The Secret Life of the American Musical - 读书笔记

我自己的读书笔记，写得太好了，忍住不整段copy

About Musicals

Is the American musical an animal or a machine? A lot of Broadway musicals are well-made machines, but the best ones rise above—they stand up and dance on their own, with their own unique beating hearts. This book is mostly about those very best ones, and about deconstructing the machined parts that allowed them to work. Why? Because that other element, the lightning bolt that gives life, can be described but never entirely understood. That intangible thing that separates the special Broadway shows from the routinely competent ones—My Fair Lady from Camelot, or Hairspray from Legally Blonde—is partly a matter of craft, but who really knows what makes that final difference happen? Every now and then the divine spirit comes down for a visit, that’s all. The idea behind this book, though, is that such blessed events don’t have much of a chance of happening unless the machine is up and running. Without the lungs and liver, there’s no way for the heart to soar or the brain to make lightning and thunder. So this book is an attempt to describe the mechanics of the great musicals—how they were planned and built, and why, so often, they get under our skin and remain a part of us for a lifetime.

Unlike in any other kind of story, the characters in musicals keep interrupting themselves to burst into song. They dance, they leap, they speak one line and sing the next; they convey what’s in their brains in dialogue; they turn what’s in their hearts into melody and movement. And when the men and women who are creating this odd hybrid form of storytelling do it brilliantly, audiences respond in a way that is as unique as the form itself, because the storytellers are operating on different parts of the human brain simultaneously. In that sense, musicals have more latitude than plays.

Love&Sex: The Broadway musical, in its heyday, was an integral part of human courtship for a considerable portion of the American population. It gave validity to the idea of taking sex seriously, while laughing at it, along with those of us who were perpetually trying to figure out romantic love. It showed us beautiful, sensuous, sinuous people trying to get it right, which inspired the rest of us mere mortals to redouble our efforts. It gave harmonic voice to desire and ecstasy in ways we never dared to do out loud in our own lives. And it endorsed the idea that romance—the kind that demands a bed right away—far from being destructive, was the first building block to happiness in society.

Fortified with a somewhat reliable set of blueprints, the Broadway musical had found its path—romance joined to social issues, sex, love, politics, and place. It questioned American attitudes while promoting American values, and it gave us a soundtrack suitable for courtship and moral authority in equal measure. It preached tolerance, promoted dizzy passion, endorsed personal responsibility, and ultimately told us that although we might have been carefully taught to hate and fear, we still had the capacity to overcome, to love and embrace

Show by Show

Oklahoma! (1943) Rodgers and Hammerstein While Oklahoma! did not have a plot worth talking about, it had a subject. It placed its rather routine romantic story against the context of impending statehood. It asked audiences to consider courtship (and marriage, and the inevitable next generation) in the light of what it meant to be an American, to become an American. Suddenly, sexual love was joined to responsibility to the land, to fellow feeling and patriotism, to an implied critical review of the democratic process itself.

Hamilton (2015) It implicitly raised questions about how race, immigration (Hamilton was born on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean), political cowardice, and class have been burning American issues since before the beginning of the nation and have never gone away. It also provided a fascinating discovery that should have been obvious: rap is a great way to tell a theatrical story. Unlike in classic pop-rock, where the lyrics tend to be abstractly poetic, ruminative, repetitive, or simpleminded pleas for love and/or sex, the best of rap wants urgently to communicate something bigger—a personal and political creed and a contextualized view of the world as it really is. As a key component of the hip-hop life, it is always on the attack, trying to change things and call things by their right name. In a rich and varied score full of jazz and rock influences, Hamilton uses rap sparingly, but when it does, the urgency is palpable.

Opening

The "I want" Song

Conditional Love Songs

The Noise

Second Couples

Villains

The Multiplot

Stars

Tent Poles

Act1

Intermission

Act2

The Candy Dish

Beginning to Pack

The Main Event

The Next-to-last Scene

The End