “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” and “Don’t Bring Me Down.” Even if you’re hearing the songs for the first time, you can’t deny their somehow perfect fit within the story line’); Jeff Favre, ‘On stage: Troubies recharge Shakespeare with Doobies – Pop music helps retell fractured comedic tale’, Ventura County Star, 17 August 2006 (‘As with other Troubadour shows, some songs are a perfect fit for the story and others need a shoehorn’). 73 Darcie Flansburg, ‘OthE.L.O. Is Short, With Sweet Classic-Rock Music’, Redlands Daily Facts, 9 August 2007. 74 Flansburg, ‘Oth.E.L.O. Is Short’. 163 ripe for mockery, such as the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale, are not lampooned.75

Reviewers often report such moments as emotional highpoints in the production, rather than intrusions of incongruous seriousness. For example, David Nichols writes of As

U2 Like It, ‘Kennedy’s deadpan Jaques, her white face and throaty delivery far removed from her rubber-mugged “One-Hit-Wonderland” work, nails “All the world’s a stage” with a classical poise that hushes the house’.76 Sarah Taylor Ellis notes of Fleetwood

Macbeth that ‘an ongoing joke about Macbeth’s “aside light”, for instance, gives way to a showstopping “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy. Such flights from comedic flights of fancy to classical, compelling lyricism are gripping’.77 These moments of serious spoken blank verse stand out in the Troubies’ works due to their contrast not only with the surrounding comedy but also with the production’s songs and improvisations. As a result, their relative stillness increases their pathos: Kevin

Wetmore, a Shakespeare academic, notes that Hamlet, The Artist formerly Known as

Prince of Denmark ‘is the only production of Hamlet that has ever moved me to genuine tears at the end’.78 This is not to say that only the overtly ‘serious’

Shakespearean passages should be taken seriously, nor that they should be considered worthy dramatic relief inserted to justify an otherwise enjoyable but lightweight production. These productions derive their meaning and emotional effect from their mixing of comic and serious in song and speech. This is not to say that the Troubies do not critique or comment on Shakespeare’s text. Flansburg notes the Oth.E.L.O. story

75 Evan Henerson, ‘A Wither’s Tale’, Curtain Up, n.d. (based on 21 August 2010 performance), http://www.curtainup.com/witherstalela.html. 76 David C. Nichols, ‘Mr Shakespeare, meet Mr Bono’, Los Angeles Times, 27 August 2008. A review for Variety of the same show reads: ‘Kennedy is superb as Jaques, a melancholy shadow amidst the revels, and her perf [sic] of the “Ages of Man” speech is extraordinary, combining humour and skill in such a way that the audience is simply mesmerised’ (Variety staff, ‘As U2 Like It’, Variety, 24 August 2008). 77 Taylor Ellis, ‘Fleetwood Macbeth’. 78 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. ‘A Wither’s Tale: Review’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 29:2 (2011), 256-265 (263). 164 did not end with Shakespeare’s text: ‘The actors clear the stage for the alternative endings, which include Desdemona fighting back, OthE.L.O. finding the handkerchief in his back pocket, and a surprise birthday party’.79 However, their critique tends to take place separately from moments of ‘serious’ Shakespeare performance, and not to use song as a vehicle for that critique.

Song placement

In fact, as Wetmore notes, in general ‘the songs make sense, but they are often linked to the show in a tenuous manner at best’.80 That is not to say that a tenuous link between song and dramatic moment will inevitably be experienced as a poor ‘fit’. It is perhaps in numbers – like ‘Sara Smile’ that Romeo sings to Juliet – that have more than usually personalised or dramatically specific lyrics that a poor fit is likely to be noticed when those lyrics are performed without adjustment. While some songs might appear to fit the dramatic situation remarkably well, many of them are relatively generic ‘mood’ numbers that can be made to fit the mood of a scene rather than a specific, detailed set of dramatic interactions between individualised characters. As Walker notes of A

Wither’s Tale, ‘we use the music to enhance and really help set the tone for the play.’81

In A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream, for instance, Lysander’s singing and dancing to ‘Boogie Shoes’ as an expression of his delight at Hermia’s agreement to elope to the woods with him appeared perfectly appropriate in terms of an expression of his mood. If the overall impression was of a ‘mood’ song, the lyrics of the opening

79 Flansburg, ‘This OthE.L.O. Is Short’. 80 Wetmore, ‘“Are You Shakespearienced?”’, 135. 81 Ashley Steed, ‘Matt Walker’s Troubies Spin A Wither’s Tale at the Falcon’, LA Stage Times, 18 August 2010. 165 couplet – ‘Girl, to be with you is my favourite thing/ And I can't wait ’til I see you again’ – were sufficient to make the song seem tailored to the dramatic situation.

If opening lines to a song assist in creating a sense of close fit to the dramatic situation, the opening number is important in creating a sense of confidence in the audience that the combination of Shakespeare and pop music will produce a coherent whole. In A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Dream, many of the songs from Saturday

Night Fever were sung with at most minor changes to the lyrics. The first number –

‘Stayin’ Alive’, also the first number of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack – was an exception: the lyrics beyond the refrain were rewritten almost entirely, in order to allow all the mortal characters to introduce themselves (the elderly Egeus also amended his refrain from ‘stayin’ alive’ to ‘barely alive’).82 The number also set out the production’s references to multiple timeframes from the beginning. Matt Walker introduced it with Quince’s speech from the prologue to act 5’s Piramus and Thisbe ‘If we offend, it is with our good will…’ (5.1.108-17), thus bringing in early modern language from the outset.83 As well as the 1970s disco music, many of the costumes reflected 1970s fashion, while the costumes and wigs of Helena (Beth Kennedy),

Hermia (Katherine Malak), Demetrius (Joseph Leo Bwarie) and Lysander (Tyler King) gave them a passing resemblance to Velma, Daphne, Fred and Shaggy from the 1970s cartoon Scooby Doo. A reference to the Occupy Wall Street movement gestured towards contemporary America: the Mechanicals, dressed in overalls with work belts attached, introduced themselves with the unison line ‘We work all day to pay our rent –

82 In his review of Fleetwood Macbeth, Steven Stanley refers to ‘a one-by-one introduction of each character’ as a Troubie ‘trademark’: Stanley, ‘Fleetwood Macbeth’. 83 References to A Midsummer Night’s Dream are to William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks, Arden Shakespeare 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1979). 166 we are the ninety-nine per cent’, drawing a cheer from the audience at every performance I attended.84

That this first number was so closely tailored to the characters of the play and had such a clearly defined dramatic function did not so much set up expectations for a similar level of close fit as produce a sense of coherence and purpose in the use of song as a dramatic vehicle that then allowed later numbers to relate less closely to the dramatic situation without appearing jarring. These numbers were spread relatively evenly throughout the first part of the production, i.e. in the narrative up to the performance of Piramus and Thisbe that took up all of the second part. In contrast to

King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream only contains two songs: the Fairies ‘You spotted snakes’ (2.2.9-22) and Bottom’s ‘The ousel cock’ (3.1.120-28) after his transformation. Shakespeare’s play therefore does not provide a ready-made structure for the incorporation of multiple songs. A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream replaced the Fairies’ song with ‘Night Fever’: here their imitation of the ’ falsetto sung at a relatively low volume combined with stage smoke and low lighting levels to provide a remarkably atmospheric scene. However, no song was substituted for Bottom’s song, which was omitted. Given the presence of so many other songs in the production, the surprise changes of texture in Shakespeare’s play at that point – from prose to song to Titania’s blank verse and back to song – would be difficult to replicate simply by replacing ‘The ousel cock’ with a modern song. Nonetheless, the

Troubies introduced a comic level of surprise by omitting the song and interpolating a new scene, in which Puck (Matt Walker, doubling Quince) tests the extent of Bottom’s

84 This appears to be an example of a revision of the 2000 production: Kevin Wetmore notes that in that production ‘Bottom and the mechanicals are presented as the Village People’ (Wetmore, ‘“Are You Shakespearienced?”’, 130). 167 transformation by asking a series of quiz questions to which Bottom (Rick Batalla) responds with increasingly ludicrous variations on a donkey’s bray:

PUCK. What is your favourite TV show from the seventies? BOTTOM. ‘Hee Haw’! PUCK. What is your favourite playground activity? BOTTOM. Seesaw! PUCK. Who is your favourite actor? BOTTOM. Jude Law! PUCK. What is the first exit after La Brea on the Santa Monica Freeway heading east? BOTTOM. Crenshaw!

By omitting a song where Shakespeare incorporates one, the Troubies nonetheless managed to introduce an element of surprise in the aural texture by other means.

As the songs were sung with at least a gesture towards the qualities of vocal performance of the original Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, their distribution in the first act appeared dictated partly by a requirement to distinguish characters by their voice types. Numbers from the soundtrack sung by the Bee Gees using their characteristic falsetto registration were therefore used only for the ensemble numbers that effectively structured the first part: falsetto registration was used for the ensemble refrain and Theseus’s lines in the opening number, in the Fairies’ ‘Night Fever’ at the midpoint of the first part, and in ‘How Deep is Your Love?’, the ensemble number that closed the first part. Elsewhere, Lysander’s version of KC and the Sunshine Band’s

‘Boogie Shoes’ used their predominantly sonority, Demetrius sang the Bee

Gees’ ‘Jive Talkin’’ – a song from 1975, before their move to falsetto registration – in a tenor voice as he fell in love with Helena as a result of Puck’s magic, and Titania sang

‘If I Can’t Have You’ to Bottom in a voice similar to ’s on the Saturday

Night Fever soundtrack.

That the titles of the Troubies’ works flag the presence of music from a specific source potentially cuts down the opportunities for surprises in the performance texture

168 discussed in connection with King Lear. However, the Troubies compensate for this by incorporating snatches of songs from other sources. Hermia, for example, had no solo numbers from Saturday Night Fever, but sang a fragment from the title number of

Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods as she heads off to the forest, and later sang a line from ‘No-one is Alone’ from the same musical. A further comic surprise in the jukebox-musical texture occurred in Helena’s lack of a solo. Left alone in the woods, she declared to the audience: ‘I am suddenly moved to sing’. The band, however, refused to play.

A further set of surprises occurred during Piramus and Thisbe: instead of a play- within-a-play, the Mechanicals performed a jukebox-musical-within-a-jukebox-musical, incorporating an eclectic choice of songs with an ostentatiously poor fit. For example,

Flute-as-Thisbe (Rob Nagle) entered in grotesque drag singing an amended version of the advertising jingle for Slinky toys: ‘It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, for fun it’s a wonderful toy/ It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, it’s fun for a girl or a boy’, amended to ‘I’m Thisbe, I’m

Thisbe, I’m fun I’m a bundle of joy/ I’m Thisbe, I’m Thisbe, I’m either a girl or a boy’.

She then exited singing ‘So Long, Farewell’ from . The arbitrariness of the choice of music within Piramus and Thisbe was evident on multiple viewings: Thisbe made another entry singing ’ ‘Oops, I Did It Again’ on

5 and 7 July and the matinee performance of 6 July, but sang the Black-Eyed Peas’ ‘My

Humps’ at the same point on the evening of 6 July. The lack of close fit between dramatic moment and song in the jukebox-musical-within-a-jukebox-musical encouraged a retrospective reception of the songs in the first part as having a relatively close fit in comparison. At the same time, having encouraged an audience identification with the Mechanicals as ‘the ninety-nine per cent’ in the opening number, the

169 production allowed the audience to laugh at Piramus and Thisbe as an example of a bad jukebox musical without reducing the Mechanicals themselves to figures of mockery.

Managing the carnivalesque

Rather than providing crucial plot or character development, several of the songs placed at regular intervals throughout the first part appeared to function primarily as a means of raising audience energy while maintaining an underlying sense of rhythmical structure – or more precisely, of periodically restoring a level of audience energy that had already been raised during the pre-show warm up.85 Audience members arriving early were kept in the foyer until around ten minutes before the performance. As they entered the auditorium, Lisa Valenzuela – dressed in an outrageous 1970s wig and costume – began singing a medley of 1970s pop songs, signalling for the audience to clap along. At the beginning of the warm up, three balloons were tossed into the audience area (the Falcon Theatre is small, with 120 permanent seats), which audience members patted above their heads, passing the balloons across the auditorium. This activity not only created movement among the audience, breaking down issues of personal space, but acted as a distraction that quelled fears of audience participation.

After the first number, Valenzuela increased the level of audience participation by inviting them to sing along. Between numbers, she chatted to the audience, encouraging

85 Although not strictly part of the on-stage narrative, and although they begin before the production is officially due to start, these warm-ups occasionally feature in reviews along with the show proper. See for example, Pauline Adamek, ‘Troubies Mix Hamlet and Prince With Hilarious Results’, Studio City Sun, 11 August 2005 (‘As soon as you walk in to take your seat, Diva Lisa Valenzuela is warming up the audience with her magnificent rendition of “Let’s Party like it’s 1599”. Upstage, the four-member-strong back-up band is hot and the atmosphere is vibrant’); Theatre Times staff, ‘Stayin’ Alive: Shakespeare OC Goes From Polynesia to Polyester in Midsummer’, Theatre Times, 1 August 2014 (‘Fever Dream gets underway with cast member Lisa Valenzuela warming-up the crowd with a late ’70s sing-along that shows off the Troubie band, a powerhouse of L.A. musicianship under the direction of drummer Eric Heinly’). 170 participation and movement in a welcoming and non-threatening way. For example, before beginning ‘Car Wash’, she asked the audience to raise their hands if their car was dirty, inviting participation in a non-threatening group activity. While this process made participation seem enjoyable, it also acted as a training ground for audience behaviour in the rest of the production, establishing from the outset that participation was by invitation. Gareth White in his monograph on audience participation describes four types of ‘invitation’ to participation: overt, implicit, covert and accidental.86

Throughout A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream, almost every invitation to participation was overt. The warm-up thus created a sense of upbeat energy in the audience while gently setting up the rules of engagement between performer and audience. As a result, audiences did not sing along to songs during the performed narrative unless invited to do so.

A review of the production for Theatre Times aptly calls the Troubies ‘a theatrical snake-in-a-can that turns playhouses into parties’.87 As I discuss below, this party atmosphere – which one might rephrase as a sense of the socially transformative moment of communal celebration that accompanies carnival – did not reach its peak until the end of the show. The passage to that state was assisted by the concentrated deployment of aspects of the carnivalesque. A celebration of the grotesque, excretion and the lower bodily strata was much in evidence. The fairies, for example, were grotesque in costume and make-up, with names such as Stinkerbell, Gingervitis and

Flickabooger. The latter (Suzanne Jolie Narbonne, doubling Hippolyta) constantly dribbled large quantities of bright green, extremely elastic slime from her nose. At one point, Puck threw this into the audience, after much stomach-churning play. Starveling

86 Gareth White, Audience Participation in the Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 40. 87 Theatre Times staff, ‘Stayin’ Alive’. 171

(Lisa Valenzuela) represented the moon in Piramus and Thisbe by dropping her trousers and exposing a (fake) pair of buttocks. The title of Joel Beer’s review of Romeo Hall and Juliet Oates, ‘Dick Jokes, Fart Gags, Drunks, Whores’ suggests the type of humour regularly used in the Troubies’ verbal jokes.88

The carnivalesque world-upside-down was evident in the cast’s willingness to comment on the audience’s costume, whether positively (‘Nice shirt, sir’; ‘Nice outfit, madam’), or negatively (‘Flipflops at the theatre? Really, sir?’).89 Likewise, the cast were not the servants of the audience. A regular feature of Troubie productions is that latecomers are scolded for distracting the cast’s performance, albeit good-humouredly.

As latecomers attempt to get to their seats, they are picked out in lights. The cast then drop whatever they are doing and appear on stage, singing a version of ’s

‘You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you’ at the latecomer, with ‘vain’ replaced by ‘late’ – one particularly late set of theatregoers were faced with several cast members dressed only in their underwear, having been interrupted changing costume into their doubled roles as fairies.90 The world-upside-down aspect also inverts the show-business rule that ‘the show must go on’. Depending on the performance, the narrative might be stopped on several occasions. In the event of a performer missing or tripping up on one of his or her lines, Matt Walker blows a referee’s whistle and either produces a yellow penalty flag from his costume if he is onstage at the time, or throws the flag onstage if not. After a directorial scolding, the scene is then played again from the nearest convenient starting point.91

88 Beers, ‘Dick Jokes, Fart Gags, Drunks, Whores’. 89 ‘Nice shirt’, Saturday 6 July 2013, 4pm; ‘nice outfit’, Sunday 7 July 2013 4pm, ‘flip-flops’, Friday 5 July 2013. 90 Saturday 6 July 2013, 4pm performance. 91 These breakdowns in narrative do not seemed to be examples of rehearsed ‘spontaneousness’ included in every performance. There were no ‘yellow cards’ on Friday 5 July 2013, for example. 172

Bakhtin’s theory that ‘the boundaries between the play and life are intentionally erased’ in dramatic works associated with carnival resonates with several aspects of the

Troubies’ works. 92 A noticeable feature of their approach to Shakespeare’s text is their practice of localising names and geographical references, localisation taking precedence over blank verse scansion. While this can be comic, it also reduces the difference between the on-stage and off-stage worlds. Thus, mortals are referred to by the fairies as ‘Los Angelenoids’, Theseus’s reference to ‘the law of Athens’ (1.1.119) is amended to ‘the law of Toluca Lake’, referring to the suburb adjoining Burbank, while Helena’s

‘Through Athens I am thought as fair as she’ (1.2.227) becomes ‘Throughout a decent portion of the L. A. basin I am thought as fair as she’. Shakespeare’s language was used throughout the production, but with interpolations in modern American English with modern references. This blending of modern and early modern English reduced the distance between the worlds of the play and the audience’s lived experience. It also produced comic effects in the juxtaposition of old and new, as well as contributing to an understanding of character. For example, modernising interpolations were used to create a sense of Helena and Hermia as sexual, as well as romantic, subjects (and sexual subjects for whom sexual pleasure and romance were not isometric), and also to differentiate them in terms of frustration and self-containment. Helena’s embarrassing schwärm for Demetrius was given a modern goofy teenage touch in her reply to

Demetrius’s ‘Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit/ For I am sick when I do look on thee’ (2.1.211-12). Expanding on Shakespeare’s Helena’s response, ‘And I am sick when I do not look on you’ (2.1.213), she added with a mixture of comic shyness and desperation, ‘When I look in your direction, all I see is that “One Direction” all wrapped up into one. I wish you were in concert right now’. That her frustration

92 Bakthin, Rabelais and his World, 258. 173 was sexual as well as romantic was emphasised in her interpolated joyful response

‘Now that’s what I’m talking about!!!’ to Demetrius’s ‘Or if thou follow me, do not believe/ But I shall do you mischief in the wood’. As well as references to contemporary popular culture, characters’ use of mobile telephone technology likewise brought the modern world into the production and undercut a sense that the production was set nostalgically in the 1970s, the period of its music. They also contributed to the characterisation of Hermia, differentiating her approach to sexual frustration from

Helena’s. Following his line ‘and to speak troth, I have forgot our way’ (2.2.35) ,

Lysander set up an extended joke by calling Siri, the voice-activated Apple computer

‘personal assistant’ on his mobile phone, asking ‘Siri, where are the woods?’, to which the voice of Siri replies, ‘I was not invented in Shakespeare’s time’. The Siri gag achieved its payoff later in the scene when the resourceful Hermia leant over the sleeping Lysander, extracted his mobile phone from his pocket and murmured, ‘Siri, switch settings to vibrate’ as the lights dimmed.

The dividing line between audience and performer in the Troubies’ works is permeable. In A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream, for example, the house lights were only partially dimmed for the performance. Individual audience members were frequently addressed by performers, sometimes in character, sometimes out of it.

Performers frequently entered the viewing area, not only using the aisle space, but squeezing along rows. During Piramus and Thisbe the aristocratic mortal characters joined the audience, sitting on the floor in the aisles. Direct audience address was used in one performance in a way that gave a good-natured reprimand for uninvited

‘participation’ and both reinforced the idea of a division between audience and performance spaces and drew attention to its permeability: Matt Walker as Puck struck up a conversation with an audience member who was leaning on the edge of the stage:

174

‘Hello, sir. Are you in show business yourself? No? Well, if you’re not in show business, get your elbow off the stage’.93

However, if, as Bakhtin suggests, ‘the absence of clearly established footlights is characteristic of all popular-festive forms’, the division between performing area and viewing area, between performer and audience member, only broke down substantially in the finale.94 Here all the characters assembled on stage to sing two numbers from

Saturday Night Fever that might have proved difficult to incorporate into the play itself.

The first, ‘Disco Inferno’, was sung and danced by the company. The line ‘What you doin’ on your back?’ in the second number, ‘You Should Be Dancing’, was replaced by

‘What you doin’ in your seats?’, an invitation to the audience to join the performers on stage. Each evening around half of the audience did so, leaving approximately equal numbers on stage and in the viewing area, many singing, and all dancing, whether energetically on stage, or at least moving in time to the music in the viewing area. That this communal festive celebration occurred at every performance was the result of a sustained invocation of aspects of the carnivalesque, activated by the songs of the warm-up and sustained through a careful placement of upbeat numbers during the play itself. At the same time, the performers’ radio microphones and knowledge of the script and choreography ensured a power differential between them and the audience, which assisted in keeping control of the permeable division between audience and performer in the hands of the performers. This allowed them to manage rapid changes in tone between joyous musical numbers and more serious moments of Shakespearean speech.

To use Theatre Times’ terms, while one had the sense that the playhouse was constantly in the process of becoming a party during the performed narrative, it did not fully

93 Saturday 6 July 2013, 8pm performance. 94 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 265. 175 become one – did not achieve a moment of Bakhtinian communal celebration and release – until after the end of the play proper.

Other jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare use similar strategies. Beyond those considered in this thesis, for example, Bob Carlton’s Return to the Forbidden

Planet – a science-fiction version of The Tempest with 1960s songs – incorporates a warm-up drill, led by performers in the viewing space, which requires the audience to perform a series of gestures moves while seated – the ‘Polarity Reversal

Procedure’ – that they will later be asked to perform during the performance proper in order to save the characters from destruction.95 The musical then ends with a rock-and- roll medley that the audience are encouraged to dance along with. The performed narrative of Diane Paulus’ The Donkey Show – a disco version of A Midsummer Night’s

Dream – emerges from a dance floor on which the audience has been dancing, and on which they continue to dance, while the musical is performed on raised platforms.96 The event then turns back into a nightclub after the performance. In such works, Shakespeare can be the catalyst for moments of shared celebration in which

95 ‘Fifteen minutes before the show starts, members of the cast mingle with the audience. They welcome them aboard “Scientific Survey Flight Nine”. A few minutes before the scheduled start to the show the crew take the audience through the regulation safety procedures. They point out the emergency exits, inform them that in the event of cabin depressurization oxygen masks will come down from overhead compartments, etc. All the dialogue is improvised in character as 1950s “B” movie stereotypes. Finally the crew teach the audience the “Polarity Reversal Procedure” [instructions for which follow]’. Bob Carlton, Return to the Forbidden Planet, revised version for the 1989 West End and 1991 Off-Broadway productions (New York: Samuel French, n.d.), ‘Preshow’, 7. The script for the 1984 London Tricycle Theatre production contains similar stage directions, and notes that ‘in the original (1983 Bubble Theatre) production, the programme contained the emergency drill, a full colour galaxy guide and a sick bag’ – more Bakhtinian comic celebration of excretion. Bob Carlton, Return to the Forbidden Planet (London: Methuen, 1985), ‘Preshow’, 7. 96 For discussions of The Donkey Show, see, for example, Lenora Inez Brown, ‘She Turns the Beat Around: Director Diane Paulus Taps the Zeitgeist with a Mixture of Music, Pop Culture, Improvisation – and a Little Help from her Friends’, American Theatre 19:1 (2002): 46-49, 120, 122; Arnold Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre: A History (London: Routledge, 2000), 207-209.

176 barriers among audience members and between audiences and performers are temporarily erased in a perhaps superficial, perhaps utopian sociability.

The two works in this section suggest some of the strategies available in structuring jukebox musical versions of Shakespeare. Among others, these include using Shakespeare’s own structure of song inclusion where this is an option, and using the structural features of musicals, such as the reprise and the concentration of songs in the first half. They also include using songs as one of a range of features that structure a passage to (or a withholding of) a moment of communal participation. In particular, the works discussed demonstrate the importance of the early songs in setting the tone of the production. The following chapters move from discussions of the mechanics of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare to case studies of individual examples of the form, with an emphasis on interpretation. As we shall see, structural features still have a role in these chapters: for example, the first of these, Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s

Labour’s Lost demonstrates the risk of audience rejection due to a poorly executed opening number.

177

CHAPTER THREE

INTERROGATING ESCAPISM: RETHINKING KENNETH BRANAGH’S LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

I begin this series of case studies with a shift in focus towards a consideration of reception strategies that might allow audiences to engage productively with jukebox- musical versions of Shakespeare. The first case study – Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s

Labour’s Lost (2000), a film that incorporated song and dance routines from film musicals of the 1930s alongside a severely cut version of Shakespeare’s text – has a problematic reception history.1 It was not generally well received by journalistic reviewers on its release in 2000, nor, until relatively recently, by academic critics.

While academic writers have considered the film from a number of angles, common threads in approaches to the film have been negative assessments of the film’s use of the conventions of the Hollywood musical film of the 1930s, in particular musico-dramatic integration, and of the performance competence of the cast.2 Although the film is not

1 Otherwise unmarked references to Love’s Labour’s Lost in this chapter refer to the film; where a reference to the play is intended, this will be made clear by a reference to Shakespeare alongside the title. 2 For examples of negative academic reactions to the film, see Gayle Holste, ‘Branagh’s Labour’s Lost: Too Much, Too Little, Too Late’, Literature Film Quarterly 30:3 (2002): 228- 30; Katherine Eggert, ‘Sure Can Sing and Dance: Minstrelsy, the Star System, and the Post- postcoloniality of Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night’, in Shakespeare the Movie, II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video and DVD, ed. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose (London: Routledge, 2003), 72-88; Michael D. Friedman, ‘“I Won’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me”: Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the American Film Musical’, Literature Film Quarterly 32:2 (2004): 134-43; Kelli Marshall, ‘“It Doth Forget to Do the Thing It Should”: Kenneth Branagh, Love’s Labour’s Lost and (Mis)Interpreting the Musical Genre’, Literature Film Quarterly 33:2 (2005): 83-91; Courtney Lehmann, ‘Faux Show: Falling into History in Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 69-88. For a developing strand of more positive criticism, see Douglas E. Green, ‘Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Return of the Hollywood Musical: Song of the Living Dead’, Shakespeare Bulletin 26:1 (2008): 77-96; Anna K. Nardo, ‘Playing with Shakespeare’s Play: Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 13-22; Penny Gay, ‘“A Romantic Musical Comedy” for the Fin-de-Siècle: Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Sydney Studies in English 36 (2010): 1-21; Diana E. Henderson, ‘Catalysing What?: Historical Remediation, The Musical, and What of Love’s Labour’s Lasts’, Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011): 97-113. 178 without its faults, the primarily evaluative rather than hermeneutic approach taken by this criticism suggests the lack of a suitable reception paradigm that might draw meaning from the discontinuities caused by the film’s apparent failures of musico- dramatic integration – discontinuities that are a regular feature of jukebox musicals.

Diana Henderson, in a recent article on musical adaptations of Love’s Labour’s

Lost, notes the lack of a shared discourse among academic critics and creative practitioners adapting Shakespeare’s plays to the format of the musical. While recognising that valuable, but limited, critical work has already been done on Branagh’s

Love’s Labour’s Lost, she suggests:

More still needs to be said about media differences […] and varieties of pastiche, about historically informed remediation, and about the general overreliance on just a few canonical descriptions of the musical form (especially Rick Altman’s excellent work) as genre theory.3

This chapter is in part a response to Henderson’s article. I suggest in the first part of the chapter that much of the negative criticism of Love’s Labour’s Lost relates both to an assumption that the film is a more or less straightforward attempt to recreate the

Hollywood film musical, and to a mode of reception that approaches the film as containing a single coherent meaning – or that at least assumes that the film presents itself as such, even as it ultimately fails. In the second part I argue instead that the film is more productively approached in terms of and pastiche rather than recreation or revival, positing that the combination of the manifold discontinuities of its pasticcio texture and its ‘failures’ of music-dramatic integration set it up as an interrogative text which draws viewers into conversation with it, rather than as a consistently readable text containing fixed and identifiable meanings.4 In the third part

3 Henderson, ‘Catalysing What?’, 105. 4 As I discuss further below, my understanding of the ‘interrogative text’ is based on Catherine Belsey’s account of it in her Critical Practice, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), especially 70- 84. 179 of the chapter, I suggest that one of the potential ‘conversations’ the film invites is an interrogation of the concept of escapism, an aspect I explore through a hermeneutic approach to performance competence within the film. Approached in this way, the film’s negotiation of its discontinuities and the performance skills of its actors might be seen not as evidence of aesthetic failure but as an overlooked strength, responding to

Shakespeare’s text on a number of levels and adding dramatic meaning and cohesiveness to the adaptation.

The film and its critics

Love’s Labour’s Lost was Branagh’s fourth cinematic Shakespeare adaptation, following (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and Hamlet (1996).

Although Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet are both set in the nineteenth century,

Branagh’s first three films were received as relatively straightforward adaptations of

Shakespeare’s plays – indeed the publicity for Hamlet fetishized its use of the ‘full text’.5 By the time Love’s Labour’s Lost appeared, Branagh’s Shakespeare films carried with them expectations of high quality, accessible adaptations that were untroublingly

‘faithful’ to their Shakespearean sources. In not only setting the film apparently in the build-up to World War Two but cutting around three-quarters of Shakespeare’s text, incorporating found wartime film footage, and structuring the film around dance routines and songs by Cole Porter, George and , , Dorothy

Fields, Jimmy McHugh and , with their original lyrics, Branagh’s overtly interventionist approach to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost thus represented a

5 See Peter Holland ‘Film Editing’, in Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes, ed. Ioppolo (Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses, 2000), 273-98 for an extended discussion of the role in Hamlet’s reception played by its apparent ‘full-text’ status, a status Holland argues is problematic. 180 notable break from his previous approach to filming Shakespeare’s plays, while the performance competence of the actors in the song and dance routines appeared to mark a move away from the ‘quality’ label that had attached itself to his previous

Shakespeare adaptations.6 Patrick Doyle provided original incidental music for the spoken scenes.7 While this music does not function as a transition between speech and song, its presence nonetheless serves to some degree to soften the shifts in texture between the spoken scenes and the song and dance routines. Branagh himself adapted the play for the screen, cutting Shakespeare’s text by around 75 per cent.8

Despite the large amount of cuts to Shakespeare’s text, Love’s Labour’s Lost retains most of the play’s plot and structure and almost all its characters: only the very small role of the Forester (five lines in act 4, scene 1) is cut completely. Two characters undergo significant changes in the transition from stage to screen: the schoolmaster

Holofernes becomes the King’s female tutor, Holofernia (Geraldine McEwan), while

Shakespeare’s witty and garrulous Moth, the young page of Don Armado (Timothy

Spall) becomes a middle-aged page-companion (Anthony O’Donnell), who is given no

6 The songs featured in the film are ‘Cheek to Cheek’, ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’, ‘No Strings (I’m Fancy Free)’, ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ (Irving Berlin); ‘I’d Rather Charleston’ ( and Desmond Carter); ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’, ‘They Can’t Away From Me’ (George and Ira Gershwin); ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ (Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields); ‘I Won’t Dance’ (Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh); ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ (Cole Porter). If Love’s Labour’s Lost represents a break in Branagh’s approach to filming Shakespeare’s plays, there is nonetheless a continuity with his approach to engaging with the production of Shakespeare, as seen in his 1995 comedy, In the Bleak Midwinter (renamed A Midwinter’s Tale for its American release), a film that, although not a musical, clearly draws on the Mickey Rooney- backstage-musical film in its depiction of a mishap-stricken charity production of Hamlet. Although not itself a musical, the opening titles for In the Bleak Midwinter are accompanied by Noël Coward’s song, ‘Why Must the Show Go On?’. 7 See David Morgan, Knowing the Score: Film Composers Talk About the Art, Craft, Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Writing for the Cinema (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 220-25 for Patrick Doyle’s reflections on the composition process and the challenges of composing incidental music for a film featuring existing songs. 8 Russell Jackson, ‘Filming Shakespeare’s Comedies: Reflections on Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Shakespearean Performance: New Studies, ed. Frank Occhiogrosso (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2008), 62-73 (66). 181 solo singing lines to compensate for almost all his lines being cut, and who only ever speaks when he and Don Armado are alone. The pageant of the Nine Worthies is shown in an extremely compressed montage, and little of the aristocrats’ mocking of the pageant’s performers remains. Several scenes were filmed (and are included as extras in the DVD release), but were dropped from the final version of the film, including the episode from act 5, scene 2 of the King of Navarre (Alessandro Nivola) and his friends

Berowne (Branagh), Dumaine (Adrian Lester) and Longaville (Matthew Lillard) disguised as Muscovites.9 Otherwise, the play’s plotlines are followed remarkably closely, despite the extensive textual cuts.

The plot of the film diverges from that of the play towards the end. As in the play, Marcadé (Daniel Hill) arrives to announce the death of the King of France, which prompts the Princess of France (Alicia Silverstone) and her ladies Rosaline (Natascha

McElhone), Katherine (Emily Mortimer) and Maria (Carmen Ejogo) to leave Navarre.

In the film, this announcement also appears to trigger the onset of war. Branagh then adds a black and white montage of shots of the characters throughout the war, ending with a reunion of all the characters other than Boyet (Richard Clifford), the Princess’s chaperone, who is shown being shot while working for the French resistance. As the characters assemble for a photograph taken by Dull (Jimmy Yuill) the film returns to colour. Although Lehmann and Wray focus on Love’s Labour’s Lost’s presumed attempts at creating a ‘faux’ version of 1930s history, the film ostentatiously obstructs a sense of stable time and place, a practice that is almost a calling-card of jukebox musicals.10 Whereas the inclusion of wartime footage, both found and filmed for this production, appears on one hand to set Love’s Labour’s Lost at the outbreak of the

9 Penny Gay gives a usefully detailed summary of the deleted scenes, all of which come from late in the play (‘“A Romantic Musical Comedy”’, 7-9). 10 Lehmann, ‘Faux Show’; Wray, ‘Nostalgia for Navarre’. 182

Second World War, other aspects, including the pastiche newsreels from ‘Navarre

Cinetone News’, also indicate the film’s setting in the independent kingdom of Navarre, whose neighbour, France, is still a monarchy (the historical kingdom of Navarre having been merged with France in 1620), and the everyday language of which appears to be a mixture of spoken Elizabethan English and sung twentieth-century English, but whose broadcasters speak in a clipped early-twentieth-century BBC English. Further, as I discuss below, while many of the song and dance routines invoke 1930s musicals, others bring in earlier and later styles, obstructing a stable sense of historical musical and choreographic style. This juxtaposition of markers of different places and times renders Lehmann’s and Wray’s privileging of the 1930s as a stable, nostalgic setting problematic.

The academic writing on Love’s Labour’s Lost constitutes by far the largest body of academic attention focused on any of the case studies in this thesis. The film has the odd distinction of being criticised as both populist and elitist: for example,

Anthony Guneratne, in a single work, notes that Branagh ‘not only trims the majority of the lines from his version of Love’s Labour’s Lost but adulterates them with interpolations dragged in’ from musical lyricists, while at the same time describing

Branagh as ‘the quintessence of that generation of filmmakers who positively requires their audience’s intimate familiarity with cinema, even to the extent of demanding a specialized knowledge of the Golden Age Musical from the audiences of Love’s

Labour’s Lost’.11 Beyond discussions evaluating the work as an adaptation, critical interventions have drawn on a number of theoretical approaches, including postcolonial,

11 Anthony R. Guneratne, Shakespeare, Film Studies, and the Visual Cultures of Modernity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 32, 216. 183 sociological-biographical, racial, postmodernist and queer theories.12 Only Ramona

Wray attempts to set the film in the context of other works that use existing songs, referring to ’s television serials The Singing Detective (UK broadcast

1986) and Lipstick on Your Collar (UK broadcast 1993); however, she does not relate the film to other jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays.13 Indeed, while academic writing on the film has had frequent recourse to Rick Altman’s The American

Film Musical, a genre-focused work from 1987, little work has so far appeared that uses the current critical tools available for studies of the musical.14

I suggest that much of the negative criticism of Love’s Labour’s Lost appears to result from approaches that treat the film as a consistently readable text, or from assumptions that the film intends itself to be approached as such, even as it ultimately fails. In this chapter I argue that the film’s manifold discontinuities set it up as an interrogative text that draws viewers into conversation with it, rather than as containing fixed and identifiable meanings. As Catherine Belsey describes it, the interrogative text

‘does not lead to that form of closure which in classic realism is also disclosure’.15

Instead of yielding up meanings,

the interrogative text invites an answer or answers to the question it poses. Further, if the interrogative text is illusionist it also tends to employ devices to undermine the illusion, to draw attention to its own

12 For postcolonial approaches, see Ramona Wray, ‘Nostalgia for Navarre: The Melancholic Metacinema of Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Literature Film Quarterly 30:3 (2002): 171-78; Ramona Wray, ‘The Singing Shakespearean: Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Politics of Genre’ in Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres and Cultures, ed. Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche and Nigel Wheale (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 151-171, and Eggert, ‘Sure Can Sing and Dance’; which also incorporates a sociological-biological approach; for a race-focused approach, see Lehmann, ‘Faux Show’; for Jamesonian postmodernist approaches, see, for example, Wray, ‘Nostalgia for Navarre’; Wray, ‘The Singing Shakespearean’; Eggert, ‘Sure Can Sing and Dance’; for a postmodernist approach based on Linda Hutcheon’s approach, see Gay, ‘“A Romantic Musical Comedy”’; for approaches to the film through queer theory, see Lehmann, ‘Faux Show’ and Friedman, ‘“I Won’t Dance”’. 13 Wray, ‘The Singing Shakespearean’, 159. 14 Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 15 Belsey, Critical Practice, 76. 184

textuality. The reader is distanced, at least from time to time, rather than wholly interpolated into a fictional world. Above all, the interrogative text differs from the classic realist text in the absence of a single privileged narrative which contains and places all the others.16

The interrogative text shares common ground with a number of theoretical concepts, particularly Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic, as opposed to monologic, texts, Bertolt Brecht’s dialectical theatre, Roland Barthes’ scriptible as opposed to lisible texts, and Umberto

Eco’s opera aperta or open text. Indeed, the interrogative text might serve as a form of umbrella term for all of these approaches – in fact, Belsey subsumes Brecht’s theatrical works into her description of the interrogative text.17 In contrast to the novel-focused theories of Bakhtin, Barthes and Eco, Belsey explicitly explores the concept of the interrogative text in terms of dramatic works (despite the mention of ‘reader’ quoted above); while she includes Brecht’s plays as interrogative texts, a Marxist conscious- raising program is not a prerequisite for the interrogative text. Belsey’s description of the interrogative text is thus particularly useful in relation to Love’s Labour’s Lost, which no-one is likely to argue has a politically revolutionary agenda.

As queer theory has shown us, even ‘classic realist’ texts are never entirely

‘closed’, while the apparent ‘openness’ of texts such as Brecht’s plays might also be disputed, since audiences are given almost unmistakable hints as to what conclusions should be drawn from his plays’ disjunctions. Rather than absolute categories, concepts such as the interrogative, scriptible, or open text, and their counterparts, the ‘classic realist’, lisible, or closed text, are thus perhaps best approached as tendencies in a text that are catalyzed most productively in conjunction with particular modes of reception.

To approach Love’s Labour’s Lost as an interrogative text one must first recognise the disjunctions, uncertainties and discomforting features that the film brings about by

16 Belsey, Critical Practice, 76. 17 Belsey, Critical Practice, 76. 185 juxtaposing Shakespeare’s text with song-and-dance routines in the style of Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and 1940s; having recognised and acknowledged these features as an integral part of the film, one must then establish a relationship between them.

In keeping with Belsey’s description, Love’s Labour’s Lost underlines its own illusions, thus repeatedly drawing attention to its own textuality: as Sarah Hatchuel notes, for example, ‘Branagh play[s] with revealing the illusion of the sets during the musical numbers: the King of Navarre and his three followers soar into the air, and the character of Don Armado takes the moon down with a kick’.18 References to non- musical films such as Casablanca and the jukebox-musical nature of the film, with songs taken from a number of classic Hollywood musicals rather than composed especially for the dramatic characters and situations, have the result that the film is not so much a musical version of Shakespeare’s play, as, in Osborne’s words, ‘a fully articulated encounter between Shakespeare and film canon’, in which neither is subordinated to the other as, in Belsey’s terms, a single privileged narrative.19 This sense is reinforced by the presence of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan language in the spoken passages alongside the original twentieth-century song lyrics in the song and dance numbers. Indeed, seen in this light, even the film’s full title, Love’s Labour’s Lost: A

Romantic Musical Comedy, suggests a meeting of two discourses, rather than a title and an explanatory genre marker. To use Osborne’s words again, ‘Branagh is explicitly forcing the encounter’ between Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Hollywood film musical of the 1930s and 1940s: the encounter, rather than the subordination of one to the other or the melding of both, is the significant point.20

18 Sarah Hatchuel, Shakespeare, From Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 91. 19 Osborne, ‘Introduction’, in Screening Shakespeare, special issue of Colby Quarterly 37:1 (2001): 5-14 (6). 20 Osborne, ‘Introduction’ 6. 186

As an example of an approach in which the film assumes the status of a consistently readable text, Courtney Lehmann claims to find fixed, unarguable meanings in the film in her trenchantly condemnatory critique of Branagh’s apparent racism, homophobia, and finally anti-Semitism, masquerading under the guise of utopian colour-blind casting. For instance, Lehmann claims that only racism can underlie the film’s depiction of Longaville’s expression of physical sexual attraction.

Longaville, played by the white American Matthew Lillard, has fallen in love with

Maria, played by the mixed-race Scottish-Nigerian Carmen Ejogo. The men have sworn an oath to each other to abjure women; each has fallen in love with one of the

Princess of France’s retinue, but is unable to express this in front of his friends.

