LIKE NIGHT AND DAY
posted by James Reel
I’m teaching a four-session course on the history of the American musical theater for the Arizona Senior Academy this month, and boy, did I get lucky with my content this past Wednesday. This week’s session was about shows before the development of the “integrated musical” in the early 1940s. From Oklahoma! on, all of a show’s elements—the book, the lyrics, the music, the dance numbers—ostensibly worked together to define the characters and propel the story. During the period I was talking about this week, though, any old song could be dropped into a show, whether it was relevant or not.
Well, on Wednesday morning I watched online the first episode of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the latest project from Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel and Firefly/Serenity. Whedon produced Dr. Horrible on the fly and has posted it free online (until July 20, at which point you’ll have to pay to download it from iTunes). As I was driving out to Academy Village, I impulsively resolved to work Dr. Horrible into my presentation. The subject is a geeky young man who aspires to be a supercriminal. (Remember the trio of nerd villains in Season 6 of Buffy? This guy, who goes by the name Dr. Horrible, is cut from the same cloth as Jonathan and Andrew, but he’s not as malevolent as Warren.) Trouble is, Dr. Horrible has a crush on a girl he sees every week at the laundromat, and his first opportunity to have a real conversation with her comes when he’s in the middle of committing a crime. Said crime is foiled by Dr. Horrible’s arch-nemesis, Captain Hammer, who thereupon starts making googly eyes with the bad doctor’s love interest. That’s the gist of Episode 1, which you can watch here, except I forgot to mention that every couple of minutes the characters break out into song.
My audience on Wednesday had no familiarity with the Whedon oeuvre, and I doubt that they had any interest in Dr. Horrible’s subject matter, but I forced them to watch a few bits and pieces of the first episode because I think it’s a splendid, compact example of the craft of the integrated musical. Every single song reveals what the characters want, and follows them as they resolve to set the next course of action. Oh, and the whole thing is very, very funny.
So then I contrasted that with the hodge-podge approach of the creators of American musicals from the 1850s through the 1930s, and I ended the class with a clip from the movie version of Cole Porter’s Gay Divorce (retitled The Gay Divorcee for cinematic release). Honestly, I hadn’t really watched the cllip all the way through before I plugged it into PowerPoint, but as I stood there watching the whole thing with the class, I realized that it perfectly brought the session full circle. Here was the great transition to the integrated musical: In the song “Night and Day,” Fred Astaire lays out to Ginger Rogers exactly what his character wants and tries to persuade her to succumb to his blandishments; this doesn’t work, so Astaire resorts to dance, and in the dance sequence the relationship between the two characters develops further. The whole clip really moves the specific characters and the show’s plot along, and I was able to tie this in with the Joss Whedon material I’d shown at the beginning of class. Symmetry is a lovely thing. Here are Fred and Ginger, courtesy of YouTube:
