The Broadway stage of the twenty-first century has been one of great freedom. This freedom, both reflected in and directly inherited from Londonâs West End, represents the pinnacle of the form of musical theatre. As an art, the musical is distinctly American, but since the musicalâs Golden Age, the pond has been easily crossed and this form has been shared and developed globally, with the West End and Broadway standing as its beacons. Broadway is the model for how the form grows and develops. The form of the musical has seen great changes. The strict two-act structure with overture and entrâacte are no longer expected by producer or audience. Contact made way for dance plays to be widely accepted, even heralded by mass audiences, partially because of the attraction of the woman in the yellow dress. Contact , which debuted on Broadway in 2000, gives the audiences three discrete stories to witness, mostly through choreography. Movinâ Out quickly followed suit as a dance play devoted to the loosely based tales of growing up on Long Island in the Vietnam era. The form forgoes a well-drawn plot, eschews dialogue, and uses different performers to sing and dance the same role.
Musicals such as The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee experiment with form through the introduction of improvization and audience participation. In âSpelling Bee,â audience members become an integral part of the plot, obliterating the fourth wall. If/ Then and Fun Home experiment more with narrative form than theatrical form. If/ Then , a 2014 musical starring Idina Menzel, fresh from Frozen success, simultaneously tells the story of one woman, Elizabeth, and the two paths that her life could take, so that the audience, with the protagonist, exists in both realities at once. Fun Home uses three actresses to play the same character in three different stages of her life. The narrative trajectory and the actresses move in a seamless, somewhat nonlinear path through the play, with no intermission or division of acts. To varying degrees, audience has accepted these musicals and their new formats.
Along with form or structure, twenty-first-century musical theater sounds different. Lloyd Weberâs Jesus Christ Superstar was a rock opera extraordinaire debuting on Broadway in 1971, merging popular and theatre music. Audiences were meant to feel at ease with the sound, as if it was part of their daily soundtrack. Sondheimâs usage of minor keys and extensive recitative had the opposite effect, alienating the audience in a somewhat Brechtian fashion. Still, both of these dominate composers used traditional musical form and instrumentation to convey their sounds and stories. Broadway musicals sound different now. Rock and pop are standard with the music of twentieth-century icons such as Billy Joel, Green Day, and Bruce Springsteen being only slightly modified. Pop composers such as Sting, Duncan Sheik, and Sara Bareilles have tackled the composition of entire scores, while Rock of Ages , among others, features popular rock music from a variety of artists. Along with rock, and pop, now not only common, but somewhat expected in commercial musicals, we hear hip-hop, rap, country music, Latin rhythms, and spirituals. Hamilton remains the most wildly successful merger of musical styles and has made hip-hop standard Broadway fare.
Despite these recent changes in musical theatre form and sound, little has been done to advance or experiment with character portrayals on Broadway, especially those of mothers and mother figures. It is important to understand why that is and what, if anything can or should be done to change that.
The options for female characters, particularly mothers, in all narrative forms, are ones of constant critical inquiry. Rachel Blau Duplessisâs Writing Beyond the Ending , published in 1985, remains of the best studies of women writers and characters in the twentieth century. Duplessisâs work represented a radically new conceptual framework for understanding women writers and the potential they give to their characters. While the figures and texts she uses do not focus on drama or musical theatre, her strategy can easily be applied to any narrative text. The core of her argument is that women writers, especially contemporary women writers, see through binary distinctions and give their female characters more options than those traditionally allotted to women in literature. Her book ironically begins, âOnce upon a time, the end, the rightful end, of women in novels was social â successful courtship, marriage â or judgmental of her sexual and social failure â death. These are both resolutions of romance. Sometimes, the ends of novels were inspirational, sublimating the desire for achievement into a future generation, an end for female quest that was not fully limited to marriage or deathâ (Duplessis 1). The options offered to women were not many: marriage, death, or maybe, a future legacy not to be enjoyed by the woman in the moment. This is a worldview in which deferment seems to be the most freeing option. Such deferment of gratification can only serve to make larger and more demanding the process of establishing that which will allow future fulfillment. At best, that deferment creates anxiety for the woman, which she will never see, sated. At worst, it forces her to put forth effort with no satisfaction. This is the Lacanian Real, par excellence, and while in theory, at least for Lacanian devotees, that Real is the best we can achieve in our lives, as it frees us from all social and psychological refuse, it is most definitely not practical. The Real is a state of ultimate solipsism and a complete break with society. While in theory, this is appealing, in practical application, it leads to psychosis. What is needed and what Duplessis implicitly hopes and demonstrates is that women authors can give practical paths as examples for women, beyond societal conventions, that are not Real or psychotic. Those paths will not always be enjoyable or stable, but they will give greater range of opportunity.
Duplessis explains, âAs a narrative pattern, the romance plot muffles the main female character, represses quest, valorizes heterosexual as opposed to homosexual ties, incorporates individuals within couples as a sign of their person and narrative successâ (5). This is frequently what musical theatre, even great musical theatre, does. Guys and Dolls (1950) ends with a double wedding; Saraâs and Adelaideâs dreams of marrying and reforming low-level criminals come true. Uncle Abernathy even sings, âMore I couldnât wish ya, / than to wish you find your love / your own true love/ today.â His wish is for the happy ending to her romance. Loesser gives it to the audience, and the audience loves it. The neat conventional ending makes the audience feel at ease. The goal is met; the romance is resolved.