Thinking he is unobserved, Longaville enters the library and begins to sing to a photograph of the absent Maria while lying on his back on a desk. At two points, he lifts himself upwards with what appear to be pelvic thrusts, to the embarrassment of his friend Berowne, hidden elsewhere in the library. While the combination of a reticence amongst the men towards expressing their feelings in public and physicalized outbursts of pent-up feelings in private might be explained by their oath, for Lehmann, in a ‘film wherein the men are otherwise painfully reserved, prone to shuffling their feet, shrugging their shoulders, and simply acting “swell”’ – a description that requires an erasure of the song and dance routines – ‘the only explanation [my italics] for

Longaville’s behaviour, then, is a racial one, as if the hypersexuality historically ascribed to the black female has rubbed off on him in his first dance with Maria’.21 The closed nature of Lehmann’s assertion is belied by the open nature of the text, in which, amongst other aspects, it is not always apparent whether the characters are ‘knowingly’ engaged in phenomenal (diegetic) dance or expressing themselves ‘unknowingly’

21 Lehmann, ‘Faux Show’, 81. 187 through dance – particularly in the number ‘I Won’t Dance’ to which Lehmann refers – and so whether Longaville has in fact ‘danced’ with Maria; whether, given the little we know about his character, this is the first time that Longaville has been moved to indulge in pelvic thrusts; whether he regularly performs such a move at the thought of the object of his desire, regardless of race, or whether racial difference is a trigger; and indeed whether, given Lehmann’s practice in her chapter of applying an American understanding of race relations and racial stereotypes to non-American actors, ‘the hypersexuality historically associated with the black female’ has universal or continuing currency as an interpretive tool.

Michael Friedman also gives a negative critique of the film. However, in contrast to Lehmann, he appears to approach the film as a text open to interpretation rather than as consistently readable, although he does not state this explicitly. Like

Lehmann, Friedman interprets Boyet’s wartime death as due to the apparent need to purge the film of homosexual blockages to heterosexual union, although he does not attempt to follow Lehmann’s breathtaking transformation, over the space of two sentences, of ‘Boyet, the dirty queer whose elimination shores up the symbolic community around which fascism and the integrated musical are structured’ into

‘nothing other than the film’s honorary Jew’ [my italics].22 However, Friedman accepts that ‘Branagh does not give his film’s Boyet any overt markers of homosexual orientation’.23 Friedman’s reading arises from the fact that seventeen years prior to the film’s opening, Branagh had played the King of Navarre in Barry Kyle’s 1983/4 stage version of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which Boyet (who does not die in the play) was played as ‘a kind of ’

22 Lehmann, ‘Faux Show’, 87. 23 Friedman, ‘“I Won’t Dance”’, 139. 188 figure.24 As Friedman’s admission of the absence of overt evidence for his identification of Boyet as a sacrificial homosexual in the film suggests, one result of the lack of a single privileged narrative in the film is that it opens the film up to a number of interpretations and engagements, in which intertextuality might well play a part alongside other meaning-making tools. Although it is not my intention here, it is perfectly possible to discuss the film in terms of racism, homophobia and anti-

Semitism, and to offer interpretations of the film’s treatment of these issues. However, in a film so characterised by discontinuities as Love’s Labour’s Lost, it is finally impossible to establish, as Lehmann claims to do, that the film (or Branagh) is racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic.

Pastiche, Genre, Integration and the Interrogative Text

Given the film’s strange combination of a relatively little known Shakespearean play and the by-then moribund genre of the film musical, it is perhaps not surprising that academic critics had recourse to theories of genre in an attempt to understand and evaluate the film. Genre had already been mobilised as a critical tool in approaching

Branagh’s earlier Shakespeare adaptations: James Quinn and Jane Kingley-Smith note that:

The majority of academic critics writing on Branagh’s Henry V in the 1980s and early 1990s were Shakespearean scholars for whom the screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s work could be seen as an extension of their own field, rather than a foray into the relatively unfamiliar territory of film studies. This was perhaps most obvious in their generally untroubled and unproblematising use of the term ‘genre’.25

24 Friedman, ‘“I Won’t Dance”’, 139. 25 James Quinn and Jane Kingley-Smith, ‘Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989): Genre and Interpretation’, in British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film, ed. Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant (London: Routledge, 2002), 163-75 (164). 189

For Quinn and Kingley-Smith, academic critics ‘made assumptions about genre without recourse to theory, and in defiance of the fact that film criticism did not recognize the “Shakespeare movie” as a genre’.26 As with Henry V, the majority of academic critics writing on Love’s Labour’s Lost have been Shakespeare scholars, rather than, for example, scholars of the musical. However, in contrast to the response to Henry V, the academic critical response to Love’s Labour’s Lost has been strongly characterized by a recourse to film genre theory, overwhelmingly as expounded by Rick

Altman in The American Film Musical.

In this work, Altman creates a new typology of the film musical, proposing three basic types: the ‘ musical’, the ‘show musical’ and the ‘folk musical’, and takes a structural approach to the definition of the genre of the film musical, proposing a

‘dual-focus’ structure in which the text of the film musical ‘proceeds by alternation, confrontation, and parallelism between male and female leads (or groups)’.27 For

Altman, a romance plot is central to this dual structure – as he succinctly puts it, ‘no couple, no musical’.28 This romance plot initially creates a sense of difference that usually extends beyond gender to include factors such as age, wealth, class, or social outlook, and subsequently provides the impetus to reconcile these differences.

Although Altman’s work is useful as a general framework, his theories do not so much describe the genre of the film musical as create a corpus of films that conforms to his theories, which are then labelled as film musicals. Rather oddly, the romance plot is the overriding factor in the definition of the genre: the presence of song and dance numbers alone is not sufficient for a film to be treated as a film musical in Altman’s terms. For

Altman, a film such as The Wizard of Oz – that to all intents and purposes appears to be

26 Quinn and Kingley-Smith, ‘Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989)’, 165. 27 Altman, The American Film Musical, 127, 107. 28 Altman, The American Film Musical, 103. 190 a film musical but nonetheless does not fit Altman’s structural theory – must either be excluded from the genre of the film musical (Altman suggests instead that The Wizard of Oz could be classified as a children’s film, rather than a film musical), or else the genre analyst must ‘restore through interpretation the connection to the courtship model’ implied by the film musical genre as propounded by Altman – or in other words, must engage in an against-the-grain reading.29 The Wizard of Oz is not the only film that would otherwise appear to be central to the film musical canon but that fails to meet

Altman’s theoretical requirements: Steve Neale notes a range of well-known film musicals, such as Brigadoon, West Side Story, Ziegfeld Follies, Meet Me In St Louis,

Gold Diggers of 1933 and Easter Parade that trouble Altman’s theories.30 That a film does not meet Altman’s criterion for inclusion within the genre of the film musical does not therefore preclude it from being generally considered a film musical.

While Altman’s theories are thus not unproblematic in approaching Love’s

Labour’s Lost’s engagement with genre, his work has been cited to judge Love’s

Labour’s Lost (mostly negatively) as a genre film, or more frequently, as a failure as a genre film as defined by Altman.31 However, although I will argue that the film is more productively approached as pastiche, rather than as a recreation of a genre, it is worth noting that it is perhaps appropriate that Branagh’s film has been discussed as a ‘failure’ in genre terms: as an apparent comedy, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost itself is overtly and self-consciously a ‘failure’ in genre terms. Not only does the play not end

29 Altman, The American Film Musical, 104-105. 30 Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), 112. 31 Holste, ‘Branagh’s Labour’s Lost’; Wray, ‘Nostalgia for Navarre’ and ‘The Singing Shakespearean’; Friedman, ‘“I Won’t Dance”’; Marshall, ‘“It Doth Forget”’; and Lehmann. ‘Faux Show’ all cite Altman repeatedly and all work from the assumption that the film is a failed attempt at a nostalgic recreation of the 1930s film musical, against the standards of which it should be judged. 191 with the expected marriage(s) of the early-modern comedy genre, but the characters are metatheatrically aware of this:

BEROWNE: Our wooing doth not end like an old play: Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy Might well have made our sport a comedy. KING: Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day, And then ’twill end. BEROWNE: That’s too long for a play. (5.2.862-866).32

It is therefore by no means certain that by ‘failing’ on questionable genre terms the film should thus be considered as a failure as an adaptation.

Although Branagh had already signalled his interest in genre pastiche in Dead

Again, his 1991 neo-noir pastiche, and in In the Bleak Midwinter (1995), his non- musical pastiche of the ‘Let’s-put-on-a-show’ backstage musical, it is perhaps not surprising that a straightforward genre reading has been preferred over an approach that treats Love’s Labour’s Lost as both genre pastiche and pasticcio. Pastiche is notoriously difficult both to define and to recognise: Richard Dyer in his work on pastiche notes that the fact of ‘not even being unmistakably, unarguably pastiche’ is ‘typical of pastiche’.33

Acknowledging that ‘the word pastiche is in practice extremely elastic’, Dyer differentiates pastiche, ‘a kind of imitation’, from pasticcio, a work ‘based on putting together elements taken from elsewhere’.34 In these senses, Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s

Lost contains both pastiche – not only of the Hollywood musical, but of 1930s newsreels, of wartime films such as Casablanca, of country house entertainments, and perhaps even of his own Shakespeare films – and pasticcio, in its combination of these various with Shakespeare’s play. Indeed, one might argue that in this respect

32 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 1998). Further quotations are from this edition. 33 Richard Dyer, Pastiche (London: Routledge, 2000), 46-47. 34 Dyer, Pastiche, 8-9. 192 the film represents a relatively faithful refashioning of Shakespeare’s play, which might be characterised as containing a number of pastiches – of, for example, outmoded

Lylian Euphuism and scholasticism, commedia dell’arte, the masque, and historical pageants.35 The play itself, like the film, might thus be described as a pasticcio of pastiches.

In her article ‘Nostalgia for Navarre’, Ramona Wray proposes that the film creates a 1930s ‘look’ by combining the use of symbolic objects with a reflection of many of the conventions of the 1930s musical. She then interprets this concern with objects as signifiers of a historical period as an expression of the film’s postmodernism.36 While in some respects Love’s Labour’s Lost is indeed very like a

1930s film musical, at the same time, it deforms the style of that genre. For Dyer, the combination of likeness and deformation is a clear signpost that a work can productively be received as pastiche.37 For example, in its recycling of existing songs, the film reflects the texture of many 1930s film musicals, the songs of which had often had an independent existence prior to their appearance on film, whether in Broadway shows – where they often served different dramatic purposes or had different lyrics from those in the film – or as hits on radio, as recordings or as sheet music.

Thus, while the film’s second number, ‘I Won’t Dance’, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, made its first appearance on film in

35 The play is unusual in the Shakespearean canon in having no known primary source (Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 62), drawing instead on a range of literary and dramatic styles. The play’s engagement with Lylian Euphuism – a style derived from John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580) and at its height in the 1580s – has been used in the authorship debate to propose a date of composition of 1578 rather than the more generally accepted date of the mid-1590s, and thus too early for Shakespeare to have composed it (Felicia Hardison Londré, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Critical Legacy’, in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’: Critical Essays, ed. Felicia Hardison Londré (London: Routledge, 2001), 3–37 (3)). Viewing the play’s engagement with Euphuism not as topical parody but as pastiche of an outmoded style seems a more reasonable proposition. 36 Wray, ‘Nostalgia for Navarre’. 37 Dyer, Pastiche, 54-58. 193 the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicle Roberta for RKO Pictures (dir. William A.

Seiter, 1935), its original version, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto

Harbach, had already appeared in the 1934 West End musical Three Sisters. In Love’s

Labour’s Lost, the lyrics from the Roberta version are retained, but the song’s narrative function is changed, resulting in almost a mirror image of its function in Roberta: the later film thus demonstrates its likeness to the earlier one not simply through its incorporation of one of Roberta’s well-known numbers, but also through its willingness to reconfigure this existing material. While in Roberta the number is a quasi-diegetic solo song and dance routine (i.e. one which the character is aware that he is performing) performed by Fred Astaire, accompanied by an on-screen band and in the presence of an on-screen audience, Love’s Labour’s Lost stages the number as a complexly layered ensemble for the Princess and her ladies, led by Rosaline, each of whom responds to one of the King’s party. In Roberta, Fred Astaire’s refusal to dance with Ginger Rogers and his request that she refrain even from asking him to dance is clearly related to sexual desire and the fear that dancing with her would inevitably result in his losing his sexual self-control: in the first part of the number, Astaire appears to stare repeatedly at

Rogers’ breasts as he sings his refusal to dance with her.38 Only after he moves out of sight of Rogers and into a different room does he move from singing to dancing, beginning a frenzied solo tap-dance routine, an apparent working-off of sexual frustration. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, on the other hand, the song demonstrates a solidarity between the women: the women’s refusal to dance is a show of assertiveness.

A solo diegetic song and dance number for a man wary of his own sexuality is thus transformed into a complexly layered ensemble number for women who demonstrate

38 That Astaire’s downward glance might also be attributed to the trademark diffidence and demureness of Astaire’s characters make this moment pleasurably ambiguous. 194 their assertiveness and their refusal to yield to the advances of men whom they have just met.

At the same time the number deforms the style of the 1930s musical through an ironic accentuation of the musical’s convention of non-diegetic ‘book’ – or expressive – song and dance numbers, in which characters are apparently unaware of their singing and dancing, song and dance serving instead as languages of expression rather than as literal, diegetic, song and dance. That Love’s Labour’s Lost does this using a number that in Roberta is set up, at least at the outset, as a diegetic number – with a clear source of music to accompany the singing and dancing, and a dance floor for Astaire to dance on – adds to the ironic deformation. In Roberta, the sung section of the number is preceded by a dance band accompanying Astaire on the piano; in Love’s Labour’s Lost, on the other hand, not only is there no obvious source of music to accompany the singing and dancing, but the number is not introduced by any orchestral underscoring.

By opening only with a sudden orchestral chord before the singing and dancing begin, the number thus draws attention to the abrupt change in performance modality. While the women sing – apparently unironically – of not dancing, they accompany their sung refusal to dance with non-diegetic dancing from the outset: Roberta’s temporal and spatial separation of diegetic singing and diegetic dancing thus collapses in Love’s

Labour’s Lost. This is highlighted by the fact that the number is elaborately choreographed as an intricate interweaving of principal dancing couples, with ladies-in- waiting and male servants also dancing in the background, and that editing and fluid camerawork dominated by dolly and crane shots themselves appear to be intrinsic to the choreography. That the screen is thus filled with dancing couples apparently refusing to dance constitutes an ironic accentuation, rather than a straightforward recreation, of one of the conventions of the musical.

195

This tendency to deform the style of the 1930s film musical by selecting, condensing and accentuating particular aspects of the genre is perhaps most noticeable in the sheer quantity of song and dance numbers: eleven to the usual four or five of the

1930s Hollywood musical. For Holste, in the earliest genre-focused article on the film, the film contained too many musical numbers for it to be a successful attempt at recreating the earlier genre.39 However, following Dyer, this selecting of the traits of a work’s referent and ‘repeating them more frequently than in the original’ is a further clear sign of pastiche.40 In addition, the film pastiches the idea of the 1930s musical, rather than the style of one particular 1930s studio. This is particularly apparent in the

‘No Strings’ number, sung initially by the Princess and her ladies and then opened up into a production number with an added female chorus. Like the majority of the numbers in Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘No Strings’ (music and lyrics by Irving Berlin) was first introduced by Fred Astaire, in this case in the RKO film Top Hat (dir. Mark

Sandrich, 1935). In both Love’s Labour’s Lost and Top Hat, the song is associated with awakening from sleep: Astaire’s dancing wakens Ginger Rogers, asleep in her bedroom on the floor below, while the Princess and her ladies, asleep in a tent in four beds with the heads placed together in the shape of a cross, appear to be awakened by the number’s musical introduction. However, instead of using the number to set up a conflict between a central couple in a way typical of the Astaire-Rogers RKO films,

Love’s Labour’s Lost uses choreography and camerawork in the style of Busby

Berkeley’s ensemble-dominated Warner Bros. musicals, such as (dir. Lloyd

Bacon, 1933) and, especially, (dir. Lloyd Bacon, 1933). Thus, the number begins with a crane shot directly above the sleeping women, who wake up and

39 Holste, ‘Branagh’s Labour’s Lost’, 229. 40 Dyer, Pastiche, 57. 196 perform identical movements, rather than dance steps, that form geometric patterns when viewed from above. The women then move from the tent, ending up in a swimming pool filled with numerous women identically clad in gold swimming suits and caps, who then perform an elaborately choreographed synchronised-swimming routine reminiscent of Berkeley’s choreography in the ‘By a Waterfall’ number in

Footlight Parade, with nods to the sub-genre of aqua-musicals made famous by Esther

Williams. ‘No Strings’, as performed in Love’s Labour’s Lost, appears to serve no narrative purpose: however, by abstracting and combining traits from both RKO and

Warner Bros. musicals in one number, it concentrates and pastiches the idea, from a twenty-first century viewpoint, of the 1930s film musical.

Dyer suggests that pastiche makes a number of responses possible: for example, enabling a work to tell a story of a particular period in the style of that period, setting in play our relationship with the past, and suggesting the ways in which feeling is shaped by culture.41 Particularly relevant to Love’s Labour’s Lost is his suggestion that pastiche of a particular style allows ‘the possibility of inhabiting its feelings with a simultaneous awareness of their historical constructedness’.42 This awareness is foregrounded in Love’s Labour’s Lost by the inclusion of found wartime news footage of events in Europe alongside pastiche news reports, voiced by Branagh, reporting events in Navarre in the lead-up to the war. In contrast to the saturated colour of the scenes in Navarre, these pastiche newsreels are presented on scratched, jumpy black and white stock; in contrast to the contemporary American and British accents the cast use for Shakespeare’s dialogue, Branagh presents a pastiche – verging on parody – of the clipped early-twentieth-century BBC accent in the newsreels, which are underscored by

41 Dyer, Pastiche, 176-77. 42 Dyer, Pastiche, 130. 197 a pastiche, by composer Patrick Doyle, of the marches that accompanied Pathé newsreels.43 The film thus uses multiple forms of pastiche to set the 1930s Hollywood musical firmly in its historical context.

Alongside the apparently excessive number of songs in the film, Holste’s article also draws attention to the ‘jarring’ experience of moving between speech and song, which she sees as problematic: ‘added to this problem is the further mental adjustment needed to shift between the Elizabethan English of the text and the modern English of the songs’.44 Holste’s comment should immediately raise alarm bells in any attempt to apply strict prescriptive genre theorising to the film on the basis that it can and should be judged as a straightforward adaptation to the genre of the classic American film musical. Simply put, no film in the genre of the American film musical employs

Elizabethan English for its dialogue. Viewed as an attempt to adapt Shakespeare to that genre, the film inevitably fails at the first hurdle; however, viewed as pasticcio, these jarring changes appear to open up gaps within the fabric of the film that obstruct an understanding of either the musical genre or Shakespeare’s play as, in Belsey’s terms, ‘a single privileged narrative’, instead inviting the viewer to receive the film as an interrogative text.45

Nonetheless, Holste’s comment raises a significant point in relation to the film’s difficult initial reception. While modern audiences often need time to adjust to

Elizabethan English, the passages of Shakespeare’s dialogue in the film are generally not long enough for the ear to become fully attuned to what, for most viewers, will be very unfamiliar Shakespearean speech. As the spoken language is continually interrupted by songs there is little opportunity to relax and immerse oneself in

43 Patrick Doyle quoted in Morgan, Knowing the Score, 224. 44 Holste, ‘Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, 230. 45 Belsey, Critical Practice, 76. 198

Shakespeare’s language. The ‘mental adjustment’ referred to by Holste thus continues at some level throughout the film. Other adaptations that incorporate Shakespeare’s language alongside modern song lyrics have developed strategies for maintaining a productive clash of registers without placing excessive demands on the modern audience member’s ear. Bob Carlton’s Return to the Forbidden Planet, for example, places Shakespeare’s dialogue alongside 1950s rock and roll in an adaptation of The

Tempest. The dialogue used, however, is not only from The Tempest, but is culled from other plays by Shakespeare, often very well-known passages from plays central to the performance and educational canon. The work thus allows for a clash of registers to be accompanied by a delight in recognition. Further, Return to the Forbidden Planet is written for actor-musicians who step out of character to play in an onstage band when their character is not engaged in the action: the extensive instrumental underscoring of the Shakespearean text in the approach to a song that is a feature of this musical thus prepares audiences both aurally and visually for a change in performance mode. The

Troubies’ works discussed in the previous chapter use modern English alongside

Shakespearean dialogue in shorter passages between songs, the relative closeness of linguistic registers making the transition between performance modes less jarring, and use Shakespeare’s uncut text for longer, often well-known, scenes uninterrupted by songs. Again, a clash of registers is often accompanied by a delight in recognition. For those unfamiliar with the original plays on which the company’s work is based, not all of which are central to the performance canon, the extended scene allows the ear sufficient time to become accustomed to the early-modern dialogue.

In the case of Love’s Labour’s Lost, however, the Shakespearean play is relatively little known. The effect of the continuing requirement for mental adjustment at some level throughout the film is that the viewer is given little opportunity to become

199 fully engaged either with Shakespeare or with the song and dance routines, which are also relatively short – or indeed with the newsreel sequences and the references to world events. While clashing registers can productively signal a work’s pasticcio status, the film might have proved more recognisable as a pasticcio on its initial release if audiences had been given sufficient time to attune themselves to the various constituent parts of the pasticcio.

Related to Holste’s description of the clash between early modern and modern

English is the question of the film’s handling of musico-dramatic integration, a feature regularly raised in genre approaches to Love’s Labour’s Lost. Integration is the concept according to which, in one articulation at least, ‘all elements of a show – plot, character, song, dance, orchestration and setting – should blend together into a unity, a seamless whole’.46 Scholarship on the film has generally approached integration (whether by name or by description) unproblematically as an evaluative framework, drawing attention either to failures of integration or successes.47 However, as I discuss below, the concept of integration within the field of musical studies – particularly as a criterion of value – has been the site of critical contestation for well over a decade.

Although integration in studies of the musical is perhaps best seen as a problematic discourse rather than as a verifiable practice, criticism of Branagh’s film has often used the term (or variations on it) in ways which, at best, lie oddly with its position in academic studies of the musical, and, at worst, are misleading. Altman, the theorist upon whose work most critics of the film have relied, in fact makes very limited

46 Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1. 47 For examples drawing attention to failures of integration, see Osborne, ‘Introduction’, 11; Holste, ‘Branagh’s Labour’s Lost’, 229; Marshall, ‘“It Doth Forget”’, 84-88; for examples drawing attention to successful integration, see Crowl, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare Bulletin 18:3 (2000): 37-38; Green, ‘Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, 84; Lehmann, ‘Faux Show’, 77; Nardo, ‘Playing with Shakespeare’s Play’, 17; Gay, ‘“A Romantic Musical Comedy”’, 11-19. 200 reference to integration and is notably circumspect in his discussions on the matter.

Noting that conventional histories of the musical stress how Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

(MGM), in their musical films of the mid-forties to mid-fifties, ‘“integrated” the musical numbers into the plot, and thus reduced the awkward sense of unreality often associated with earlier musicals’, he also considers that ‘the very notion [of integration] itself champions a standard of realism which I believe to be antithetical to the spirit of the genre as a whole’.48 Discussing the close collaboration amongst studio, stars and creative personnel in RKO’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals of the 1930s, one result of which was ‘a trim sense of integration’, he differentiates these films from

‘most musicals in the thirties’.49 Nonetheless, Marshall, taking Branagh to task for an apparently failed attempt at integration, posits ‘integrating the musical numbers into the narrative’ as one of the ‘most important conventions of the 1930’s musical comedies’ (a glance at any musical of the 1930s should dispel that misconception immediately).50

Although a practical concern for aspects of integration stretches through the history of the form in both its stage and screen versions, Barry Keith Grant places the

‘Golden Age’ of the integrated film musical in the 1940s and 50s – thus postdating the musicals upon which Branagh draws. These integrated musicals were intimately linked to producer ’s work, mainly with MGM, in which ‘Freed approached the film musical as an organic whole, tying the music to the book, the production numbers to the narrative’.51 The early years of Freed’s work coincided with the rise – especially in the wake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s stage musicals, Oklahoma! (1943) and

48 Altman, The American Film Musical, 11; 115. 49 Alman, The American Film Musical, 167. 50 Marshall, ‘“It Doth Forget”’, 84. 51 Barry Keith Grant, The Hollywood Film Musical (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 20. 201

Carousel (1945) – of the discourse of integration as a fetishized primary signifier of value in the musical. Scott McMillin links the rise of this discourse to the powerful influence of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk on opera and stage theory in the United States, and to the New Criticism, the dominant aesthetic theory of the time in America, and its search for an organic wholeness in works of art.52 Indeed, Rodgers and Hammerstein – who, McMillin suggests ‘were aware that they had a cultural bias to overcome’ as creative artists working within a resolutely popular artform – themselves played a large part in promoting a discourse of integration that went beyond the relationship of numbers and narrative.53 proposed a particularly ‘strong’ articulation of integration: ‘when a show works perfectly, it’s because all the individual parts complement each other and fit together. No single element overshadows any other’.54 A critic such as Marshall who questions how successfully Branagh integrates the songs into Shakespeare’s plot is already discussing integration in a way that is at odds with this ‘strong’ formulation of integration: in Rodgers’ formulation, the plot is not privileged, but is only one of a range of elements that make a musical.55 A more appropriate question in relation to this form of integration would be how successfully

Love’s Labour’s Lost’s plot, dialogue, song lyrics, music, dance, mise-en-scène, costumes and editing combine to form a new, unified whole.

The presence of multiple articulations of integration theory already problematizes its use as an evaluative tool. However, in recent years, critical studies on the musical have thrown integration theory as a whole into question. By rejecting integration as a fixed and determinable entity, scholars of the musical have undermined

52 McMillin, The Musical as Drama, 3-5 53 McMillin, The Musical as Drama, 5. 54 Quoted in McMillin, The Musical as Drama, 1. 55 Marshall, ‘“It Doth Forget”’, 85. 202 its usefulness as a criterion of value. In particular, writers from a number of spectator positions have drawn attention to discrepancies between integration theory and the individual spectator’s lived experience of a work. For those writing from a queer perspective, an approach which embraces rather than suppresses these discrepancies might give a spectator a point of entry into works which on the surface are overwhelmingly and often overdeterminedly heteronormative. Thus D. A. Miller, in an extended meditation on the relationship between musicals and his experience of growing up gay in 1950s America, writes of boys similar to himself:

What he consequently sought in the Broadway musical was the very thing that those who despised it also found there: not the integration of drama and music found on the thematic surface, but a so much deeper formal discontinuity between the two that no makeshift for reconciling them could ever manage to make the transition from one to the other less abrupt, or more plausible.56

For Miller, the apparently integrated musical’s ‘frankly interruptive mode-shifting had the same miraculous effect on him as on every character, no matter how frustrated in ambition or devastated by a broken heart, who felt a song coming on: that of sending the whole world packing’.57 Likewise, Stacy Wolf understands the musical as characterized by fragmentation rather than integration, a fragmentation she relates to the subject positions of lesbian spectators, arguing:

Furthermore, in spite of the received history of musical theater, the form is hardly ‘integrated’ at all. Although composers, lyricists and librettists are said to have successfully ‘integrated’ the book and the numbers, musicals are figured around what might be called Brechtian pauses, gaps, absences, interruptions, and ‘Alienation effects’.58

56 D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3. 57 Miller, Place for Us, 3. 58 Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 32. 203

Wolf concludes that this fragmentation ‘complicate[s] identification and offer[s] other means of engagement; these different, sometimes nonidentificatory modes allow and encourage the varied, against-the-grain readings undertaken [by Wolf’s book]’.59

Like Miller and Wolf, Scott McMillin’s work on integration focuses not on the identification of integration in the musical-as-text, but on the question of the pleasure musicals generate in the spectator. Moving beyond against-the-grain readings and queer subject positions, McMillin claims that the pleasure of apparently integrated musicals lies precisely in their ‘crackle of difference, not the smoothness of unity’.60 In a particularly influential critical shift, McMillin draws a distinction between the theory of integration (‘a theory easily believed as long as it remains unexamined’) and the actual experience of musicals, arguing, ‘it takes things different from one another to be thought of as integrated in the first place, and I find that the musical depends more on the differences that make the close fit interesting than on the suppression of differences in a seamless whole’.61

While the theory of integration has been thrown into question, recent scholarship has also fostered new modes of engagement and reception for those musicals which are clearly not integrated, scholarship that usefully confirms the notion of Branagh’s Love’s

Labour’s Lost’s potential as an interrogative text, a potential further likely to be activated by a recognition of the film as pasticcio. Two recent approaches to what I shall refer to by the shorthand phrase ‘non-integrated musicals’ are particularly helpful as an entry point to the film. Michael Dunne, writing on film musicals of the 1930s, takes a Bakhtinian approach to the non-integrated musical, using as an example the film

Golddiggers of 1933 (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, Warner Bros., 1933), in which he notes the

59 Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 33. 60 McMillin, The Musical as Drama, 2. 61 McMillin, The Musical as Drama, 1; 2. 204 presence of multiple, conflicting chronotopes (Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms for the spatio- temporal organization of narratives) far beyond the standard dual timescales for speech and song-and/or-dance numbers which are an accepted (or suppressed, depending on one’s viewpoint) feature of integrated musicals.62 Indeed, Dunne demonstrates that in

Golddiggers of 1933, multiple, conflicting chronotopes are present even within single numbers – the ‘My Forgotten Man’ number, for example, is structured around a number of fades to black, each of which opens on a different chronotope: beginning with ‘a patently theatrical rendering of a realistic street scene’ with an on-screen theatre audience, the number moves to an apparent outdoors scene of soldiers in the rain (later revealed to be a film or theatre set with moving walkways), then to a dole queue with no scenery to signify place, followed by a return to a theatrical setting, but this time to a different, much bigger stage with no visible audience.63 Dunne argues that approaches to film musicals of the 1930s which rely on a monologic approach (i.e. on a value system based on a fetishized notion of the unity apparently resulting from integration) will inevitably find non-integrated musicals flawed or inconsistent, as many critics of

Love’s Labour’s Lost have done. Dunne quotes Bakhtin: ‘Raised on monologic forms of artistic visualization, thoroughly steeped in them, aesthetic thought tends to absolutize these forms and not see their boundaries’.64 He then argues that:

By recognizing the animating force of Bakhtinian dialogue, however, we might be able to comprehend the concept, also articulated in [Bakhtin’s] Problems [of Dostoevsky’s Poetics], that ‘the idea is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses’. In the case of Golddiggers in particular, we might be able to comprehend that ideas are cinematically rooted in chronotopic specificity and that juxtaposing such radically different chronotopes can

62 Michael Dunne, American Film Musical Themes and Forms (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 13-34. 63 Dunne, American Film Musical Themes and Forms, 22. 64 Dunne, American Film Musical Themes and Forms, 24. Here Dunne quotes Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 271. 205

create ideological dialogue between such radically different ideas as social representation and romantic escapism.65

Dunne continues: ‘the task of resolving the paradoxes posed by Golddiggers of 1933 falls to the viewer and critic because resolution cannot be fully attained within the textual limits of the film’.66

Millie Taylor makes a similar point in relation to stage musicals, but with reference to Roland Barthes, and expands on McMillin’s distinction between integration theory and the experience of integration in practice. She first draws attention to the overcoding that is a feature of integrated musicals and that ‘might imply that the various parts of the performance text work together to produce a single, clearly discernible reading of a coherent narrative, in which music, dance and book over-code each other’

(or in Bakhtinian terms, produce a monologic form or in Belsey’s formulation of the interrogative text, a single privileged narrative).67 However, she also draws attention to the fact that each medium signifies in a particular way, with the result that even integrated musicals with an apparently high degree of over-coding can still result in multiple ‘readings’.68 Following Taylor’s argument, musicals are not intrinsically integrated or otherwise: an integrated musical is only fully integrated if the spectator experiences it as such through the convergence of meanings signified by multiple media, a convergence which is not guaranteed. Seen in this light, it is therefore not surprising that critics of Love’s Labour’s Lost have been divided on the question of its integration. With this caveat, Taylor characterizes integrated musicals as Barthesian readerly texts capable of generating pleasure through their apparently coherent

65 Dunne, American Film Musical Themes and Forms, 24, quoting Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevksy’s Poetics, 88 (Bakhtin’s emphasis). 66 Dunne, American Film Musical Themes and Forms, 24. 67 Millie Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 55. 68 Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment, 55. 206 narrative, and non-integrated musicals as scriptible or writerly texts capable of generating jouissance through the spectator’s negotiation of their gaps and disjunctions.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is in fact a fascinating mixture of the integrated and the non-integrated. Several of the song and dance numbers, such as ‘I’d Rather Charleston’ and ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, discussed later in this chapter, arise naturally from the plot, and indeed move it forward. The film also contains elements of over-coding, suggesting an engagement with a stronger articulation of integration theory. Thus, the film draws on the conventions of colour and spectacle in the Hollywood musical, using costume choices to over-code the apparent inevitability in the particular couplings which occur between the Princess and her friends on the one hand and the King and his friends on the other, the colour of each man’s tie matching the colour of the dress of his opposite number in the women. Over-coding also occurs at the level of mise-en-scène and props. Thus, in the first scene for the King and his friends, in which Berowne is reluctant to agree to the terms of their proposed study-filled retreat, the men are presented in a library against a background of books, with Berowne generally situated screen left. In the first scene for the Princess and her friends, the women are also linked to reading: as they arrive in Navarre in punts, the Princess and Maria read newspapers and Katharine reads a book. Rosaline, however, in the punt at screen left, knits. The apparent inevitability of Berowne’s coupling with Rosaline is thus over-coded by her occupation of a similar screen-left position as that of Berowne and her distancing of herself from her companions’ reading activities. At the same time, the reading-related props also over-code differences between the men and women: the King’s desire to withdraw from the world contrasts with the Princess’s engagement with the approaching war, underlined by a shot of the headlines of her newspaper.

207

On the other hand, the film is clearly not integrated on a number of levels. I have already noted the clash of languages between Shakespearean spoken language and modern American song lyrics, which in turn clash further with the clipped early twentieth-century English accent of the pastiche newsreels. While the film’s musical numbers are generally internally consistent (a fantasy number, such as ‘Heaven’ is clearly set out as a fantasy number from the outset, as the men float to the ceiling), some numbers neither arise naturally from the plot, nor move it forward: for instance in the

‘No Strings’ number discussed earlier (a scene that appears to flaunt its lack of integration), a swimming pool appears – apparently inside a tent pitched in a field – along with a large female chorus of synchronized swimmer-singers who make no further appearance.

One particular number, ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ (music and lyrics by

Irving Berlin), appears to be especially unintegrated. This number replaces the scene of the supposed Muscovites in act 5, scene 2 of the play. The Princess, Rosaline, Maria and Katherine have just received gifts and verses from their respective admirers. Like the ‘No Strings’ number discussed earlier, this number abstracts and condenses traits of several styles of musical; however, it stands out in the context of Love’s Labour’s Lost for its layering of traits from musicals beyond the 1930s. The song was first sung by

Fred Astaire to a melancholy Ginger Rogers in the RKO film Follow the Fleet (dir.

Mark Sandrich, 1936); there, ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ is a diegetic number performed on a theatrical stage to an onscreen audience. As in its treatment of ‘No

Strings’, Love’s Labour’s Lost sets ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ as a non-diegetic ensemble number for four couples, who sing and dance simultaneously, instead of its original configuration of diegetic solo song followed by couple dance. The scene is set in a nightclub (apparently called ‘Navarre’ to judge by the sign on its gates), and

208 intertextual references to iconic nightclub scenes from later musicals are layered on top of the Astaire-Rogers number. The red lighting and simmering sexuality of the number reference the ‘Broadway Melody’ nightclub scene with Cyd Charisse in Singin’ in the

Rain. However, the couples in Love’s Labour’s Lost are far more overt in their sexuality than Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain. Whereas Charisse caresses her inner thigh with Kelly’s spectacles in a full-length two-shot and the couple engage in pelvic thrusts while positioned side-by-side, in Love’s Labour’s Lost the women’s thighs are seen in close-up being caressed both by their own disembodied hands and those of the men, while instead of standing side-by-side, the women straddle the seated men. A further layer references Liza Minelli’s ‘Mein Herr’ number as Sally

Bowles in Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret (Broadway 1966, filmed 1972) through the use of props and choreography: in a clear reference to the mise-en-scène of Cabaret’s Kit Kat

Klub, part of the women’s dance is staged while they sit on black kitchen chairs. The choreography likewise reflects that of Bob Fosse in Cabaret, as the women balance on and slide off the chairs in a series of angular stretches and flexes of the legs. However, unlike Cabaret and Singin’ in the Rain, the men also display themselves as sexual objects to be looked at by the audience, an aspect emphasised by the use of close-ups which tend to cut out the face to focus on body parts: in a gender reversal of Minelli’s slow descent of her hands from her breasts down her black dress, the men’s hands are first seen pressed to their crotches, then moving slowly down their black trousers.

For critics of the film, the incongruity of this number was not overlooked.

Marshall is particularly exercised by its inclusion in the film, largely on the grounds of its anachronistic depiction of sexuality rather than its anachronistic choreography:

One of my first reactions to this segment filled with tight black pants, heaving cleavage, and yearning eyes was something to the effect of, why is it here? Although sex is alluded to in classical Hollywood musicals, it is done so much more subtly and discreetly, primarily because of the 209

strictures of the Production Code. ... Since obviously this Code no longer exists, Branagh can include in this film whatever he pleases; however, if one of his goals was to pay to and/or recreate the studio musicals, I ask again, why is it here?69

The inclusion of this scene, the overt sexuality of which – both male and female – undeniably jars both in the context of the 1930s dance styles of other numbers, and of the layered references to Singin’ in the Rain and even Cabaret, again draws attention to the film’s textuality. A potential answer to Marshall’s questioning of the scene’s presence in the film might simply be that it throws a spotlight on the relative sexual innocence, or at least reticence, of the other numbers in the film, prompting a recognition, as Dyer suggests pastiche often does, that ‘they don’t make films like this anymore’, a reminder of contemporary cinema’s tendency to focus on sexuality instead of romance.70 Another answer might be found by considering the scene in relation to

Shakespeare’s play. While Marshall finds the sexuality of the number inappropriate in terms of the conventions of the film musical, Kenneth Rothwell finds the number – ‘a sensuous, quasi-pornographic dance number’ – entirely appropriate as a response to

Shakespeare’s play: ‘not really gratuitous sex for the sake of sex, the soft porn restates the way that Love’s Labour’s Lost conceals behind its innocent façade a cesspool of bawdy puns about male and female genitalia’.71 However, a recognition of the layering of references in the scene suggests a further answer to Marshall’s question. Having escaped to Berlin from the repressive life of her homeland, Cabaret’s Sally Bowles performs an escapist retreat into decadence and sexuality as a means of avoiding acknowledging the rising Nazi presence in 1930s Germany. An allusion to Sally

Bowles in a film that engages with the 1930s suggests the potential dangers of a politics

69 Marshall, ‘“It Doth Forget”’, 87. 70 Dyer, Pastiche, 177. 71 Kenneth Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 251-52. 210 of escapism, an aspect explored in the next section of this chapter. Nonetheless,

Marshall’s response to this scene is significant in a discussion of the film as an interrogative text. Her repeated questioning of why the scene has been included in the film and her recognition of the scene’s blatantly non-integrated nature suggest the power of the non-integrated number to create an interrogative text, even if it is not recognized as such.

Performance Competence and Escapism

In this third and final part of the chapter I argue that one potential outcome of approaching Love’s Labour’s Lost as an interrogative text activated by its pasticcio texture is to receive the film as an invitation to engage with the question of escapism.

Although Friedman objects that Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play about women who decline to dance with men’ (and thus clashes with the presence of mixed- sex dance in the film), Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is at least as much ‘about’ a failed attempt at a withdrawal from the world into a utopia of study and same-sex comradeship, as it is with a refusal to dance.72 Shakespeare’s play begins with the King of Navarre’s decision to withdraw from the world with his friends Berowne, Dumaine and Longaville in order to create an alternative polity in which study is prized. The friends’ oath – ‘Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep’ (1.1.48) – suggests how their particular utopia will be organised. However, their attempt at withdrawal fails: the arrival of the Princess of France and her ladies obstructs the men’s plans, and the resolution ‘not to see ladies’ is quickly broken as the men fall in love. The film of

Love’s Labour’s Lost thus places a play about a failed attempt at withdrawal from the world in conversation with the Depression-era Hollywood film musical, one of the most

72 Friedman, ‘“I Won’t Dance”’, 134. 211 escapist of film genres, at least in the sense that it provided temporary emotional escape from the rigours of the Depression.73 Like the King’s decision to withdraw into a utopian world of study and comradeship, the film musical genre also draws on ideas of utopianism. As Dyer argues, the film musical genre does not present a model of a utopian world. Instead, in its virtuoso song and dance routines it ‘presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized’.74 However, as I shall argue, the lack of virtuoso performance competence among the actors has the result that the song and dance numbers in this film fail to convey a sense of what utopia would feel like, obstructing the sense of emotional escape often associated with the musical.

