When is a musical not a musical? When it's an opera, usually.
But also, according to the Scottish playwright David Greig, when
it's a "play with songs". This, at least, is how he describes
Midsummer, now
playing at Edinburgh's Traverse theatre.
But what is a play with songs when it's at home? For Gordon
McIntyre, who composed the music for Greig's play, the difference
between his work and a musical lies in the role of the songs
themselves. In a musical, explained McIntyre to the BBC's
Culture Show, songs participate in the telling of the
story, whereas in Midsummerthey "express what
the characters are feeling and thinking".
He managed to get the point across, but you can tell he wasn't
happy with his answer. Nor should he have been. In musicals, as in
operas, it is precisely the function of the songs - or arias - to
give time and shape to the inner feelings of the characters on
stage. Arguably, Greig's story about two unlikely characters united
in love, song and dance, is a musical by any other name.
However, this prickly issue of categorising isn't made any clearer
when the appetite for musical theatre is booming on both sides of
the Atlantic. Take Caroline Or
Change, a work by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori,
which recently re-ran on Broadway, and is referred to as "a
through-composed musical" because there are no spoken lines in it
whatsoever. This has prompted some to ask why shouldn't just be
considered an opera. It seems like a fair question, until of course
you consider that there are many operas in the repertoire - from
Mozart's Magic Fluteto Berg's Lulu-
which make use of spoken dialogue. Likewise, Les Miserablesand Miss Saigonand are both known
as musicals without a single line being spoken in either.
So what, if anything, does the difference between opera and musical
theatre come down to? On one level, the distinction is simply a
pragmatic one. Presumably, Greig and McIntyre didn't choose the
term "musical" for the same reason Kushner and Tesori avoided the
term "opera": because the generic associations grouped around each
term would have given their audiences the wrong impression, if it
hadn't frightened them away altogether.
This article is by Guy Dammann and ran on www.guardian.co.ukon 19
August, 2009.
For the full article go to here
Midsummer [a play with
songs], Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 1 February -
10 March, 2012.