What is a musical, anyway? - Dance Theater - dance and music theater, narrative - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Oct, 2002 by Sylviane Gold

WHEN MY COUSIN FROM PARIS VISITED me in New York for the first time at 20, she amazed me with her fluent English, her full command of decades of American television, and her extensive knowledge of Hollywood movies. (Ask her any question about Johnny Depp.) But she had never been to a musical.

It seemed a serious gap in her pop-culture database, so I determined to remedy the situation. The Full Monty was then in previews, and since Amandine had seen and liked the film, I thought that might be a good bet. I was right; she was hooked, and during subsequent trips she took in Rent and Chicago, which she loved, and several others, which she loved less.

When she arrived last July, she noted that Contact, which had won the 2000 Tony, was going to be closing. So she picked up a ticket at the half-price booth in Times Square and came back from the matinee stinging with disappointment. "Nobody sang!" she moaned. "I thought if it was a musical, there had to be singing." And then, my cousin Amandine asked a question whose answer could fill a book: "What is a musical, anyway?"

I assured her that this seemingly simple question did not have a simple answer. It had been asked before Contact first won the Tony nomination, and it is bound to come up again this month when the Twyla Tharp musical Movin' Out opens at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. It's the story of six lifelong friends as they make their way through the turbulent 1970s and '80s. Like most musicals, it has characters involved in a story and a series of songs, in this case from the recordings of the great pop balladeer Billy Joel. But, unlike most musicals, it has no dialogue. Of course, the same is true of Les Miserables. But in Movin' Out, the characters don't sing either--they are played by dancers whose movements tell the story as Michael Cavanaugh performs the songs onstage.

So why isn't it ballet? How is it different from, say, Paul Taylor's Company B, in which a group of highly differentiated soldiers and their girls make their way through the 1940s accompanied by the Andrews Sisters? Or, for that matter, Swan Lake?

The easy answer is that it's not a ballet because it's not being presented as one. But not every dance show that plays a regular run in a Broadway house can be called a "musical," no matter how loosely we define the word. No one thought of Tango Argentino and Riverdance as musicals, although they were Tony-eligible and had long runs on Broadway. They were dance revues--a term that wouldn't quite serve for Contact or Movin' Out. And of course there was no confusion when Matthew Bourne's updated version of Swan Lake came to the Nell Simon Theatre--that was just a ballet on Broadway.

The problem is that if we're going to say Movin' Out is a ballet, don't we also have to say that Les Miserables is an opera? Surely Les Mis is closer in both form and spirit to Verdi than it is to Rodgers and Hammerstein. And speaking of Rodgers and Hammerstein, what on earth would they make of Mamma Mia!? Could they see any kinship between that strung-together catalogue of ABBA hits and their gorgeously crafted South Pacific? The fact is, musicals are still evolving, and the minute we're prepared to say, "This is the definition," that's when the form stops growing and changing. That's when the form ceases to be alive. As long as there are innovators working in the field, the borders between musicals and opera and dance will remain imprecise and ever shifting.

The great American dramatist Edward Albee is a judge on Newsday's Oppenheimer Award Committee, which gives a prize every year to a playwright making his or her New York debut. I'm the committee chair, and one year, trying to make life easier on the committee, I polled the judges to find out if they thought we should eliminate one-person plays from the competition. Edward thought it was a bad idea. "I just can't envision giving the prize to a play with only one person on the stage," I said to Edward. I think of myself as adventurous in my tastes, especially when it comes to new ideas in the theater. But Edward, in his wisdom, showed me what a great imaginative distance I had yet to traverse. "I can conceive of giving the prize to a play with nobody on the stage," he said. And in that Albeean spirit, I will say to Amandine, and to anyone who's asking what makes a musical--let's just wait and see.

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for the Boston Phoenix, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The New York Times, and other publications.