That the bulk of the film is set just before the outbreak of war, underlined by the interpolation of real and pastiche newsreel footage, significantly raises the stakes in the

King’s attempts at withdrawal from the world. A quasi-monastic retreat in which one attempts to set up an alternative polity with a handful of close friends might be considered an admirable form of social activism. However, for a head of state to attempt to withdraw from public life in this way in the face of growing threats of war might be understood as self-indulgent escapism. For Wray, ‘the problem with this alternating between external and internal events is that it has the effect of making the protagonists’ flight into romance seem self-indulgently irresponsible’.75 That an audience member might have a complex relationship to a Shakespearean character is a strange point on which to criticise the film. As Russ Macdonald puts it,

73 Dunne’s discussion of Golddiggers of 1939 demonstrates that the genre was not blind to these realities, and that at least some musicals actively drew attention to them while still providing temporary emotional escape. Escapism in the musical need not mean the obscuring of political realities or alternatives. 74 Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992), 18. 75 Wray, ‘The Singing Shakespearean’, 160. 212

In all the great tragedies, Shakespeare encourages in each sensitive spectator a kind of internal disputation. It is the source of our struggle, in Romeo and Juliet, with the attractiveness and foolishness of the title characters, or, more abstractly, with the beauty and danger of passion. It causes us to feel both scorn and pity for King Lear, sympathy and disgust for Anthony and Cleopatra. It is the quality that makes the plays endlessly fascinating, debatable, and – what would have meant most to Shakespeare the theatrical shareholder – revivable.76

While McDonald’s point is raised in a discussion of the tragedies, it need not be restricted to them: his ‘kind of internal disputation’ also arises in relation to characters from Shakespeare’s comedies, including Love’s Labour’s Lost, and it is therefore entirely appropriate that an audience finds the aristocrats in Love’s Labour’s Lost not entirely admirable or likeable. For example, Shakespeare’s Pageant of the Nine

Worthies in act 5, scene 2, performed by the lower-class characters for the aristocrats, and shown in a severely cut montage in the film, prompts a scene in which the aristocratic men ridicule and humiliate the pageant’s performers, particularly

Holofernes. As Bobbyann Roesen (Anne Barton) puts it in her influential essay on the play, ‘the behavior of the [aristocratic] men is incredibly unattractive, particularly that of Berowne’.77 That our distaste for the aristocrats’ behaviour towards the lower classes should not be assumed to be an anachronistic attitude is confirmed by Holofernes’ rebuke to Berowne: ‘This is not generous, not gentle, not humble’ (5.2.623). For viewers who approach the film as an interrogative text, the problem that Wray finds in the film’s presentation of the aristocratic characters might not be a problem, but precisely the point – a point underlined by the apparent failure of the attempts at flight to various utopias, and one in keeping with an adaptation of a play that invites a complex relationship with those characters.

76 Macdonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, 49-50. 77 Bobbyann Roesen (Anne Barton), ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare Quarterly 4:4 (1953): 411–26 (139). 213

Academic writers on the film have often deprecated its standards of singing and dancing, turning this deprecation into an evaluative tool for the film as a whole.

Osborne, for example, refers to ‘the uninspiring quality of some of the musical interludes’ as one of the film’s ‘shortcomings’.78 Others describe the singing and dancing as bearing ‘an unfortunate resemblance to community theater’ and not approaching ‘the “wow” quotient of the dance routines from the earlier films Branagh and company attempt to emulate’; as ‘a cultivated amateurishness of technique’; as failing ‘to deliver the virtuoso performances the genre demands’, as performed by

‘actors with neither singing nor dancing talent’; or by ‘mere hacks’, whose ‘poor imitations of Astaire have the effect not only of revealing this production as in some way second-rate, but of designating this production with that status’.79 Penny Gay, on the other hand, defends the performers’ ability:

Criticisms--and there are many among both academic and popular critics--that the singing and dancing are incompetent constitute an insult to the professionalism of all concerned, and are based, I suspect, on an unthinking snobbery that privileges the original over its postmodern reappropriation. These actors-singers-dancers give highly competent and indeed charming performances in their own late twentieth-century styles.80

In fact, the performers are generally perfectly competent in the singing and dancing tasks to which they are put; they are simply not asked to sing or perform choreography beyond their abilities, which are generally not of a virtuoso standard. Hence Holste’s perception of a missing ‘“wow” quotient’.

Holste’s missing ‘“wow” quotient’ is particularly pertinent if we are to consider the film as setting various types of escapism in dialogue with each other. Here the

78 Osborne, ‘Introduction’, 11. 79 Holste, ‘Branagh’s Labour’s Lost’, 229; Wray, ‘Nostalgia for Navarre’, 175; Friedman, ‘“I Won’t Dance”’, 134; Marshall, ‘“It Doth Forget”’, 88; Eggert, ‘Sure Can Sing and Dance’, 79. 80 Gay, ‘“A Romantic Musical Comedy”’, 6. 214 concept of the voice-object (or vocal object), a concept originating in opera studies but now adopted by musical studies, is useful in clarifying what appears to be missing in the film’s singing and dancing performances.81 Carolyn Abbate describes the emergence of the voice-object in performance as follows:

There is also a radical autonomization of the that occurs, in varying degrees, in all vocal music. The sound of the singing voice becomes, as it were, the sole center for the listener’s attention. That attention is thus drawn away from words, plot, character and even from music as it resides in the orchestra, or music as formal gestures, as abstract shape.82

A similar phenomenon, which I will call the dance-object, occurs in virtuoso dance performances, when the figure of a body moving in time and space becomes the sole object of the spectator’s attention, with individual dance steps and gestures, music, plot and character falling away from the spectator’s experience. Moments when the voice- object or dance-object assert themselves within a narrative thus constitute a form of spontaneous escape from the confines of plot and character, beyond the control of writers and directors – indeed Joy Calico notes the problems that the voice-object, in its power to dominate all other aspects of a performance and thus neutralize theatrical dialectics, poses for Brechtian performances that incorporate song and that actively wish to avoid a sense of escapism.83 The virtuoso dance sequences of 1930s musicals are

81 The concept of the ‘objet-voix’ was introduced into opera studies in 1986 by Michel Poizat’s Lacan-influenced Opéra, ou le cri de l’ange: Essai sur la jouissance de l’amateur d’opéra (Paris: Métailié, 1986). Arthur Denner, Poizat’s translator for the English version of his book, translated the concept as ‘vocal object’ (Michel Poizat, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992)). However, the concept had already been introduced into Anglophone opera studies as ‘voice- object’ by Carolyn Abbate in her Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1991). This English version of the concept has become more widely used than Denner’s : for example, Joy H. Calico in Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) and Millie Taylor in Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment both use Abbate’s version. I therefore use the term ‘voice-object’. 82 Abbate, Unsung Voices, 10. 83 Calico, Brecht at the Opera, 70. 215 sites where the dance-object is particularly likely to manifest itself; these moments of temporary escape from already escapist plots add to the intensity of a spectator’s engagement with the films, and are usually eagerly awaited by the dedicated fan.

The voice-object and the dance-object are both by their nature intensely subjective: my own experience of the film is that the voice-object appears fleetingly and only once, and the dance-object not at all, despite Adrian Lester’s excellent performance of ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’, which is clearly well above the standard of dancing displayed elsewhere in the film. That single, fleeting appearance of the voice-object occurs towards the end of ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’, from the moment when Nathan Lane sings ‘but you go on’ – a moment of release as, finally, a singer sings at full power – until the end of the number. W. B. Worthen’s reaction suggests he experienced a similar restriction of the appearance of the voice-object to this number:

With the exception of Nathan Lane, the actors seem held back, constrained when it comes to the requisite singing and dancing, tentative. Lane’s irritating, Harpo Marx (toot-tooting his horn) Costard has one of the few moments in the film – ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ – in which the performance actually delivers the work of musical comedy: that blend of apparent nonchalance and evident technical mastery of voice and movement that drives films from Top Hat to West Side Story to Moulin Rouge.84

Significantly, in a film in which the song and dance numbers have otherwise repeatedly

(and, for many critics, frustratingly) withheld both the voice-object and the dance- object, this long-awaited moment of escape from character and plot is immediately followed by Marcadé’s entrance with news of the death of the father of the Princess and the subsequent outbreak of war: a culminating moment of escapism, where the voice- object appears in a non-integrated number in an escapist genre, immediately followed by a devastating intrusion from the external world, following which the romantic life of

84 W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 71. 216 the Navarre court collapses. On one reading, the withholding of the voice-object up until that point, a consequence of the performance competence of the actors, enhances this climax and collapse of escapism.

Although discussions of the amateurishness, competency, virtuosity, or otherwise of the performers’ singing and dancing in Love’s Labour’s Lost have generally been used within an evaluative framework (or what Henderson describes as the ‘“pick or pan” mode which still pervades much scholarly writing’), critical work in studies of the musical is capable of examining questions of singing, dancing, and acting competence for hermeneutic rather than purely evaluative ends.85 Thus, Grant acknowledges the negative evaluation that previous critics and reviewers have given to

Karen Lynn Gorney’s ‘decidedly mediocre dancing ability’ in Saturday Night Fever

(dir. John Badham, Paramount, 1977), but proceeds to read this as meaningful within the terms of the film.86 Anna Nardo is an exception amongst critics of Branagh’s Love’s

Labour’s Lost in taking this hermeneutic approach. Nardo accepts that the film does not contain ‘flawless Fred and Ginger performances’ but convincingly sees meaning in this:

‘Just as the King, Biron, Dumain and Longueville are playing at being Petrarchan lovers, so Branagh’s lords and ladies are playing at being Fred and Ginger’.87 Nardo reads the levitation scene from the ‘Cheek to Cheek’ number as follows: ‘the fact that

Kenneth Branagh’s and Alicia Silverstone’s graceful posing can’t hold a candle to Fred and Ginger’s brilliant “Cheek to Cheek” pas de deux in Top Hat (1935) only emphasizes the fact that we are in the midst of a fantasy – indeed a fantasy (being able

85 Henderson, ‘Catalysing What?’, 98. 86 Grant, The Hollywood Film Musical, 112. 87 Nardo, ‘Playing with Shakespeare’s Play’, 14. 217 to dance like Fred) within a fantasy (being levitated by the power of one’s own

“mush”)’.88

A hermeneutic approach might also create meaning in the patterns of competence displayed in the film. The ensemble work for the king and his friends is noticeably scrappy, for example, compared to the stillness that often accompanies the

Princess and her ladies in public (and that contrasts with the private exuberant childishness of their bedtime frolics that the King spies in silhouette through the walls of their tent). This lack of a tight ensemble for the men is apparent from the first number of the film, ‘I’d Rather Charleston’ (music by George Gershwin, lyrics by

Desmond Carter), an unusual number in the context of the film in not having appeared previously in a film musical, instead having been introduced by Fred Astaire in the 1924

London stage production of Lady Be Good. The datedness of its dance references in the context of a film apparently set in the 1930s suggests from the outset the conservative nature of the King and his friends. In the approach to the song, the King of Navarre and his friends Berowne, Dumaine and Longaville are in the library; the King stands at a lectern facing his friends as the men are about to subscribe to an oath to retire from the world for three years. Willingly agreeing to sign, Dumaine and Longaville join the king at the lectern: Berowne, however, declares, in a one-shot, that he is unhappy with the requirements ‘Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep’ (1.1.48). As a quiet musical introduction underscores the men’s speech, the other three men join Berowne, facing the camera in a row of four, as their gestures become larger and more stylized. Erin

Brannigan, in her work on dance and film, describes such an increase of motor excess as a ‘gestural anacrusis’: ‘the moment between one mode of performance and another – the space where the shift occurs between walking and dancing, utilitarian movements and

88 Nardo, ‘Playing with Shakespeare’, 16. 218 choreography, between recognizable and dance-like deviations’.89 While Berowne puts his hands in his pockets, the King, Longaville and Dumaine then all cross their arms.

This particular gestural anacrusis is capable of yielding at least two meanings. For those (few) viewers very familiar with Love’s Labour’s Lost, the scene is capable of provoking a delighted recognition of the references at three points in the play (but not present in the film) in which crossed arms are associated with love-melancholy: the men’s gesture thus already prefigures their breaking of the oath not to see women.90

The gesture also draws attention to the lack of true singlemindedness of commitment among the men. On an obvious level, the distinction between Berowne with his hands in his pockets and the other men with crossed arms reflects Berowne’s reluctance fully to join his friends in the oath. However, instead of the precisely controlled ‘corporate gesture’ – the simultaneous gesture, reflective of group solidarity, made by multiple characters or by members of a chorus or dance troupe – the crossed-arm gesture also reflects unconscious division in the apparent unity of purpose of the King, Longaville and Dumaine: while the King and Longaville cross their right arm over the left arm with the right hand showing, Dumaine crosses his left hand over the right, leaving no hand showing. This division in apparent unity continues when the men move into dance: as the men kick their right leg over the left in unison, Dumaine kicks with a pointed foot, while Longaville, positioned at the end of the kickline next to Dumaine, kicks with a

89 Erin Brannigan, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 141. 90 Moth advises Armado to advertise his love by appearing ‘with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit’ (3.1.16-18); Berowne refers to Cupid as ‘lord of folded arms’ (3.1.176); the King of Navarre, having observed Longaville alone, addresses Longaville ironically with ‘You do not love Maria? Longaville/ Did never sonnet for her sake compile/ Nor never lay his wreathed arms athwart/ His loving bosom to keep down his heart’ (4.3.130-133). For further details of the early modern association of crossed arms with love melancholy, see David Bevington, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984),78. 219 flexed foot.91 Neither step is correct or incorrect, competent or incompetent: what is significant is their simultaneous use, which produces a scrappy effect that undercuts the apparent unity in the corporate gesture of the men’s kickline. Here Gay’s use of the plural in her description of the performers’ ‘own late twentieth-century styles’ becomes significant.92

It is quite possible that this first number is responsible for much of the negative criticism of the film’s performance standards. I would argue that the scrappiness of the ensemble in a first number, before we have had sufficient opportunity to observe the characters, is a structural flaw in the film: the hermeneutic value of the lack of unity in this first scene is more apparent on subsequent viewings after the film as a whole has been seen. As the film progresses, however, meaningful patterns emerge in the ways that different characters or groups of characters handle the corporate gesture and the gestural and vocal anacrusis, that moment between speech and song when the delivery of words becomes slower and more rhythmical, when vowel sounds gradually lengthen, and when musical underscoring becomes noticeable. For example, in direct contrast to the men’s first number, the arrival of the Princess of France and her friends Rosaline,

Katherine and Maria is characterized by stillness and control: seated each in their own punt, the women are propelled to Navarre, while they themselves remain still. In contrast with the men’s scrappy negotiation of the gestural anacrusis, the women completely dispense with the gestural and vocal anacrusis in their first encounter with the men, to startling effect. Rosaline, standing still during her verbal sparring match with Berowne, disconcerts Berowne (and the viewer) by breaking suddenly into song and dance (‘I Won’t Dance’, discussed previously) with no transition between speech

91 The camera angle makes it difficult to distinguish the type of kick produced by the King or Berowne. 92 Gay, ‘“A Romantic Musical Comedy”’, 6. 220 and singing, walking and dancing. In this abrupt change in performance mode, Rosaline and her friends can be interpreted as not simply disregarding the conventions of the musical (in which, despite the tiresome cliché, characters very rarely ‘burst into’ song, but instead carefully negotiate the gestural and vocal anacrusis to transition between performance modalities), but also as manipulating these conventions as a negotiation of power hierarchies, as a means of throwing the men off their guard.

Whereas the song and dance routines of the two royal groupings demand a more or less obvious break from the characters’ speaking personas to push them over the gestural and vocal anacrusis into song and dance, the film’s other characters appear to live their life in their spoken scenes in a state of permanent gestural and vocal anacrusis, always ready to break into song or dance. Thus the speech of Costard (Nathan Lane) is interspersed with whistles and comic impersonations; Don Armado walks with exaggeratedly high steps and pointed toes when feeling confident, collapses at the knees when dejected, and speaks in a Spanish accent with outrageous modulations; Jaquenetta

(Stefania Rocca) walks with exaggeratedly swinging hips; Holofernia lurches into quasi-singing, trilling the word ‘verses’, and suddenly descending an octave to put a seductive emphasis on the word ‘society’, after leading the ensemble in ‘The Way You

Look Tonight’. The result of this motor and verbal excess in the spoken scenes of those characters outside the royal foursomes is that speech and everyday movement on the one hand and song and dance on the other appear as points on a performative continuum rather than separate performative modalities. That the distance between points on that continuum is not always great thereby appears to naturalize their forms of emotional expression, at least in comparison with the royal groupings. While, as Nardo suggests, the aristocratic men are only playing at being Petrarchan lovers, it is the characters from

221 outside the royal foursomes who appear able to negotiate the realms of love and sex successfully.

For these characters, flirtation, love and seduction are not symptoms of an escapist flight from the external world. It is therefore appropriate that, as viewers, we are not drawn into the escapism of the voice-object or dance-object in our encounters with them. Indeed, the appearance of the voice-object or dance-object seems to be deliberately avoided in ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ (music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by

Dorothy Fields), an absolutely charming number for the King’s tutor, Holofernia,

Nathaniel the curate (Richard Briers), Jaquenetta the dairymaid, Costard the clown and

Dull, a constable. In its original version in Swing Time (dir. George Stevens, RKO

Radio Pictures, 1936), the song is a diegetic number sung by Fred Astaire, accompanying himself on the piano, to Ginger Rogers, washing her hair in the room next door. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, at least the lyrics are diegetic: Holofernia ‘reads’ in song the content of a letter sent by Berowne to Rosaline, but mistakenly delivered to

Jaquenetta, although – in the style of the Astaire-Rogers RKO musicals – Holofernia soon gives up the pretence of reading (indeed she drops the letter) as she turns the song into the beginnings of a flirtation with Nathaniel, accompanied by the others. In a dance with several jumps, none of the characters is able to jump at all high – a feature emphasized by the use of a camera fixed at head height and by a mise-en-scène dominated by a flat horizon bisected by a large number of verticals (trees, a horse jump, fence posts) against which to measure the jumps. Jaquenetta gamely assumes an arabesque, assisted by Dull and Costard, but has to stop and pull up her dress to enable her to stretch her leg sufficiently, which she does with obvious awkwardness. Geraldine

McEwan’s singing voice is thin and wavering, and Richard Briers’ is of uncertain pitch;

222 the dancing of all five is undisciplined, but nonetheless the number is one of the highlights of the film.

Although this scene has not attracted the negative criticism that ‘Let’s Face the

Music and Dance’ has received on the basis of the incongruity of its choreography in a film relating to 1930s musicals, the choreography in this scene is at least as out of place, but this time for its old-fashioned qualities. Indeed, the growing love affair between

Holofernia and Nathaniel (brought in as a result of the film’s replacement of the play’s

Holofernes with a female tutor for the King) has resonances not in the films of the

1930s, but in pairs of elderly lovers in two works of the later nineteenth century: the dalliance between the governess Miss Prism and the Reverend Canon, Doctor Chasuble, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and that between Lady

Sangazure and Sir Marmaduke Pointdextre, conducted over the course of an extremely old-fashioned gavotte in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorceror (1877). The dance accompanying ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ is noticeably old-fashioned for the 1930s.

Unlike the dance numbers of the royal groups, in which the dance steps occur in a constant flow, the dance in this number is characterized by a more archaic style – appropriately enough, given the advanced ages of the two main dancers – in which poses are interspersed with transitional movement. While in the dances of the royal groups film editing contributes to the overall choreography and the soundtrack technology suppresses any signs of obvious physical exertion (as is usual in film musicals), the physical exertions of the characters/actors in ‘The Way You Look

Tonight’ are not disguised by film technology or editing: the number and the following scene are shot in one continuous take, and Holofernia and Nathaniel/ McEwan and

Briers are visibly and audibly out of breath by the end. Whereas a recurring theme of

Richard Dyer’s In the Space of a Song is the function of songs in film in creating an

223 expanded sense of time and place distinct from the rest of a film, the stillness of the camera, the continuous shot and the obvious exertions of the performers in this number obstruct any sense of a shift to a different, expanded sense of time and space.93 And yet, by the end of the scene, Holofernia’s seduction of Nathaniel appears to be successful and unproblematic. In eschewing the possibilities of cinematic technology to create a flawless performance, and in the characters’ resonances with works from before the age of cinema, this scene thus undercuts the authority of the 1930s film musical as the vehicle for romance. At the very least, the number suggests an , physically awkward, exhausting, old-fashioned, and yet joyfully seductive alternative to the escapist lures of the 1930s film musical.

A mode of reception that treats the film as an interrogative text rather than as a single privileged narrative is thus able to work usefully with many of those aspects that

Shakespeare scholars have found problematic in the film, inviting an engagement with themes of escapism. Indeed, current scholarship on the musical confirms that such a mode of reception is an appropriately productive one. Nevertheless, Angela Pao acknowledges the dangers of a failure of reception for musicals that do not aim to create a single privileged narrative, when critics and other viewers do not ‘establish the appropriate relationship between the various verbal, visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic signs placed before them. That relationship must by definition be dialogical in nature, double- rather than single-voiced’.94 Quoting Linda Hutcheon’s work on parody, Pao suggests that to establish a productive mode of reception, ‘we need signals from the text to guide our interpretation, and the degree of visibility of these signals determines their

93 Richard Dyer, In the Space of a Song: The Uses of Song in Film (London: Routledge, 2012). 94 Angela C. Pao, ‘Green Glass and Emeralds: Citation, Performance, and the Dynamics of Ethnic Parody in Thoroughly Modern Millie’, MELUS 36:4 (2011): 35-60 (54). 224 potential for assisting us’.95 Branagh’s film certainly provides signals to guide our interpretation; indeed, Branagh added the Navarre Cinetone News voiceovers after an initial screening, explicitly to guide audience interpretation.96 As discussed above, the film might have made its pasticcio nature more accessible by allowing viewers sufficient time to relax into its various constituent parts, and might have encouraged audiences to approach performance competence as a hermeneutic, rather than evaluative tool, if it had opened with a more coherently choreographed number against which the men’s lack of group solidarity could subsequently be measured. However, given the expectations raised by Branagh’s previous Shakespeare films, particularly his 1996 so- called ‘full-text’ Hamlet, it is perhaps not surprising that early audiences and critics assumed the film should be approached as a consistently readable text.

As Russell Jackson, the film’s academic advisor, notes, ‘a film that challenges audience assumptions may have a rough ride at previews where it is denied its opportunities through wide distribution of “finding its audience” or (in some cases) modifying audience expectations’.97 Nonetheless, the fact that Love’s Labour’s Lost was anticipated as a ‘Branagh film’ – and indeed contained the expected Branagh features of transatlantic casting, regular ‘Branagh’ actors such as Branagh himself,

Richard Briers, Richard Clifford, and Jimmy Yuill, high production values and an original score for its spoken scenes by regular Branagh composer Patrick Doyle – obstructed expectations that the film might intend to challenge audience assumptions.

At some distance in time from the film’s release, Love’s Labour’s Lost’s combination of pasticcio and pastiche is in fact not particularly difficult to recognize. What might have

95 Pao, ‘Green Glass and Emeralds’, 54, quoting Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), xvi. 96 Jackson, ‘Filming Shakespeare’s Comedies’, 66. 97 Jackson, ‘Filming Shakespeare’s Comedies’, 65. 225 helped secure an initial reception as a pasticcio of pastiches is not so much a clearer sense of its pastiche of the 1930s musical, as an overt distancing of itself from the expected Branagh approach to the spoken Shakespearean scenes, a signal that the film should be received in a different way from his earlier Shakespeare films. Perhaps clearer intertextual links to Alicia Silverstone and Matthew Lillard’s previous films, whether in the film itself or in the publicity surrounding its release, might have strengthened the sense of pastiche and an ironic relationship to genre: Silverstone achieved her star status in (dir. Amy Heckerling, 1995), a reworking of Jane

Austen’s Emma set in contemporary Beverley Hills, and Lillard, who initially came to fame in Scream (dir. Wes Craven, 1996), a film that pastiched the conventions of the horror genre, had recently appeared in She’s All That (dir. Robert Iscove, 1999), a reworking of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion set in a Southern Californian high school.

Due to its restricted cinematic release, Love’s Labour’s Lost had little chance of

‘finding its audience’ or modifying audience expectations in cinemas even after its previews. However, more than a decade on from the film’s release, and with the DVD widely available, it is possible to approach Love’s Labour’s Lost as a freestanding work beyond the expectations raised by Branagh’s previous Shakespeare adaptations, and to explore alternative modes of reception than those that were useful for critics of his earlier films. Wray correctly describes the film as ‘by far the most radical interpretive gesture of [Branagh’s] career’.98 Nonetheless, the film does not set itself out as simply a transparent medium, a celluloid record of a director’s interpretation of a play. What is perhaps most radical about the film, especially in the context of a commercial

Shakespeare film, is that the gaps, discontinuities, and clashes created by its formal

98 Wray, ‘The Singing Shakespearean’, 151. 226 quality as a pasticcio of pastiches invite viewers to make their own radical interpretive gesture: of the film, the play, the musical genre, and their own relationship to escapism.

227

CHAPTER FOUR

EVOKING TWELFTH NIGHT’S UNSTABLE IDENTITIES, PART ONE: PLAY ON! AND ITS GHOSTS

In this and the following chapter, I discuss two jukebox-musical versions of

Twelfth Night – Play On!, conceived by the director Sheldon Epps and with a book by

Cheryl L. West, and All Shook Up by Joe DiPietro. These chapters continue to explore some of the themes raised in the preceding chapters, particularly the significance of framing in the reception of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare, and the valorisation of modes of reception that do not assume that those versions should contain a single privileged narrative. However, their main focus is the different ways in which these musicals engage with Twelfth Night’s theme of the instability of identity.

Twelfth Night and the instability of identity

The centrality of this theme in Twelfth Night makes it an attractive source text for adaptations that also wish to draw attention to issues of identity. Modern productions of Twelfth Night almost inevitably present their audiences with the opportunity to observe onstage characters experiencing a sense of the instability of identity. The play is full of confusions and delusions, recognitions and misrecognitions, resulting, among others, from Viola’s cross-dressed disguise, Malvolio’s class-based cross-dressing and sense of a fluid class hierarchy, and the final presence on stage of almost identical twins. Nonetheless, the potential for modern audiences to experience that sense of the instability of identity for themselves is often limited or absent. For example, productions of Twelfth Night in which Viola is played by a woman might emphasise Viola’s femininity even in her disguise as Cesario, through costume details

228 such as cinched waistlines, oversized hats or heeled boots.1 This reinforces Marjorie

Garber’s assertion of the tendency among cultural critics and others to ‘look through rather than at the cross-dresser, to turn away from a close encounter with the transvestite, and to want instead to subsume that figure within one of the two traditional genders’.2 A female Viola’s transvestite disguise thus does not usually discourage modern audiences from a psychological-realist understanding of Viola and Viola-as-

Cesario as a unified character underpinned by the personality and female body of Viola.

Safe in their understanding of Viola and Cesario’s apparent fundamental unity, modern audiences can appear to be in a position of privileged knowledge compared to the play’s characters, who experience confusion due to the apparent instability of identity provoked by Viola’s status both as a transvestite and a twin.

However, Shakespeare himself appears to discourage an unproblematic audience identification of (and with) Viola as the fundamental character in the Viola-Cesario amalgam. For example, it is not until Viola-Cesario’s aside: ‘Yet a barful strife:/

Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife’ (1.4.41-42) at the very end of Cesario’s first scene that it becomes clear that the characters of Viola and Cesario are related.3 In addition, although we learn Cesario’s name as soon as he appears in act 1, scene 4

(1.4.2), Viola’s name is withheld from us until the final act (5.1.237), leaving audiences unfamiliar with the play without a convenient label for the central character. The uncertainty of identity during act 1, scene 4, Cesario’s first scene, might be supposed to

1 Dorothy Tutin’s costume for Peter Hall’s 1958 production combined all three. See Penny Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women (London: Routledge, 1994), 27, for an illustration. 2 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), xxiii. See Elizabeth Schafer, ‘Twelfth Night’: Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 29 for examples of reviews of productions of Twelfth Night in which critics more or less expressly ‘look through’ Viola’s disguise in their ‘search for the woman-beneath-the-boy in Cesario’. 3 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (London: Cengage Learning, 2008). Subsequent in-text references relate to this edition. 229 have been stronger for early-modern audiences who were used to actors doubling parts, and who may have wondered whether the boy actor who had played an unnamed young woman two scenes previously was now simply playing another role, particularly since that role - a non-singing boy servant - appears to differ from the eunuch-musician disguise that the young woman had proposed at 1.2.153.4 Further, if the Folio text is indicative of the play as performed on the early modern stage, audiences would have been without the benefit of equivalents to the stage business and additional lines that are sometimes interposed in modern productions in act 1, scene 2, in which Viola produces the clothes with which she intends to disguise herself (and in which she then appears in act 1, scene 4), or states at the end of the act that she will adopt the name ‘Cesario’ (the name she is called as soon as she enters in act 1, scene 4).5 In clarifying the plot for modern audiences, such strategies create an ironic gap between audience and characters from a very early stage and as such reduce the uncertainty of these early scenes.

In contrast, for early modern audiences encountering a boy actor playing Viola, the character’s cross-dressing as Cesario results in a congruence of the gendered body of the actor and the disguised role: it is thus likely that there would not be the same draw to look through Cesario to find a disguised Viola underpinning him as in productions in which a woman plays Viola. Yu Jin Ko’s work on As You Like It’s

Rosalind-as-Ganymede, another of Shakespeare’s cross-dressed disguised heroines, can usefully be extended to Twelfth Night’s Viola-as-Cesario here. Ko proposes an

4 Keir Elam refers to this discrepancy as ‘the most notorious’ of ‘the play’s structural mysteries, a major cause of audience – and especially critical – puzzlement’. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Elam, 13, 11. 5 See Schafer, ‘Twelfth Night’, 92-93 for examples of stage productions in which such clarifying strategies were used. Trevor Nunn’s 1996 film of Twelfth Night incorporates an additional scene in which Viola (Imogen Stubbs), alone, disguises herself as a man after she leaves the Captain at the end of act one, scene 2. By setting this scene as a background to the opening credits that must be looked ‘through’ in order to see this action, the film thus doubles Garber’s observation of the process of looking ‘through’ rather than ‘at’ in relation to cross-dressing. 230 approach to early-modern productions of As You Like It that does not assume the same unified psychology standing beneath Rosalind and Rosalind-in-disguise. Ko argues for what he calls a ‘charactor’, a combined stage persona that ‘allows for a dynamic exchange between a psychologically real social character called Rosalind and an irrepressibly ebullient interlocutor [Ganymede] whose theatrical outbursts bring alive the play’s irreverent energy’.6 As Ko suggests, the early-modern boy actor might play this charactor as both Rosalind and a rollicking stage antic loosed by disguise, shifting fluidly between the two as the play progresses and thus keeping audiences’ ‘sense of a coherent personality constantly unbuckled’.7 Audience members might thus experience the instability of identity surrounding the figure of the cross-dressed heroine, rather than merely observing as on-stage characters experience it. That a work provides its audiences with an opportunity to experience a sense of the instability of identity for themselves imbues it with what I refer to as ‘queer agency’, the potential to destabilise apparently fixed forms of identity across a range of manifestations, including, but not restricted to, sexual identity.

Ko’s description of the experience of a ‘free-wheeling, precarious exhilaration of a fluid becoming’ which he proposes that the charactor of Rosalind/Ganymede offered to early modern audiences resonates remarkably closely with the experiences that Play On! and All Shook Up offer their audiences.8 In contrast to many modern productions of Twelfth Night that remain more or less faithful to Shakespeare’s text, these musicals provide audiences with the opportunity to experience Twelfth Night’s unstable identities for themselves. In both musicals, however, this experience is not

6 Yu Jin Ko, ‘Shakespeare’s Rosalind: Charactor of Contingency’, in Performing Gender and Comedy: Theories, Texts and Contexts, ed. Shannon Hengen (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998), 21-34 (28).Tht 7 Ko, ‘Shakespeare’s Rosalind’, 29. 8 Ko, ‘Shakespeare’s Rosalind’, 30. 231 offered by one character, but by the entire cast of characters. As I demonstrate below, one way in which Play On! creates this sense of fluid identity is through ‘ghosting’ the onstage characters with both their Shakespearean analogues and historical figures from jazz and African-American history. In the next chapter, I argue that All Shook Up creates a similar sense of fluid identity through its manipulation of the queer agency of adaptation, and indeed with its very status as an adaptation.

Play On!

Play On! began its first run in 1996 at The Old Globe in San Diego, a theatre designed as a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre in London in which many of

Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed (albeit the San Diego theatre is roofed in and has modern seating). The musical’s Shakespearean roots were thus foregrounded by theatre architecture in this first production. As Epps explained in an interview with

Alvin Klein for , his role as ‘conceiver’ consisted in ‘gathering composers’ existing material – buried treasures mostly – and finding ways of making you listen to it as if it’s new’.9 The composer in this case (with one significant exception, discussed below) was . The production then transferred to

New York, opening at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Broadway in 1997. Despite a successful run in San Diego, the Broadway production was rather less successful and closed after sixty-one performances. A proposed transfer to the in

London’s West End fell through after an investor pulled out.10 Play On! then went on to further productions in, amongst others, Chicago, Seattle, Pasadena and New

9 Alvin Klein, ‘The Duke and I’, New York Times, 30 March 1997. 10 Chris Jones, ‘Second Chance: After New York, Play On! Team Hope Chicago is its Kind of Town’, Chicago Tribune, 26 June 1998. 232

Brunswick, New Jersey. A performance of the Pasadena production was recorded for television and broadcast on PBS in the United States and Canada.11

Although musical theatre scholarship has tended to focus on Broadway productions as the definitive version of a musical, both Bruce Kirle and Chase

Bringardner argue for an approach that also considers the musical from a regional perspective, taking into account earlier, later and touring productions as well as the

Broadway version.12 Play On!’s relatively short run as a Broadway production, therefore, should not be taken as a marker of the work’s overall longevity or success, nor should its meaning-making potential be fixed by the Broadway production and its context (or even by the medium of live theatre, given that the PBS broadcast of the

Pasadena production is likely to have reached more viewers than the combined theatrical productions). Indeed, while productions of Play On! so far have used more or less the same scenic designs, costumes, choreography, musical numbers and, largely, text as the initial production, I shall demonstrate that, for a number of reasons, the meaning-making potential of Play On! has been richer in productions beyond the

Broadway staging.

Play On! sets itself out clearly as an adaptation of Twelfth Night. Many of the characters’ names map clearly on to those of Shakespeare’s characters. For example, the Duke in Play On! is clearly an analogue of Orsino, Duke of Illyria in Twelfth Night, while the way that the names of Vy, Lady Liv and Miss Mary recall Shakespeare’s

11 In-text references to Cheryl L. West’s script are to the annotated typescript held in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and used by the New York Library’s Film and Tape Archive on 7 May 1997 when videotaping the Broadway production at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, New York. 12 Bruce Kirle, Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005; Chase A. Bringardner, ‘The Politics of Region and Nation in American Musicals’, in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 225-38. 233

Viola, Olivia and Maria clearly signals a link between the musical and Shakespeare’s play. Further, the name of Vy’s uncle, Jester, relates clearly to Feste’s function in

Twelfth Night. To ensure that Play On! was received as an adaptation, the press release for the Broadway production included a list of equivalences between the characters of

Play On! and ‘their Shakespearean antecedents from Twelfth Night’.13 This clarified further character parallels, not so clearly flagged by naming strategies: ‘Sir Toby Belch,

Olivia’s uncle – Sweets, Lady Liv’s band leader’, and ‘Malvolio, steward of Olivia’s household (with a touch of) Sebastian, twin brother of Viola – Rev, manager of the

Cotton Club’.14 One principal female character, CC, a dancer at the Cotton Club, has no equivalent in Twelfth Night, and was not mentioned in the press release, strengthening the sense of a relatively straightforward set of parallels between Shakespeare’s characters and those of the musical. Accordingly, without exception journalistic reviewers discussed the production as an adaptation – not only as a work in itself, but in relation to Twelfth Night.

Publicity material for the Broadway production also claimed that Play On! features the songs of Duke Ellington. However, this was not an entirely straightforward claim to make: not only is it notoriously difficult to attribute definite authorial responsibility to Duke Ellington, who collaborated with many others – from 1941 onwards most closely and consistently with Billy Strayhorn – but at least the music for the opening number, ‘Take the ‘A’ Train’, the signature tune of the Duke Ellington

13 Richard Kornberg and Associates, undated press release for Play On! at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, New York, held in the Play On! clippings and programmes file at the New York Library for the Performing Arts. 14 Richard Kornberg and Associates, undated press release, 2. The Broadway press release in fact muddied the distinction between musical and play, referring to Jester as ‘Viola’s [rather than Vy’s] uncle and choreographer of the Cotton Club dancers’. 234

Orchestra, is clearly attributable to Strayhorn rather than Ellington.15 Strayhorn’s contribution was in fact highlighted by a number of reviewers and critics.16

Theatre programmes for the Broadway and other productions informed the audience that the story is set in ‘The Magical Kingdom of Harlem’ during ‘The

Swinging 1940s’.17 Despite the stated time setting, the musical obstructs a sense of a nostalgic return to a stable, identifiable historical period. Although its songs are from the 1940s, Play On! references the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as later African-American culture. For example, much of the action is set in and around

Harlem’s Cotton Club, which closed in 1940, while the set design by James Leonard

Joy is ‘inspired by the work of Romare Bearden: a great artist, a friend and colleague of

Duke Ellington, and a lover of jazz’, whose artwork as drawn on in Play On! dates from the 1960s.18 In that period, Bearden, an African-American artist, was working mainly in collage, using found material. The choice of Bearden’s collages as an inspiration for the set design thus reflects the overall texture of Play On!, a musical constructed from an existing plot and existing songs. The cast of every production has been entirely

15 See Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (London: Elm Tree Books, 1977), 63 on the difficulties in establishing authorship. In 1941, a dispute between the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and the radio industry meant that no compositions by ASCAP members could be broadcast on radio. Ellington had been a member of ASCAP since 1935, while Strayhorn was not a member. As the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s signature tune was Ellington’s ‘Sepia Panorama’, it was essential that a new signature tune (as well as more or less an entire new repertoire) be composed by someone who was not a member of ASCAP if the Orchestra was to continue broadcasting. See Jewell, Duke, 64; David Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (New York: North Point Press, 1996), 83-85. 16 For example, Ben Brantley, ‘Swinging Shakespeare Gets Aboard the A Train’, review of Play On! by Sheldon Epps and Cheryl L. West, Brooks Atkinson Theatre, New York, New York Times, 21 March 1997; Klein, ‘The Duke and I’; Alvin Klein, ‘A Jazzy Twelfth Night Gets a Second Chance’, New York Times, 21 November, 1999; Jones, ‘Second Chance’; Barry Singer, ‘In 1940s Harlem, Even Shakespeare Learns to Swing’, New York Times, 16 March 1997. 17 See, for example, the programme for the 1996 Old Globe production in San Diego, 2; the Playbill programme for the 1997 Broadway production (n.p.); the programme for the 1999 Arizona Theatre Company production, 45, all held in the Play On! clippings and programmes file in the New York Library for the Performing Arts. 18 Programme for the 1996 Old Globe production of Play On!, 2; programme for the 1999 Arizona Theatre Company production, 45. The Playbill programme for the 1997 Broadway production did not contain a similar note. 235

African-American, employing a particularly broad and energetic performance style, choreographed by Duke Ellington’s granddaughter Mercedes Ellington and designed to reference the performance style of the Cotton Club of the 1920s and early 1930s.

During this period, entertainment at the Cotton Club consisted of fast-paced floor shows performed by black performers playing a series of ‘types’ – for example, an eccentric dancer, a comedian, a singer of ‘adult songs’, a ‘star’ performer, interspersed with numbers for of young women chosen for their lighter ‘high yaller’ skin colour, height and age, and for the tuxedoed Cotton Club band – for the benefit of an exclusively white audience seated amongst ersatz jungle decor.19 Performers were able to achieve star status, and the high prices charged to audience members resulted in high salaries for performers.20

Play On’s performance style thus not only conveys the onstage plot, but also alludes to a significant period in African-American performance history. However, this was not always recognised as such. In an interview with Chris Jones of the Chicago

Tribune after the closure of the Broadway production and prior to the opening of the

Chicago production, Sheldon Epps and André DeShields, the creator of the role of

Jester, expanded on accusations that the production perpetuated racial stereotypes through its performance style:

‘I would never change that performance style’, says Epps. ‘It’s an homage to a vital period in the history of black entertainment. And we reserve the right as black performers to have as much fun as anyone else.’

‘I’ve had it up to the eyeballs with that double standard’, says DeShields. ‘Stereotypes are the essence of Broadway, yet those paternalistic white critics patronized our show. They had no idea where I was coming from, yet they sat in judgement of my intent...’21

19 Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African American Culture, 1920-1930 (New York, Pantheon Books, 1995), 126-28. 20 Jewell, Duke, 41. 21 Jones, ‘Second Chance’. 236

This illustrates one of the dangers for jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays that invoke multiple meanings or perspectives simultaneously: not simply that audience members fail to recognise one or more of these meanings or perspectives, whether through a lack of the necessary cultural awareness or through the production’s handling of its own material, but that through that failure they draw conclusions at odds with the creators’ intentions.

More positively, the outcome of this Chicago Tribune interview suggests the importance of guiding the audience towards a mode of reception that is alert to the likelihood of different meanings or perspectives being invoked simultaneously in various semiotic registers. Having discussed the complex, layered reception potential of the performance style with Epps and DeShields for the Chicago Tribune, Jones then responds positively to it in his review of the Chicago production for Variety:

While the criticisms of Broadway naysayers who found this narrative to be thin still seem valid, arguments that the piece somehow perpetuated racial stereotypes are not. In this honest but humanized re-creation of Harlem street culture, Epps and cast honor the tradition of African- American performance troupes in the era of the Cotton Club, while simultaneously finding dignity in these characters.22

Jones thus in his turn alerts audiences to the show’s complexity, setting up expectations for those yet to see the show, and clarifying, challenging or confirming aspects of it for those who have already seen it.

Of the jukebox-musical Shakespeare adaptations considered in this thesis, Play

On! is one of the more straightforward in its use of existing songs. A large amount of the pleasure to be found in its use of existing songs is in their apparent appropriateness to the dramatic moment. Two of the songs, ‘Take the “A” Train’ and ‘Drop Me Off in

22 Chris Jones, Review of Play On!, by Sheldon Epps and Cheryl L. West, 29 June 1998, Goodman Theatre, Chicago, Variety, 13 July 1998. 237

Harlem’ contribute to setting the scene in terms of place and provide a sense of hectic, communal, urban energy that contrasts with the stillness of several of the songs sung in the club or the Duke’s studio – for example, ‘Mood Indigo’, ‘Don’t Get Around Much

Anymore’, ‘I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But the Blues’, ‘I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good’ and

‘Prelude to a Kiss’ – which, though performed as diegetic songs, nonetheless comment on or advance the dramatic action.

This is not to say that Play On’s use of existing songs is without sophistication.

The adaptation occasionally reworks a song from its usual format: for example, a particularly beautiful version of ‘Solitude’, usually a solo number, is revoiced for a quartet of Vy, Duke, Lady Liv and Rev as the finale of act 1, as each character experiences a sense of isolation in different ways and for different reasons. This number demonstrates some of the potential complexities of jukebox-musical stagings.

