Integration and Distance in Musical Theatre: the Case of Sweeney Todd

Abstract

The term ‘integration’ and the concept of the ‘integrated musical’ are generally taken to imply that songs, dance and narrative work towards the same dramatic end. This may mean that music, dance and book over-code each other, but it is also possible that they present different aspects of a character, atmosphere or situation such that a complex reading is presented. Is this still integrated? Can there be such a thing as a completely integrated musical made up of media that create meaning in different ways? And if a musical is perceived as ‘integrated’, how do the writers and creative teams deal with the problematic leap from speech to song and its distancing effects?

Notes

1. John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2003), p. 10.

2. Ibid., p. 76.

3. Peter H. Riddle, The American Musical: History and Development (Ontario: Mosaic Press, 2003), p. 40.

4. Ibid., pp. 48–49.

5. Riddle, The American Musical, 2003, p. 49.

6. I discussed the alteration of time and its relationship to the coherent presentation of psychological realism by performers of musical numbers in a conference paper, ‘Illusions of Realism in the Musical Play’ presented at the conference Song, Stage, Screen II, Leeds University, 2007. The examples in the paper were drawn from West Side Story.

7. Andrew Lamb, 150 Years of Popular Musical Theatre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 171.

8. John Graziano, ‘Images of African Americans: African-American Musical Theatre, Show Boat and Porgy and Bess’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. by William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 63–76 (p. 75).

9. Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves, p. 140.

10. Ibid., pp. 142–43.

11. Lamb, 150 Years, p. 257.

12. Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves, p. 258.

13. Ibid., p. 198.

14. Ibid., p. 295.

15. Ibid., p. 296.

16. Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves, p. 76.

17. In Everett and Laird, The Cambridge Companion, p. 125.

18. Millie Taylor, ‘Layers of Representation: Instability in the Characterisation of Jenny in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny of Brecht and Weill’, in Bertolt Brecht: Performance and Philosophy, ed. by Gad Kayner and Linda Ben Zvi (Tel Aviv: Assaph Book Series, 2005), pp. 159–76.

19. Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), front flap.

20. Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama, front flap.

21. D. A. Miller, Place for Us (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 57.

22. Presented at the conference Song, Stage, Screen II, Leeds University, March 2007.

23. Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 12.

24. Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, p. 12.

25. Brecht quoted in Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Show and the Gaze of Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), p. 36.

26. In Bertolt Brecht Collected Plays, ed. by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, vol. 2 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), pp. 87–90.

27. Carlson is referring to Chapter 22 of the Poetics in Theories of the Theatre (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 385.

28. Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, pp. 385–86.

29. Ibid., p. 361.

31. Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, p. 14.

30. See, for example, Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, Series in Affective Science, ed. by Patrick Juslin and John A. Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

32. Ibid.

33. Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1956), pp. 25 and 46.

34. Millie Taylor, ‘Collaboration or Conflict: Music and Lyrics by Brecht, Weill and Eisler’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 23 (2003), 117–24.

35. I have argued this in Chapter 6 of British Pantomime Performance (London and Chicago: Intellect, 2007).

36. This is a term used in film music and is derived from the cartoon character whose name it assumes. It is used to describe the type of music that aurally depicts the physical actions of a character. Pantomime examples include the use of a staccato rising figure in time with the actor's steps to depict creeping or the use of percussion effects to render painless slapstick blows. This device is used less overtly in many film scores.

37. Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, Sweeney Todd Vocal Score (New York: Revelation Music Publishing Corp and Rilting Music Inc., 1981), Nos. 2 and 2A, bars 201–62 (pp. 25–31).

38. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

39. Stephen Banfield, Sondheim's Broadway Musicals (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 292–307.

40. For example, in Todd's melody and the accompaniment at Nos. 2 & 2A, bars 7–8 and 13–14 (Vocal Score, p. 20), and repeated in the melody at bars 212–13 (p. 27). The motif appears in the accompaniment in the first four bars of the section (p. 19). It could be argued to relate to other motifs that appear throughout the score in melody and accompaniment.

41. The climax/scream is at No. 1, bars 130–35 (Vocal Score, pp. 14–15). The rising chord sequence begins at bar 114 (p. 12) and continues to the climax.

42. As, for example, in the introduction to No. 6 bars A–E (Vocal Score, p. 62) and again in the flute figures at bars 4–5 and 15 (pp. 62–63).

43. Vocal Score, p. 62.

44. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for this information. The text of The String of Pearls was published in book form by Wordsworth in 2005. Anon, Sweeney Todd or the String of Pearls: The Original Tale of Sweeney Todd, Wordsworth Mystery and Supernatural (London: Wordsworth Classics, 2005).

45. Steve Swayne, ‘Remembering and Re-membering: Sondheim, the Waltz, and A Little Night Music’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 1.3 (2007), 259–73.

46. ‘Pretty women’ and ‘A little priest’ are discussed at greater length in Paul M. Puccio and Scott F. Stoddart's chapter ‘It Takes Two: A Duet on Duets in Follies and Sweeney Todd’ in Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays, Studies in Modern Drama, 10, ed. by Sandor Goodhart (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 121–29. Sweeney Todd is discussed from pp. 123–26, although the whole chapter is interesting.