Even musicals that are considered innovative or edgy resolve themselves in ways that reflect Duplessisâs criteria. Jonathan Larsonâs Rent is generally considered to have ushered in a new wave of musical theatre that appeals to a younger, hipper demographic than Broadway was entertaining at the end of the twentieth century. An updated version of Pucciniâs La Boheme, Rent , is the story of a loosely related group of artists and their associates suffering through poverty, addiction, and the AIDS epidemic. Throughout the first act, Rodger and Mimi have an on-again/off-again âromanticâ relationship that devolves because of her drug use and his lack of willingness to disclose his AIDS diagnosis. When finally on the verge of death, Mimi and Rodger reunite. While Rodgerâs successful courtship of Mimi and her death are intimately related, co-dependent, in fact, they fulfill both of the outcomes Duplessis describes: successful courtship and social death. What at first glance appears to be one of the most innovative musicals of the end of the twentieth century is not. That is not to say that it is not a great work; it is simply not as atypical as we think.
Next to Normal , the brutally honest 2009 Broadway musical about a mother whose sonâs death and bipolar disorder led her to walk away from her husband and daughter gives us a glimpse of possibilities different from those Duplessis sets out. A contemporary riff on Nora Helmer, Diana Goodman struggles as she approaches her Real though her bipolar disorder and, at some points, actively resists treatment for her delusions, as those delusions bring her in touch with her dead son. By the end of the musical, Diana chooses to leave her family, to stay with her parents. Her choice eschews romantic and societal convention and in that denial of convention she is hopeful. The audience is left disconcerted though; Diana is a mother who chooses to leave her child, not for the sake of her child, but for her own good. The decision is still considered selfish, and although Diana is presented as hopeful at the end of the play, the audience relates more to her bewildered family. Audiences are not ready for a woman who makes choices that thwart societal norms.
Helene Cixousâs seminal essay, âThe Laugh of the Medusa,â provides a mechanism, albeit an extreme one, to write innovative portrayals of women, especially mother figures, on stage. While Cixous does not specifically write about theatre, she does not target, nor exclude any genre. In the first sentence of this essay, she asserts, âI shall speak about womenâs writing; about what it will doâ (2039). When written in 1976, Cixous knew that the womenâs writing for which she was advocating had been millennia in the making and would not be accomplished easily. Her essential argument, in its blunt and then radical assertion, is that â⊠woman must write womanâ (2041), meaning that no man can write a womanâs body or, in turn, a woman character. Cixousâs argument is that a woman must write her body; she makes the connection between a woman writing and a woman masturbating, both creative endeavors designed first to bring pleasure to the self, with little care for the effect the act might have on others. Masturbation, a secret pleasure, can come into the open when it is sublimated through the new body of a text. Cixous claims, â[B]y writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display â the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same timeâ (2043). Writing is a radical act of self-assertion and an act that allows a woman to claim her whole self. Although Cixous does not go this far, writing, as she describes, is an anti-Cartesian act of rejoining the mind and body.
It is not just writing itself that could enact Cixousâs anti-Cartesian stance, but other forms of art, especially musical theater, as it is able to connect multiple art forms: writing, music, performance, into one presentation. Purposefully, the term âunifiedâ is excluded here, because what slips away is as important as what comes together. Musical theater, even as it brings together multiple art forms, is not a unifying art. The struggle that some audiences have with accepting the form is that it does not often hold together in the way the audience wants it to. It is not ânormalâ for people to sing in the middle of an intense argument or even in the rain. Audiences perceive that lack of normalcy and that lack is the lynchpin in unification. In moving from Cixousâs perspective into those of Kristeva and Lacan, that slippage is the defining nodule of the art form itself and is also its most honest and female point. It is where the combination of art forms is exposed that it offers its greatest power and its greatest parallel with womanhood.
It is not just the mind and body of a woman herself that is brought together through writing, but also that of her child. Unlike Winnicott, Klein, Kristeva, and so many others in the psychoanalytic tradition who explore the dynamics of the mother/child dyad, and who assert, in varying ways, that motherhood produces a fraught, even contentious relationship between the mother and child, and the mother and her own body, Cixous seems to oppose that. Her image of motherhood is intensely positive. She writes about motherhood, âI donât mean the overbearing, clutchy âmotherâ but, rather, what touches you, the equivoice that affects you, fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches your force; the rhythm that laughs you; the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible and desirable ⊠In women there is always more or less of the mother who makes everything all right, who nourishes, and who stand up against separation; a force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out of the codesâ (2045). The impetus of motherhood, that which brings a woman to want to bear a child and that which touches the child in a positive, generative fashion, is also the drive to create narrative. The ability to conceive and bear children is also the ability to conceive and bear text. Cixous does not draw significant distinction. It is not, then the product, but the process that is important here an...