At times, the single vocal line is fragmented and shared among the characters; at others, separate vocal lines are overlayered; a flute solo provides instrumental ‘fills’. As each character is unaware of the others, the number creates a sense of separate dramatic spaces on the same stage. In its usual format, the solo voice, first-person lyrics and undemanding vocal range invite the listener to identify strongly with the singer. When a recorded version is listened to alone in a darkened room, this close identification invites an almost solipsistic melancholy in the listener. When heard in concert, the song can create a sense of isolation in a crowded environment, again with an element of pleasurable wallowing in solipsistic melancholy, the singer/listener apparently aware only of his or her own emotional separation from the surrounding masses. By appropriating a well-known non-dramatic and non-narrative first-person solo number about solitude and turning it into an ensemble number that stages multiple examples of isolation within a narrative framework, the musical does something more than invite

238 listeners to hear the song afresh. While the lyrics, blocking and lighting stress solitude and separation, the shared or overlapping vocal lines suggest social bonds. In contrast to the song’s usual performance format, the presence of multiple first-person vocal lines obstructs an easy identification with the singers on the part of audience members. In place of the solipsistic reception potential of the solo version in which a single feeling subject stands apart from and against a background of ‘others’, solitude is seen as part of a network of social relations: if one character feels isolated from others, he or she is also one of the background of ‘others’ from whom someone else feels isolated. In place of solipsism, the result is a nuanced plurality of perspectives on a shared emotion, with a bittersweet ironic twist in that that emotion is caused by solitude.

Although West’s book follows the plot of Twelfth Night relatively closely, it also makes significant adjustments to fit the story to its Harlem milieu. In particular, West’s

Vy has a clear motivation for travelling to Harlem from her home in the South and for cross-dressing: she is a songwriter who wants to succeed in New York. On arriving there, her uncle Jester tells her that songwriting in Harlem is a male-dominated closed shop. In order to get Vy’s songs heard, Jester arranges for her to dress as a man (known as Vy-Man) and introduces her to the greatest song writer in Harlem, the Duke.

Another significant change is that unlike Malvolio and Olivia, Rev, the manager of the

Cotton Club, and Lady Liv are a couple by the end of the show. When we first meet him, Rev is in love with Lady Liv, who has no romantic interest in him. In order to transform the uptight and conservatively dressed Rev into romantic material, Miss Mary and Sweets teach him to dance and dress him in a yellow zoot suit, a reference to

Malvolio’s yellow cross-gartered stockings. As both Vy’s transformation into Vy-man and Rev’s into a hipper version of himself take place during large-scale song-and-dance production numbers (‘I’ve Got To Be A Rug Cutter’ and ‘I’m Beginning To See The

239

Light’ respectively), the adaptation draws attention to the parallels between Viola and

Malvolio’s ‘cross-dressing’. Rev’s transformation from uptight to hip through a change of costume is also in its way an example of a crossing of conventional gender roles: the costume change that signals a transformation to an apparently more emancipated self is a recurring feature of musicals, but one usually reserved for female characters (for example, Louise in Gypsy, Sarah Brown during her Havana trip in Guys and Dolls,

Maria in The Sound of Music, Agnes Gooch in Mame, Millie in Thoroughly Modern

Millie).

Frances Teague, the academic who has written most extensively on Play On!, sees the coupling of Lady Liv and Jester as a function of African American culture:

the image of the isolated Lady Liv recalls the ‘tragic mulatto’ stereotype, yet reclaims it: this woman has agency and concludes with love as well as her career. As for Malvolio/Rev, surely the idea that a black servant becomes a partner and wins his love is, in this cultural context, more bearable than that a black servant is mocked, humiliated, imprisoned and finally driven away.... [Writer Cheryl L. West’s] concern clearly was to privilege African-American culture both in her emphasis on the Harlem Renaissance and in her refusal to let a black man be humiliated.23

Teague’s suggestion is certainly plausible. Although Rev is the manager of the Cotton

Club and therefore not exactly a ‘black servant’ as Teague puts it, his employers in the

23 Frances Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 169. Although she does not specify her sources, Julie Sanders appears to refer to Teague’s point when she says of Play On! in her monograph on music and adaptations of Shakespeare:

Malvolio is reimagined as ‘The Rev’, a Man of Islam and the club manager who this time gets to win the heart of ‘Lady Liv’, albeit dressed in a fittingly yellow zoot suit (Julie Sanders, Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 26).

There is nothing in the New York script to suggest that Rev is Muslim (although there are certainly suggestions that he is a Christian), and I have been unable to find any reviews of any production that make that assumption. Sanders does not cite a production or script in her bibliography, which does however refer to an unpublished conference paper by Teague on Play On!. Sanders’ puzzling description of Rev as ‘a Man of Islam’ is perhaps best left to fend for itself. 240 historical Cotton Club would have been white. He makes clear in a speech to Lady Liv that he has been humiliated in the past in his role:

I know that someone of your stature could never imagine being with someone like me. I know what people say, that I’m a bought and sold Negro; when they bought the Cotton Club they bought me too. But it’s a job. One that’s provided me with an opportunity to work with the best singer in Harlem, the world. When they called me boy and treated me worse, I took it. I took crap from them so I could make sure you didn’t ever have to. And I’d do it again. Every day of my life just to keep you happy (81-82).

However, an alternative or additional reading of Lady Liv and Rev’s partnering is that the adaptation has an overriding drive towards a heterosexual closure that can leave no principal character uncoupled. After Lady Liv apparently falls in love with Rev from a standing start over the course of a single duet (‘Something To Live For’) extremely late in the second act, Miss Mary and Sweets then pair off, followed shortly by Vy and the

Duke. The narrative thread of Vy’s high hopes of a successful career as a songwriter is abruptly subordinated to the need for her to be coupled with the Duke. Unlike

Shakespeare’s Viola, who remains in male dress to the end of the play, Play On! sees

Vy transformed from provincial hick to cross-dressed apprentice songwriter to ostentatiously feminine wife: stage directions for the final entrance of Vy, the Duke,

Lady Liv and Rev state: ‘VY wears a knockout evening gown which rivals LADY

LIV’s. She is ready to start her new life as “the Duchess”’ (94).

Play On!’s destabilising effects

The excessive nature of this drive for heterosexual closure is displayed as Jester couples off with a very minor character, CC, a dancer from the Cotton Club with no equivalent in Shakespeare. If there is very little preparation for Lady Liv’s change of heart towards Rev, CC and Jester’s pairing off is thoroughly perfunctory. This might be seen as an example of what David Van Leer refers to as ‘cultural carelessness’. Van 241

Leer, discussing the casualness of expression in musicals and other popular texts of the assumptions of dominant cultures (here heteronormative assumptions), suggests:

The complacency of the dominant culture encourages what we might call ‘cultural carelessness’. At sites of complacency, where discipline is relaxed, the very confidence that allows a culture blithely to assume control permits oppositional voices to undermine that control undetected. In the carelessness that attends confidence, these apparently discriminatory representations can actually become occasions for a variety of minority voices to speak with comparative freedom. 24

Given the opportunities for non-heteronormative readings of Twelfth Night that the relationships between Orsino and Viola-Cesario, between Olivia and Viola-Cesario, and between Sebastian and Antonio invite, it would appear that an adaptation of

Shakespeare’s play would hardly need the cover of such cultural carelessness for

‘minority voices to speak with comparative freedom’.

Nonetheless, in terms of its plot structure, Play On! appears to cut down on the opportunities available for non-heteronormative readings. While Viola’s true status remains concealed to the other characters until the final scene of Shakespeare’s play, Vy confesses her cross-dressing to the Duke much earlier. Teague ties the apparent heteronormativity of Play On! to issues of race, writing that ‘what the show insists on is racial pride. It suggests repeatedly that African-American history is important and inclusive (although it re-writes that history and Shakespeare’s play as firmly heterosexual)’.25 She comments on how this rewriting occurs:

one major plot change...is the elimination of Viola’s twin brother Sebastian and his loving rescuer Antonio. Cutting these characters reduces the size of the company, but it also brings a consequent reduction of homoeroticism in the show’s subtext.26

She then suggests that:

24 David Van Leer, The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (New York: Routledge, 1995), 158. 25 Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 168. 26 Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 169. 242

such changes make sense in terms of African-American culture. The resistance to homosexuality, after all, has been called ‘the greatest taboo’ among African-Americans. Thus reducing such homoerotic elements as Antonio’s declared passion for Sebastian neatly trims the production budget and eliminates social discomfort.27

Here Teague’s comments stand as an example of Margaret Jane Kidnie’s thesis in her monograph Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation that both the ‘work’ and its

‘adaptations’ are provisional categories that require each other in order to distinguish at any given moment the (temporarily) authentic Shakespearean ‘work’ from its adaptive relations. The practice of staging a denotatively homosexual relationship between

Antonio and Sebastian is comparatively recent: in her performance history of Twelfth

Night, Elizabeth Schafer notes that ‘Twelfth Night only went overtly gay circa 1970’.28

That the lack of a recognisably homoerotic relationship can now be cited as evidence of the distance of an adaptation from the ‘work’ that is Twelfth Night is a demonstration of the mobility of conceptions of what that ‘work’ consists of and how profoundly they can change in a relatively short timespan. This is not to say that all apparently straightforward productions of Twelfth Night emphasise homoeroticism: indeed, Schafer

27 Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 169. Teague explains (200, n.11) that she takes the epithet ‘the greatest taboo’ (surely at least incest, paedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, parricide and cannibalism might all be argued to trump homosexuality for that title?) from Delroy Constantin-Simms and his anthology The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities. Stacy Wolf has also commented on the reception of homoerotic relationships between African Americans on the musical stage, finding a mixed range of responses. Writing of the Broadway musical version of The Color Purple (Russell, Willis, Bray, Norman, 2005), she notes: Audiences’ responses to Celie’s lesbianism and the onstage kiss between Celie and Shug seemed to range from nonplussed and comfortable to fidgety and anxious to coldly hostile. (This assessment is based on anecdotal evidence [which, although unscientific, is likely accurate] from my observations at the performance I attended, conversations with others who saw it, on-line blogs and video clips). The African American community, especially those affiliated with church groups that brought many spectators to see the musical, has a long history of homophobia, which this musical was unable to shake. A review of the production in the African American New York Amsterdam News, in fact, completely ignored their romance and wrote, ‘Shug and Celie end up becoming close friends and looking out for each other’. (Stacy Wolf, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 185-86, square brackets in original). 28 Elizabeth Schafer, ‘Twelfth Night’: Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 59. 243 notes that while ‘it has become commonplace to play Antonio as gay, and in love with

Sebastian...nevertheless, there are still some straight Antonios in circulation’, citing a programme note by Duncan Wass, who played Antonio in a Bell Shakespeare production that toured Australia in 1995, in which he states: ‘I have sons about

Sebastian’s age, so I immediately identify with Antonio’s over protective obsession with Sebastian’s safety’.29 That Play On! does not portray a homoerotic relationship between Antonio and Sebastian therefore sets it in relation to a spectrum of performance practice, rather than distancing it from a universally agreed approach to Twelfth Night as a work.

However, the absence of a readily recognisable non-heterosexual character is insufficient ground for understanding Play On! as rewriting African-American history and Twelfth Night as ‘firmly heterosexual’.30 Indeed, I want to argue that performance aspects of Play On! might render it a remarkably queer text in its potential to undermine essentialist notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality, emphasising instead shifting, fluid boundaries of gender and attraction. A text with a readily recognisable homosexual character is not necessarily a queer text; conversely, a readily recognisable homosexual character is not necessary for a text to be queer. While the absence of

Antonio removes some opportunities for an overt declaration of same-sex love, the presence of Antonio as a single denotatively homosexual character might also work to contain non-heteronormative eroticism, especially when that character is left deserted at the end of the play.

Alexander Doty proposes that, ‘unless a text is about queers, it seems to me that the queerness of most mass culture texts is less an essential, waiting-to-be-discovered

29 Schafer, ‘Twelfth Night’, 60. 30 Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 168. 244 property than the result of acts of production or reception’. 31 Some of Play On!’s potential to disrupt essentialist notions of sexuality and gender lies in such acts of production and reception, rather than in denotative homosexual characters or situations.

I suggest below that ghosting effects trouble a straightforward reception of Play On! at a number of levels, at least some of which undermine the argument that either African-

American history or Twelfth Night is being rewritten as ‘firmly heterosexual’. Further, performance aspects of at least some productions of Play On! have introduced a level of homoeroticism and experiential queerness beyond the textual or visual. This sense of queernesss is partly a function of vocal range, timbre and . Relatively early on in their relationship, the Duke and Vy-man/Vy sing a duet, ‘I Got It Bad and That Ain’t

Good’. At this stage, Vy has fallen in love with the Duke, who is in love with Lady Liv.

The duet begins as a diegetic song that the Duke is trying out at the piano in his rehearsal room, a song that expresses his own feelings at the time. He sings a whole stanza before Vy/Vy-man joins him from , first repeating one of his lines and then responding to later ones in lines that complete the Duke’s rhyme scheme. The effect of Vy/Vy-man’s entry into the song is complex and might be understood in a number of ways both by the audience and by the Duke, if the Duke is indeed aware of

Vy/Vy-man’s presence: Vy-man, as apprentice songwriter, might be understood as responding to the Duke’s vocal line either by repeating it or completing his rhyme scheme as a technical exercise; Vy also repeats the Duke’s vocal line and completes his rhyme scheme, but the words, instead of being merely those of a diegetic song, express her feelings for the Duke. While it is clear that Vy can hear the Duke’s singing, it is not clear whether the Duke can hear Vy/Vy-man’s singing but chooses not to acknowledge

31 Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xi. 245 it, or whether the duet is a hybrid of a diegetic number on the Duke’s part and a non- diegetic number on Vy’s part, inaudible to other onstage characters. The duet ends with the Duke and Vy/Vy-man singing simultaneously and in major-key harmony; however, the Duke only acknowledges Vy/Vy-man’s presence after the duet has ended. Even then it is not clear whether he has in fact been aware of Vy/Vy-man.

Despite the duet’s complexity and unfinalizability, for audiences used to the conventions of musicals, the duet clearly fits the conventions of what Stacy Wolf calls the hypothetical love duet.32 In such a duet, the singers might deny that they are in love, disagree with each other, or simply discuss something else – indeed in extreme cases they might not be aware of each other’s presence. However, the audience is able to see beyond the content of the lyrics or spatial arrangements to recognise that the couple either are in love or will fall in love during the course of the musical by the fact that the duet follows the conventions of overt love duets – particularly in its use of a shared rhythmical and rhyme scheme, turn-taking between the characters around a motif or refrain between the characters, and a final section of simultaneous singing in major-key harmonic closure that together signal the couple’s appropriateness for each other. Here the invitation to read the duet as a hypothetical love duet is made especially strong in that it is crafted from an existing song for a single singer: that a solo number in the first person is not only revoiced for two characters but is restructured and harmonised so that

32 Stacy Wolf, ‘“Defying Gravity”: Queer Conventions in the Musical Wicked’, Theatre Journal 60:1 (2008): 1-21 (2). Wolf’s term is a useful one: however, she does not fully establish what the conventions are that she claims makes the ‘hypothetical’ love duet recognisable, although these seem to be the musical, prosodic and rhyme structures that together work as conventions to support an overt declaration of love in duets between lovers in musicals. Indeed, I find her central argument for a particular duet – a declaration of hate between women - that she wishes to claim as a hypothetical love duet compromised by its failure to include sufficient structural conventions of the overt love duet to counter the content of the lyrics. I discuss the structural conventions of the love duet and ‘hypothetical’ love duet and the way in which they form a mise en abyme of the wider narrative more fully in Chapter Six. 246 it deploys the conventions of love duets in musicals draws attention to these conventions.

In most duets for male and female lovers in musicals, vocal range, registration, timbre and tessitura are relatively well-matched, yet another sign that the couple is well suited. Thus a ‘legitimate’ soprano voice is likely to be paired with a tenor, while a

‘belt’ voice might be paired with a baritone, each pair singing in similar relative with similar registration, albeit their relative pitch is separated by a gender- defining octave or so. As register and tessitura depend on the vocal range of the singer, differences in vocal ranges between performers of versions of the same song have the potential to create differences of meaning.

This was the case with performers of the role of Vy in different productions of

Play On!. In the San Diego and Broadway productions, Vy was played by Cheryl

Freeman, whose speaking voice has a relatively low pitch, giving some plausibility to

Vy-man’s spoken scenes.33 However, her singing voice, although certainly not a clear soprano, lies recognisably within the expected range of female voices. Further, she employs vocal ornamentation usually associated with 1990s American female singers that take her into a relatively high tessitura (much to the distaste of The New Yorker’s

John Lahr, who refers to Freeman’s ‘disconcerting nineties voice’ as having ‘more decoration on it than a Fabergé egg’).34

In contrast, in later productions, including the Arizona and Pasadena productions, Vy was played by Natalie Venetia Belcon. As Don Shirley notes in his

33 Freeman’s speaking and singing voices can be heard on the original cast album, Sheldon Epps, Play On!: A New Musical: Original Broadway Cast Recording, with Carl Anderson, Yvette Cason, André De Shields, Cheryl Freeman, Lawrence , Larry Marshall, Tonya Pinkins, recorded 14 April 1997, Varèse Sarabande, VSD-5837, . 34 John Lahr, ‘Shakespearean Rag’, review of Play On! by Sheldon Epps and Cheryl L. West, Brooks Atkinson Theatre, New York, New Yorker, 7 April 1997. 247 review of the Pasadena production, ‘[Belcon’s singing] voice is ideal for a woman playing a man. Her rich, husky lower register faultlessly matches the smooth vocalizing of tenor Raun Ruffin as Duke in their duet “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good”. Yet her speaking voice is light and frisky’.35 That a male tenor singing in a relatively high tessitura with a relatively ‘feminine’ smooth timbre, presumably in head register, is paired with a woman, dressed as a man, singing in a low tessitura with a relatively

‘masculine’ husky timbre, presumably in chest register, has the result that this hypothetical love duet for a male and a female performer playing a male and a female character sounds like a hypothetical love duet for two men whose suitability for each other is suggested by their matching voices. Throughout the musical the shifts in registration and pitch between Belcon’s relatively light and high-pitched speaking voice and her relatively heavy and low-pitched singing voice have an uncanny effect, as aural and visual signifiers of gender are perceived as working independently, now corroborating, now contradicting each other. 36 As Vy/Vy-man remains a shadowy silhouette until the end of the number, the aural here is privileged over the visual.

Nonetheless, while the audience is aware that the performer is a woman, the silhouette is that of an apparently masculine figure, corroborating the apparently masculine pitch and timbre of the voice that emanates from it.

The darkness in which Vy/Vy-man stands opens up several interpretive possibilities that can neither be confirmed nor discounted. It cannot be established, for example, whether Belcon is singing in the character of Vy or of Vy-as-Vy-man; nor is it

35 Don Shirley, ‘This Play’s Got That Swing: Shakespeare Meets Duke Ellington in a Rollocking Musical Fantasy That’s Set in 1940s Harlem’, review of Play On! by Sheldon Epps and Cheryl L. West, Pasadena Playhouse, Pasadena, CA, Los Angeles Times, 20 July 1999. 36 Belcon’s transition from higher pitched speaking voice to lower pitched singing voice can be heard on the YouTube video excerpt from the PBS broadcast, Play On! – Don’t Get Around Much Anymore, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-1NS8QjWF8.

248 clear whether the Duke, sitting at the piano and facing away from Vy/Vy-man, becomes aware of Vy/Vy-man’s presence before the end of the duet. Nonetheless, concern with finalising plot points and ambiguities – male/female, performer/character, base character/assumed character, onstage character/ghosted figures – and the potential meaning to be found in their various possible combinations, is subordinated to the unusual aural and kinesthetic pleasures to which a familiar melancholy solo song, unusually revoiced for two voices of similar quality and pitch range, gives rise. Apart from Vy/Vy-man’s entrance, the scene is unusually static, in contrast to the hyperactive choreography of other numbers. The stillness of the scene, the lack of dramatised interaction between the characters, one of whom is barely visible, and the fact that the song (at least as far as the Duke is concerned) is set up as a diegetic number all encourage a reception of the scene in which the song itself is the object of attention.

While the ambiguity of the song’s function in the dramatic narrative is not erased, aural pleasure temporarily places a pause on the need to classify, clarify and seek definitive meaning: a concern with identity and categorisation thus gives way to the pleasure of a love duet imbued with intimations of queerness. Instead of the containable, observable homeroticism that the inclusion of a denotatively homosexual Antonio might have provided, Belcon’s vocal qualities spread a pleasurable queer contagion to the audience.

It might be argued that for audience members uncomfortable with homosexuality – those whose potential ‘social discomfort’ at the depiction of Antonio’s ‘declared passion for Sebastian’ are evoked by Teague – the experience of taking musical pleasure – with all the kinaesthetic responses such pleasure gives rise to – in an aurally and visually queer scene is in fact more conducive to a turn towards an inclusive sexual politics than the experience of seeing a depiction of Antonio as a homosexual.37 In

37 Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 169. 249

Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, a molar objection to a nameable sexual identity one does not share might be undermined by the molecular experience of being drawn into a pleasurable sense of unplaceable queer becoming.

Play On!’s ghosts

Moreover, through its deployment of layers of meaning, Play On! both conceals and reveals its own homoeroticism as well as homoeroticism in African American history and culture. This layered texture here takes a particular form: the ‘ghosting’ of fictional onstage characters by figures from the Harlem Renaissance and jazz history.

To use Marvin Carlson’s imagery in The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory

Machine, Play On! is a haunted text.38 For those familiar with the Harlem Renaissance and its historical figures, the plotlines of the musical and its setting gesture towards historical figures that are sensed as invisible presences alongside the onstage characters, that, to borrow from Derrida, ‘inhabit without residing’ in the fictional characters.39

While the invisible presence of these historical figures mediates audience reception(s) of the onstage characters, these onstage characters in turn awaken further memories or trigger imagined relationships with the historical figures in an unfinalizable cycle. Most obviously, in a jukebox musical version of Twelfth Night that employs the music of

Duke Ellington, a character who is a jazz composer known as ‘the Duke’ is a blatant invitation to understand the character on at least three levels: as the Duke, the character of the onstage narrative; as Orsino, Duke of Illyria; and as Duke Ellington. However, it is also possible to understand other characters as ghosted by figures from the Harlem

Renaissance. Reporting an interview with André De Shields, who played Jester in the

38 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 39 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 21. 250

Broadway production and was about to direct a production in New Brunswick, Alvin

Klein writes:

The Shakespeare-minded may read Feste for Jester, but to Mr DeShields the character is Bill (Bojangles) Robinson. ‘When I look at Lady Liv, I think of , as opposed to Olivia’, Mr DeShields went on. ‘The Reverend in a yellow zoot suit embraces , not Malvolio’. And to Mr DeShields, the androgyny of Vy, or Vy-man, conjures up Zora Neale Hurston or Countee Cullen, not Shakespeare’s Viola.40

Others might find the character of Jester, whom Vy refers to as ‘Uncle Cootie’, as (also) ghosted by jazz trumpeter Cootie Williams, who rose to fame in Duke Ellington’s orchestra before leaving to join Benny Goodman’s orchestra in 1940 and then setting up his own orchestra in 1941. Some of Williams’ independence is reflected in the freedom to come and go between the Duke and Lady Liv that Jester shares with Shakespeare’s

Feste. While Lady Liv makes DeShields think of Lena Horne, others might be prompted by Lady Liv’s blues numbers, by her attraction to Vy/Vy-man, and, by the reputation of the Harlem Renaissance as a safe space for bisexuals and homosexuals, to think of any number of prominent African-American bisexual blues singers – Billie

Holiday, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, amongst others – associated with the Harlem jazz and blues scene.41

Although she does not frame her argument in terms of ghosting, Teague likewise suggests that ‘the show is not simply imitating Shakespeare: it’s imitating life’.42

Teague draws parallels between the character of Vy and two figures in American jazz history, although neither of these were African Americans nor associated with the

Harlem Renaissance. Teague firstly links Vy’s cross-dressing with jazz singer Anita

40 Klein, ‘A Jazzy Twelfth Night’. 41 See Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 119-22 and Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 67-79 for discussions of bisexuality and the Harlem jazz and blues scene. 42 Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 171. 251

O’Day, who, in order to be taken seriously as a musician, wore a band jacket rather than an evening gown until of lesbianism led her to adopt evening gowns again.43

Vy’s appearance at the end of the production in a ‘knockout evening gown’ might thus be ghosted by memories of O’Day.44 For those with an awareness of Twelfth Night’s performance history, Vy’s appearance in an evening gown might also be ghosted by

Vivien Leigh’s famous appearance for curtain calls in ‘a splendid evening dress’ at the end of her performance as Viola at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955, an ostentatious recuperation of femininity that Schafer suggests nonetheless failed to prevent Leigh’s performance as Viola-as-Cesario running foul of the ‘femininity police’ among journalistic reviewers. Teague draws a further fascinating parallel, this time with the life of jazz pianist Billy Tipton (1914-1989). Tipton, born Dorothy Lucille Tipton, lived as a man from 1940, had three apparent marriages, and adopted three sons.

Tipton’s biological sex was only revealed after death. Nonetheless, while Tipton’s life provides insights into the gendered world of 1940s music, parallels with Vy are not especially strong: Tipton was white, did not form part of the Harlem Renaissance, and was based largely in Spokane, Washington State. Further, as Teague notes, ‘Tipton’s case is complicated by personal desires’.45 Unlike Vy, Tipton only appears to have been romantically or sexually linked with women. This is not to say, however, that Vy’s cross-dressing is not ghosted by Billy Tipton for some audience members. Although widespread awareness of Tipton’s story arose from journalistic coverage surrounding the publication of Diane Middlebrook’s biography, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy

Tipton in 1998, a year after the Broadway production of Play On! closed, the PBS

43 Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 170. 44 Schafer, ‘Twelfth Night’, 55. 45 Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 171. 252 broadcast of the Pasadena production of Play On! was accompanied by a PBS website article by Gia Kourlas that mentions Tipton.46 Kourlas quotes Epps:

‘I remember once reading a review that said, “The show’s fun and the music is wonderful, but what a ridiculous plot line – a woman who would actually have to disguise herself as a man to be successful in the world of jazz”’, Epps recalls. ‘A month later, the story broke about Billy Tipton who had disguised herself for 40 years to have a successful career as a jazz player. So I believe that there’s a certain truth to the story in that way as well. Unless you wanted to be a singer, women had a hard road in the world of jazz. As composers, players – they were not part of that club’.47

Viewers of the PBS broadcast who also read this interview are thus likely to have been prompted to receive the onscreen character of Vy as ghosted by Billy Tipton.

Strangely, given that the Duke is clearly ghosted by Duke Ellington, neither Teague nor

DeShields link the character of Vy with Ellington’s long-term collaborator, Billy

Strayhorn, a composer, lyricist, pianist and arranger whose relationships with Ellington and with Lena Horne are paralleled in a number of aspects by Vy-man’s relationships with the Duke and Lady Liv. Like Vy, Strayhorn was an upcoming songwriter when he met Ellington in Pittsburgh in December 1938, and played him some of Strayhorn’s compositions. Impressed, Ellington, like the Duke, offered him a song-writing assignment immediately.48 Strayhorn soon became extremely close to Ellington, to the extent that Ellington moved him into the home Ellington shared with his son Mercer and sister Ruth Ellington.49 Jewell reports that Duke Ellington and Strayhorn’s relationship was, ‘as several Ellingtonians have witnessed, a love affair’, although there

46 Diane Middlebrook, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 47 Quoted in Daniel Fischlin, ‘Shakespeare, Jazz and Canada: The Ellington Connection’, Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, University of Guelph, http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/multimedia/audio/m_a_jazz.cfm (link to PBS interview no longer available). 48 Walter van de Leur, Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 24. 49 van de Leur, Something to Live For, 25. 253 are no suggestions that this was anything other than platonic. 50 Strayhorn was openly homosexual in a way unusual for his time. Jimmy Hamilton, the clarinettist for the

Duke Ellington Orchestra told David Hajdu, Strayhorn’s biographer: ‘There wasn’t a lot of guys who was homosexual and acted like that, like there it was and you have to accept it – and if you don’t that’s your problem’.51 While Strayhorn and Ellington collaborated closely as songwriters, many works either by Strayhorn alone or by

Ellington and Strayhorn were released under Ellington’s sole name. Although Ellington acknowledged Strayhorn’s contribution in live performances, on albums and in reviews

Strayhorn’s contributions were often either uncredited or downplayed.52 Both Hajdu and van de Leur attribute this erasure of Strayhorn’s role at least in part to the influence of Ellington’s publicist, Joe Morgen, who combined homophobia with a deep personal hatred for Strayhorn.53 That Vy proves herself a songwriter in the final duet with the

Duke, ‘Prelude to a Kiss’ only to have her status as a songwriter effaced in her transformation into ‘the Duchess’ at the end of Play On! thus resonates with the subordination of Strayhorn’s songwriting career to Ellington’s in the eyes of the public.

The ghosting of the Duke and Vy by Duke Ellington and Strayhorn and other figures from the Harlem Renaissance also gives added depth to the fact that Play On! is an adaptation of Shakespeare. As Teague notes, the works of Shakespeare had a high profile within the Harlem Renaissance: ‘many understood an interest in Shakespeare’s works as an indicator of their privileged status as members of the talented tenth’, giving as examples Langston Hughes’ 1942 poetry collection, Shakespeare in Harlem, and

50 Jewell, Duke, 63. 51 Hajdu, Lush Life, 70. 52 van de Leur, Something to Live For, 90, 135; Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 179. 53 Hajdu, Lush Life, 166-71; van de Leur, Something to Live For, 135-36. 254 important African American Shakespeare productions.54 Ellington and Strayhorn shared an interest in Shakespeare, an interest that resulted in the instrumental suite, Such

Sweet Thunder (1956), composed for the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, each movement based on a character or characters from Shakespeare’s plays. In preparation for writing the suite, both Ellington and Strayhorn re-read the complete works of Shakespeare.55 However, Play On! does not contain any music from Such

Sweet Thunder. For Stephen Buhler, this absence is one of the ‘unsettling aspects of

Play On!’:

The show’s creator, Sheldon Epps, has claimed to have introduced the Duke and Shakespeare to each other, completely erasing Such Sweet Thunder from Ellington’s canon. During the show, audiences can hear, once again, ‘Take the A Train’ and ‘I’ve Got It Bad (And That’s Not [sic] Good)’, but are not treated to any of Ellington’s own encounters with Shakespeare, either with lyrics that could be provided for the instrumentals (as [John] Dankworth had done [in the 1964 and 1978 albums Shakespeare – And All That Jazz and Wordsongs]) or in dance sequences (which were choreographed by Ellington’s granddaughter Mercedes).56

Buhler does not quote Epps directly, and does not give sources or context for his claim.

In any event, Buhler’s suggestion that Epps might have set new words to extracts from the instrumental suite, or might have chosen them as accompaniment to dance seems somewhat misjudged. Play On!’s musical numbers consist of Ellington and Strayhorn’s songs, which are presented with lyrics intact: a significant source of pleasure in Play

On! is the often unexpectedly apt fit of existing words and music to a dramatic situation for which they were not composed. Writing new words simply does not fit with this project. In addition, Play On!’s song list consists of Ellington and Strayhorn’s songs

54 Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 170. 55 Hajdu, Lush Life, 156. 56 Stephen M. Buhler, ‘Musical Shakespeares: Attending to Ophelia, Juliet and, Desdemona’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 150-74 (151-52). 255 from the 1940s: not only were the movements of Such Sweet Thunder written as instrumental music, a different idiom from songs, but Ellington and Strayhorn’s style in

1956 had developed away from the style of their 1940s songs.

The ghosting of Vy by Strayhorn was discussed expressly using the metaphor of haunting by at least one reporter, Barry Singer of The New York Times, in his 1997 interview with Epps:

The vision of Viola as an aspiring songwriter perhaps reflects most on the Ellington history, as it evokes with bittersweet irony the spirit of Billy Strayhorn. While Mr. Epps, the director, readily concedes that the Strayhorn symmetries are entirely unintentional, the eerie light they throw across Play On! haunts him.

Back in December 1938, a 23-year-old Strayhorn – according to legend – slipped into the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh and, just like Viola, introduced himself to the Duke as an aspiring songwriter, thereby commencing his own conflicted musical love affair, underscored by Twelfth Night-like questions of illusion and identity that echo to this day. ‘I often used to think, as I uncovered this Ellington song or that one for the show, that the Duke himself was sometimes leading me to them’, said Mr. Epps. ‘Now, I wonder, though, if maybe it was Billy after all’.57

While accepting Epps’ denial of intentionality in the ghosting of Vy by Strayhorn, we might see concealed within Singer’s interview evidence of the multiple voices that emerge in the collaborative work that goes into creating a musical. Although parallels between Strayhorn and Vy might be entirely unintentional as far as Epps is concerned, details within Play On!’s dialogue suggests that not only were they not unintentional on the part of Cheryl L. West, but that West signposts the parallel with Strayhorn – and others – for those familiar with jazz history. With a level of detail unnecessary to the plot, Vy twice introduces herself by her full name, “Vi-O-la Willamina Caledonia Pea”

(9, 90). Each component of her name invites the character of Vy to be received on a

57 Barry Singer, ‘In 1940s Harlem, Even Shakespeare Learns to Swing’, New York Times, 16 March 1997. 256 number of levels simultaneously. The first component, ‘Vi-O-la’, clearly suggests that

Shakespeare’s Viola is a component of Vy’s character. While on its own “Willamina” is a thin foundation on which to argue that Billy Strayhorn is another component, for those aware that Strayhorn was almost universally known by the nickname ‘Swee’ Pea’, the combination of ‘Willamina’ and ‘Pea’ in Vy’s full name is likely either to alert them to parallels with Strayhorn, or confirm their existing sense of Strayhorn’s ghosting of

Vy’s character. Indeed, the musical links Vy with Strayhorn from the opening number,

Strayhorn’s ‘Take the A Train’, here scored for Vy and chorus. ‘Caledonia’ also has resonances with the Harlem of the 1940s that are meaningful in the world of Play On!:

‘Caldonia’, a blues hit in 1945 for Louis Jordan and subsequently covered by many other performers, is extremely unusual in its historical context in having its composition credited to an African-American woman, Fleecie Moore, Jordan’s wife. Through Vy’s name, West thus signals that Vy’s aspirations to be a female African-American songwriter are not inevitably hopeless. When Vy’s role is perceived as ghosted by any or all of Billy Strayhorn, Fleecie Moore, Anita O’Day and Billy Tipton, the gender and sexual politics of Play On!’s final scene are thus blurred. On the one hand, the ending appears to negate the apparent feminism of much of the rest of the musical; on the other it evokes – although in its upbeat joyousness it does not appear to critique – a history of cultural production that is both antifeminist and homophobic.

Lady Liv’s unrequited sexual attraction to Vy-man also raises Strayhorn’s ghost, in a way that allows audiences familiar with jazz history to create some meaning from

Lady Liv’s unexpectedly rapid pairing off with Jester. This time Strayhorn’s ghost appears in connection with Lena Horne, corroborating DeShields’ statement, ‘when I look at Lady Liv, I think of Lena Horne, as opposed to Olivia’.58 Horne and Strayhorn

58 Klein, ‘A Jazzy Twelfth Night’. 257 first met in 1940, after Ellington had told Horne that she and Strayhorn needed to know each other.59 The two quickly became extremely close and, despite Strayhorn’s sexuality, Lena Horne fell in love with him. In her 1950 as-told-to autobiography, she refers to Strayhorn’s sexuality in coded terms:

I welcomed him – so gladly. My husband had filed suit for divorce by this time, and I felt that I had the right to male companionship by now. But this was hardly to become a romantic attachment, for Sweetpea is a confirmed bachelor. At any rate, this is the impression of him I received during all the years I have known him. He pours all his thought, his energy, his attention into his music. His devotion to his work is so complete that he has little interest left to give to other things or people.60

In fact, Strayhorn lived openly with his lover, jazz pianist Aaron Bridgers, from 1939 until 1947.61 In a later interview with Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hajdu, Horne was more expansive:

I wanted to marry him so badly. He was just everything I wanted in a man, except he wasn’t interested in me sexually. If I could have had him, I would have taken him. We were in love, anyway. He was the only man I really loved. ... He was very, very strong, and at the same time very sensitive and gentle. He was the perfect mixture of man and woman.62

Horne subsequently married Lennie Hayton, the music director for MGM, in 1947, although the marriage did not last. As Horne told Ebony magazine in 1980, ‘You must know that in the beginning I didn’t marry Lennie because I was in love with him. I respected him because he knew a lot about music’.63 If Lady Liv is ghosted by Horne, her sudden shift in affection from Vy-man to Rev might thus be understood less as an expression of an over-determined heteronormativity in the production than as a

59 Lena Horne and Richard Schickel, Lena (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 123. 60 Helen Arstein and Carlton Moss, In Person: Lena Horne (New York: Greenberg, 1950), 200. 61 van de Leur, Something to Live For, 33. 62 Hajdu, Lush Life, 95-96. 63 Ebony, ‘Ebony Interview: Lena Horne On Her Loveless Childhood, Her Durable Beauty, Sex and the Older Woman, Her Life’s Triple Tragedy’, May, 1980.

258 reflection of Horne’s life, her love for a man unattracted to her sexually, and her marriage to someone she did not initially love.

The relationship of Play On!’s characters to those of Twelfth Night and the ghosting of those characters by figures from African American and jazz cultural history

– a set of ghostings that will vary from audience member to audience member – thus results in characters whose identity – sexual and otherwise – is indeterminate and indeterminable, in an adaptation of Twelfth Night the meaning of which is likewise indeterminable. The table below represents some of the possible combinations of ghosted historical figures and characters from Twelfth Night that might accompany audience receptions of Play On!’s characters.

Play On! Twelfth Night Ghosted historical figures Vy (Vi-O-la Viola/ Cesario Billy Strayhorn (Swee’ Pea); Fleecie Willamina Caledonia Moore; Billy Tipton; Anita O’Day; Pea)/Vy-man Zora Neale Hurston; Countee Cullen The Duke, famous Orsino, Duke of Duke Ellington Harlem songwriter Illyria Lady Liv, the Cotton Olivia Lena Horne; ; Bessie Club’s star singer Smith; Ma Rainey; Alberta Hunter; Ethel Waters Rev, Manager of the Malvolio, Cab Calloway; Lennie Hayton Cotton Club Olivia’s steward/ Sebastian Miss Mary, Lady Maria Liv’s wardrobe assistant Sweets, Lady Liv’s Sir Toby Belch bandleader Jester, the Cotton Feste Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; Cootie Club’s Williams choreographer; Vy’s uncle CC, a dancer at the Cotton Club

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The potential for individual characters to be ghosted by more than one historical figure while also displaying a readily identifiable relationship to Shakespeare’s characters thus obstructs a reception of Play On! either as a coded musical biography or as straightforward musicalisation of Twelfth Night. On the one hand, while studies of adaptations of Shakespeare tend to focus on “spectral Shakespeares”, as Maurizio Calbi puts it in his Derridean reading of twenty-first century adaptations of Shakespeare, a focus on Shakespearean ghosting, at least at the level of plot and character, reveals a relationship to Twelfth Night that is almost embarrassingly clunky: Play On!, both through internal cues and publicity material, wears its Shakespearean parallels on its sleeve.64 On the other hand, Play On! is not a jukebox musical à , even if the work invites a mediated reception of the onstage characters through their ghosting by multiple historical figures: receptions of Play On! that approach it as a form of biography are likely to lead at best to frustration with the work. Thus, one of the ‘unsettling aspects of

Play On!’ for Buhler (2007, 151) is that

the new play’s transformation of Ellington’s real-life collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, from a gay man to the Viola figure from Shakespeare … suppresses what some clearly see as inconvenient truths in the Duke’s biography.65

However, Buhler’s criticisms seem misplaced, although they are testament to the power of the musical’s ghosting effects: curiously, he appears only to see Play On!’s ghosts.

In his own suppression of the character of Vy/Vy-man in favour of Strayhorn and Viola, he passes over the energetic, physical onstage character with whom the audience has its primary relationship. Indeed, by using music composed after the closure of the Cotton

Club, and ghosting characters with historical figures from the 1920s to the 1940s

64 Maurizio Calbi, Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 65 Buhler, ‘Musical Shakespeares’, 151-52. 260

(among other temporal disparities), Play On! obstructs any straightforward historicising reception. Instead, in its layered, allusive texture, Play On! allows audiences to experience some of the slipperiness of identity explored in Twelfth Night, rather than the sense of fixed, commodified identity Buhler invokes in his description of Strayhorn as a

‘gay man’. Play On!’s ghosting effects and anachronistic musical references and set designs thus do not construct its onstage characters as readily graspable symbols of historical characters in coded form, so much as destabilise narratives, identities and spatial and temporal categories.

Indeed, what might be described as a truly ‘unsettling aspect of Play On!’ is the incompatibility of the fluid and multi-faceted identities of its characters and the sense of finality to which they are brought in the final scene, an incompatibility that, to return to

Van Leer’s discussions of cultural carelessness, is not unproductive. Here, Play On!’s transformation of Shakespeare’s loose ends into a scene of universal heterosexual closure cannot contain the historical ghosts and Shakespearean analogues that inhabit the musical in unpredictable combinations along with the onstage characters. While

Shakespeare’s Antonio might have no analogue in Play On!, for audience members the musical, and by extension Twelfth Night, might be haunted by their own unique set of ghosts – including a cross-dressing transgendered pianist, bisexual torch singers, an openly homosexual composer, a female songwriter, and a host of African-American cultural figures – that disrupt patriarchal, heteronormative cultural histories – both black and white – of twentieth-century America.

Place and time in the reception of Play On! and its ghosts

Buhler’s apparently straightforward reference to ‘the new play’s transformation of Ellington’s real-life collaborator’ is in fact not as self-evidently meaningful as it

261 might appear. As I have suggested, an approach that attempts to see definite meaning in the onstage events of Play On! is perhaps less productive than an approach that explores the memories, associations, pleasures and discomforts that productions of Play On! might set off in their audiences, and how these might inform individual responses to the work. While productions of Play On! so far have used more or less the same scenic designs, costumes, choreography, musical numbers and, largely, text, I have already demonstrated how different voice qualities can affect meaning when casts change. In addition, beyond the prompts in the text that encourage ghosting effects, each production takes place in a set of contexts that serve, more or less overtly, as further prompts to such effects.

