Theater may be an ephemeral experience on stage, but the ways we have presented and attempted to preserve American musicals everywhere else – the printed page, photographs, the cast album, film, video, online — have helped determine what the public wants to see on stage.
This argument explains the title of Doug Reside’s new book, “Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory” (Oxford University Press, 216 pages.)
When Reside, the curator of the much-beloved Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, talks about technologies “fixing” musicals, he doesn’t mean they repaired a broken Broadway. His argument is more sophisticated; he’s using “fixed” the way a creative team for a Broadway musical talks about how the show becomes “frozen” right before opening night: “Fixed” as in “the definitive version.”
The libretto for a musical – the story within which the songs are placed — had been “disposable scaffolding” in the nineteenth century. It was not necessarily “fixed” – did not remain the same – from production to production, because theatergoers sought out particular shows just for their songs, not for their story. But improved printing processes in the twentieth century made it easier and more economical to start publishing these texts. The result, Reside argues, is that the text of a musical began to be taken more seriously; it was treated as literature. “Of Thee I Sing,” one of the early beneficiaries of the more efficient, high-quality printing process, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1932, the first musical to be so awarded. This made the libretto much less likely to be changed from production to production.
The author uses the innovations in other technologies to make the same argument. The visual arts — poster art, photography, website images — helped determine how a particular show should look (its costumes, its scenery) from production to production. As the technology for recording music advanced, those shows that could be appreciated based on their audio alone “entered the repertory” (were produced frequently) more easily than those that emphasized other unrecorded or unrecordable elements, such as dialogue or visual design. The changes made in a film adaptation of a stage musical often changed the public’s expectations for the show, especially when home video starting in the 1970s made individual films permanently available to view and to study by individual consumers (as well as directors of future productions.) The author claims that Stephen Sondheim’s embrace of broadcasts and videos of his musicals is what turned him from “hardly a household name” to a “divinity” (pointing to a 1994 issue of New York Magazine with the headline: “Is Stephen Sondheim God?”), and thus — taking his argument even further — changed the “chronically conservative aesthetic of the academy” into accepting the musical in general as a form of high art.
Although Reside’s thesis hovers over each chapter, the bulk of the book recounts the history of the development of each medium, as well as its evolving interaction with stage musicals, focusing on individual examples in sometimes dense and technical detail. There is a chapter on bootlegging musicals (copying/recording and distributing musicals illegally) through the ages, and one on the companies that legally license musicals.
Reside’s last chapter, the most tentative but also the most tantalizing, focuses on digital theater. He wrote it in 2021 just as in-person theater was reopening after the pandemic shut-down had sparked a raft of innovation online, some of which became popular. He describes Dan Mertzlufft’s Ratatouille, and Joshua Gelb’s Theater in Quarantine.which produced such original work as I’m Sending You The Sacred Face and Blood Meal. He observes: “Although the broadcasts of theatrical performance have long existed, the interplay of digital video processing with live, intentionally theatrical performance is a new art form and one that might well develop to create its own repertory in coming years.”
Even more intriguing is his speculation, after recounting various Virtual Reality experiences that heightened theatergoer interaction, that “the lobby experience” before and after the performance may in the future become “no less part of the text of some musicals than the script, score or design…”
“Fixing the Musical” is a clear-eyed if implicit dismantling of the myopic view of theater as an unchanging ancient art form that has defiantly survived despite competition from new-fangled lesser forms of entertainment. The book demonstrates instead how much theater has thrived (rather than just survived) because of (not despite) the way it has collaborated (not competed) with the evolving arts and tools of modern life.
