Unrepeatable, Is That What You Are?

(This is a bit of an old article but still worth a comment or two)

More from the Guardian Theatre Blogs on musical theatre. This time it's Dan Rebellato venturing the opinion.

Money is, again, the starting point. (There does seem to be a train of thought that is highly suspicious of anything in the theatre that makes a profit). So recent boffo box office from the likes of Wicked and The Lion King are "likely to be a cause for grumbling as much as celebration". Well, you can't please everyone:

"Musicals generate polarised responses for two reasons."

I'm assuming he's taking about people who work in the theatre rather than audiences. Judging by the box office, at least, the response of the paying public generally seems favourably unilateral.

"First, musicals are pleasure machines: vast theatrical mechanisms to generate rapture, exhilaration and joy. If you go see a musical with a sceptical attitude, these efforts are bound to seem teeth-clenchingly awful."

This is true. But it's not the exhilaration and joy that make it awful; it's the creekiness of the drama. The same thing happens with bad political theatre where the message is hammered home at the expense of the drama. It all becomes too obvious and embarassing to watch.

"Second, the scorn for musicals on one side tends to inspire equally passionate defences on the other, and vice versa, so that musical audiences wind up getting mocked as much as musicals themselves."

And, presumably, the scorners get mocked for being joyless ponces.

“Those of us who work in theatre tend to think what is distinctive about the form is its unrepeatability, its liveness...Some musicals raise that to a high level. Seeing enormously skilful dancers and singers performing complicated dance steps and hitting high Cs is an exhilarating live experience. But other musicals have taken the opposite route. These are the shows in which liveness takes second place to smooth reproducibility"

Two points. The first is that his subsequent examples – Cats, Phantom and The Lion King - are not judiciously chosen. Cats is essentially a dance musical requiring plenty from the performers including high Cs. Phantom goes two tones higher to a piercing high E. As for The Lion King, I admit I've never seen it. But I hear the giraffes are t’riffic.

The second broader point is that I don’t think the theatre’s “liveness” is best equated with its “unrepeatability”. Yes, every theatrical performance is technically a one-off but, in reality, most performances and most aspects of a performance do get repeated to one degree or another. And knowing that a performance will be repeated doesn’t diminish my experience as an audience member. My experience is still unique. So I don’t see that replicating a West End show in Toronto or Sydney or Reykjavik really demonstrates that “liveness takes second place to smooth reproducibility”.

I suspect what Mr. Rebellato means is that some potential aspects of a live performance such as spontaneity and improvisation can be lost in a large-scale musical production. This is true but inevitably so; indeed the larger the production, the less spontaneity is possible. But rather than dimishing the “liveness” this kind of production can bring out another aspect of it. When a well-drilled group of people work together to turn a song and dance routine into a smooth effortless joy the results can be exhilarating; a kind of exhilaration only possible with a large-scale musical. Co-ordinated disipline is as much to be admired as spontaneity; repeatability can be a virtue. It’s the difference between a marching band and a jazz quartet.

For me the “liveness” of theatre is more to do with its immediacy and riskiness than its “unrepeatability”. This is a significant point when the article brings up the important issue of microphones. Miking can take away from the immediacy of the singing voice and the kind of audio trickery that “cleans up” a singer’s voice in real time also takes away the risk. There’s a genuinely useful discussion to be had here.

But unfortunately it doesn't happen.

Instead the article continues with some cryptic talk about miking being “symbolic displacement” in theatre’s “connectedness to time and place” which suggests the need for “a vision of value that can't be reduced to market exchange?”.

Told you: it all comes back to the money.