Although what little academic attention the production has received has focused exclusively on the Broadway production, that production might in fact be considered unrepresentative of productions of Play On! in the lack of interpretive mediation it provided for its audiences. Broadway Playbill theatre programmes are notoriously thin on interpretive or contextualising matter beyond biographies of the cast and creative team. The programme for the Broadway production contained little information on

Duke Ellington or the African-American jazz world, and no information linking the set designs to Romaire Bearden. Its list of musical numbers gave no information on who created which number. Although information as to authorship was available in small print at the end of the programme in the permissions section, those unaware that

Strayhorn wrote the first number were thus likely to assume that all the numbers were by Duke Ellington, while those aware of jazz history might assume that Strayhorn was yet again being wiped from the record. We have already seen how discussions in the

Chicago Tribune of the show’s relationship to African-American history and culture by its creative team prior to the Chicago run filtered through into Chris Jones’ review for

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Variety, which in turn would have guided reception of the production. In the case of the

Broadway production, Barry Singer’s New York Times article raised the ghost of Billy

Strayhorn, but nothing further appeared in the press or publicity materials to guide audience members in their reception of the performance style or other aspects invoked by the musical beyond the relationship with Twelfth Night. This lack of interpretive contextualisation that might either prompt or validate a sense of ghosting and layered meanings – and thus provide a more complex reception of the musical – may well have contributed to the Broadway production’s comparative lack of success.

In contrast, the programmes for the original San Diego Old Globe Theatre and the Arizona Theatre Company’s productions contained a three-page essay on Duke

Ellington’s life and works. In addition, the San Diego programme contained photographs of figures from African-American jazz history, including Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway. The programmes for both productions contained a prominent list of musical numbers for each scene, in which it was made quite clear that the first number,

‘Take The “A” Train’ for Vy and chorus, was the only number for which Ellington did not have some creative responsibility. The number was clearly credited to Billy

Strayhorn, thus prompting an association between that composer and Vy from the opening number.

The potential for theatrical intertextuality also varies from production to production, and was evoked in different ways at a regional level: Don Shirley’s Los

Angeles Times review of the Pasadena production, for example, draws comparisons between Play On!’s ‘Magical Kingdom of Harlem’ in the ‘Swinging Forties’ and the more realistic depiction of 1940s Harlem in John Henry Redwood’s play The Old

Settler that had been produced shortly beforehand in the same theatre.66 In his review of

66 Shirley, ‘This Play’s Got that Swing’. 263 the Chicago production, Chris Jones compares the ‘euphoric standing ovation’ accorded the Chicago opening night and the ‘Gotham thumbs-down’ of the Broadway production, suggesting the contrast ‘has a lot to do with different expectations’.67 The Chicago production at the Goodman Theatre was seen largely by subscribers ‘clearly happy to take a break from the Goodman’s typically weighty material’.68 Nonetheless, Jones refers to the ‘gravitas injected by the Goodman outing’ – a production in a theatre known for serious works and attended by subscribers to that theatre invites that production to be taken seriously.69 Both of these reviews draw attention to another form of theatrical ghosting: the effect that Carlson describes when one theatre production is ghosted by memories of other productions experienced by audiences in the same theatre space.70 This effect is likely to have been particularly complex and strong in the production in San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, in which productions are not only haunted by audience members’ memories of previous productions, but also by the imagined Tudor – and especially Shakespearean – theatrical past.

Further intertextual references were possible, with variations at a regional level.

Those familiar with Sheldon Epps’ previous work, the revue Blues in the Night (off-

Broadway 1980, Broadway 1982, West End 1987, off-Broadway revival 1988), might have memories stirred of Bessie Smith and Alberta Hunter, whose blues numbers were featured in the revue alongside those of Duke Ellington, raising their ghosts around

Lady Liv. Star casting also prompts its own associations. For example, Leslie Uggams, one of the leading performers from the Broadway production of Blues in the Night, appeared as Lady Liv in the New Brunswick production of Play On!, potentially

67 Jones, Review of Play On!. 68 Jones, Review of Play On! 69 Jones, Review of Play On!. 70 Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 131-164. 264 bringing the ghosts of Smith and Hunter with her to receptive audience members, alongside memories of her own performance.71 (In an intriguing twist, Uggams appeared as Lena Horne in the bio-musical Stormy Weather in the Pasadena Playhouse in 2009, raising the possibility of Lady Liv having her turn at ghosting Lena Horne through a combination of performer and theatre space).

The presence or absence of framing elements beyond the onstage action might thus explain at least in part the comparative lack of success of the Broadway production and the comparative success of the various regional productions of Play On!. The absence of a widespread paradigm for the reception of jukebox musicals means that audiences need to be guided towards a mode of reception that alerts them to the presence of multiple layers of reference and encourages them to see meaning in this. In productions of Play On! this guidance might come from a combination of internal cues, such as the Duke’s name, Vy’s full name, and Vy’s ‘Uncle Cootie’ name for Jester, and external prompts such as interviews, reviews, programme notes and photographs, or web-based guides to the televised performance. The relative lack of such external prompts around the Broadway production may well have contributed to its short run.

For example, while the ghosting of Billy Strayhorn did not go uncommented, the lack of a prominent acknowledgement of his contribution to the music in the Broadway Playbill theatre programmes (in contrast to those of regional productions) likely resulted in those with a dormant awareness of jazz and/or gay history missing an opportunity to link the characters of Vy and Viola productively with that of Strayhorn. This lack may well also have offended those with a more lively awareness of either or both of those histories, through what might seem to be an attempted erasure of Strayhorn’s contribution to the

71 Andrew Ganns, ‘Uggams and Mills Star in Play On! at NJ’s Crossroads, Nov. 17 – Dec. 19’, Playbill, 1 November 1999. 265 production. However, for those audience members who were successfully prompted by the programmes of regional productions, or who noticed the parallels themselves, the production allowed historical figures from American jazz and African-American cultural history to co-exist with Shakespeare’s characters, and brought together African-

American historical performance styles and Shakespeare’s storyline. At the same time, the ghosting effects of both Shakespeare’s characters and historical figures that surround Play On!’s onstage characters at varying degrees of perceptibility go some way to creating a sense of the instability of identity that is one of Twelfth Night’s themes. The next case study, All Shook Up, places this sense of the instability of identity – in particular gender, sexual and racial identities – at its centre. In doing so, it uses its own ambiguous status as an adaptation to create an experience of the instability of identity for its audiences.

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CHAPTER FIVE

EVOKING TWELFTH NIGHT’S UNSTABLE IDENTITIES, PART TWO: ALL SHOOK UP AND THE UNANNOUNCED ADAPTATION

Eight years after Play On! appeared on Broadway, All Shook Up opened at the

Palace Theatre there, featuring songs linked by their association with a single performer,

Elvis Presley. The original production of All Shook Up began at Goodspeed Musicals in

Connecticut in 2004, moved to Chicago later that year, and opened on Broadway in

2005, where it ran for 213 performances, before embarking on a national tour of thirty- five cities. The touring version was then licensed for amateur performance and has subsequently become a popular work with regional and amateur companies, particularly in the United States. The touring version differs structurally in some respects from the

Broadway production, with ‘Jailhouse Rock’ moved from its second-act position on

Broadway to become the opening number. In the period following Play On!’s

Broadway run, the concept of the jukebox musical had become more widely known, particularly in the wake of Mamma Mia!’s successful runs in London’s West End and on Broadway (opening in 1999 and 2001 respectively, both currently still in production). All Shook Up appeared on Broadway alongside several other jukebox musicals, such as Jersey Boys, Lennon, Good Vibrations, all of which opened in the same year, together with the long-running Movin’ Out and Mamma Mia!. Like Mamma

Mia!, but in contrast to the bio-musicals Jersey Boys and Lennon, the cast of All Shook

Up sang their songs in character, instead of attempting to replicate Presley’s distinctive vocal style.1

If Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost has had the most academic attention paid to it among jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare, All Shook Up has had the

1 An exception to this, in the number ‘Jailhouse Rock’, is discussed below. 267 most widespread, if brief, moment of popular notoriety. In January 2013, the temporary cancellation of an amateur production of All Shook Up in Herriman, Utah, received an extraordinary level of coverage both within the United States and in the international

Anglophone media: Herriman High School’s annual musical was reported, first, to have been cancelled by the Jordan School District following a complaint of sexual inappropriateness and failure to meet ‘community standards’, but subsequently to have been permitted to be staged following an agreement with the work’s publishers allowing unspecified changes to song lyrics and dialogue.2 Neither the identity of the sole complainant nor the exact details of the complaint were released; according to a spokesperson for the district, however, the complainant was ‘upset with sexually explicit language and some other aspects of the play—what they deemed cross- dressing’. A parent of a would-be performer was quoted as finding nothing offensive in the work: ‘they’re singing Elvis songs. A girl dresses up as a boy and kisses a boy …

It’s not promoting homosexuality. It’s supposed to be a farce’.3

In the various news reports, most of which were based on an Associated Press release, these references to cross-dressing and the potential promotion of homosexuality in All Shook Up were invariably contextualised by discussing the musical as an

2 Alongside widespread coverage in the US media, the Herriman story was also reported in Australia (Associated Press, ‘Elvis Presley Too Hot For US High School’, The Australian, 4 January 2013; Associated Press, ‘School Stops Musical With Racy Elvis Songs’, 9 News, 4 January 2013); Canada (Associated Press, ‘Utah School Tweaks Elvis Musical After Parent Gets All Shook Up’, CBC News. 3 January 2013); Gibraltar (Associated Press, ‘School Shook Up Over Elvis Music’, Gibraltar Chronicle, 4 January 2013); India (Associated Press, ‘School Cancels Play Over Elvis’ Song’, Times of India, 4 January 2013); Indonesia (Associated Press, ‘Elvis Presley: Play Generates Controversy at Utah High School’, Jakarta News, 5 January 2013); Ireland (Associated Press, ‘Suspicious Minds Change Over Elvis’, Independent.ie, 4 January 2013); New Zealand (Associated Press, ‘Elvis Leaves School All Shook Up’, Stuff, 4 January 2013) and the United Kingdom (Associated Press, ‘Back to the 50s: US Parent Forces School To Tone Down Production of All Shook Up Because It’s Too Suggestive’, Daily Mail, 4 January 2013). 3 This and the preceding were widely quoted in the Associated Press reports cited in the note above; ellipsis in original reports. 268 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Comments by Martine Green-Rogers, a

University of Utah academic, on the musical and its relationship to Twelfth Night were widely quoted or paraphrased, apparently in an attempt to downplay suggestions that the musical might indeed be ‘promoting homosexuality’. The Huffington Post, for example, reads:

All Shook Up brings a modern twist to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which portrays a female castaway who dresses as a boy to evade detection in ancient southern Europe, said Martine Green-Rogers, a theater fellow at the University of Utah. ‘There’s a misunderstanding about the plot of the play’, Green-Rogers said. ‘It happens a lot in theater. Artists push boundaries’. The female castaway dresses as a boy as cover, but reveals herself as she falls in love with a young man. ‘By that time, the genders have been righted’, Green-Rogers said. ‘The audience knows it’s not a homosexual relationship’.4

Yet, while reviewers and other audience members have frequently recognised aspects of

Twelfth Night in All Shook Up, the relationship between the musical and Shakespeare’s play is not a straightforward one of acknowledged adaptation and a single, obviously recognizable source text. This is not to say that Green-Rogers is incorrect to frame All

Shook Up as an adaptation of Twelfth Night. Indeed, I argue that, in addition to setting up the plot and character parallels one might expect in an adaptation, All Shook Up successfully incorporates an experience of the instability of identity that is a central theme of Twelfth Night, but that is difficult to achieve in modern psychological-realist productions that cast adult women in roles originally played by boy apprentices.

Significantly, All Shook Up achieves this through playing with its own identity as an adaptation. By inviting audiences to recognise All Shook Up’s status as an adaptation as the musical unfolds itself, rather than announcing itself as one in advance, it reveals

4 Paul Foy, ‘Utah School Stops Elvis Musical Because of “Sexually Suggestive” Songs’, Huffington Post, 3 January 2013. 269 adaptation’s queer agency, its potential to destabilise categories of identity.5 All Shook

Up, ostensibly a light-hearted Elvis vehicle, harnesses this potential and expands on

Twelfth Night’s unstable identities in order to destabilise various forms of modern identity-markers, including gender, sexuality, race, class, region, and age. While adaptation studies have moved from a fidelity-based critique of the adaptation-as-work to an understanding of adaptation as a creative process, often with a focus on medium- specificity, adaptations still remain second-tier works, largely considered in relation to their sources and to differences in media between source and adaptation. All Shook Up makes a claim for the adaptation as an art form in itself, with its own particular aesthetic and political strengths and values.

Although the characters of Natalie, Chad, and Miss Sandra in All Shook Up are clearly mappable onto Twelfth Night’s Viola, Orsino, and Olivia, the plot points of

Twelfth Night that Green-Rogers highlights in fact differ significantly from the plot of

All Shook Up. In the latter, set in a small town in the American Midwest in 1955, a young woman, Natalie, falls in love with a man, Chad, a newcomer to town who has stereotyped views of gender roles. Natalie disguises herself as a man named Ed expressly in order to get closer to Chad. Chad, initially attracted to Miss Sandra, the female curator of the town museum, falls in love with the disguised Natalie while believing her to be a man – and privileges what for him is a disconcerting experience by discussing it in song. When Natalie-as-Ed ‘reveals herself’ as a woman, Chad is initially distraught and leaves town. While one can certainly say that in All Shook Up

‘the audience knows it’s not a homosexual relationship’, at least one of the main protagonists does not: audiences thus witness a man experiencing and coming to terms

5 As mentioned in the last chapter, by ‘queer agency’, I mean the potential to destabilise apparently fixed forms of identity across a range of manifestations, including, but not restricted to, sexual identity. 270 with an unexpected fluidity of both sexual orientation and of the object of sexual attraction. Further, even if it were ever possible to say definitively that in Twelfth Night

‘the genders have been righted’, as Green-Rogers appears to suggest, the very fact that genders are perceived as needing to be ‘righted’ opens up the possibility that gender is not an essentially fixed feature of identity.

As might be deduced from some of the anxious discourse surrounding the

Herriman High School production, the fluidity of sexual attraction is one of the aspects of identity that All Shook Up places at its centre. That an early-twenty-first-century work that engages with Twelfth Night should do so is hardly surprising. While stagings of Twelfth Night have regularly made a homosexual orientation for the character of

Antonio more or less explicit since the 1970s, some have also implied bisexual, fluid, or queer orientations for the characters of Orsino, Olivia, Viola’s twin Sebastian, and occasionally Viola herself.6 Similarly, as we have already seen in the previous chapter’s discussion of Play On!, musical adaptations have also found ways to explore this aspect of Twelfth Night. Your Own Thing, a 1968 off-Broadway rock musical adaptation, overtly addresses one of the issues raised by Green-Rogers: the significance of the fact that, in contrast to some of the characters, ‘the audience knows it’s not a homosexual relationship’. At the same time, it problematises her statement, drawing attention to the different ways that individual audience members can receive the issue of on-stage gender. In Your Own Thing, Orson (the Orsino analogue) finds himself falling in love with Charlie (the Cesario analogue), and makes an awkward visit to a library in order to research the subject of latent homosexuality. The production featured screens on which were projected images of Hollywood stars and historical figures (including

6 For a discussion of portrayals or suggestions of homosexuality and bisexuality in productions of Twelfth Night, see Elizabeth Schafer, Twelfth Night: Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 59–64. 271

Shakespeare himself), who commented on the action. In one exchange, described by

Irene Dash, John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart debate the significance of the ‘true’ gender of Charlie:

John Wayne exclaims, ‘That man’s falling for that boy!’ ‘That’s your old problem. It’s a girl’, responds Bogart. Then they argue. ‘Yeah, but he don’t know that’. ‘Would it change anything if he did?’ ‘Sure, it’d be decent’, says Wayne. ‘No, just legal’, Bogart replies. And here the adaptors are probing to the heart of the musical. Queen Elizabeth then introduces yet another perspective. ‘I say, “pair anyone off with anything”. The only crime I know is loneliness’. A moving observation, it prompts Shakespeare’s recitation of another of the Clown’s songs, ‘What is love? ’Tis not hereafter/ Present mirth hath present laughter’, a song that concludes with the statement ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure’.7

Despite the apparently unproblematic identification of All Shook Up as an adaptation of

Twelfth Night in the Herriman High School discussions, All Shook Up’s status as an adaptation of Twelfth Night is nonetheless not, in fact, self-evident. First, for most of its existence, productions of All Shook Up have not advertised themselves as adaptations of

Twelfth Night; second, All Shook Up has been received as an adaptation of a number of different works.

In its early history, All Shook Up was not presented as an adaptation of Twelfth

Night, nor in fact as an adaptation at all, being marketed instead as a non-biographical vehicle for songs made famous by Elvis Presley. When playwright Joe DiPietro was commissioned by the estate of Elvis Presley to write a musical based on the star’s musical hits, the commission was accompanied by the stipulation that the work should not be based on Presley’s life. Publicity thus stressed that the show’s music was based on Presley’s hits, rather than on Presley himself, the tagline for posters for the original production running: ‘ALL SHOOK UP: A NEW MUSICAL COMEDY. The story is all

7 Irene G. Dash, Shakespeare and the American Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 141-42.

272 new. The hits are all ELVIS’. Unlike the songs of Duke Ellington used in Play On!, many of which were ‘standards’ in the repertory of almost every jazz singer, the songs in All Shook Up are primarily associated with the readily recognisable voice of a single performer: the musical is thus characterised by an absent presence.

The angular, 1950s-inspired artwork for the Broadway poster was dominated by the show’s title, in green, red, blue and pink letters, and by the figure of a china-pink motorcycle driven by a young woman in what appears to be a frilly white dress blown back to reveal denim jeans and sneakers underneath. A dark-haired young man dressed in black rides pillion, his body largely obscured by the woman in front of him; the neck and head of a guitar are visible next to him. In contrast to the colourful central images, a trail of paler, apparently monochrome figures (actually picked out in white and navy with sky-blue highlighting) appear to chase the central couple. While the poster encapsulates themes from the show, the central motif of the couple, the motorcycle and the guitar also draws on images from the 1964 Presley film Roustabout (dir. John Rich) that would very probably be readable as such for many of the show’s target audience of

Elvis fans. The dark-haired, black-clad, motor-cycling young man is easily readable as the character played by Presley, Charlie Rogers. The image of the woman, on the other hand, appears to combine aspects of two female characters from the film. While the long pony-tailed hair and white dress reflect the character of Cathy Lean, Charlie’s relatively conventional love interest, played by Joan Freeman, the jeans revealed under the dress suggest the character of Maggie Morgan, Charlie’s employer, played by

Barbara Stanwyck, an independent, jeans-wearing owner of a carnival who lives with her long-term partner, Cathy’s father, without being married. That the young man’s image is subordinated to that of the woman driving the motorcycle, combined with the fact that the motorcycle is china pink rather than the crimson and black of Charlie’s

273 motorcycle in the film, suggests that audiences should expect a subversion of both

Roustabout and traditional tropes of masculinity, while the presence of traits of two characters from Roustabout being combined in the image of one woman prepares audiences for All Shook Up’s technique of combining multiple adapted plotlines and characters in order to provide audiences with a sense of the instability of identity that is central to Twelfth Night.

While the initial press publicity for the pre-Broadway Chicago run did not present the show as an adaptation, critics nonetheless spotted Shakespearean elements prior to the Broadway opening. Such observations were then gently encouraged in pre- show publicity on a gradually increasing basis, without overtly discussing the work as an adaptation. Following a preview for the press of four songs from the show, Jim

Farber of the Daily News, for example, reported on 2 December 2004 that

the producers emphasised that Shook, which opens at the Palace Theatre on March 24, will offer a light, original story based around the songs Presley recorded. From the outline offered, the show seems to insert a Shakespearean comedy of errors into a Leave It To Beaver-era MidWest America of cartoon repression.8

By 19 December 2004, Playbill’s website contained an article on the musical, in which

Kenneth Jones reported:

What the producers want you to know, foremost, is that All Shook Up is not a biography about Elvis Presley. The King isn’t a character in this original musical fairy tale that’s in the tradition of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like lovers opening their eyes to surprising love, it’s about a town awakening to romance and possibility – with music being the alarm clock.

Those who thought the new show was only about songs made popular by Elvis will be surprised to learn that Shakespearean comedies also inspired the show’s plot, an original tale packed with romantic yearnings, mismatched partners, deception and disguise.

8 Jim Farber, ‘Elvis Lives (Sort of)’, Daily News, New York ed., 3 December 2004. 274

Although All Shook Up is set in Eisenhower’s middle-America of 1955 – the period when Elvis emerged – the musical’s characters and plot twists conjure the sparring lovers and surprise couplings of The Bard of Avon.

‘In Joe's first draft was the idea of Shakespeare together with Elvis, which is the first thing that was really interesting to me’, said [director Christopher] Ashley, who was Tony Award-nominated for directing The Rocky Horror Show. ‘In it is the idea that if the girl can’t get the guy she wants, maybe she should dress like a guy to be his buddy and see what happens...’

What sparks it all, of course, is the music you associate with the late singer Elvis Presley; the score is by many songwriters, representing a range of work Elvis sang. ‘Music works like the love blossom in Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Ashley said. ‘It can unlock something, it can a make a statue come to life. In a show, that gives a director an immense amount of permission and latitude to invent’.9

Thus, while pre-show publicity began to prepare audiences to look for elements of

Shakespearean adaptation in All Shook Up, references were not restricted to Twelfth

Night.

All Shook Up and Twelfth Night

Nonetheless, even if the names of All Shook Up’s characters bear no resemblance to those of Shakespeare’s characters, All Shook Up contains significant parallels in terms of structure and character to Twelfth Night that are readily recognisable for those familiar with Shakespeare’s play. Orsino becomes Chad, a motorcycle-riding unskilled labourer from out of town. Viola becomes Natalie, who helps her father in his motor repair shop and who creates a new male persona, Ed, in order to get closer to Chad, eventually becoming his sidekick. Olivia becomes Miss

Sandra, the curator of the town’s museum, isolated from the rest of the town by her interest in high culture. Miss Sandra provides a clear cue that serves to confirm a link

9 Kenneth Jones, ‘All Shook Up Rumbles into Chicago Dec. 19 Prior to Broadway’, Playbill, 19 December 2004. 275 between All Shook Up and Twelfth Night for audiences familiar with Shakespeare’s play: on hearing the sound of a distant guitar, she cries ‘Play on! Play on! Play on!’ (1-

69), quoting the first line of Twelfth Night.10 Clearly following Twelfth Night’s storyline, Chad initially falls in love with Miss Sandra, Natalie falls in love with Chad and Miss Sandra falls in love with Natalie-as-Ed. Chad uses Natalie-as-Ed as go- between in his attempts to win over the hostile Miss Sandra, who instead falls for

Natalie-as-Ed. Natalie’s best friend Dennis, who is secretly in love with her, is a loose amalgamation of Viola’s twin Sebastian, and Sebastian’s lover Antonio. Chad eventually falls in love with ‘Ed’, whom he assumes is a man, and Miss Sandra pairs off with Dennis. When Natalie reveals herself, the distressed Chad leaves town, but eventually returns to reunite with Natalie. The musical splits references to Malvolio’s plotlines between two characters. His cross-gartered yellow stocking storyline is given to Jim, Natalie’s widowed father, who is persuaded to dress inappropriately youthfully in in order to woo Miss Sandra, and his role as puritanical busybody is given to Mayor Matilda Hyde, whose ‘Mamie Eisenhower Decency Act’ has banned public necking, tight pants and loud music in the town. The characters of Feste and Sir

Andrew are cut. Echoes of Maria appear in the character of Sylvia, an African-

American bar owner and single mother, secretly in love with Jim, and some of Sir

Toby’s ‘cakes and ale’ mentality arises occasionally across a range of townspeople, despite Mayor Hyde’s prohibitions. At a more diffuse level, the melancholy atmosphere of mourning that pervades Twelfth Night is reflected firstly in the early number,

‘Heartbreak Hotel’, for chorus and principals, and through much of the rest of the show

10 Script references are to Joe DiPietro, All Shook Up (New York: Theatrical Rights Worldwide, n.d.), in which acts are separately paginated. Citations in the text therefore take this form: act number, page number (for example, 1.69). 276 in the continued mourning for Margaret, Jim’s wife and Natalie’s mother, who died almost three years before the onstage story begins.

However, All Shook Up is clearly more than an adaptation of Twelfth Night alone: it piles on allusions to other works, and intertwines plotlines and characters from a variety of fictional worlds. While later in this chapter I discuss the potentially destabilizing effects that arise when All Shook Up is received as an adaptation of both

Twelfth Night and Meredith Willson’s 1957 musical The Music Man (a very popular work among amateur and school productions in the United States and thus likely to be familiar to many of All Shook Up’s audiences), this is by no means intended to downplay the potential for All Shook Up to be received as a combination of other apparent sources: for example, journalistic reviewers also cite a number of works in combination as multiple ‘sources’ on the grounds of plot and character parallels.

Further, reviews also cite a plethora of more fleeting parallels and briefer allusions in various semiotic registers – dialogue, plot, lighting, costume, scenery, choreography – to a wide range of Shakespearean plays, Presley vehicles, Broadway musicals, films, and other works.

For example, journalistic reviewers of various productions have drawn attention to the following apparent sources beyond Twelfth Night, in a range of combinations:

Anyone Can Whistle, As You Like It, Bye Bye Birdie, Cyrano de Bergerac, Footloose,

Grease, Hairspray, Hamlet, Happy Days, Jailhouse Rock, The Love Boat, Mamma

Mia!, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, The Music Man,

Pleasantville, Romeo and Juliet, Roustabout, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two

Gentlemen of Verona, The Winter’s Tale and The Witches of Eastwick.11 For those with

11 See J. Peter Bergman, ‘Review of All Shook Up’, Berkshire Bright Focus, 7 September 2013; Bill Curtright, ‘Elvis, Shakespeare Meet in All Shook Up’ (review), Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, 12 February 2010; David Finkle, ‘Review of All Shook Up’, TheaterMania, 24 March 2005; Lesley 277 no knowledge of Twelfth Night, it would be possible to argue for All Shook Up as at least partially an adaptation of any of these works; indeed, Bonnie Goldberg, reviewing a production in Berlin, Connecticut, does just that. While her review does not mention

Twelfth Night, she describes the production in these terms: ‘think Footloose meets

Cyrano de Bergerac collides with A Midsummer Night’s Dream with touches of Romeo and Juliet’.12 Lesley Grigg, on the other hand, demonstrates that audiences cued in advance to expect an adaptation of Twelfth Night are still capable of recognising traces of other sources. Reviewing a production in Berwyn, PA, she writes, ‘I was told this story is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, but with the mention of a

“decency act” and [the] town stranger falling for the pretty professional I also picked up hints of Footloose and The Music Man rolled into one’.13

As the above list suggests, the wider one’s cultural frame of reference, the greater access one is likely to have to the musical’s allusions and parallels. If All Shook

Up aims to be recognised and received as an adaptation, it does not so much demand a wide cultural frame of reference as cater to a diversity of cultural frames of reference.

Indeed, the range of parallels and allusions is so broad and appeals to such widely differing cultural frames of references that most audience members could expect to recognise multiple ‘sources’. The discussions below primarily map parallels between

All Shook Up and other apparent sources beyond Twelfth Night, without arguing for any

Grigg, ‘The King Never Entered the Building: All Shook Up at Footlighters Is Fun’ (review), Stage Magazine, 29 September 2010; Barbara Lounsberry, ‘Music-filled and Fun Elvis Tribute All Shook Up Sure to Be a Hit’ (review), WCF (Ia.) Courier, 11 July 2011; Matthew Murray, ‘Review of All Shook Up’, Talkin’ Broadway, 24 March 2005; Nancy Oliveri, ‘Elvis Never Leaves the Building in Cider Mill’s All Shook Up’ (review), Broome County (N.Y.) Arts Council, 9 June 2013; Steven Stanley, ‘Review of All Shook Up’, Stage Scene LA, 23 February 2008, and ‘Review of All Shook Up’, Stage Scene LA, 13 May 2011; Tis4Theatre, ‘All Shook Up: Don’t Want to Love You But I Do’ (review), 11 November, 2012; and collected reviews of All Shook Up, North Shore Music Theatre, Boston, August 2012. 12 Bonnie Goldberg, ‘All Shook Up in 50 Shades of Elvis’ (review), Middletown (Conn.) Press, 1 August 2012. 13 Grigg, ‘The King Never Entered the Building’. 278 further more complex engagement with these sources. Nonetheless, the repeated acts of recognition of adaptation that these parallels offer audiences play a crucial role in undercutting a sense of stable identity located within onstage characters. They are thus a key part of All Shook Up’s engagement with Twelfth Night’s theme of the instability of identity.

All Shook Up and other plays by Shakespeare

Although parallels with Twelfth Night come to dominate the show in terms of

Shakespearean structural motifs, relationships between the onstage characters and

Shakespearean analogues are rarely stable. In one scene, for instance, Natalie-as-Ed attempts to persuade Chad to kiss her, ostensibly as a trial run in preparation for his desired coupling with Miss Sandra. Rather than an adaptation of Twelfth Night, this scene appears to be an adaptation of As You Like It, act 3, scene 2 and act 4, scene 1, with Natalie-as-Ed and Chad briefly transformed into analogues of Rosalind-as-

Ganymede and Orlando respectively. Further, Christopher Ashley’s description in

Kenneth Jones’s interview of ‘the idea that if the girl can’t get the guy she wants, maybe she should dress like a guy to be his buddy and see what happens...’ does not call to mind any of the Shakespearean plays Jones mentions – As You Like It, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – but instead appears to parallel the motivation for

Julia’s cross-dressing plotline in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. All Shook Up also invites a recognition of Shakespearean allusions beyond the cross-dressing comedies: for example, reviewers have recognised Mayor Matilda Hyde as sharing puritanical policing methods on a whole town with Measure for Measure’s Angelo, and have seen

279 echoes of The Winter’s Tale when statues in Miss Sandra’s museum come to life, singing ‘Let Yourself Go’.14

The musical provides a number of internal cues that serve either to alert viewers to Shakespearean parallels or to confirm those that have already been recognised. For example, Lorraine and Dean, respectively the daughter of Sylvia the bar owner and

Mayor Hyde’s son, have no obvious parallels in Twelfth Night. Nonetheless, as lovers prevented by parental influence (in the form of Mayor Hyde’s racism and Sylvia’s disapproval on unspecified grounds) from openly declaring their love, they not only provide echoes of Romeo and Juliet, but explicitly conceive of their love in terms of

Shakespeare’s play:

LORRAINE. Our love would be a forbidden love. But that’s okay – forbidden love is the best. Did you ever read Romeo and Juliet? Theirs was a forbidden love, and it’s the dreamiest story ever (1-37).

Miss Sandra and Dennis are also explicitly linked to Shakespeare. Mirroring the roles of Orsino, Olivia and Viola-Cesario, Chad attempts to woo Miss Sandra by sending

Natalie-Ed to her with a love poem. However, the poem is in fact Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet, a copy of which Dennis, a lover of Shakespeare, just happens to have on him (1-53). Miss Sandra, likewise, is a lover of Shakespeare and equates

Shakespeare with eroticism. On reading the sonnet she falls immediately for its bearer,

Natalie-Ed (‘Quote Shakespeare and peel me like a banana!’ (1-63)). Later, on discovering that Dennis was responsible for Chad sending the sonnet, she falls immediately for him and he for her. This moment of recognition of attraction contains both an echo of Olivia’s ‘Most wonderful’ change of heart as she transfers her affection from Viola to Sebastian, and an echo of Romeo and Juliet’s encounter sonnet, as Miss

14 For example, J. Peter Bergman’s review of a Chatham, NY production for Berkshire Bright Focus, and Matthew Murray’s Talkin’ Broadway review of the Broadway production draw attention to the parallels with Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale respectively. 280

Sandra and Dennis begin to quote alternate lines of Sonnet 18 to each other. Physical attraction is presented as a secondary consideration in Miss Sandra’s erotic life: neither

Natalie-Ed nor Dennis appear to be particularly physically attractive to her (she appears only mildly disconcerted when she feels Natalie-Ed’s arms (‘All right, but only if you swear to come and take me in your manly arms, your – (feeling ED’s arms) – small, manly arms’ (2-19)), and calls Dennis ‘you funny-looking man’ as she is in the process of falling for him (2-41). Miss Sandra’s eroticised love for Shakespeare and for fellow lovers of Shakespeare appears to be part of the phenomenon that Valerie Traub refers to, in relation to Phebe’s attraction to Rosalind-Ganymede in As You Like It, as ‘erotic style’, an erotic preference separable from gendered object-choice, and mirrors Chad’s uncomfortable self-discovery that his erotic attraction is not intrinsically linked to gender.15

All Shook Up and Elvis Presley

Given that a large part of the audience for many productions of All Shook Up is likely to be familiar with Elvis Presley’s output, it is not surprising that the musical also contains parallels to his films and songs. A running joke reinforces the Elvis Presley connection: increasing numbers of characters appear wearing blue suede shoes after

Chad’s arrival, creating a pleasurable sense of the fulfilment of a long-frustrated expectation when the inevitable rendition of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ is sung. Further,

‘Jailhouse Rock’, an act-2 number in the Broadway production and the opening number of the touring version, is accompanied by choreography and monochrome costumes and scenery that set the number up as a clear homage to the title number from Jailhouse

15 Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), 108. 281

Rock (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1957); like Vince Everett in Jailhouse Rock, Chad spends time in jail. By opening with a clear aural, scenographic and choreographic reference to an iconic Elvis Presley moment, the touring version thus raises audience expectations of

All Shook Up as an Elvis Presley tribute vehicle, only to subvert them in subsequent numbers in which performers sing and dance in character, rather than mimicking

Presley’s delivery.

References and structural parallels to the 1964 film Roustabout are particularly prolific and strong, to the extent that All Shook Up is capable of being received as an adaptation of the film. The most prominent cues to All Shook Up’s adaptive relationship to the film are the borrowing of the film’s title song, sung early in the show by Chad as his first number, and the repeated description of Chad as a ‘roustabout’ (an unskilled labourer) in dialogue at 1-11, 13, 14, 32, 37, 57, and 2-29, 35, 45. As discussed above, the Broadway poster for All Shook Up provided additional resonances with Roustabout. Moreover, the central male characters of Roustabout and All Shook

Up (Roustabout’s Charlie and All Shook Up’s Chad) have similar names. Once these cues activate a recognition of All Shook Up’s relationship to the Elvis film, parallels are relatively easy to spot. In terms of setting, the fairground in Act 2 of All Shook Up mirrors the fairground settings of the bulk of Roustabout. In terms of characters, the relationships in All Shook Up between Chad and Natalie on one hand and Natalie’s widowed father Jim and business-owner Sylvia on the other reflect the relationships of the central young couple, Charlie Rogers and Cathie Lean, and of Cathie’s widowed father Joe and business-owner Maggie Morgan, another older unmarried couple, in

Roustabout. In terms of plot points, both Chad and Charlie arrive on a motorcycle, and the breakdown of that motorcycle is the motivation for their remaining in their respective towns; both subsequently make an abrupt departure from their new home,

282 followed by a return. Both Chad and Charlie revive the fortunes of an ailing business, run by an older unmarried woman, through music and dance (Sylvia’s bar in the musical standing in for Maggie Morgan’s fairground in the film). Taken together, these similarities suggest an adaptive relationship between All Shook Up and Roustabout for audiences familiar with the film.

All Shook Up as an adaptation of The Music Man and Bye Bye Birdie

All Shook Up also incorporates aspects of character, plot and imagery from stage and film musicals, and cues receptive audience members to receive it in the context of adaptations of musicals. Lorraine, for example, on first meeting Dean introduces herself as a fan of musicals: ‘You look like you just stepped out of a movie or something. Do you like movies? I do. What kind? I like musicals. I’m Lorraine.

What’s your name?’ (1-19). Among many allusions to specific musicals, All Shook Up contains particularly strong parallels with The Music Man and Bye Bye Birdie, two musicals that are regularly performed by schools and amateur companies in the United

States. The parallels with The Music Man begin to make themselves apparent in Act 1, scene 5, as Chad attempts unsuccessfully to seduce Miss Sandra at her place of employment, the town museum, a scene I analyse in more detail later in this chapter.

For those familiar with The Music Man, this scene is clearly readable as an adaptation of act 1, scene 7 of The Music Man, in which ‘Professor’ Harold Hill, like Chad a musician of dubious morality from out of town, attempts unsuccessfully to seduce the socially isolated town librarian and piano teacher, Marion Paroo, at the library, Marion’s place of work. In both All Shook Up and The Music Man, the high culture over which Miss

Sandra and Marion preside has overtones of the erotic. In All Shook Up the town museum is adorned with a statue of Venus, and its grounds feature several other

283 classical statues that come to sexualised life to accompany Miss Sandra in act 1, scene

10, while in The Music Man, Marion’s choice of literature is viewed as morally suspect by the rest of the town:

MAUD. Of course, I shouldn’t tell you this, but she advocates dirty books! HAROLD. Dirty books? ALMA. Chaucer! ETHEL. Rabalais! [sic] EULALIE. Bal – zac!16

Ironically, All Shook Up’s libidinous dancing classical statues have their own parallel with the judgmental Ladies Auxiliary Committee of The Music Man, who rehearse a

Delsarte-style dance modelled on poses from Grecian urns in preparation for the Ice

Cream Sociable. Further, Mayor Matilda Hyde’s Decency Act has an analogue in

Mayor Shin’s hysterical campaign to close River City’s pool hall in The Music Man.

More parallels with The Music Man are readily detectable once a reception of All Shook

Up as an adaptation of The Music Man has been activated: Dean, the Mayor’s son and his forbidden African-American girlfriend Lorraine have clear roots in The Music

Man’s Zaneeta Shinn, the Mayor’s daughter, and her forbidden lower-class boyfriend,

Tommy Djilas. Strengthening the parallels between the two sets of young lovers,

Zaneeta and Tommy also imagine themselves as Romeo and Juliet. In the stage version of The Music Man, Zaneeta pleads with her father, who has just ejected Tommy from the rehearsal for the Ice Cream Sociable: ‘Papa, please. It’s Capulets like you make blood in the market place. Ye Gods’.17 The parallels with Romeo and Juliet are made even more overt in the film version of The Music Man (dir. Morton DaCosta, 1962): while Harold attempts to seduce Marion in the library, the camera closes in on an enormous copy of Romeo and Juliet, its back cover showing a large black and white

16 Meredith Willson, The Music Man, libretto (London: Frank Music, 1962), 32 (act 1, scene 6). 17 Willson, The Music Man, libretto, 47 (Act 2, scene 1). 284 engraving of the balcony scene. Zaneeta and Tommy’s heads then appear over the top of the book as they watch Marion and Harold. Harold’s ‘Marian, the Librarian’ number then transitions into dance: in a pas de deux inset amongst ensemble dancing, Zaneeta goes to the first floor of the library and hangs over the metal railing, as if over a balcony, to meet Tommy, who clambers up balletically, stretching over to kiss Zaneeta, who leans over in an expansive arabesque, while orchestration and harmony change as if gesturing towards Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet.

While parallels with The Music Man are particularly strong, All Shook Up is also capable of being received as having a source in Bye Bye Birdie, a musical whose central character, Conrad Birdie, draws on both Conway Twitty and Elvis Presley at the time of his draft into the US Army. Like Conrad, Chad is a musician capable of driving people into excessive enthusiasm with his music. Hugo and Kim, two younger characters in

Bye Bye Birdie, have parallels in Dennis and Natalie: Dennis’s jealousy and suspicion over Natalie’s attraction to Chad can be linked clearly to Hugo’s jealousy of Kim’s relationship with Conrad Birdie, while the racist Mayor Matilda Hyde with her objection to Dean and Lorraine’s relationship has an analogue in Bye Bye Birdie’s racist

Mae Peterson, who conspires to keep her son Albert from marrying his Latina girlfriend, Rosie. As Mayor Hyde pairs up with her taciturn deputy, Sheriff Earl, late in

All Shook Up, so Mae also ends up married to a relatively minor character, Mr Maude, at the end of the film version of Bye Bye Birdie (dir. George Sidney, 1963).

Parallels and allusions to other works

Beyond these parallels with The Music Man and Bye Bye Birdie, All Shook Up contains a range of further parallels and allusions to musicals, plays and films, sometimes fleeting, sometimes more sustained. Mayor Hyde’s decency act clearly

285 parallels the ban on dancing in Footloose (dir. Herbert Ross, 1984), while for fans of more recherché musicals, the oppressive Mayor Hyde and her relationship with Sheriff

Earl might resonate with the similarly oppressive Mayor Cora Hoover Hooper and her relationship with Comptroller Schub in ’s Anyone Can Whistle

(Broadway, 1964). That Dennis provides Chad with the words with which to woo Miss

Sandra is mirrored in the assistance the titular hero of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de

Bergerac gives to Christian in his wooing of Roxane. All Shook Up also contains visual as well as plot-based parallels and allusions: the lighting design is such that the set and costumes appear monochrome until Chad arrives and turns on the jukebox, whereupon sets and costumes are suddenly transformed into full colour, paralleling Dorothy’s arrival in Oz in The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), and the transformation from black and white to colour in Pleasantville (dir. Gary Ross, 1998).

All Shook Up thus ensures that a range of parallels and allusions is available to audience members in at least three separate constituencies: those familiar with

Shakespeare, fans of Elvis Presley and those familiar with a wider range of musicals, plays and films. It is likely that many audience members would straddle two or more of these constituencies. Journalistic reviewers have generally discussed All Shook Up in terms of parallels to a mixture of Shakespearean and musical sources, presumably reflecting their professional interests: references to Roustabout, for instance, are generally absent, although parallels would be quite overt for Elvis Presley fans (Steven

Stanley of Stage Scene LA is a rare exception, mentioning both the parallels with

Roustabout and the script cues that draw attention to them in reviews of two separate productions).18 Nonetheless, a sample of journalistic reviews demonstrates that audience members recognise eclectic mixtures of references that differ from one

18 Stanley, Review of All Shook Up, (2008); Review of All Shook Up (2011). 286 audience member to another, even when viewing the same production. Unlike the discussions surrounding the Herriman High School production, journalistic reviews that draw attention to All Shook Up’s status as an adaptation cite multiple source texts.

Nonetheless, although All Shook Up contains structural, visual, and character parallels with multiple apparent ‘source’ texts, the musical appears to have a particularly strong relationship with Twelfth Night and that play’s theme of the instability of identity, an aspect I explore in the latter part of this chapter. While, as discussed above, the musical contains cues that confirm and guide its reception as an adaptation of a range of works, All Shook Up encourages audiences to engage thematically and experientially with Twelfth Night in a way that it does not with its other apparent sources. The parallels with works beyond Twelfth Night neither encourage thematic or other engagement with the source texts nor invite a series of radical interpretive shifts within All Shook Up’s narrative that might rely upon intertextual reception practices. Instead, they simply invite a recognition of themselves as parallel characters and plotlines oscillating among a perceived adaptation and multiple perceived sources. Significantly, these repeated acts of recognition have an instrumental role in undercutting an audience member’s sense of stable identity located within onstage characters. Twelfth Night’s theme of fluid identities is exemplified in the character of Viola–Cesario, originally a site of fluctuating identity between a boy apprentice actor and a character composed of a young woman, one of a pair of twins, and her male alter ego. In the absence of boy apprentice actors, All Shook Up extends this instability of identity throughout the cast of characters, who become sites of fluctuating identity among performers, characters in the world of All Shook Up, and adapted characters from a range of sources. The musical’s status as an adaptation, but as one that audiences must recognise as such for themselves, is thus key to its

287 engagement with Twelfth Night’s theme of the instability of identity. Exactly which of

All Shook Up’s multiple sources are recognised is less important than that there be a series of acts of recognition of multiple sources: provided that audiences experience this, an individual audience member need not have knowledge of Twelfth Night itself in order to encounter the sense of fluid identity that All Shook Up draws on in its relationship to Twelfth Night. Paradoxical as it may seem, discussions that present the musical as a straightforward adaptation of Twelfth Night – or more precisely, that imply that All Shook Up is an adaptation of Twelfth Night alone, as happened in the Herriman discussions – go some way toward neutralizing All Shook Up’s engagement with

Twelfth Night’s themes of fluidity and instability. While All Shook Up is inclusive in its approach, making no demands on the audience as to which adaptations are recognised, these discussions risk setting up All Shook Up as an exclusive text, implying an ideal

‘knowing’ audience member who is familiar with Twelfth Night. At the same time, in announcing the musical as an adaptation in a way that productions of the musical itself have rarely done, these discussions also downplay the experience of unexpected recognition that is part of the meaning-making process of All Shook Up.

All Shook Up, the unannounced adaptation and identity

All Shook Up both conceals and reveals its status as an adaptation. On the one hand, the Broadway and most subsequent productions have gone out of their way not to announce All Shook Up as an adaptation in advance: the tagline ‘ALL SHOOK UP: A

NEW MUSICAL COMEDY. The story is all new. The hits are all ELVIS’ discussed above in connection with the Broadway poster was also the licensed tagline on posters

288 for subsequent productions runs.19 All Shook Up thus differentiates itself from most of the adaptations theorised by Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation – works that are both acknowledged as adaptations and presented as such.20 On the other hand, All

Shook Up’s plot and character parallels, which are relatively obvious to those familiar with the source texts, are confirmed by internal cues to reception, such as Miss Sandra’s

‘Play on!’ or the references to ‘roustabout’. While it is always possible that audience members will assume that All Shook Up is an adaptation unacknowledged as such by its creators, the recognition of internal cues to reception is likely to function as a form of authorial acknowledgment for many audience members, and, in fact, this recognition of the theatrical equivalent of the sly wink functions as one of the pleasures of reception surrounding the musical. All Shook Up thus also differentiates itself from those more problematic works discussed recently by Christopher Morrow, ones that might function as adaptations ‘in the subjective realm of reception’, but that are not acknowledged as such (or that might even be expressly disavowed as such) by their creators.21 I therefore refer to All Shook Up as an ‘unannounced adaptation’, in contrast to those adaptations that are overtly presented as such, which I refer to as ‘announced adaptations’. This distinction aims to draw attention to the way of modes of presentation affect the reception of adaptations, a topic which remains an underexplored area in adaptation

19 The Herriman High School discussions are not unique in contextualizing the musical as an adaptation of Twelfth Night: some recent productions have likewise marketed the musical as an adaptation of Twelfth Night, presumably, at least in part, to draw on Shakespeare’s cultural capital as a marketing device. For its 2011 production, for example, Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse in Rock Island, Illinois, produced a study guide that, along with instructions on ‘Proper Etiquette for the Theatre’, not only described All Shook Up as ‘based on the plot of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night’, but provided both a plot summary of the musical and notes on Twelfth Night. See Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse, ‘All Shook Up: 2011 Excursion into Professional Theatre Study Guide’, available at http://www.circa21.com/images/asu.pdf. Nonetheless, this is both a recent and unusual phenomenon. 20 Linda Hutcheon, with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). 21 Christopher L. Morrow, ‘Acknowledgment, Adaptation and Shakespeare in Ron Rash’s Serena’, South Central Review 30:2 (2013): 136–61, (138). 289 studies. As I argue, the effects of unannounced adaptations are different from those of announced adaptations. This is because when we observe an unannounced adaptation, we undergo the experience of recognizing its status as an adaptation, an experience that takes place as the work unfolds itself and (apparently at least) at the viewer’s own pace, which draws our attention to the instability of identity.

Acknowledgment of a work’s status as an adaptation is fundamental to

Hutcheon’s definition of an adaptation, which she describes as

 an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works;  a creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging;  an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work.22

In her theorizing on adaptation and appropriation, Julie Sanders is less prescriptive on the subject of acknowledgment. Nonetheless, if acknowledgment of the link between adaptation and adapted text is not a defining requirement in Sanders’s theory of adaptation, it is still an important factor. Discussing a number of film adaptations that appear to engage critically with their source texts, she writes that ‘it could be argued that…the full impact of these film adaptations depends upon the audience’s awareness of an explicit relationship with the source text. In expectation of this, most formal adaptations carry the same title as their source text’.23 However, as Morrow notes:

‘while the importance of acknowledgment in the definition of adaptation is clear, the definition of acknowledgment is not. It is neither clear what specifically constitutes an acknowledgment nor who gets to make the acknowledgment. Adaptation studies do not provide us with an explicit sense of where to seek the acknowledgment required to create “knowing readers”’.24

22 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 8. 23 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 22. 24 Morrow, ‘Acknowledgment, Adaptation and Shakespeare’, 150. 290

Morrow suggests that this lack of guidance in defining adaptation results in the author being understood as

the primary source of this acknowledgment, as well as the driving force behind the commentary [that an adaptation is assumed to be making on its source text]. These definitions assume that the author has a specific idea to convey in his or her adaptation and will acknowledge the source text in order to convey this idea.25

While Morrow is principally concerned with the problems inherent in the requirement of acknowledgment as a defining feature in adaptation studies, All Shook Up provides a useful test case for the role that an adaptation’s ambiguous relationship to acknowledgment might play in the audience’s reception process. Morrow does not dispense with the definitional requirement of acknowledgment for adaptations, but suggests instead that

privileging authorial intentionality in adaptation limits our understanding of how adaptations work by overlooking the role of alternate sources of acknowledgment. We need to be able to escape explicit authorial acknowledgment without reverting to mere intertextuality and to focus more on how publishers, reviewers, readers, and the marketplace can acknowledge and construct relationships between adaptations and source texts.26

His proposals for rethinking acknowledgment in adaptations are undoubtedly useful in circumventing the authorial intention that both Hutcheon and Sanders invoke.

However, the acknowledgment of All Shook Up as an adaptation of Twelfth Night in the

Herriman discussions and in the marketing for some recent productions suggests how nonauthorial acknowledgment might close down interpretive strategies: the act of naming a specific, single source text has the potential to tame the unruly nature of works that are adaptations of more than one source.

25 Morrow, ‘Acknowledgment, Adaptation and Shakespeare’, 150. 26 Morrow, ‘Acknowledgment, Adaptation and Shakespeare’, 138. 291

All Shook Up sits problematically with Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation, not because of a lack of clarity as to what exactly constitutes acknowledgment and who gets to make it, but because it destabilises her definitional requirement of ‘an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works’ through the sheer number of potential combinations of source texts that any one audience member is capable of recognizing. As noted above, journalistic reviewers have regularly constructed relationships among various productions of All Shook Up and multiple apparent ‘source’ texts (frequently, but not always, citing Twelfth Night as one source), often in ways that leave open the possibility that other audience members might construct different relationships between the musical and its apparent sources, and that emphasise the act of unexpected recognition of these sources in the reception process. The question of what

All Shook Up is an acknowledged adaptation of is thus highly contestable. In this respect, the musical’s title does, in fact, acknowledge its status as an adaptation of multiple sources. Because the potential reception of any single performance of All

Shook Up is likely to vary from audience member to audience member, the musical, as its title suggests, is thus a noticeably unstable text.

The choice of Twelfth Night has an obvious logic as one ‘source’ text for a work that itself disrupts stable identities, in that Twelfth Night’s playful exploration of unstable identities might allow it to be thought of as a queer text. Further, the process of adaptation itself is imbued with queer agency, an inbuilt potential to foreground the destabilization of identities.

The very act of receiving an adaptation as an adaptation disrupts a sense of stable textual identity. Hutcheon describes this process in terms of oscillation: ‘if we know the adapted work, there will be a constant oscillation between it and the new

292 adaptation we are experiencing’.27 Even among audiences attending the same performance of an announced adaptation, the way Hutcheon’s oscillations are experienced will vary, mediated by a range of factors, including familiarity with the source text, investment in fidelity to that source, and literacy in the conventions of the adapted medium. Moreover, while she describes a ‘constant oscillation’, the force with which that oscillation makes itself felt is not necessarily constant. The sense of oscillation that occurs when receiving an announced adaptation is likely to be felt most strongly at moments of perceived distance between the adapted text and the adaptation, those moments when an audience member’s expectations are challenged, and is likely to become progressively weaker over the course of an adaptation that an audience member considers more or less faithful to the adapted work. Indeed, Hutcheon discusses the demands and expectations that ‘knowing’ audiences (in this case, those familiar with the adapted text) bring to an (announced) adaptation in terms of a resistance to change.28 In contrast, in unannounced adaptations, to which audience members do not initially bring expectations of fidelity to a particular source, Hutcheon’s sense of oscillation is likely to be felt less on perceiving difference than on recognizing similarities between the work being experienced in the present and another work. In unannounced adaptations like All

Shook Up that demonstrate the possibility of social change, it is, of course, extremely valuable that this oscillation is not itself predicated on a resistance to change.

The pleasures and effects of the instability that arises from a strong sense of oscillation thus vary between announced and unannounced adaptations. As the sense of oscillation in unannounced adaptations begins at moments of realization that a work might be an adaptation, it is likely to become progressively stronger as audiences

27 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, xvii. 28 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 122. 293 remain alert for evidence confirming that realization. The emotions aroused by this recognition might range from delight to outrage, accompanied by accusations of , depending on the work’s willingness to provide internal cues to its own reception and audiences’ willingness or ability to recognise these as a form of acknowledgment of the work’s status as an adaptation. Regardless of the emotions aroused, the growing string of moments of recognition foregrounds reception as an active decoding practice, one from which an audience might receive a strong sense of satisfaction, whether at having the necessary cultural know-how to recognise cues to reception and shift meaning-making strategies accordingly or at apparently uncovering immoral artistic practices. Further, whereas deviations from expectations in announced adaptations encourage a sense of disintegrated identity predicated on binary logic, recognition of similarities in unannounced adaptations encourages an awareness of the collapsing of categories, a sense of multifaceted polyvalence, and a demonstration of the potential for identity to be characterised by ‘both/and’ as well as ‘either/or’, perspectives. Nonetheless, it is not inevitable that announced adaptations will evoke a clear binary logic that operates between adapted text and adaptation. We have already seen how ghosting effects in Play On! create further layers between and alongside the adapted text and the adaptation. Hutcheon also discusses the ‘palimpsestuous’ intertextuality that is likely to be brought into play in the reception of ‘multilaminated’ adaptations—adaptations of works that have a history of reworkings and adaptations.29

In such works, the awareness of multiple potential iterations of a work or a character replaces binary logic with a wider sense of disintegration.

While the sense of oscillation between source and adaptation that is part of the process of receiving an adaptation as an adaptation means that even the most faithful

29 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 21. 294 announced adaptation cannot fully escape adaptation’s queer agency, this ability to disrupt a sense of stable identity becomes particularly active and productive when a work neither announces itself as an adaptation nor attempts to conceal its status as an adaptation, but instead activates its audiences to recognise it as such. To borrow from

Yu Jin Ko’s work on Rosalind discussed at the beginning of the previous chapter, for audiences who recognise the work’s status as an adaptation, this oscillation at the level of the character keeps their ‘sense of a coherent personality constantly unbuckled’. 30

Ko’s description of the experience of a ‘free-wheeling, precarious exhilaration of a fluid becoming’ which he proposes that the disguised boy actor offered to early modern audiences resonates remarkably closely with the experiences that All Shook Up offers its audiences.31 In contrast to many modern productions of Twelfth Night that remain more or less faithful to Shakespeare’s text, All Shook Up provides audiences with the opportunity to experience Twelfth Night’s unstable identities for themselves – and does so through its manipulation of its very status as an adaptation. Onstage characters are recognised as having fluid relationships – sometimes extremely fleeting, sometimes more sustained, but never static – to characters from a range of ‘source’ texts, which, depending on an individual audience member’s cultural frame of reference, may or may not include Twelfth Night itself.

As the Herriman discussions demonstrate, All Shook Up does more than replicate an experience of early modern theatre: it also has the potential to disrupt apparently stable modern categories of identity. It draws its power to do so through augmenting the queer potential of adaptation with its own elements of plot, character,

30 Yu Jin Ko, ‘Shakespeare’s Rosalind: Charactor of Contingency’, in Performing Gender and Comedy: Theories, Texts and Contexts, ed. Shannon Hengen (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998), 21-34 (29). 31 Ko, ‘Shakespeare’s Rosalind’, 30. 295 and setting that draw attention to issues of identity. While All Shook Up engages thematically and experientially with the instability of identity by manipulating its status as an adaptation, it also engages denotatively with the concept of identity-markers in various forms – gender, sexuality, race, class, region, and age – and presents identity- markers and their relationship to structures of power as spatiotemporally specific. The town in which the musical is set is dominated by the middle-aged white mayor, Matilda

Hyde, and her middle-aged white male deputy, Sheriff Earl. As well as enforcing racial segregation, Mayor Hyde has recently passed her ‘Mamie Eisenhower Decency Act’ mentioned above. Perhaps surprisingly, gendered patriarchal values do not have obvious currency in the town. None of the principal characters is married at the beginning of the show, although some of them have been in the past. Gender in itself does not appear to be a barrier to power or employment; indeed, the mayoral car is painted a symbolic pink. Beyond Mayor Hyde, the central female characters consist of

Sylvia, a middle-aged black business-owner; Lorraine, Sylvia’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who is a lover of both Shakespeare and musicals; Natalie, a young white motor mechanic; and Miss Sandra, a slightly older (but not yet middle-aged) white curator in charge of the town museum. Chad, an unemployed, unskilled white male labourer from out of town, is the only character who has fixed views on gender: on first meeting Natalie, he expresses astonishment at the existence of a female mechanic, and later addresses her as ‘hey, female mechanic’ (1.48). He also views himself in gendered terms, although he playfully subverts stereotypes of masculinity in the process: when told he has to leave town to avoid Mayor Hyde throwing him in jail, he replies, ‘a man doesn’t leave when he’s threatened, Ed. A man hides. Now where can I go hide?’

(1.67). While the townspeople do not appear to subscribe to gender as a fixed identity paradigm that lends itself to a system of oppression and control, Chad, an outsider,

296 prides himself on knowing how women as a class want to be handled. Approaches to gender roles are thus portrayed as regionally variable.

The town is, however, divided on other identitarian grounds, primarily race.

Moreover, the approaches to racial difference that threaten to keep Lorraine and her new boyfriend, Dean, the mayor’s son, apart are assumed by both Chad and the townspeople to be widespread. However, while Chad is sexist, he is not racist: when both Sylvia and

Mayor Hyde forbid their children’s relationship and Lorraine and Dean try to flee town,

Chad advises them that things are no better elsewhere and encourages them to stay and make a stand for change in the town, thus suggesting that oppression on the grounds of racial identity might be subject to change over time. Chad also views different forms of identity-based oppression as interconnected: he has also decided to stay to try to change the town’s views on same-sex relationships (although he hedges this in discussion with

Lorraine and Dean). This interconnectedness is then expressed in the form of a trio, ‘If

I Can Dream’. The relationships between forms of identity and power are thus exposed as both spatiotemporally specific and changeable.

If the instability of identity is almost a commonplace in academic and avant- garde discourses, this is not the case in wider contemporary society. Many works of popular culture (especially advertising, television shows, Hollywood cinema and tabloid and magazine publishing) expend a great deal of energy in reinforcing the idea of fixed, stable identity categories, one result (and aim) of which is the creation and consolidation of marketing opportunities through the segmentation of the marketplace. The spread of such cultural work over a range of media has the effect of reifying and naturalising identity categories that are in fact socially and discursively produced. However, Esther

Peeren’s Bakhtin-based examination of spatiotemporal specificity in a number of television programmes and films suggests that some works of popular culture also have

297 the potential to destabilise apparently fixed identity positions, at least in terms of gender and some forms of sexuality (even as they might reinforce a sense of fixity and stability in other identity categories).32 Peeren’s summation of the message of these works can usefully be expanded to include other forms of identity, such as race and class, in the context of All Shook Up: ‘if what is abjected in one time-space is acceptable (even normative) in another, then there are no “natural” genders or sexualities immune to reformulation’.33

That Chad is a stranger in town with values different from those of the townspeople is thus key to exposing identity-based power relations as spatiotemporally specific rather than universal. For characters from the town, the disorientation and faux pas of a charismatic stranger variously prompt a hardening of attitudes in defence of the town’s status quo, and a growing awareness that other forms of power relations might be possible. This may well reflect the effect of the musical on audiences. For audience members whose approach to identity categories has largely been formed by the discursive effects of popular culture, this exposure of the spatiotemporal specificity of identity-based power structures invites a realization that the hegemonic power structures of their own lived reality might be conceived of as resistible. In this respect, All Shook

Up functions as a particularly strong example of the liberating effects that the validation of difference often found in the musical genre can provide. As suggested by the testimony of the writers, mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, who trace their growing political awareness to this aspect of the musical, such audience members are perhaps the most likely to be receptive to the space that All Shook Up’s destabilizing effects opens up for renegotiating one’s understanding of identity.

32 Esther Peeren, Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond (Palo , CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 33 Peeren, Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture, 48. 298

For another group of potential audience members, those more firmly entrenched in racist, sexist, classist or homophobic positions, this space is likely to be threatening.

One might argue that the upholders of such positions are all too well aware of the instability of identity categories, whether in their emphasis on fixed degrees of difference, or in their denial of identity at all (for example, same-sex attraction as a lifestyle choice) – it is the very instability of these categories that calls for violence and persecution as supports. Such a space for renegotiating an understanding of identity is thus politically charged – a potentially liberating one, but also a potentially threatening one for those deeply invested in maintaining spatiotemporally specific power structures, such as the anonymous complainant who was responsible for the temporary cancellation of the Herriman High School production on the grounds that it failed to uphold

(unspecified) community values.

Chad is not the only newcomer in town. Miss Sandra has only been in town for a week and brings her own identity-based prejudices, in her case based on class as seen through an urban perspective.34 The scene in which Chad and Miss Sandra first meet brings two spatiotemporally specific sets of identity-based approaches to power into conflict over the course of a song. Chad, Natalie, and Natalie’s best friend Dennis are outside the town museum when Miss Sandra appears. Chad immediately attempts to seduce Miss Sandra by feigning an interest in art, while at the same time treating her as a commodity rather than an individual: ‘Well, I dig hot art, and I dig hot women, and

34 In a note to the script of the touring version available for amateur productions, DiPietro states that while ‘All Shook Up was performed on Broadway with an interracial cast, featuring both African-American and white performers…to remove any specific casting issues your theatre group may have, it is acceptable to perform an alternative version of All Shook Up in which the town is divided not along racial lines, but along class lines. Of course, all efforts should be made to integrate your cast as fully as possible’ (n.p.). In this alternative version (for which DiPietro supplies a number of lines of substitute dialogue), Miss Sandra’s class-based prejudices collapse into those of the town, reducing the variety of spatiotemporal identity configurations. 299 when I see a hot woman who digs hot art, I say hot-diggity’ (1.27). Not deterred by a put-down that relies upon stereotypes of ruralism – ‘You mostly marry your cousins around here, don’t you?’ (1.27) – by Miss Sandra, who does not recognise him as not being local, Chad increases the emotional stakes of his attempted seduction by transitioning from speech to song, singing Miss Sandra a verse from the Elvis number

‘Teddy Bear’. While Chad flexes his assumed male privilege in an erotic reversal of gendered power differentials, he nonetheless still configures male/female relations in terms of power, his lyrics entreating Miss Sandra to treat him like her teddy bear and inviting her to chain him up and lead him around. Miss Sandra (her title a reminder of her higher class status) rejects him on the grounds of his lower class status, responding to his F-major ‘Teddy Bear’ first with another spoken put-down – ‘Sir, let me put this in language you’ll understand’ (1.28) – and then on his own terms by singing a verse from

‘Hound Dog’ in F major (a song in which the singer explicitly denigrates her addressee for his lower class status).

At the same time, identity itself as a stable category is disrupted, at least for those who know The Music Man. This scene is the first in which obvious parallels with

The Music Man make themselves felt. For those familiar with that musical, the scene is clearly readable as an adaptation of act 1, scene 7 in which ‘Professor’ Harold Hill – like Chad, a musician of dubious morality from out of town – attempts unsuccessfully to seduce the socially isolated town librarian and piano teacher, Marion Paroo, at the library, Marion’s workplace. As discussed above, in both All Shook Up and The Music

Man, the high culture over which Miss Sandra and Marion preside has overtones of the erotic. For receptive audience members, the oscillation between adaptation and adapted work is likely to be particularly noticeable if they recognise the clear parallels between the onstage characters and action and those of The Music Man. While the recognition of

300 a shift in one’s reception experience from a set of oscillations among All Shook Up,

Twelfth Night, and The Music Man – and, of course, Elvis Presley, given that ‘Hound

Dog’ is one of his best-known hits – might be experienced variously as disconcerting, uncanny, or pleasurable, the emotion felt by a particular audience member will almost inevitably be accompanied by a sense of destabilization at the level of the characters within All Shook Up. That those characters also bear markers of personal identity that are themselves seen to be subject to change makes the sense of unstable identity particularly acute.

As a demonstration of Chad and Miss Sandra’s incompatibility, ‘Teddy Bear’ and ‘Hound Dog’ are then scored as a combination song, the simultaneous singing of different songs demonstrating that neither character will give the other a hearing.35

Although the main protagonists in this number are Chad and Miss Sandra, Dennis

(whom Chad has just appointed his sidekick – temporarily, as it turns out) provides diegetic accompaniment on Chad’s guitar, and he and Natalie also provide backing vocals. As the lyrics of neither character respond directly to those of the other, the disagreement appears to be more a struggle for territory than an argument on merits.

This becomes particularly noticeable when Miss Sandra’s vocal line forces an abrupt and very noticeable modulation from F major, the ‘agreed’ framework for the argument, to G major, dragging not only Chad’s vocal line, but also Dennis’s accompaniment into that key with her. This struggle for territory is not resolved over the course of the song,

35 The combination song, sometimes referred to as a ‘quodlibet’, is a feature of many musicals, and particularly of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy operas; it consists of two or more songs sung simultaneously either by individual characters or groups of characters, who may or may not be aware of each other. As Raymond Knapp, the writer who has theorised the phenomenon most widely, notes, ‘the combination song has proven effective and versatile in establishing relationships ranging from genuine compatibility . . . to the strikingly incompatible’ (see Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 41–42). 301 nor does the song’s ending signal a future resolution. In musicals, combination songs often signal a present or future resolution of diverse viewpoints in one of two ways.

The first is to end the songs either in harmony or in unison (or more precisely, given that the singers are usually a combination of male and female voices, in parallel octaves). ‘I Wonder Why / You’re Just in Love’ from Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam is a well-known example of such a combination song, ending with a sustained note in parallel octaves over four bars. The second, employed to demonstrate a more radical shift in interpersonal relations, is to show that one or both sides have come to see the other’s viewpoint by having one or both singers adopt the other’s music and/or lyrics.

The ‘Goodnight My Someone / Seventy-six Trombones’ combination song from The

Music Man, which ends with Marion and Harold each adopting the other’s music and lyrics, is a particularly pertinent example in the context of this scene in All Shook Up.

However, in the ‘Teddy Bear / Hound Dog’ number, the voices do not end together

(Chad sings the last line), and there is thus no harmonised closure in the vocal lines. As neither Miss Sandra nor Chad adopts the other’s lyrics, there is also no dialectical resolution to the number – neither sexism nor classism is seen to prevail.

In portraying identity not only as spatiotemporally specific, but as comprising intersecting categories – gender and class in the ‘Teddy Bear / Hound Dog’ number and in other configurations throughout the musical – All Shook Up carries out political work.

Beyond the increased sense of a both/and perspective on identity created by the oscillations among, for example, Miss Sandra and Marian Paroo, or Chad, Harold Hill and Elvis Presley, the intersections of these identity categories disrupt and complicate the notion that particular sets of markers might function as mutually exclusive identity paradigms. Indeed, the oscillations between onstage characters and multiple characters from a range of source texts obstruct a sense of a stable centre on which denotational

302 markers of identity can be fixed unproblematically: class difference, for example, is not a primary feature in the antagonistic relationships of Orsino and Olivia or Harold Hill and Marion Paroo that underlie the relationship between Chad and Miss Sandra. While it would be overstating the case to claim that All Shook Up itself undertakes a rigorous intersectional analysis of identity, or even that it overtly asks its audiences to do so, by staging a range of intersecting denotative identities underscored by an oscillation between adapted work(s) and adaptation, the musical enacts a queer form of intersectionality, one that encourages an unstable, shifting, both/and conception of identity.

Even in the unlikely event that an audience member were not to recognise any allusion to another work or any sign of adaptation in All Shook Up, the fact that the score consists of Elvis songs draws attention to the musical’s creation from existing material. Indeed, by foregrounding the constructed nature of their own realities in their structural use of well-known songs, jukebox musicals in general – even those with a newly written plot and that are not otherwise adaptations – are well placed to alert audiences to the constructed nature of identity. While All Shook Up provides a sense of unstable identity in a number of forms, it focuses particularly on the constructed, as well as unstable, nature of racial identity. Even Chad, who can imagine a future in which a relationship between lovers will not be opposed on racial grounds, does not dispute that racial identity is fixed and natural. This is likely to mirror the experience of many audience members: as cultural theorist Paul Gilroy argues, for minorities and majorities alike, ‘racial difference and racial hierarchy can be made to appear with seeming

303 spontaneity as a stabilizing force’, in contrast to other forms of identity that are more widely recognised as fluid.36

The town’s racial division is policed particularly visibly and vocally by Mayor

Hyde, and its effects are foregrounded in the plotline concerning the romance between

Dean, whose mother (the mayor) regularly flaunts her horror of miscegenation, and

Lorraine, the African American daughter of Sylvia, the bar-owner. Dean has been raised to believe that his father died in the war before he was born. However, in a moment of crisis, the mayor reveals that Dean was the result of a one-night stand with a black musician. The apparently white Dean is therefore immediately reclassified as black: in the absurdity of the effects of this reclassifying, race is thus revealed not as a fixed, closed, and reified identity founded on visible markers intrinsic to the holder of a particular racial identity, but as constructed from a range of features, including genealogy and the discourse of others. As such, it is subject to change as new information comes to light or as others’ discourse takes new turns.

That racial identity is generally perceived as a more than usually stable category suggests the limits of adaptation’s queer agency. In contrast to the musical’s approach to destabilizing other forms of identity, All Shook Up relies upon the force and clarity of spoken dialogue to disrupt racial identity as a fixed category. As this spoken dialogue ensures that all audience members receive an unambiguous message simultaneously, there is no reliance upon ‘knowing’ audience members’ acts of recognition. For those audience members already alerted to All Shook Up’s playing with its status as an adaptation, this overt demonstration of the instability of identity confirms and reinforces the sense of unstable identity provoked by the oscillations among onstage characters and

36 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 6. 304 perceived ‘source’ characters. Once again, by exposing race as a social construction and thus opening up the possibility of resistance to hegemonic conceptions of race in audiences’ own lived realities, All Shook Up conducts its political work.

Like Twelfth Night, All Shook Up’s title invokes topsy-turvy confusion: the play and the musical both invoke and resist the carnivalesque. In the musical, this becomes particularly evident at the end of act 1. Here, the solo Elvis number ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love with You’ is revoiced for multiple characters. The various principals appear onstage, unaware of one another’s presence. To a melancholy acoustic guitar accompaniment, each sings a line or half-line from the song as they ponder their apparently inappropriate though inevitable romantic situations. The fragmented nature of the vocal line and the sheer amount of apparently inappropriately directed love suggest topsy-turvy confusion. The music, however, then modulates to the dominant of the dominant, a very noticeable key change that provokes the sense of a release of positive energy, and the chorus joins the principals in major-key block chords. The singers then provide the harmonic underpinning while trumpets carry the melody.

Isolated cases of inappropriately directed love no longer appear as topsy-turvy aberrations; instead, they are revealed not only as ubiquitous, but as underpinning a harmonious society. All Shook Up’s society needs not so much to reassert its authority and repress the carnivalesque as to recognise the latent harmony in its own diversity, moving beyond a need for the carnivalesque. This sense of both invoking and resisting the carnivalesque is reinforced by the mise-en-scène. As this scene begins, the action moves to an abandoned fairground (with echoes of Roustabout’s down-on-its-luck funfair), where the action remains until the last scene. This scene thus progresses beyond the safe containment of the carnivalesque to the open-ended post-carnivalesque,

305 the setting signposting the musical’s refusal to return fully to a world of stable identities.

As the anxieties surrounding the Herriman High School production suggested, the disruption of stable categories of sexuality is a central feature of All Shook Up.37

The Viola–Chad–Miss Sandra plotline in All Shook Up initially follows Twelfth Night’s

Orsino–Viola–Olivia plotline relatively closely. Natalie-as-Ed flirts with Chad who, presented initially as a ladies’ man, surprises and disturbs himself by falling in love with

Ed. This prompts him to sing Elvis’s ‘I Don’t Want To’, a number from the soundtrack to the film Girls! Girls! Girls!, as he struggles to come to terms with this unexpected and unwanted turn of events. Although ‘I Don’t Want To’ was originally sung by Elvis in a heterosexual context, the lyrics fit Chad’s situation remarkably well. For audience members familiar with the song, hearing it as a vehicle for same-sex desire co-opts them into an unexpected exercise in queer reading, with plausible new meanings emerging as the song is experienced against the grain of their familiarity with it. Subsequently, unlike his Shakespearean counterpart, Chad is shocked when Natalie removes her disguise and declares her love for him. Having painfully come to accept that he has fallen in love with a man, Chad is distraught at discovering that ‘Ed’ is, in fact, a woman and leaves town. For those audience members initially unaware of All Shook

Up as an adaptation of Twelfth Night, but for whom Hutcheon’s sense of oscillation between adaptation and adapted text has been increasing at each recognition of parallels between the musical and Shakespeare’s play, this sudden departure from the expected

37 The media reports do not state whether the Herriman High School production used the original performing version in which the town is divided by race, or the permitted substitutions in which it is divided by class. If the latter, it is unlikely that in a culture that prizes (or at least pays lip service to) social mobility, but in which homosexuality is still a highly socially contested subject, the revelations of Dean’s lower-class (rather than black) father would be particularly shocking or liberating. The demonstration of the fluidity of sexual attraction is thus likely to have appeared particularly prominent. 306 plotline of Chad’s pleasure and relief in discovering that ‘Ed’ is a woman is likely to be jarringly unexpected and therefore able to be mined for meaning. Here, the perceived adaptation disconcerts us by demonstrating its willingness to reimagine the scenarios of the original.

In the meantime, in a parody of the classic musical’s overwhelming push toward heterosexual closure, various romances between apparently contrasting couples – the beautiful and confident Miss Sandra and the physically and socially awkward Dennis; the voluble Mayor Hyde and her taciturn deputy, Sheriff Earl; an interracial couple, Jim and Sylvia; and a couple formerly perceived to be interracial, Dean and Lorraine – resolve themselves, culminating in a multiple wedding. In a final treatment of the theme of unstable identities and their effect on a love relationship, Chad returns during the multiple wedding ceremony to ask Natalie to marry him. Natalie, however, refuses him; now that her father is remarrying, she has decided to follow her dream and ‘tune up [her] motorbike and hit the open road’ (2.46). Over the course of the final number, she and Chad eventually agree to leave together, with Chad as Natalie’s sidekick (she tells him, ‘back of the bike: I’m drivin’’ [2.47]), but not before Chad has suggested that once in a while Natalie might put on Ed’s beard and hat so that they can both ‘hang out’ with him (2.46). (As Twelfth Night’s Orsino continues to call Viola ‘boy’ after her identity is revealed, the suggestion is arguably planted that this complex form of

‘hanging out’ might be an attractive option for that couple also). In a town in which gendered patriarchal values are not a strong feature, Natalie’s decision not to marry and to relegate Chad to the back of the bike while she drives is not in itself especially revolutionary; Chad’s sexist approach to power, based on an understanding of gender as a fixed and foundational difference, is shown to be open to change.

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Chad’s decision to return to the town is left unexplained beyond the fact that when he left ‘it was like I lost the music inside me’ (2.45), and that this was because of

Natalie (2.46). That Chad’s moment of recognition – his Aristotelian anagnorisis – that gender was not a foundational difference in his sexual and romantic attraction to

Natalie–Ed is kept offstage confirms All Shook Up’s modus operandi as an unannounced adaptation: observing a character’s recognition of a particular instance of fluid identity is less important for audience members than their recognizing adaptation across multiple moments, encouraging them to embrace a multivalent fluidity of identity both in onstage characters and, potentially at least, in their own lives.

All Shook Up is not the only instance of a musical that manipulates the queer agency of the unannounced adaptation in order to disrupt a sense of stable identity. For example, the instability of personal identity is central to Ruthless! (1992), as character after character is revealed to be someone other than she appears to be. Like All Shook

Up, Ruthless! is not announced as an adaptation, but it contains clear plot and character parallels to multiple other works, together with cues that appear to confirm that the musical, or particular scenes in it, should be received as an adaptation. Act 1, for example, might be received variously as an unannounced adaptation of Gypsy, Mame, and The Bad Seed, while the second act shifts its apparent sources to Mommie Dearest and All About Eve. The queer agency of the unannounced adaptation is here used alongside role-doubling and cross-generational (and, in some productions, cross-gender) casting in order to enhance a sense of unstable identity within the world of the musical itself – identity there being largely a question of heredity and unknown or unacknowledged family relationships – rather than to engage with either its sources or contemporary society.

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In contrast, by exploiting the queer agency of the unannounced adaptation, All

Shook Up makes some of Twelfth Night’s queer agency available for modern audiences in a particularly inclusive way. While Viola is the main site of unstable identity in

Twelfth Night, almost all of All Shook Up’s characters might be perceived as sites where the instability of identity is experienced by audiences. By encouraging a series of acts of recognition of a broad range of parallels and allusions beyond Twelfth Night that appeal to widely differing cultural frames of references, All Shook Up makes this experience available even to those unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s play. By then extending its scope to encompass a range of contemporary identity-markers that it invokes only to destabilise (for example, through portraying an individual’s changing self-identity and through dramatizing the ways in which context-based identities are open to contestation by events and revelations), All Shook Up demonstrates the progressive political potential, as glimpsed in the discussions around the Herriman High

School production, of the unannounced adaptation. To adapt means here not so much to be haunted by the original work as to employ it as one tool among many in the proliferation of perspectives and identities.

The following chapter continues the theme of the jukebox-musical’s suitability for destabilising categories of identity and for responding to Shakespeare’s plays in unusual ways. It moves from Broadway and Shakespearean comedy to a miniature

YouTube version of Romeo and Juliet by the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, a very short adaptation that achieves its compactness through a dense semiotic texture characterised by an extensive use of allusions. I argue that this essentially comic piece responds to the ambiguous genre of Shakespeare’s play, usually now regarded firmly as a tragedy, and replicates formal features of that play, in particular in its replacement of the lovers’ encounter sonnet with a song. I also argue that the allusive nature of the

309 performance texture of this and other jukebox-musical adaptations of Shakespeare can render them catalysts for collaborative reception.

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CHAPTER SIX

JUKEBOX-MUSICAL SHAKESPEARE IN MINIATURE: THE SCOTTISH FALSETTO SOCK PUPPET THEATRE’S ROMEO AND JULIET

This final chapter takes as a case study the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet

Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet, short YouTube videos that might be thought of as a micro- version of the jukebox musical.1 It draws together and extends some of the themes of the previous chapters, particularly in relation to the suitability of the jukebox-musical format for destabilizing categories of identity, for valorizing diversity, for engaging with aspects of Shakespeare’s text in unusual ways, and for recuperating aspects of the performance history of the plays. It also argues that the interpretive demands of jukebox-musicals versions of Shakespeare, in which the act of interpretation is often foregrounded, turn these works into catalysts for inclusive interpretive communities.2

The Sock Puppets’ YouTube Romeo & Juliet is both short and extremely compact, packing in layers of potentially conflicting meanings into a series of moments of semiotic density. By semiotic density, I refer to the complex performance texture that occurs when a relatively large number of signs occur simultaneously. One might think of these moments of semiotic density in terms of efficiency, viewing them as offering ‘a highly focused means of experimenting with ideas in miniature’, to borrow

1 Unless otherwise stated, references to the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet are to the two-part studio recording uploaded on 28 March 2008 and available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YnNQef7etk (Part One) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-UgOgVRrvU (Part Two). I also refer to a ‘very early’ four-part performance recorded live, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSslFTkjsNA (Part One), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbLxCBFQCOA (Part Two), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjcMs3Yy-5Y (Part Three) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zToGrRWb3TI (Part Four), and a two-part version recorded live at Komedia Brighton, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVDMprMVGmY (Part One) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKUKPWCBgno (Part Two). 2 It is appropriate that I acknowledge here my own interpretive communities relating to the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre: in conversations, e-mails and telephone calls, the enthusiasms and insights of Helen McIntosh, Alison York and my sister Valerie have all influenced my reception of the complex density of the Socks’ works, including Romeo & Juliet. 311

Barbara Hodgdon’s words in relation to another YouTube version of Shakespeare.3

One might also think of them in terms of a pleasurable awareness that one has grasped an allusion, and that other allusions remain for the grasping. Indeed, the Sock Puppets’ work as a whole relies for much of its pleasure and effectiveness on the deployment of moments of semiotic density: viewers of their Romeo & Juliet familiar with their other works are likely to be prepared for the need to be alert for allusions to other works

(often at least one -related allusion) and generally to look beyond surface dialogue and action for layers of meaning. Unlike the multiple simultaneous signs that ideally contribute to a single meaning in the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk or the golden- age Broadway musical, these signs in the Sock Puppets’ work often (indeed perhaps ideally) point to a number of contradictory potential meanings. The careful planning of this semiotic density is belied by the theatre’s threadbare physical attributes. Working in an extremely short format, the Sock Puppets litter their surface action and dialogue with a series of depth charges in the form of puns, double entendres and other kinds of word play that are often triggered by allusions so fleeting that a single viewing is insufficient to pick them all up. Their works often contain a combination of cultural references that then open up a sometimes exhilarating potential for multiple meanings.

This is particularly so in their versions of Shakespeare.

While popular, the Sock Puppets’ Shakespeare works are by no means internet sensations, their video viewing figures ranging from the hundreds to the tens of thousands. Barbara Hodgdon, in an article on YouTube clips of Shakespeare productions and adaptations, discusses the Sock Puppets’ King Lear in warm terms.

3 Barbara Hodgdon, ‘(You)Tube Travel: The 9:59 to Dover Beach, Stopping at Fair Verona and Elsinore’, Shakespeare Bulletin 28:3 (2010): 313-30 (322).

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However, in contrast to the other clips of Shakespeare she studies – clips from feature films, professional productions and ‘mash-ups’ of cinematic footage – she refers to it as a ‘postcard from the edge’. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the complex work of which such a compact, if peripheral, adaptation of Shakespeare is capable, and the pleasures that can arise from an encounter with it. One of the moments of greatest semiotic density in the Puppets’ Romeo and Juliet is a duet for the title characters.

After an overview of the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, I submit this duet to a series of theoretical approaches, aiming to draw out its layers of complexity and pleasure. A formal analysis based on the conventions of the musical demonstrates how the duet functions both in the surface narrative and also as a mise en abyme, a micronarrative within the wider work. In doing so, it draws attention to the function of the lovers’ encounter sonnet as a mise en abyme in Shakespeare’s play. I then demonstrate how the Sock Puppets’ layering of meaning opens a space for non- heteronormative readings of the central love story, relating this to similar reception potential in the stage history of Romeo and Juliet. A further section considers how the

Sock Puppets’ version responds to issues of genre in Shakespeare’s play that are often erased in modern performances. The final section considers the role of mediation in the reception of the Sock Puppets’ Romeo & Juliet, arguing for jukebox-musical versions of

Shakespeare as catalysts for a pleasurable sense of community.

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre and Shakespeare

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, a comedy act written and performed by Kev F. Sutherland, has toured the United Kingdom and internationally since 2005.

Besides posting YouTube videos of live performances, Sutherland has produced a large number of studio versions of sketches for the Sock Puppets designed specifically for

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YouTube.4 The Sock Puppets’ repertoire consists of a range of adaptations, parodies and topical sketches usually lasting from around two to twenty minutes. So far they have produced four adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays: Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo &

Juliet and Titus Andronicus.5 They have also produced a sketch for the Leicester

Comedy Festival that combined parts of Richard III (mostly playing on the ‘My kingdom for a horse’ speech) with topical allusions to the discovery of Richard III’s remains in a Leicester car part.6 Of these, Romeo & Juliet is the only one to incorporate song. Sutherland has in fact posted three versions of Romeo & Juliet and two versions of Macbeth on YouTube: like so many of the plays of Shakespeare, these are unstable texts with no definitive version. Of the jukebox musicals studied in this thesis, the Sock

Puppets’ Romeo & Juliet is most clearly related to the nineteenth-century burlesque. As in burlesque, puns and other word-play, satirical contemporary references (sometimes extremely topical ones), and a playing with conventions of gender representation are prominent in all the Sock Puppets’ work. While the Sock Puppets’ Shakespearean adaptations are severely cut and largely light-hearted and comic, in contrast to many of their other adaptations they rarely overtly parody or satirise their sources (with the possible exception of their Titus Andronicus). Like nineteenth-century burlesques of

Shakespeare, these adaptations parody the contemporary performance conventions

4 As of 1 June 2015, there were 176 Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre videos on Kev F. Sutherland’s YouTube channel, with many more uploaded by others. The Sock Puppets also issue their own online newspaper, Scottish Falsetto Socks News; see http://paper.li/falsettosocks/1302861443. 5 Their King Lear is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_6F7t8X_CI. Two versions of Macbeth are available, both in two parts. The first, a studio version from 2006, is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI0OpUfi26U (part 1) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXslau8KlJ4 (part 2). The second, a recording of a live performance in Bristol in 2008, is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKarCnIjXT0 (part 1) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVwcjIEpqlE (part 2). Titus Andronicus is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UidFRP4DssI. 6 Richard III is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIf0iTJ-bxc.

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(especially amateur ones) of serious stage works more than the Shakespearean sources.

However, as I shall argue, their Romeo & Juliet does more than just parody amateur dramatics: it draws attention and responds to aspects of Shakespeare’s play and its performance history that are not usually brought to the fore in modern productions of the play, particularly those aspects that concern genre and gender and sexual identity.7

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s ‘actors’ are two unnamed, relatively crudely constructed sock puppets made from white sports socks, with spherical eyes only loosely attached to the fabric of the sock, and who perform in a puppet booth covered and lined with tartan fabric. Scenery is rarely used (their production of King Lear is an exception, featuring a cut-out castle as background).

Sutherland, a Scottish comedian and comic strip creator as well as a puppeteer, provides the voices for both ‘actors’, whose voices in their own personas and in most of their adopted roles are indistinguishable from each other. These ‘actors’ speak in a falsetto register with a Scottish accent in their own personae, and also usually in their adopted roles. Shifts to a lower pitch characterised by the deep, croaky rattle of the ‘vocal fry’ register are occasionally used to voice minor characters (Tybalt in Romeo & Juliet, for example). The modal register (the ‘normal’ speaking register) is generally avoided.

Their introductory lines to each production are as follows:

STAGE-RIGHT SOCK: We are the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. STAGE-LEFT SOCK: And so am I

7 Sutherland overtly places the Sock Puppets’ Romeo & Juliet in the context of performance history when he highlights on his blog the discovery of the remains of the Curtain Theatre, the likely venue for the original production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and posts a link to the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s 2008 studio recording version of the play in commemoration (Sutherland, ‘Shakespeare Celebration with the Socks’, Kev F Comic Art (blog), 6 June 2012, http://kevfcomicart.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/shakespeare-celebration-with- socks.html. In addition, he commemorates the Sock Puppets’ first outdoor performance, a version of Romeo & Juliet at the Windsor Globe, a reproduction of Shakespeare’s Globe, with a comic book version of the play, with Stage-Right Sock in a ruff and Stage-Left Sock in a wig (Kev F. Sutherland, ‘Terror of Tyntesfield Teaser’, Kev F Comic Art (blog), 6 August 2011, http://kevfcomicart.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/terror-at-tyntesfield-teaser.html). 315

STAGE-RIGHT SOCK: And so is he.

These lines confirm that at least Stage-Left Sock, who plays all the female roles in their

Shakespeare adaptations, is to be understood as male, but it appears from occasional references that Stage-Right Sock is also male. The puppets are distinguishable from each other by Stage-Right Sock’s dark fabric ‘mouth’ and Stage-Left Sock’s fixed, dark fabric ‘tongue’; Stage-Right Sock wears nothing in his own persona, while Stage-Left

Sock wears a kilt and sporran. In each performance, after varying amounts of introductory business, the ‘actors’ perform a short show, taking on multiple roles and frequently breaking out of character. Minor characters are sometimes represented by hand props: for example, in Romeo & Juliet an Action Man doll and a toy dwarf are held up by Stage-Left Sock to represent Balthazar and Friar Lawrence respectively. In scenes with more than two characters Sutherland provides a disembodied voice for one or more characters who are described by one of the onstage Socks, often ambiguously in or out of character, as being ‘just out of shot’ or some similar expression.

Duet for Sock Puppets: Comedy and Pleasure

After a brief introduction that sets out the families of the Catapults and the

Montagues of Beaulieu as ‘mental enemas’ [all sic], the narrative proper begins as

Romeo, having ‘been chucked by a lassie by the name of Rosalind’ and now ‘on the pull’, plans to gatecrash the Catapults’ party. Once there, the puppets sing a duet in place of Romeo and Juliet’s encounter sonnet in Shakespeare’s play. The performance of the duet is accompanied by an array of allusions and word play that provide further layers of hermeneutic potential alongside the apparently surface action and lyrics. Even if the speed of performance means that these layers are not likely to be completely unpacked on a single viewing, the fleeting recognition of their existence can provide

316 moments of exhilarating pleasure for the viewer. The duet begins almost as soon as

Romeo has successfully gatecrashed the party. Addressing the audience directly, he comments: ‘What a swell party this is’. Spotting Juliet, he continues to address the audience directly with: ‘Oh, hello. I think I shall impress her with my Shakespearean dialogue’. He then begins to sing a list of references to Shakespearean characters to the tune of ‘Well, Did You Evah!’ (music by Cole Porter) from the stage musical Dubarry

Was a Lady (Porter, Fields and De Silva, Broadway 1939, West End 1942) and, with different lyrics, the film musical High Society (1956, director Charles Walters). Juliet quickly joins in, contributing her own list of Shakespearean references in a series of rejoinders around the refrain, ‘Well, did you ever? What a swell party this is’. Their list is comic in its use of bathetic plot summaries (ROMEO. Did you hear about Twelfth

Night? JULIET. No. ROMEO. Some folks got shipwrecked – it turned out all right; and,

JULIET. Did you hear about the Thane of Cawdor? ROMEO. No. JULIET. He stabbed a lot of people–/ ROMEO. That is out of ord-or!’). There are also excruciating puns

(ROMEO. We like a drink, us. JULIET. Aye, you’re all tight as Andronicus!), incongruous images (JULIET. There’s Julius Caesar – he’s drinking a Bacardi Breezer), and play with the expectations raised by rhyme and misplaced stress (ROMEO. Oh - did you hear about Shylock? JULIET. No? ROMEO. To get a pound of flesh they cut off his–/ JULIET. Oh, what a shock – talk about ‘prick me, do I not bleed?’).

Thomas Cartelli, in his article on ‘Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath’ discusses with approval adaptors who, like the Sock Puppets in this duet, take ‘the kinds of risks that most updatings seldom venture by invoking the name and words of

Shakespeare in ways that suggest that they and their characters are living both in the

317 play’s and the playwright’s aftermath’.8 While any such risks certainly pay off in this case, the duet is in fact even more risk-taking in its invocations: that Romeo, a

Shakespearean character, begins to woo Juliet by referencing other Shakespearean characters is in itself delightfully self-reflexive. However, in doing so, Romeo appears to be following the advice of the two gangster characters from Kiss Me, Kate (itself an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew), as set out in their eleven-o’clock duet ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ (‘Brush up your Shakespeare/ Start quoting him now./ Brush up your Shakespeare/ And the women you will wow’), which also consists of a list of references to Shakespeare’s plays and characters using a similar range of comic techniques. That a character from an adaptation of one Shakespeare play appears to be following advice from characters from an adaptation of another Shakespeare play adds further layers to the complexity and, for some members of the audience, the pleasure of the duet. An additional layer of potential meaning and pleasure can be found in the YouTube recording of the Socks’ early live production of Romeo & Juliet.9

In this version, the song ends on a particularly high, held note for Stage-Right Sock as

Romeo. His voice is clearly straining to reach and hold the note, and his intonation both in the approach and on the note itself is comically unstable. After coming off the note,

Stage-Right Sock says, as an apparent out-of-character aside, ‘Oh, A flat?! Fuck that…’

I am happy to stretch an interpretive point here and read this mention of a particular note as an allusion to a feature of another duet for appropriations of Romeo and Juliet: the high A flat sung in unison by Tony and Maria at the end of ‘Tonight’ in the balcony scene in West Side Story, a note that is often the ruin of amateur productions. Waves of pleasure thus arise from the recognition of the overlayering of two songs from different

8 Thomas Cartelli, ‘Doing it Slant: Reconceiving Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath’, Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 26-36 (31). 9 Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSslFTkjsNA). 318 musicals that then serve a narrative purpose in a third work, which in turn alludes to a fourth work, another musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. That three of these works are adaptations of Shakespeare turns the Socks’ Romeo & Juliet into a recurring feedback loop of meta-adaptation.

However, while pleasurable, listening to new words to a well-known melody is also rather unsettlingly challenging, demanding that the audience play particularly close attention to the lyrics. In this particular song, the combination of misplaced verbal stresses and mangled pronunciation necessary to fit the lyrics to the music sometimes threatens to push the lyrics to the edge of intelligibility, at least on first hearing. This tension between the reassuringly familiar and the new and unexpected constantly risks uncoupling the combination of words and music that constitute the vocal line and that is usually perceived as inseparable in the experience of a song. The duet is thus always on the edge of deconstructing itself, drawing attention to the fact, often suppressed in the reception of songs, that words, music and form are separate meaning-making systems that operate simultaneously. In this respect, the experience of the song and the pleasure it produces is similar to the experience of the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas. Like the Socks’ song, these often require unusual stresses and pronunciations in order for the words to fit the music. As Laura Kasson Fiss suggests, in the patter song, ‘the humour stems from the formal relationship between words and music ... The question of intelligibility that these songs raise forces a re-evaluation of the boundaries between words and music’.10 In the Socks’ duet, this results in the act of listening being foregrounded in the reception process, the effort of which creates a more than usually strong sense of participatory spectatorship/auditorship.

10 Laura Kasson Fiss, ‘“This Particularly Rapid Unintelligible Patter”: Patter Songs and the Word-Music Relationship’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, ed. David Eden and Meinhard Saremba (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 98-108 (98). 319

In a production with no scenery or costumes and in which only two characters can appear on stage at any one time, staging a party is problematic. In this respect, the foregrounding of the act of listening in the duet also serves a pragmatic purpose: like

Shakespeare’s use of verse to conjure up stage pictures on the relatively bare early modern stage, the lyrics of the duet populate the puppet booth’s Spartan tartan interior.

Thus, the duet’s refrain, ending in ‘What a swell party this is’ ensures that the audience is reminded throughout the song that the meeting takes place at a social gathering, in the presence of others. The lyrics create a sense of gossipy small talk appropriate for a party, while at the same time suggesting period costumes and crowds of guests (JULIET.

What doublets, what ruffs! ROMEO. What a lot of tasty bits of stuff!), alongside images of individual guests and their behaviour (JULIET. Oh look, there’s Julius Caesar, he’s drinking a Bacardi Breezer. ROMEO. And Brutus is at the nuts. Et tu [ate two] Brute?

JULIET. Ate the lot, the greedy guts!). For those familiar with ‘Well, Did You Evah!’ as it appears in High Society, the choice of melody provides another layer of allusive stage-setting. In High Society, the characters who sing this number – a tabloid journalist and the former husband of a bride-to-be – are both present at a wedding celebration uninvited by the bride or groom. An awareness of the context of this number in High

Society thus reinforces Romeo’s status as a gatecrasher at the Catapults’/ Capulets’ party.

Duet and sonnet: mise en abyme in the Sock Puppets and Shakespeare

That the duet occurs at the same point in the plot as Shakespeare’s lovers’ encounter sonnet is particularly appropriate. As I discuss below, the duet mirrors a number of formal features as well as the function of the sonnet. In so doing, it allows viewers to recuperate to some extent the early modern experience of the generic shift to

320 the sonnet and, at however unconscious a level, its function as a mise en abyme, an experience that was lost through cuts for almost a century of the play’s performance and is often lost in modern productions of the play due to modern audiences’ comparative lack of sensitivity to changes in verse forms.

The use of the music from one musical and a set of allusions to the lyrics of another invite a reading of the duet through the conventions of musicals. Duets are particularly important in the development of the romantic plots that are at the heart of many musicals. While the heroes and heroines of the operatic canon are usually already in love before the opera opens (Julian Budden notes ’s lack of precedents in portraying characters who fall in love during the course of the onstage action when composing his Manon Lescaut (1893), a work relatively late in the development of the operatic canon), musicals regularly portray couples who fall in love on stage, and have developed their own artistic conventions in order to do so, artistic conventions that are in fact similar to the formal features of the encounter sonnet in

Romeo and Juliet.11 A duet for the lovers often serves not only as a milestone in their dramatic trajectory, but as an emblem of the process of falling in love. Love is not always mentioned in the words of the duet; if love is acknowledged verbally, it may be expressed in terms ranging from the sophisticated to the banal. When the duet occurs, the lovers or lovers-to-be may be friends as yet unaware of the depth of their feelings for each other, or may appear actively antagonistic to each other, a type of duet Stacy

Wolf refers to as a ‘hypothetical love song’.12 Nonetheless, despite these variations in

11 Julian Budden, Puccini: His Life and Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 111- 12. 12 Stacy Wolf, ‘“Defying Gravity”: Queer Conventions in the Musical Wicked’, Theatre Journal 60:1 (2008): 1-21 (2). ‘We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back’ from Salad Days ( and Reynolds, 1954) is an example of a duet sung by friends as yet unaware of the depth of their feelings; ‘People Will Say We’re In Love’ from Oklahoma! and ‘Anything You Can Do’ from 321 emotional content and apparent subject matter, duets for lovers in musicals typically share a number of formal features so frequently found together as to constitute a convention in the musical. A competent audience member familiar with the conventions of the musical is thus able to read the duet as a duet between lovers even if the characters have not yet acknowledged their feelings.

Although the following discussion of these formal features is relatively lengthy and theoretical, the duet for lovers is such an integral part of most musicals that when these formal features are all present those familiar with musical theatre are likely to recognize them immediately without a need for conscious interpretation. However, as I argue below, the conventions of the duet for lovers in musicals are so strong and widespread that deviations from them can be used to signal – however subliminally – future problems in a romantic relationship before the lovers are even aware of their feelings for each other. While the Sock Puppets’ duet contains almost all the formal features of a duet for lovers, both characters are voiced by one performer: the duet thus cannot provide the moment of simultaneous singing in harmony that is one of the key features of the duet for lovers who will end up happily together by the finale. This deviation from musical conventions can be understood as a prediction of the characters’ unhappy ends.

Prominent among the formal features of a duet for lovers is a move from turn- taking to simultaneous singing: love is portrayed not primarily as an emotion, but as a process. Duets for lovers generally form part of a broader category of songs in which the title line is repeated throughout the number. Stephen Banfield divides this category into ‘refrain’ and ‘motif’ songs: ‘a refrain song is one in which the title line is the point

Annie Get Your Gun (Berlin, Fields & Fields, 1946) are examples of duets for antagonistic couples who have not yet acknowledged their mutual attraction. 322 of arrival; when it is the point of departure, we may call it a motif song’.13 Turn-taking in duets for lovers centres around the refrain or motif: usually one protagonist sings a section beginning with the motif or ending with the refrain, sometimes a whole strophe, sometimes the first phrase of a musical period (in musical terms, the antecedent), depending on the duet’s overall structure. The second protagonist then sings a rejoinder, whether a further strophe or the second part of the phrase (the consequent), that usually also incorporates the motif or refrain. In the lines beyond the motif or refrain, each rejoinder will usually adopt the metre and rhyme scheme of the lines to which it is responding. Thus, whether the second character’s rejoinder expresses agreement or disagreement with the first character’s statement, the second character uses not only the first character’s words (in the repetition of the motif or refrain), but also his or her metre, rhyme scheme and musical phrasing. In duets structured on antecedent-consequent turn-taking, one character may lead consistently with the antecedent, suggesting that character’s dominance, or the characters may alternate in their association with the antecedent and consequent.

The two characters then usually end the duet by singing the same or similar words simultaneously to their own melodic lines, which merge together in major-key harmony.14 In almost all refrain duets this last section includes the refrain; in some

13 Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 107. 14 This form of duet for lovers appears in almost all golden-age Broadway musicals, and is extremely common in earlier and later ones. Some well-known representative examples are: ‘You Are Love’ from Show Boat (Kern, Hammerstein and Wodehouse, 1927), ‘People Will Say We’re In Love’ from Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1943), ‘When the Children Are Asleep’ from Carousel (Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1945), ‘Almost Like Being in Love’ from Brigadoon (Loewe and Lerner, 1947), ‘I’ve Never Been in Love Before’ from Guys and Dolls (Loesser, Swerling and Burrows, 1950), ‘Till There Was You’ from The Music Man (Willson, 1957), ‘Something Good’ from The Sound of Music (Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1959). Arguments between established pairs of lovers can follow this structure: ‘You Must Meet My Wife’ from (Sondheim and Wheeler, 1973) and ‘The Thrill of First Love’ (a duet for two male lovers) from March of the (Finn and Lapine, 1992) fall into this category. 323 motif duets it includes the motif. Love is thus symbolized in the duet’s combination of partial merging and autonomy at the level of words and music. The lovers in these duets adopt and respond to each other’s words as the refrain or motif and the metrical, rhyme, rhythmical and melodic structures pass back and forth between them; at the same time, creative autonomy is maintained in the lyrics of the lines other than the refrain or motif. The lovers’ emotional fit is expressed in the musical harmony created by their individual musical lines in the final section, while the very fact that this harmony is created by separate voices underlines the characters’ autonomy. In most musicals a romantic match is thus not created in the meeting of two apparently identical personalities, or in the merging of two personalities into one, but by the harmonious co- existence of separate autonomous personalities. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s practice of finishing romantic duets with an extended section in parallel octaves – ‘All I Ask of

You’ from Phantom of the Opera (1986), or ‘Too Much in Love to Care’ from Sunset

Boulevard (1993) are two examples – thus risks accusations of naivety, kitsch or worse in his portrayals of a love that appears to limit space for autonomy of voice or personality.

While duets for lovers or hypothetical lovers account for many of the duets in musicals, there are of course other dramatic relationships that call for duets.15 Usually the lyrics and the dramatic situation make it quite clear that a duet is not intended to be read as a duet between lovers or hypothetical lovers. However, the formal structure of such duets usually reinforces these non-romantic lyrics by deviating from the formal

15 For an argument that duets between female characters constitute interventions into a hegemonic social discourse that privileges heterosexual couplings over homosocial alliances, see Stacy Wolf, ‘“We’ll Always Be Bosom Buddies”: Female Duets and the Queering of Broadway Musical Theatre”, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12:3 (2006): 351- 376. 324 conventions of duets for lovers. 16 In ‘hypothetical love duets’, the lyrics may not refer to love at all, but musical and structural conventions bear of signaling the duet as a duet for lovers (or lovers-to-be). In structuralist terms, the audience thus distinguishes between the énonciation, the formal features of the duet, and the énoncé, the actual lyrics sung. The drive for romantic closure that is a feature of musicals invites an understanding that the énonciation will triumph over the énoncé. On the other hand, in duets in which the lyrics suggest that the couple are already in love or are in the process of falling in love, a deviation from musical convention can prepare an audience for an unexpected turn in the couple’s romantic narrative. Thus in ‘If I Loved

You’ from Carousel and ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ from The Sound of Music, for example, the lack of a final section of simultaneous singing prepares the audience for the unhappy marriage followed by death in the former and the break-up of the young couple in the latter, while in ‘Tonight’ during the balcony scene in West Side Story, the interruption of the duet by Maria’s father, and the final section sung in unison likewise prefigure a deviation from the standard romantic narrative. The structure of duets for lovers thus often stands as one of the three forms of mise en abyme theorized by Lucien

Dällenbach: a microtext embedded within the wider text that mirrors the text that contains it.17 In this case, the structure of the duet mirrors the narrative structure of the couple’s growing romance, from getting to know each other, perhaps working through

16 Thus, alongside their non-romantic lyrics, ‘I Whistle A Happy Tune’ from The King and I, ‘My Girl Back Home’ from the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific (dir. Logan, 1958), ‘Every Day A Little Death’ from A Little Night Music, ‘My Own Best Friend’ and ‘Nowadays’ from Chicago (Kander, Ebb and Fosse, 1975) and ‘Agony’ from Into the Woods (Sondheim and Lapine, 1986) all end with a passage of simultaneous singing in unison or parallel octaves rather than harmony, suggesting solidarity rather than romantic love between the characters. While ‘Marry the Man Today’ from Guys and Dolls and ‘Class’ from Chicago (Kander, Ebb and Fosse, 1975) end in passages of simultaneous singing in harmony, they are in minor keys. 17 Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy Whitely with Emma Hughes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 24. 325 antagonisms, to a state where both parties co-exist harmoniously (or, conversely, to an unhappy ending to the romance when there is a deviation from convention in the duet).

In its function as a mise en abyme, the duet for lovers thus reveals a further layer of complexity. While the lyrics of a duet for lovers are directed to the situation at hand, as a microtext its structure is also directed to the macrostructure of the musical’s romance plot. By far the greatest number of duets for lovers follow the turn-taking– simultaneous harmony convention and mirror a romance plot that ends happily in heterosexual union. The inclusion of a mise en abyme that mirrors a narrative concluding in happy heterosexual union thus often has the effect of converting what is already a conventional narrative structure into one that appears to go out of its way to flag its own conventionality. The conventionality of the romance plot and the lack of narrative tension that is a product of such conventionality often have the result of shifting the focus of attention from the overarching plot to other aspects of the production. In contrast, duets that deviate from convention create a narrative tension that encourages an unusual focus on plot developments.

Like a love duet in a musical, the Sock Puppets’ duet centres around a refrain

(‘Well, did you ever? What a swell party this is’) and proceeds by turn-taking rejoinders in which the characters adopt each other’s melodic, rhythmic and rhyme schemes, the presence of excruciating forced rhymes making the rejoinder structure particularly overt. However, given that all the characters are voiced by Sutherland, the duet cannot end in simultaneous singing in harmony. For audiences approaching this duet, constructed of songs from musicals, through the conventions of musicals, the turn- taking rejoinders and the status of Romeo and Juliet as iconic lovers confirm that the couple are to be understood as falling in love. However, the failure of the duet to end in simultaneous singing – whatever the pragmatic reasons for this might be – is a deviation

326 from convention and, like similar deviations in musicals, it is mineable for its hermeneutic potential as a premonition of the lovers’ tragic end. As the structure of duets in musicals so frequently does, the structure of this duet, its énonciation, functions as a mise en abyme mirroring the macronarrative.

However, the Sock Puppets’ duet does more than provide a generalised mise en abyme of their unhappy love affair: its mise en abyme reflects the details of how their affair will end. While the song is comic in its delivery, it has darker undertones. Like

‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’, the comedy stands alongside images of violence after the first Shakespearean reference. Except for Romeo’s first hopeful reference to Twelfth

Night, all the references to Shakespeare’s characters involve characters who are connected to violence. Indeed, apart from Shylock, who is characterised in the song by his relationship to mutilation with a knife, all the subsequent allusions are to characters who die from stab wounds (Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Brutus) or poison (Cleopatra), or both (Hamlet). The song’s final references are two characters, one male, one female, who commit suicide, one by stabbing (Brutus), the other by poison (Cleopatra): the duet thus ends with allusions that (with a reversal of genders) prefigure the suicides by stabbing and poison of Romeo and Juliet.18

These features of the duet map remarkably closely onto the encounter sonnet in

Shakespeare’s play. At this stage in their narrative, Shakespeare’s characters signal their falling in love through the fact that their first interaction is expressed in a sonnet embedded in the surrounding blank verse (1.5.92-105), a primarily literary verse form inserted into a primarily dramatic, spoken one.19 Like conventional duets for lovers in

18 The recording of the early live performance posted in 2007 has a reference to King Lear disinheriting his daughters in place of the Cleopatra reference. 19 References to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet are to William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Methuen, 2012). 327 musicals, the sonnet proceeds by way of rejoinders. Romeo speaks the first quatrain, using the rhyme scheme ABAB, with ‘this’ as B1 and ‘kiss’ as B2; Juliet then speaks the second quatrain, using the rhyme scheme CBCB, again with ‘this’ as B1 and ‘kiss’ as

B2. The couple then share the third DEDE quatrain, Romeo taking lines 1, 3 and 4 and

Juliet line 2. The concluding FF couplet is also shared, Juliet taking the first line and

Romeo the second. Although it is clear that the couple kiss, the Folio has no stage direction to clarify when this happens; however, if, as René Weiss suggests, the couple kiss at the end of the final couplet, the sonnet returns visually to the ‘kiss’ refrain of the first quatrain, the couple thus joining in a simultaneous action after the turn-taking of the sonnet.20

Like the duet for lovers in a musical, in which the turn-taking leading to simultaneous singing mirrors the development of a romantic relationship, the sonnet as

énonciation – turn-taking rejoinders in which rhyme, metrical and thematic frameworks are shared, leading to a simultaneous action, a kiss – stands as a mise en abyme, a microtextual example of developing love. Shakespeare’s use of a sonnet embedded in blank verse and the Socks’ use of a song embedded in prose are significant in this context: as Dällenbach suggests, an effective mise en abyme is almost always expressed in a different genre from that of the surrounding work, and therefore functions as a generic shifter.21 Here, however, as a mise en abyme, the sonnet and its final kiss form an oppositional commentary on the macronarrative. Nonetheless, like the duet, the sonnet has further layers of reference. On one hand, this sonnet is not the first sonnet of the play: the prominence of the sonnet format when set against the background of blank verse encourages a recursive reception that mediates an approach to the lovers’ sonnet

20 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis, note to SD 1.5.105. 21 Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, 72. 328 through the sonnet that formed the Prologue, a sonnet that predicts that the lovers’ romantic narrative will end in tragedy. On the other, if we follow Gideon Rappaport, after the lovers have kissed at the end of the sonnet, they share another quatrain, again proceeding by turn-taking (1.5.6-9), followed by an interruption by the Nurse. If this quatrain is understood not as a freestanding quatrain, but as the first quatrain of a second sonnet cut short by Nurse’s interruption, the unit formed by the completed sonnet followed by a kiss, followed by an interrupted sonnet fragment, stands as a mise en abyme – or, as Rappaport terms it, ‘a formal and thematic emblem of the entire play’ – that mirrors, rather than opposes, the lovers’ dramatic trajectory: a love consummated only to be cut short.22 The Sock Puppets’ duet likewise provides further layers of reference beyond the function of its structure as a mise en abyme. Its thematic allusions to deaths by stabbing followed by two suicides combined with the deviations from the conventions of the love-duet structure might be understood as providing a more than usually detailed mise en abyme that incorporates into the dramatic arc of the lovers’ relationship the murders of Mercutio and Tybalt that result in Romeo’s banishment.

For early modern audiences more attuned to aural poetic and rhetorical devices than modern audiences, the shift to the sonnet form is likely to have been more noticeable than it is to modern audiences, who indeed may not notice the shift at all, or may not recognise the significance of the sonnet form in the wider contexts of both

Petrarchan discourse and a discourse on Petrarchism (a context discussed further below). Indeed, as James Loehlin notes, the sonnet was generally cut in performance for almost a century from 1748, replaced instead by an abbreviated seven-line version

22 Gideon Rappaport, ‘Another Sonnet in Romeo and Juliet’, Notes and Queries 223 (1978): 124. 329 by David Garrick.23 However, through their replacement of Shakespeare’s sonnet with a song, the Sock Puppets ensure that a generic shift is perceptible for modern audiences, a shift, moreover, to the love duet of the musical stage, a format the ironic significance of which is likely to be recognisable to those audiences. The Sock Puppets’ duet, while entertaining in itself, also parallels remarkably closely the work and dramatic positioning of Romeo and Juliet’s encounter sonnet in Shakespeare’s play. In so doing, it allows viewers to recuperate to some extent the early modern experience of encountering the sonnet in performance, albeit in largely comic form.

Further traces of existing song and mise en abyme

Although the duet is the only sung episode in the adaptation, a further brief use of existing song occurs during the equivalent of Shakespeare’s balcony scene, at the level of lyrics only. Romeo has spotted Juliet (‘Hello, who’s that by yonder broken window, who’s left the light on?’, a burlesque of Shakespeare’s Romeo’s ‘But soft, what light from yonder window breaks?’ (2.1.45) at the same point in the narrative) and has overheard Juliet saying his name. Having comically shimmied across to her, the following dialogue ensues:

STAGE-LEFT SOCK [out of character]: Are you milking the shimmies? STAGE-RIGHT SOCK [out of character]. I am a bit, yes. [As ROMEO] But anyway, I have heard what you were just saying – it sounds like you fancy me too. STAGE-LEFT SOCK [as JULIET]. Well, what if I do? STAGE-RIGHT SOCK [as ROMEO]. Well, in the immortal words of the classic: ‘You and me, babe – how about it?’ Admittedly that is the classic by Dire Straits, but I think it counts.

Here an appropriation of Shakespeare’s Romeo quotes another appropriated Romeo, one of the title characters in the Dire Straits song, ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Dire Straits’

23 James N. Loehlin, ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 124. 330 song in fact contains its own miniature uses of existing song: their Juliet sings – and the song quotes the music and lyrics of – a brief snatch of The Angels’ ‘My Boyfriend’s

Back’ from her window. With the line, ‘And there’s a place for us/ You know the movie song’, their Romeo attempts to woo Juliet with a quotation of the lyrics, but not the music, of ‘Somewhere’ – originally sung in West Side Story by Tony, another appropriation of Shakespeare’s Romeo. In knowingly quoting another appropriation of

Romeo, the Puppets’ Romeo sets off a second type of Dällenbach’s three forms of the mise en abyme: an apparently infinite series of reflections. 24 Like the mise en abyme effect of the duet, the potential mise en abyme set off by this short quotation is surprisingly complex: depending on one’s exposure to the Dire Straits song in its various cover versions, one might even perceive a layer of feminist and non- heteronormative reception potentials lurking in the depths of the mise en abyme.

Stephen Buhler and Adam Hansen, for example, both draw attention to the ‘memorable cover version of the Dire Straits song by the Indigo Girls’ on their 1992 album, Rites of

Passage. Buhler argues that on the Indigo Girls’ version, Amy Ray, a singer who identifies as lesbian, ‘offers feminist and same-sex recodings of one of the defining narratives of heterosexual romance’, while Hansen sets it in the context of a shift in popular music’s reimaginings of Romeo and Juliet from an emphasis on Romeo’s experience to Juliet’s, a shift Hansen argues reflects other changes in the music

24 Shakespeare’s Romeo is of course himself an appropriation of an appropriation of an appropriation. Not only is he an appropriation of Ovid’s Pyramus, the Romeo from William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1567) and the title character from Arthur Brooke’s poem, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), but Brooke’s poem is in its turn a translation of Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires tragiques (1559), in its turn an appropriation of Matteo Bandello’s Romeo e Giulietta (1554). 331 industry, ‘as women have found a more prominent place in the developing cultures of rock and pop’.25

Recuperating a space for a non-heteronormative engagement with Romeo and Juliet

This admittedly esoteric moment of non-heteronormative reception potential is in fact part of a network of allusions that cue an awareness of the potential of performance to create space for a range of non-heteronormative engagements with the play, and that in so doing recuperate some of the space that has similarly been available to audiences during periods of Romeo and Juliet’s performance history. The Sock

Puppets cue this potential early on in their version (at least for British viewers) through the use of names. There are frequent plays on the names of Shakespeare’s characters, which often provoke multiple layers of characterisation, in all of their Shakespearean productions. King Lear, for example features King Edward Lear and his three daughters Gonorrhea, Ronald Reagan and Cordelia Smith, and Gloucester’s son, Edgar

Allen Poe, with allusions that suggest that their back-stories match their names;

Macbeth features Mr and Mrs The-Scottish-Play, the three Witches of Eastwick, and

‘Duncan from Blue’ (a reference to singer Duncan James from the pop group Blue);

Mrs The-Scottish-Play, wife of the Thane of Glamis, reveals that her first given name is

Elizabeth, a reference to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, whose childhood home was Glamis Castle; Titus Andronicus features Tomorrow, Queen of the Goths, whose name gives rise to several misunderstandings. In their Romeo and Juliet, this play on

25 Stephen M. Buhler, ‘Musical Shakespeares: Attending to Ophelia, Juliet, and Desdemona’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 150-74 (157); Adam Hansen, Shakespeare and Popular Music (London: Continuum, 2010), 37. As I discuss below, suggested links on some of the Sock Puppets’ Romeo and Juliet videos indicate that viewers also make a connection between Romeo’s Dire Straits allusion and the Indigo Girls’ version. 332 names is pleasurably productive in inviting a destabilisation of the heteronormative readings of the central love affair that dominated twentieth-century approaches to the play, but which in fact are not a consistent feature of the play’s wider performance history.26 Stage-Right Sock introduces himself as Romeo ‘from the family that is called the Montagus of Beaulieu’ – a straightforward reference, in ‘Montagu’, to

Shakespeare’s Romeo of the House of Montague. At the same time, the Sock Puppets’ additional ‘of Beaulieu’ invites a reading of Romeo as another ‘tragic lover’, Lord

Montagu of Beaulieu, a bisexual British Conservative politician with a prominent place in British legal and social history. As one of three high-profile men imprisoned for homosexual offences in 1954, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu was at the centre of a cause célèbre that eventually gave rise to the Wolfenden Report that in turn led to the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in England and Wales in 1967.

The lack of clear gender markers in Stage-Left Sock’s characterisation of Juliet facilitates the destabilisation that Romeo’s family name invites. In the studio recording of Romeo & Juliet, Stage-Left Sock wears no costume as Juliet. 27 This contrasts with his practice of wearing an item of female costume in his female roles in the Puppets’ other Shakespeare adaptations – a pink feather boa as both Mrs The-Scottish-Play and as Cordelia Smith, a Siouxsie Sioux-style wig as Tomorrow, Queen of the Goths.

Given that Sutherland uses the same voice for Stage-Left Sock in and out of character as

Juliet, it is often difficult to tell whether the sock should be received as a Shakespearean character or as an out-of-character ‘actor’, as male or female, at a given point. Indeed,

26 Joe Calarco’s Shakespeare’s R&J (off-Broadway 1997, West End 2003), set in a boys’ school, and Private Romeo (2011, dir. Alan Brown), a film inspired by Calarco’s play and a response to the US Army’s ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy, suggest that the twenty-first century might see a move away from an exclusively heterosexual conception of the play extending to more ‘mainstream’ artistic outlets. 27 However, in the recording of the live performance at Komedia Brighton, Stage-Left Sock wears a pink feather boa as Juliet. 333 at the beginning of Part 2, Stage-Left Sock – who usually plays Juliet but who appears at the end of Part One using the vocal-fry register as Tybalt – interrupts his ‘Oh, Romeo,

Romeo..’. falsetto soliloquy with the clarification, ‘I’m Juliet again, by the way’. Here the apparent superfluity of this clarification again opens up the possibility of non- heteronormative reception practices.28

Another potential for non-heteronormative readings of the central couple opens up in the following exchange as Romeo and Tybalt fight, represented by Sutherland crossing his arms and hitting the upper side of his left forearm (Tybalt) with his right forearm (Romeo):

TYBALT[?]/ STAGE-LEFT SOCK [having shifted from vocal-fry register to falsetto register]: What are you doing? ROMEO[?]/STAGE-RIGHT SOCK: I am miming stabbing you. TYBALT[?]/STAGE-LEFT SOCK/ [in falsetto register]: You’re miming sex in Sign Language. [The Socks jump apart] STAGE-RIGHT SOCK (awkwardly): Emm... eh... emm... did you see the match? STAGE-LEFT SOCK: Yep. We was robbed. STAGE-RIGHT SOCK: Emm... Back into character. [The Socks remain at either side of the stage. As ROMEO:] Long distance stab. STAGE-LEFT SOCK (still in falsetto register): Deid [dead]. (In vocal-fry register:) [short indistinguishable groan as he falls down].

Stage-Left Sock is indeed correct at least about the meaning in British Sign Language of the sign made by Sutherland’s arms, even if ‘miming’ is not the most appropriate terminology. In this exchange, while it is not always clear at which point the Socks are speaking in their own personae or in character, the fact that the characters are denoted

28 This is not to say that homoeroticism is absent from Romeo and Juliet as a play: Mercutio’s relationship with Romeo has been characterized as homoerotic, albeit unacknowledged as such by Mercutio or any other character (see, for example, Joseph A. Porter, Shakespeare’s Mercutio: His History and Drama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 145- 63; Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 64; Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Romeo and Juliet’s Open Rs’, in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 218-35 (229-31). 334 by a puppeteer’s hands and arms is suddenly foregrounded. Although this fact is usually suppressed in audience reception of the Puppets, Tybalt’s comic reply to

Romeo, ‘Talk to the hand!’, shortly beforehand prepares the audience at some level for this shift of register from the fictive to the performative. At the same time as this potential for a non-heteronormative reading of Romeo opens up, the potential for other modes of reception also reveals itself: what constitutes everyday language for one viewer might not even be recognised as a signifying system by another. In drawing attention to a moment of semiotic density and the interpretive dangers that arise when – perhaps inevitably – a layer of signification is overlooked, the adaptation becomes a didactic text, providing a moment of training for the audience in appropriate modes of reception: there is more than one way of knowing, and meaning is not to be found only at the surface level of speech or action, but also in the recognition of multiple, simultaneous and potentially contradictory modes of production and reception.

The combination of the play on Shakespeare’s Romeo’s family name, the sense of shifting, overlapping genders located in Stage-Left Sock/Juliet, and the apparently unwitting engagement of some combination of Stage-Left Sock, Stage-Right Sock,

Tybalt and Romeo in the production of ‘sex’ – all of this opens up the possibility of reading moments in the central love story as both hetero- and homosexual. While the onstage kisses between Romeo and Juliet seem almost designed to foreground such a possibility for audiences of all-male early modern theatre companies – as Weis notes,

‘full-frontal, onstage kissing was rare in the Elizabethan theatre’ – the possibility was also present for British and American audiences throughout much of the nineteenth century, when Romeo was frequently played by a woman.29 Of the many women who

29 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis, 49. On the widespread practice of casting women as Romeo in the nineteenth-century, see Loehlin ‘Romeo and Juliet’, 27-31. For an extended account of Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876), one of the most prominent nineteenth- 335 played Romeo in the nineteenth century, one of the most prominent was Charlotte

Cushman (1816-1876), an actress whose same-sex relationships were relatively widely known. Lisa Merrill argues convincingly for the availability to nineteenth-century audiences of a reception of Cushman’s Romeo as both Romeo and as an enactment of lesbian sexuality. That Cushman’s 1845 London performance of Romeo was also notable for her insistence on using Shakespeare’s text instead of the adaptation by

David Garrick that had been current since the middle of the eighteenth century links

Cushman’s female Romeo intriguingly with a return to ‘authentic’ Shakespeare.

Further, the English-language performances of the Prussian actress and former opera singer Felicita von Vestvali (1829-1880) as Romeo (and also as the title role in Hamlet and as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew) might not only have facilitated readings of Romeo and Juliet as an enactment of lesbian sexuality, but might have destabilized essentialist notions of gender. Vestvali’s career as an international opera singer is perhaps unique in the extraordinary range of roles she covered: having started her career in high soprano roles such as the title roles in Norma and La Fille du Régiment, she switched to roles, such as Il trovatore’s Azucena when her voice deepened.

Her voice eventually became so deep that she was able to perform the baritone role of

Figaro in The Barber of Seville.30 She had sexual relationships with both men and women and, according to her German biographer, was widely rumoured to have been a female hermaphrodite (ein weiblicher Zwitter).31 A production in which a deep-voiced, convincingly masculine Vestvali performed Romeo (to say nothing of her performance

century female Romeos, see Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was A Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). For an account of Felicita von Vestvali, another nineteenth-century female Romeo, see Rosa von Braunschweig, ‘Felicita von Vestvali’, Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1903): 426-443. 30 Braunschweig, ‘Felicita von Vestvali’, 430-33. 31 Braunschweig, ‘Felicita von Vestvali’, 429. 336 as Petruchio) thus provided abundant opportunities for queer readings avant la lettre of a work that later became a byword for heterosexual love. The Sock Puppets’ destabilisation of a straightforward heteronormative reception of the play thus recuperates something of the potential for non-heteronormative receptions available for significant periods in the play’s performance history.

Engaging with Romeo and Juliet’s ambiguous genre

The duet is the most prominent moment of semiotic density among many in the production. For viewers new to the Sock Puppets’ layered, allusive style, it is also one that encourages a reception practice open to multiple meanings elsewhere in the play.

One significant dramatic moment that is given unexpected depth through the strategic deployment of an allusion occurs towards the end of the video. As the draught that allowed Shakespeare’s Juliet to feign death wears off, she says the following lines: ‘O comfortable Friar, where is my lord?/ I do remember well where I should be,/ And there

I am. Where is my Romeo?’ (5.3.148-150). In the Puppets’ production, Juliet does not regain her bearings so quickly. As the draught wears off, Stage-Left Sock begins to stir and says the following lines: ‘Hello... New teeth... that’s weird. Where was I? Ah yes.

Barcelona. Oh, wrong play’. This slightly startling, not entirely comic speech embraces the unsettling genre ambiguity of Shakespeare’s play that sentimentalising productions and production and reception practices that insist on the play as a more or less straightforward tragedy attempt to erase as the play reaches its conclusion. Stage-

Left Sock’s lines replicate almost exactly the first lines said in Doctor Who by David

Tennant in his role as the tenth Doctor, a character who, when critically injured, is capable of ‘regeneration’, a modern-day secular form of resurrection or reincarnation.32

32 Doctor Who: The Parting of the Ways, BBC1, TX 18 June 2005. Television broadcast. 337

While this speech is potentially comic, whether or not one recognises the allusion, it need not be seen as gratuitous. Juliet’s ‘resurrection’ reflects a convention of early modern comedies, and one likely to have been perceived as such by early modern audiences. Martha Tuck Rozett, in an article examining aspects of comedy structure in the suicide scenes of Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, notes that ‘the dangerous adventure of feigned death and promised resurrection was one of the oldest and most popular comic traditions on the English stage’, and draws attention to the fact that ‘Shakespeare used the device of the heroine’s feigned or reported death and subsequent reappearance in five of his comedies and romances: Much Ado About

Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline. Each time, the play concludes with a reunion of the married or betrothed couple’.33

Indeed, Romeo and Juliet has long been recognised as an unusual combination of comedy and tragedy. Susan Snyder’s work, both her landmark essay ‘From Comedy to Tragedy’ and its subsequent elaboration in The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s

Tragedies, has been particularly influential on understandings of this aspect of the play.

Snyder’s claim is encapsulated in her statement: ‘Romeo and Juliet is different from

Shakespeare’s other tragedies in that it becomes, rather than is, tragic’.34 While

Shakespeare’s tragedies often contain aspects of comedy, these tend to be restricted to secondary characters; in Romeo and Juliet, however, this restriction is not apparent.

Instead, Snyder argues, ‘other tragedies have reversals, but in Romeo and Juliet the reversal is so radical as to constitute a change of genre: the action and the characters begin in familiar comic patterns, and are then transformed – or discarded – to compose

33 Martha Tuck Rozett, ‘The Comic Structure of Tragic Endings: The Suicide Scenes in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra’, Shakespeare Quarterly 36:2 (1985): 152-64 (154). 34 Susan Snyder, ‘Romeo and Juliet: Comedy into Tragedy’, Essays in Criticism 20:4 (1970): 393-402 (391). See also Snyder’s The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Othello’, and ‘King Lear’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 338 the pattern of tragedy’.35 Rosalie Colie follows on from Snyder’s earlier work in identifying structural aspects of the comedy genre in Romeo and Juliet, drawing attention to Shakespeare’s use of types from Roman comedy in the play:

‘the young girl; her suitor (adulescens amans), whom her father does not favour; another adulescens (County Paris), whom the father approves; a father, senex, who becomes, naturally, senex iratus when crossed by his daughter; a nurse, not only the customary nutrix, but a particular subtype, nutrix garrula’.36

Although she does not do so explicitly, in her focus on the suicide scene, Rozett undermines Snyder’s theory of generic transformation in demonstrating that

‘Shakespeare continues to use comic strategies in Romeo and Juliet until the very end of the play, even though, according to the laws of tragedy, a comic resolution becomes impossible once Tybalt and Mercutio are dead’.37 As Rozett notes, on the one hand, the play gives both Romeo and Juliet ‘a role characteristic of the tragic protagonist – that of causing the death of another. Each lover indirectly and inadvertently brings about the death of the beloved, and each dies nobly by his or her own hand, believing that death is preferable to life without the beloved’.38 On the other hand, the play contains elements of comedy that were likely to have been recognisable as such to early audiences until the very end of the play. Not only does Juliet’s first ‘suicide’ and ‘resurrection’ continue a generic marker of comedy until almost the final scene of the play, but the play ends with further markers of comedy. Rozett notes:

As the stage fills up, the [dead] lovers are quickly relegated to the background, for Shakespeare has left himself a lot of explaining to do. This kind of fifth act, filled with the unravelling of evidence, lengthy revelations, and acts of forgiveness, is more common to comedy and

35 Snyder, ‘Comedy into Tragedy’, 391. 36 Rosalie L. Colie. Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 136. 37 Rozett, ‘Comic Structures of Tragic Endings’, 156. 38 Rozett, ‘Comic Structures of Tragic Endings’, 152. 339

romance than to tragedy. The audience’s attention is focused on to two families, whose recognition of the costly lessons their children’s deaths have taught them overshadows the lovers’ union in death. In this respect the ending anticipates the mature tragedies, where the survivors prepare to carry on the business of living and preside over a restored body politic. Any resemblance to comedy the ending retains is due largely to the long- awaited reconciliation which culminates in celebratory tokens of concord, the golden statues of Romeo and Juliet.39

While Rozett appears slightly reluctant to acknowledge ‘the resemblance to comedy’ of the final scene, she demonstrates quite clearly that structural aspects of the comedy genre are present alongside tragedy right until the end of the play.

The persistence of aspects of comedy to the end of the play suggests that

Snyder’s claims that Romeo and Juliet ‘becomes, rather than is, tragic’, that the play undergoes ‘a change of genre’, and that ‘the action and the characters begin in familiar comic patterns, and are then transformed – or discarded – to compose the pattern of tragedy’, require to be scrutinised further.40 Indeed, Snyder’s theory of a change of genre requires a suppression of the clear reference to tragic ends contained in the

Prologue that then mediates audience receptions of the comic structures and action as the play proper begins. In fact, there are unmistakable signposts of both comedy and tragedy from the very beginning of the play. In the Prologue, the Chorus explicitly states that ‘A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’ (Prologue, 6). However, the

‘pair of star-crossed lovers’ does not appear to be the principal focus of the précis of events to come: instead, the chorus presents the play as concerning the reconciliation of two feuding households, a reconciliation in which the deaths of the lovers play an instrumental, rather than central role. Both tragedy’s suicides and comedy’s reconciliation thus co-exist in the Prologue. This is immediately followed by the opening scene in which comic double entendres from Samson and Gregory, two

39 Rozett, ‘Comic Structures of Tragic Endings’, 158. 40 Snyder, ‘Comedy into Tragedy’, 391. 340

Capulet retainers, quickly move from comic wordplay, to sexual wordplay, to wordplay connoting sexual violence, to a full-scale brawl with swords as more and more characters enter: comedy and violence thus co-exist from the beginning of the play.

The play as a whole might thus be considered as containing mutually conflicting genre markers throughout the play. Shakespeare supplements these conflicting structural genre markers of tragedy and comedy with the mingling of the serious and the comic tones that has been recognised as a feature of his work since at least Samuel

Johnson. He further supplements these conflicting genre markers by repeatedly incorporating moments of semiotic density not directly related to genre or to comic or serious tone. Like the Sock Puppets’ scattergun use of allusions, one of the play’s characteristics is its extremely prolific use of wordplay, particularly sexualised wordplay, in which characters appear to share an understanding of the multiple meanings contained in particular words or phrases. As M. M. Mahood notes, ‘Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s most punning plays; even a really conservative count yields a hundred and seventy-five quibbles’ (she notes elsewhere that ‘the average number of puns in a play by Shakespeare is seventy-eight’).41 For Mahood, this wordplay serves a structural purpose: ‘it holds together the play’s imagery in a rich pattern and gives an outlet to the tumultuous feelings of the central characters. Above all, it clarifies the concept of incompatible truths and helps to establish their final equipoise’.42 Mahood usefully analyses the Prologue in terms of wordplay, noting the multiple meanings of ‘fearful’ and ‘death-marked’ in line 9, concluding that the

Prologue’s ‘ambiguities pose the play’s fundamental question at the outset: is its ending frustration or fulfilment?’43 That the structural markers of tragedy and comedy are not

41 Mahood, M. M., Shakespeare’s Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957), 56, 164. 42 Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, 56. 43 Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, 57. 341 placed in a dialectical relationship, but instead co-exist throughout the play until the very end, assists in maintaining this ambiguity.

This co-existence of apparently opposing genres not only assists in rendering the ending ambiguous: it also embodies at a formal level concerns that Shakespeare explores thematically at the level of literary style, character and narrative. That

Shakespeare was invoking, critiquing and engaging with various aspects of Petrarchism in Romeo and Juliet has long been recognised.44 For Slater, this makes ‘the basis of the play literary-critical’, and much of the critical writing on Petrarchism in the play has focused on literary elements in speech, particularly in terms of rhetoric and poetic imagery.45 One of the prominent aspects of Petrarchism in the play is Petrarchan antithesis, or oxymoron. Romeo’s overblown description of his love for Rosaline provides several examples:

Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate, O anything of nothing first create, O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-walking sleep that is not what it is. (1.1.169-179).

Julia Kristeva has discussed at length the contribution of antithesis to a play about a love-hate dilemma.46 Indeed, discussing the imagery of Romeo and Juliet, John Roe proposes that ‘the figure of Petrarchan oxymoron accordingly dominates Romeo and

Juliet’.47 However, Petrarchan antithesis is not only contained in speech,

44 See, for example, John Roe, ‘Unfinished Business: A Lover’s Complaint and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and The Rape of Lucrece’, in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’: Suffering Ecstasy, ed. Shirley Sharon-Zisser (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 109-20; Anne Pasternak Slater, ‘Petrarchism Come True in Romeo and Juliet’, in Images of Shakespeare, ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer and Roger Pringle (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 129-50; Robin Headlam Wells, ‘Neo-Petrarchan Kitsch in Romeo and Juliet’, Modern Language Review 93:4 (1998): 913-33. 45 Slater, ‘Petrarchism Come True’, 131. 46 Kristeva, Julia, ‘Romeo and Juliet: Love-Hatred in the Couple’, in Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. John Drakakis (London: Longman, 1992), 296-315. 47 Roe, ‘Unfinished Business’, 112. 342 characterisation, and narrative. The joint presence of the structures and themes of tragedy and comedy throughout the play can be understood as an experiment in

Petrarchan antithesis at a formal, generic level: as simultaneously comedy and tragedy, the play as a whole does not simply engage with Petrarchism, but is a Petrarchan antithesis in itself, in which comedy and tragedy co-exist, unmerged, throughout.

This aspect of the play, however, is rarely brought out in performance. For one thing, modern-day audiences are unlikely to recognise or respond to the play’s engagement with Petrarchism, while the full range of conventions of early modern comedy are unlikely to be sufficiently recognised to function as conventions in a modern audience’s reception practice. Further, as James Forse argues, although the play might initially have been recognised as experimenting with genre, its classification from the Folio onwards as a more or less straightforward tragedy, now one of the most well-known tragic love stories, means that the play is always likely to be mediated through a reception practice that expects to see a clearly tragic ending.48 In fact, the play is often cut in production to achieve that aim: Loehlin notes that ‘many productions, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ended with

Juliet’s death’.49 He notes further a range of prominent productions that have either cut or downplayed ‘the unravelling of evidence, lengthy revelations, and acts of forgiveness’ that occur after the suicides and that Rozett sees as more characteristic of comedy and romance than tragedy, and that have either erased or rendered hollow and cynical the reconciliation of the families.50 Adaptations, on the other hand, can provide

48 James Forse, ‘ and Romeo and Juliet: Two Elizabethan Experiments in the Genre of ‘Comedy-Suspense’, Journal of Popular Culture 29:3 (1995): 85-102. Forse’s article contains a discussion of the history of receiving Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy and the results of such a history on the critical evaluation of the play within the Shakespearean canon. 49 Loehlin, Romeo and Juliet, 245. 50 Loehlin, Romeo and Juliet, 248-251; Rozett, ‘The Comic Structure of Tragic Endings’, 158. 343 evidence of alternative reception histories: Hector Berlioz, for example, appears to recognise and respond to this generic ambiguity in his 1839 symphonie dramatique,

Roméo et Juliette.51 The final movement of this choral symphony, throughout which the key of B minor has come to represent conflict, does not end with the tragic deaths of the lovers, but concludes with an extended scene in which Friar Lawrence’s vocal line eventually succeeds both in persuading the warring families to reconcile and in wrenching the key from B minor and, after an extended struggle, establishing the final key as B major as the ground upon which such a reconciliation can be built. The work then ends with a forceful, majestic chorus for the grieving families, their voices finally united in the emotionally positive key of B major (a key that feels especially positive after the extended use of the parallel minor), while their lyrics emphasise both reconciliation and the presence of their dead children. Here Berlioz does not simply meld the structural aspects of tragedy and comedy: the sheer force of this final scene (in numbers of performers, in volume, in the emotional impact of the key change and in the tragic images of the lyrics) magnifies the continuing coexistence of tragedy and comedy to an unmistakeable degree.

On a smaller scale, the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s adaptation also responds to the lack of a dialectical resolution between comedy and tragedy in

Shakespeare’s play. In its citation of a modern form of resurrection as Juliet regains consciousness, the Sock Puppets’ Romeo & Juliet thus recovers something of the unsettling combination of comic and tragic form that is present throughout the play right until the end, but which is rarely encountered in modern productions.

51 Hector Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette: Symphonie dramatique, 2nd ed. Full score (Paris: Brandus, 1857). 344

In their unusual responses to the encounter sonnet and the play’s genre status, the Sock Puppets corroborate Christy Desmet’s observations on amateur YouTube

Shakespeare videos:

What gives the amateur productions that I discuss their particular character is their focused attention on specific moments of action and, more important, specific speech acts from the parent text. The engagement between Shakespeare and appropriator is thoroughly rhetorical, a matter of textual give-and-take rather than a wholesale usurpation of the Bard’s words and authority.52

However, the Sock Puppets go even further, engaging not only with the Shakespearean

‘parent text’, but also with its performance history. The mises en abyme provoked by the duet and by the Dire Straits quotation reveal unexpected moments of referentiality and density within the production, on one hand diverting attention away from an already well-known plot onto surface features of performance, while also locating the Socks’ version not only in relation to Shakespeare’s play, but in relation to a wider programme of Shakespearean appropriation. Further, the adaptation also allows access, even if only at fleeting moments, to some of the non-heteronormative reception potential latent in the casting strategies of earlier centuries, but that is rarely encountered in modern productions.

The role of mediation in receiving the Sock Puppets’ Romeo & Juliet

That an apparently light-hearted, low-status adaptation of less than quarter of an hour’s duration can bear the weight of such significant hermeneutic potential is due largely to its extensive use and strategic deployment of moments of extreme semiotic density, but also perhaps to the shortness of the films: their dense, compact ways of layering allusions and potential contradictory meanings risk overwhelming viewers over

52 Christy Desmet, ‘Paying Attention in Shakespeare Parodies: From Tom Stoppard to YouTube’, Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 227-38, (227). 345 a longer running time. The fact that YouTube is the medium through which many audience members encounter the productions also contributes significantly to the Sock

Puppets’ ability to rely on this density. For example, while the Doctor Who reference when Juliet awakens is likely to have puzzled many viewers at live performances, watching the performance on YouTube allows a particular set of reception practices to come into play that are particularly suited to such dense, compressed works. As Lauren

Shohet comments, ‘YouTube clips bring a variety of codex technologies to filmed performances. YouTube facilitates practices of cross-referencing, fast-forwarding and replaying that allow students to work with performances in ways that scholars habitually work with texts’.53 Not only can viewers replay scenes easily, but they can also pause the video and carry out internet searches for unfamiliar material, or open a new screen and carry out internet searches while continuing to watch or listen. On a practical basis, the shortness of the films also makes finding scenes to replay relatively easy, and also encourages a viewing of the full work before pausing, rewinding or searching.

In addition, the rhizomatic viewing practices that YouTube and the internet in general encourage have the result that the Sock Puppets’ Shakespeare works are likely to be viewed intertextually in conjunction with other YouTube versions of Shakespeare.

Alongside the chosen YouTube video, the YouTube web page also features a changing selection of further videos that others have viewed in conjunction with the chosen video, quickly accessible in a single click. A range of the Sock Puppets’ many other performances is always featured in the suggestions for further viewing alongside their

Shakespeare videos, and usually includes at least one of their other Shakespeare works.

Other Shakespeare videos are also usually suggested, including, in the case of Romeo &

53 Lauren Shohet, ‘YouTube, Use, and the Idea of the Archive’, Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 68-76 (71). 346

Juliet, other musical versions of Shakespeare’s play and works that overtly engage with multiple perspectives in or on the play, particularly with non-heterosexual interpretations.

For example, throughout November 2013, a relatively frequent suggestion on the

Sock Puppets’ Romeo & Juliet video pages was the CYA Collective’s wryly comic video ‘Waiting Room: Romeo and Juliet’, which portrays four American actresses discussing and auditioning for the role of Juliet.54 A Hispanic actress overtly folds West

Side Story’s Maria into characterisation of a Hispanic Juliet, and, presumably inspired by the balcony scene, then argues further for her audition as a personification of a combination of Juliet and Rapunzel rolled into one. When questioned on the type of sexuality she would bring to the role of Juliet, one actress replies, ‘heterosexuality’, at which another rolls her eyes and comments, ‘typical..’. Another almost permanent suggestion on the Sock Puppets’ Romeo & Juliet pages is one or other of the enormously popular ‘Sassy Gay Friend’ videos produced by Chicago’s Second City

Network, usually at least Sassy Gay Friend’s version of Romeo and Juliet.55 In each of these, a voiceover introduces a tragic or unhappy character from cinema (Nina from

Black Swan), literature (Cyrano de Bergerac, Desdemona, Miss Havisham, Juliet, Lady

Macbeth, Odysseus, Ophelia), the Bible (Eve) or history (Henry VIII), whose life would have been different if only he or she had had a sassy gay friend.56 The video then

54 Video available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLOdSxBUNnY. 55 For example, as of 31 May 2015, Sassy Gay Friend’s Romeo and Juliet video had been viewed over 7.6 million times. 56 Videos available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNa9gYlKq6s (Black Swan); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQVsuLcGruM (Cyrano de Bergerac); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQhkzYVlLl8 (Eve); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yknKa1jm0w4 (Great Expectations); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnvgq8STMGM (Hamlet); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isdMp-uL9iQ (Henry VIII); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJLvl9vk-eE (Macbeth); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0qpbwdjeLM (The Odyssey); 347 continues as Sassy Gay Friend, played by Brian Gallivan, convinces the character that their fate is not inevitable.57

Queer-related suggestions are not always comic: Juliet and Romeo, ‘a modern, lesbian reimagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet’ was uploaded by

GirlGirlSceneShow on 4 May 2015, and almost immediately became a suggested link for viewers of the part one of the studio version of the Sock Puppets’ Romeo & Juliet.58

At the same time, a further link on that version was to ‘Ich liebe dich: Liebesfilm’, a

German-French love story between two married women. One of the suggested links for part two of the Komedia Brighton version in May 2015 was to a performance by the

Indigo Girls of their queered cover version of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, the Dire Straits song referred to by Stage-Right Sock, while another is to ‘Jack and Ianto – Together

Forever!’, a compilation of clips from the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood posted by pinkpolyanthus with the tag ‘A look at the love story that is with Captain Jack and his beautiful Welshman Ianto Jones! To the music of …Together Forever!’.

Further links on that page include one to an episode, ‘Valentina & Sofia’, of the Italian lesbian web series LSB, and to an episode of Girl/Girl Scene, a US lesbian web series.

Further links also draw attention to engagements with Romeo and Juliet beyond the

Anglophone world: for example, alongside the perhaps predictable clips from Baz

Luhrmann’s 1996 film of the play recommended for viewers of the first part of the Sock

Puppets’ studio version, links included those for an Indonesian adaptation of Romeo and

Juliet set among supporters of rival football teams, a full-length recording of Gérard

Presgurvic’s French musical, Roméo et Juliette: De la haine à l’amour with Hungarian

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKttq6EUqbE (Othello); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwnFE_NpMsE (Romeo and Juliet). 57 See Kahn, ‘Afterword: Ophelia Then, Now, Hereafter’, 231, 237 for brief discussions of the pleasure and value of Sassy Gay Friend’s interventions in Ophelia’s storyline. 58 Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsDi0if9wRw. 348 subtitles, a recording of the Thai band Pru singing their ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in Thai, the

Turkish singer Frey Yabgu singing ‘Romeo ve Juliet’, and a music video of the song

‘Ami Romeo Tumi Juliet’ from the Bangla movie The Speed.

A viewer of the Sock Puppets’ Romeo and Juliet thus has the potential to view the video in the context of a network of videos that draw further attention to alternative perspectives on the play, that also foreground their semiotic density – especially the presence of the Indigo Girls link – and that provide alternatives to heteronormativity both in approaches to Romeo and Juliet and more widely in literary and other works.

The presence of these links, with thumbnail still images from the videos, act as a literal visual frame in the reception of the Sock Puppets’ YouTube Romeo & Juliet, one that suggests from the outset that that production might be received through the conventions of musical theatre and music adaptations, and is likely to be open to non- heteronormative readings. For viewers who do not identify as heterosexual, these invitations do more than confirm the Sock Puppets’ playing with gender and sexuality: they create a sense of Shakespeare as a queer ‘safe space’ shared by unseen others, a

‘safe space’ that is not a closed ghetto but an open network with pathways already trodden by others with similar outlooks but potentially different backgrounds. In this they provide a counter to Stephen O’Neill’s findings in his monograph, Shakespeare and YouTube, in which he sees YouTube versions of Shakespeare’s sonnets as performing a conservative closing down of the non-heterosexual aspects of the sonnets, framing YouTube Shakespeare as a site of ‘queer erasure’.59 Here a miniature jukebox- musical version of Romeo and Juliet might act as a starting point, a mid-point or an endpoint in a journey of perhaps unexpectedly queer intercultural exploration.

59 Stephen O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 161-87. Although O’Neill discusses Sassy Gay Friend’s YouTube Othello, he does so in the context of race rather than sexuality (153-54). 349

A further feature of YouTube videos is the option for viewers to leave comments, either in their own name or under a pseudonym, in a section below the video. These comments then appear each time the video is watched by future viewers.

While most comments list viewers’ favourite sections, comments also draw attention to the Sock Puppets’ use of allusions. 60 As Christy Desmet has noted in the context of pedagogy and Shakespearean YouTube clips both amateur and professional, ‘the urge to read closely seems positively contagious among YouTube aficionados’.61 This urge appears to extend to viewers of the Sock Puppets. The earliest comment on Part Two of the studio recording, for example, comes from a viewer with the user-name

Phantombucketmouse: ‘New Teeth! Brilliant Dr Who ref! I heart you guys so much’, while on Part Two of the Komedia Brighton recording, a virtual conversation develops among viewers on the subject of the Doctor Who allusion. Thus, dogtorwho writes ‘lol

I noticed the new teeth thing and laughed XD lol brilliant :)’. xoxAlysxox then replies to dogtorwho ‘Yeah lol, that made me laugh. So there are other Doctor Who fans! :P

Lol’. Also on Part Two of the studio recording, Caredroia draws attention to

Sutherland’s insider credentials for Doctor Who fans: ‘And who would believe that the hands inside are 47 years old, and has worked on comics from the Beano to 2000ad, and

Dr Who magazine’. The Doctor Who allusion in Stage-Left Sock’s lines is thus accessible not only to those who recognise the lines themselves, but also to those whose memories of the Doctor Who episode are stirred by the comments section, and for those who are prompted by the comments to carry out their own internet search for the lines and their possible significance.

60 Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjcMs3Yy-5Y. Quotations from YouTube comments preserve the spelling, punctuation and capitalization of the originals. 61 Christy Desmet, ‘Teaching Shakespeare with YouTube’, The English Journal 99:1 (2009): 65-70 (65). 350

Thus, in contrast to the YouTube comments on clips of Shakespearean performances and mash-ups analysed by Barbara Hodgdon, the comments on the Sock

Puppets tend to focus on the use of allusions rather than on the adaptation of the

Shakespearean plot, and on issues of interpretation, rather than on trading information about performers or comparing opinions. Allison Cole’s comment on Part Two of the studio recording – ‘oh hey so you do know that only juliet is 13? romeo was like 17 or something. alsoo you didnt include paris at all :( but that was probably for the sake of shortening it or something… anyway it was hilarious! keep it up :)’ – thus stands alone as an instance of fidelity criticism. As mindstormmaster comments on Part One of the studio recording: ‘For a rendition of Romeo and Juliet it sure has a buncha allusions to other plays’, while Kelly Scheffer writes on the same page, ‘Dire Straits and sign language? xD I love it!’ RetroChick2121 refers to Balthasar’s appearance on Part Two of the studio recording, with ‘ahhh my good friend Bathazar from N*Sync XD I love that bit’, while on Part One of the Komedia Brighton recording Rion Breffany understands Stage-Left Sock’s use of vocal-fry register to voice Tybalt as an allusion to

Star Wars: ‘Brilliant as usual. Esply liked the fact that the Stage Left Sock used “Darth

Vader’s” voice for Tybalt. And of course the song and “Remote Stab” -- brill bar none.

–r’. Viewers clearly receive the adaptations intertextually and with an awareness of genre, particularly in relation to Shakespeare’s play and his wider oeuvre, but also in relation to the multiple versions of the Sock Puppets’ adaptations. Two viewers request a Sock Puppet version of Hamlet (a1s1Tybalt, ‘Please do Hamlet’ and TANGOno5,

‘omg can u do a hamlet version’, both on Part One of the studio recording). On the same page, jinkiesscoobie compares the studio version filmed specifically for YouTube with ‘the original one’ (presumably the very early recording rather than the Komedia

Brighton recording): ‘i just don’t know about this video...sounds “too well” rehearsed. I

351 liked the original one...it seemed a little more random. Still my favorite video...but the first one was WAY better’. Two commenters appreciate the mixed genres of the ending: nhrc writes on Part Two of the Komedia Brighton recording, ‘I know it’s supposed to be sad, but I can not help but explode with laughter in the death scene’, while crazypersonC comments on Part Four of the very early live recording, ‘You have to love a funny tragidey :)’.

Whereas Shohet refers to YouTube interpretation of Shakespeare clips in terms of codex technologies, framing the interpretive act in the relationship between the work and a single viewer, the Sock Puppets’ YouTube comments pages demonstrate that interpretation can also be a collaborative activity among ad hoc groupings of strangers.

The options available to YouTube viewers for an interactive experience of reception all foreground the processes of reception: the meaning of the adaptations lies not only in the videos themselves, nor simply in one’s own interpretation of the videos, but in the experience of being part of an interpretive community, whether or not one contributes to the comments section. Not all references to allusions in the comments are to be relied upon: for example, Caredroia (in his own words, ‘I’m 23 years old and I know everthing, well that’s what most young men think isn’t it Mr Sutherland!’) has left a comment on part two of the studio version: ‘I loved it all, even the obscure musical refrence at the end, Tchaikovsky’s “Montagues and Capulets fighting scene” to the tv theme of steptoe and son, and back again’. The opening and closing moments of parts one and two are accompanied by music played on a harmonium: I cannot hear any reference to the theme tune to ‘Steptoe and Son’, although it may well be there, but the main theme is an adaptation of Prokofiev’s Montagues and Capulets theme for his ballet music for Romeo and Juliet. Nonetheless, such comments provide an environment in which a co-operative, collaborative reception practice based on the recognition of

352 allusions and the unpacking of moments of semiotic density is normalized and encouraged. To some extent, the verifiability of the recognition of an allusion and the accuracy of those described are of less consequence in the reception process than the fact that, prompted by internal cues and evidence of other viewers’ reception practices, a viewer looks for, and expects to find, a plurality of perspectives displayed in moments of semiotic density throughout the work.

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet thus draws together several of the themes raised in previous chapters – the suitability of the jukebox-musical format for destabilizing categories of identity, for valorizing diversity, for engaging with aspects of Shakespeare’s text in unusual ways, and for recuperating aspects of the performance history of the plays – and presents them in an extremely concentrated form. However, perhaps the most valuable aspect of this short work is the evidence it provides in its comments section of the desire among audience members to continue the reception process after the performance has ended, and to do so with others. If my own experience is anything to go by, what is expressed in virtual terms for viewers of the

Sock Puppets is also likely to felt as a pressing need for audiences of live performances of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare – a need to be part of an inclusive, albeit temporary, interpretive community that exists outside the time of the performance itself.

To return to my comments on the reception of burlesques in Chapter One, if jukebox musical versions of Shakespeare raise one’s awareness that one is never a perfect interpreter of such works, they are also capable of turning this awareness into a pleasurable social opportunity, an awareness of a need for collaboration. While one certainly exercises critical faculties when attending a Royal Shakespeare Company production of a familiar play, for example, these critical faculties tend to be directed primarily towards judgment, whether of acting standards, mise en scène, an actor’s

353 interpretation of a role, or a director’s interpretation of the play, rather than towards interpretation of what is already a well-known work. Conversations following a performance of Shakespeare’s more familiar plays are thus more likely to consist of a sharing of opinions rather than a communal piecing together of potential meaning in the work itself. With semiotically dense jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare on the other hand, a pleasurable sense of community can arise in recognising the value of one’s own imperfect interpretations and those of one’s friends, whose knowledge of Doctor

Who, of Dire Straits, of Cole Porter, of golden-age Broadway conventions or of LGBT history is as valuable a contribution to the work of communal meaning-making as a knowledge of Shakespeare. These imperfect interpretations, when pieced together and argued through, can provide a sense of communal spectatorial mastery that does not privilege a single meaning apparently inherent in the work, but that acknowledges the potential for multiple meanings and values the existence of multiple viewpoints on a single event. Shakespeare as a jukebox musical can thus be the catalyst for the pleasure of being with others, of the enjoyments of sociability. However, for live performances, participation in this communal activity usually requires the presence of relatively likeminded friends or acquaintances. That the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s short YouTube version of a very well-known play can be the catalyst for Shakespeare becoming a site not just for the expression of opinions but for communal meaning- making among diverse strangers separated in space and time is no small thing.

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CONCLUSION

This thesis has challenged much of the prior critical reception of jukebox musicals in general, while offering modes of reception and analysis specific to jukebox- musical versions of Shakespeare. As we have seen, the most prominent strategy in the existing critical writing on jukebox musicals has been to position them in terms of nostalgia for the time periods of their songs. This thesis challenges this positioning by demonstrating a range of strategies in jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare that undercut the sense of a stable and coherent past. While the costumes of the Troubies’ A

Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream reflect the fashions of the 1970s, the period of its songs, its characters use twenty-first century mobile telephone technology and refer to twenty-first century popular culture, all the while mixing twenty-first century

American English vernacular with Shakespeare’s early modern artistic diction. Kenneth

Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost includes numbers with choreography that is either noticeably more modern or more old-fashioned than the 1930s song and dance routines that make up the bulk of the other numbers. Play On! sets its action in a fictional version of the Cotton Club a decade after the historical club had closed. Its sets also quote artworks from the 1960s, in contrast to the musical’s apparent 1940s setting. All

Shook Up depicts a 1950s American town in which gendered patriarchal values do not have obvious currency. While each of these strategies is different, they all have the effect of obstructing a reception primarily predicated on nostalgia.

A recurring theme in the foregoing discussions has been the ability of jukebox- musical versions of Shakespeare to engage with issues of identity – more specifically, to disrupt fixed ideas of identity. Indeed, this ability is also evident in the forebears of the jukebox musical in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in terms of gender roles. Later works have extended this disruption of fixed ideas of gender roles to 355 other aspects of identity: gender identity and sexual identity in Play On! and the

Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet, and gender, sexual, class and racial identity in All Shook Up. This thesis has also demonstrated that while these works achieve similar outcomes they use a range of means to reach them. A knowledge of the original lyrics for the songs in A Cure for a Scold undermines the statements contained in the new lyrics and thus denaturalises patriarchal approaches to gender relations in an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. In Reynolds and Bishop’s

Comedy of Errors, a challenge to hegemonic gender roles within marriage arises from the conjunction of one scene in which a song usually sung by a man is revoiced for a female character, and a later scene in which the scenic effects relate to the lyrics of the previous scene’s song. Play On! ‘ghosts’ its on-stage characters with a set of historical figures and Shakespearean characters that disrupt a sense of stable identity. All Shook

Up plays with its own status as an adaptation, while the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet

Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet unleashes a barrage of allusions to other works, personalities and cultural references, sometimes simultaneously.

This thesis has demonstrated that jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare are capable of undermining identity politics. However, not in the negative manner suggested by commentators such as Frances Teague and Stephen Buhler, who in their assessment of Play On! draw attention to the lack of a denotatively homosexual character brought about by the absence of an analogue to Twelfth Night’s Antonio. The case studies do indeed suggest that jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare can undermine identity politics – not, however, by performing a conservative erasure of minorities but by engaging in a form of ‘queer’ politics that puts the very notion of fixed or reified identities into question. This potential to destabilise the sense of a fixed, graspable, reified identity means that the jukebox-musical format is particularly suited

356 to those of Shakespeare’s plays that have the instability of identity as a theme. It is therefore no surprise that multiple jukebox-musical versions of Twelfth Night and A

Midsummer Night’s Dream have been created. One might also speculate that the various jukebox-musical strategies for undermining a sense of nostalgia make the fluid spatiotemporal settings of Cymbeline ripe for a jukebox-musical treatment. As the

Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet demonstrates, the jukebox musical’s potential to destabilise identities can also suggest some of the fluctuating effects of earlier performance traditions in which the gender of the performer did not match the gender of the character performed.

What is particularly powerful about jukebox-musical engagements with unstable identity in Shakespeare’s plays is their ability to allow audiences not only to view characters who experience a sense of the instability of identity, but to experience that sense themselves. For audience members who are particularly invested in patriarchal, sexist, classist, racist or homophobic values, the experiences provided by jukebox- musical engagements with identity in Shakespeare’s plays can be threatening. This possibility is made clear by the physical attack by an audience member on one of the performers in the Australian King Lear and the temporary shutting down of the

Herriman High School All Shook Up. However, for others, the exposure of the instability of various aspects of identity, and therefore of identity-based power structures, invites a realisation that the hegemonic power structures of their own lived reality might be resistible, opening up a space for a renegotiation of identity in general.

That many jukebox musicals feature both relatively upbeat songs and aspects of the carnivalesque that themselves tend to destabilise identity and undermine identity politics means that for those audience members, this realisation can be a joyous communal experience.

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While jukebox musicals are well placed to deal with the instability of identity that is the theme of some of Shakespeare’s plays, they are also capable of replicating some of the more widespread pleasures provided by the instability of language and text inherent in Shakespeare’s wordplay that are often lost to modern audiences due to changes in linguistic usage, or a lack of reception strategies that require audiences to remain alert to the presence of wordplay for its own sake. Further, their different musical voices, sometimes singing simultaneously, foreground the range of viewpoints available on a given dramatic situation, reflecting Shakespeare’s foregrounding of multiple viewpoints in asides spoken to the audience. Paradoxical as it may seem, given that jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare all at least jettison some of his language in favour of modern song lyrics, and that some versions do not use his language at all, jukebox musicals are well placed to provide an experience that replicates the experience of hearing and seeing the surprising aural and performance texture of Shakespeare’s plays. To use the language of fidelity criticism, if they are flagrantly unfaithful to

Shakespeare’s text, they are nonetheless often more faithful to his linguistic, aural and performance texture than otherwise textually faithful productions.

Although jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare cannot be reduced to a formula, there is nonetheless a set of practices common to their construction that allows them to engage with the performance texture of Shakespeare’s plays. Among these are the practice of revoicing songs, of rewriting lyrics with the aim that audiences will bring a knowledge of the original lyrics to their interpretation of the new ones, and of making extensive use of allusions. At a relatively basic level, the provision of new lyrics for

‘Stayin’ Alive’ in A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream enables the pleasure of recognising that well-known lyrics have been replaced by new ones that fit both the music and the dramatic situation. Such an effect is best suited to songs where the

358 original lyrics are not strongly narrative or personalised. A more sophisticated effect is achieved when the original lyrics have the potential to undermine the new ones, creating potentially conflicting levels of meaning. Such an effect is more suited to songs with strong narrative content or personalised lyrics in the original, such as ‘Oh London Is a

Fair Town’ in A Cure for a Scold. A particularly complex effect occurs in the Sock

Puppets’ duet in Romeo & Juliet when music from one song is used to accompany lyrics that clearly relate to those of another, and which form a mise en abyme of the plot in which the new song is sung. While these effects create meaning, the allusiveness of that meaning creates its own pleasures. A reception strategy appropriate for jukebox musicals would include an alertness to layers of meaning and a willingness to experience pleasure in the discovery of ambiguity and multiplicity.

Another component of a reception strategy suitable for jukebox musicals is a sensitivity to changes in aural and kinetic texture, to transitions between speech and song, movement and dance – the vocal and gestural anacruses discussed in Chapter

Three. These anacruses are not only potentially dramatically meaningful in similar ways to the transitions in Shakespeare between prose and blank verse, blank verse and sonnet, speech and song, but they can also replicate some of the surprises created by shifts in the aural texture of Shakespeare’s plays that are less obvious to modern ears.

A further component of such a reception strategy, especially important given the range of ways in which jukebox musicals engage with Shakespeare’s plays, would be a willingness to approach jukebox-musical versions with relatively few preconceptions, but prepared to respond to cues to interpretation offered by the performance events themselves, including advance signs such as publicity and related material such as theatre programmes. A well-planned jukebox musical is likely to set out its modus operandi early on and to provide additional cues to reception as the work progresses.

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As the ambiguities and multiple layers of meaning that arise in the jukebox musical’s engagements with Shakespeare often rely on the audience’s knowledge of existing songs or recognition of allusions, a jukebox musical risks alienating audience members who are unable to activate the required cultural knowledge. Not recognising a song, or not being aware of changes to lyrics does not create a complete void in the performance texture: a song is still sung. However, unexpected laughter or other reactions from fellow audience members might suggest that one’s reception skills are faulty. While the limits to which this is acceptable before it becomes alienating will vary among audience members, it is probably inevitable that very few audience members will recognise every allusion, every change of lyric, or even every song.

However, it is not necessary that an audience member for a jukebox-musical version of

Shakespeare knows the play intimately and has a sufficiently vast range of popular cultural references to appreciate every allusion and recognise every song and variation on a song. A realisation that multiple meanings exist but are not immediately to be mastered is one of the potential pleasures of the form. A further pleasure – and a potentially political one, although not inevitably so – is that jukebox musicals serve as an occasion for the formation of collaborative interpretive communities. The audience member perhaps most likely to experience the pleasures and meanings of jukebox- musical versions of Shakespeare is one who is alert to changes in performance texture, who has the cultural knowledge to recognise a sufficient number of songs and allusions to the extent that he or she does not feel alienated, and who is willing to postpone the pleasures of a sense of mastery over the work performed until after the event, when this is achieved either in acts of pleasurable collaborative interpretation, or in pleasurable personal research.

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This thesis does not claim to be exhaustive in its treatment of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare. Jukebox musicals as a whole are not a fossilised art form, and new forms of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare continue to renegotiate the already fluid boundaries of the concept. However, the findings of this thesis might open up potential research pathways for other works. For example, a focus on the carnivalesque is likely to be useful in approaching the increasing role of audience participation, particularly in the form of dance, in works beyond those taken as case studies in this thesis. For instance, The Donkey Show’s performed narrative based on A

Midsummer Night’s Dream emerged out of a night club dance floor on which the audience were encouraged to continue dancing while the narrative unfolded. Ass: A

Midsummer Night’s Fever – a ‘70s Disco Immersive Dance Party Inspired by A

Midsummer Night’s Dream’ performed at the Ion Theater in San Diego over the summer of 2013 using 1970s disco hits from a number of sources – was more structured in its audience participation.1 Its publicity advertised that

this hour-long dance party includes a group dance lesson, dance competition and multiple door prizes along with food and beverages available for purchase … Guests are encouraged to don their disco- dancing best as they join a cast of motley merry-makers based on the Bard’s original star-crossed lovers lost in the deep of a magical forest. Such highly audience-immersive events also raise issues of research methodology unusual in the fields either of Shakespeare studies or musical studies insofar as the researcher becomes a participant as well as an observer.

The parallels between the performance textures of Shakespeare’s plays and jukebox-musical versions of them might inform approaches to other jukebox musicals.

For example, a further area of potential research might lie in the relationship between

1 Ion Theatre, ‘Ass: A Midsummer Night’s Fever’, http://iontheatre.com/ass-or-a midsummer- nights-fever/. An interview with the cast and creative team can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBJLIbVKdnI. 361 early modern performance practice and those jukebox musicals that transition from a version of a Shakespearean play into a song-and-dance medley that may contain its own miniature narrative structure. Return to the Forbidden Planet, for example, ends with a rock and roll medley on the theme of monsters. The medley is led by an apparently resurrected Doctor Prospero, who had left the spacecraft towards the end of the musical proper, presumably to his death. Such research might provide a sense of how early modern audiences experienced Shakespeare’s plays in the theatre: not as freestanding works, but as part of a theatrical event ending with a company dance or a dramatic jig, an afterpiece that, like jukebox musicals, incorporated existing songs.2

Jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare demand much of their audiences – a reasonable familiarity with existing songs, an openness to the possibility of unexpected meanings being revealed in the familiar, a willingness to harness that familiarity in order to recognize, decode and take pleasure in moments of semiotic complexity that other audience members may see as mindless entertainment but that are often difficult to articulate in words alone, and sometimes, but by no means always, a familiarity with

Shakespeare’s plays and a willingness to think these through in terms other than the linguistic. A close familiarity with a specific set of songs is often historically and geographically specific, and as a result the practice of incorporating existing songs to serve as media of communication within a dramatic world has often represented a minor strand in theatre history. Nonetheless, that history is long and the practice of applying it to Shakespeare’s plays has had moments of wider appeal: as we observed in Chapter

One, an awareness of this history can assist in conceptualising modern jukebox musicals. If this means that a critique of jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare’s

2 See Roger Clegg and Lucie Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs: Musical Comedy on the Shakespearean Stage: Scripts, Music and Contexts (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2014) for a study of the dramatic jig, including surviving scripts. 362 plays must accept that they are likely to remain a minor strand in contemporary engagements with Shakespeare, this minor status also allows them to create a sense of community, be it through their perceived status as a local phenomenon, their availability to online discussion, or their niche appeal to lovers of both Shakespeare and a particular type of song. In addition, this marginal status gives them a sense of newness and experimentation, even if they are a relatively widespread phenomenon. If jukebox musicals demand much of their audiences, they also offer rich rewards. For those ready to meet their demands, these versions are capable of providing thought-provoking, sociable and highly pleasurable encounters with aspects of Shakespeare’s plays – often aspects of similar semiotic density in which the instability of meaning and the inadequacies of language are foregrounded – that other modes of production are less well-equipped to provide.

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