Upon listening to "Rose's Turn" for the umpteenth time

The musical theatre is Aristotelian!

All musicals are about being recognized and known!

Every female character in musical theatre wants to be beautiful!

“Rose’s Turn” is the apex of the musical theatre form and also the beginning of the anti-musical. “Rose’s Turn” negates the principles of theatrical fantasy that ground the musical itself. Just as there are no more songs in Gypsy after “Rose’s Turn,” so the musical can never be pure again after Gypsy. The form begins its nose-dive into the theatricalism and anti-theater of the 1960s and 1970s. Eventually what was once a thriving form became a style that has then bred anti-musical-theatre-style musicals (Urinetown, Spamalot, The Producers, Bat Boy—how much more decadent can one get?).

And so, yes, the musical theatre began to die when Ethel Merman sang “Rose’s Turn,” and now it is dead, in the sense that it is no longer vital. But that does not mean that music in the theatre is dead. Nor does it mean that the musical theatre will not have many heirs, certain characteristics of which are already being suggested in concert-plays like Striking 12 and Passing Strange and in the through-sung theatre operas of See What I Wanna See, Rent, and most promisingly, Caroline, or Change.

Nor, incidentally, does it mean that great musicals do not continue to be written that employ the same forms and impulses as the musical. Legally Blonde and Wicked are two of the most commercially successful examples. Grey Gardens and Light in the Piazza two of the most critically successful. There also continue to be great well-made plays, great melodramas, and even great neoclassical dramas. This does not mean negate the fact that these forms are dead.

To throw a wrench into the works, imagine being a musical theater queen in 1959, ten years before Stonewall, and seeing “Rose’s Turn” for the first time. Consider how that experience is harder and harder to recapture as openly gay men are assimilated into normative society. The reasons for a form to die are cultural as much as they are aesthetic.

I do not have time to develop these thoughts. But perhaps I could write a dissertation on anti-theatricality in the musical theatre. It could include a theory chapter on the form, function, and phenomenon of musical theatre. Then a chapter on Kander and Ebb and Bob Fosse. Then a chapter on Sondheim. Then a chapter on musical theater since the 1980s and the “death” of the musical theatre. Then an epilogue that is a manifesto for new forms.

Now that’s an idea!

Pure Form in (of?) the Theatre

One of the great things about graduate school is that it is very possible to be discussing the same question from two different angles in two different (but related) classes simultaneously. One of these fortunate collisions took place for me this when I read both Joseph Chaikin’s The Presence of the Actor and Ignacy Witkiewicz’s “On a New Type of Play,” the former articulating the principles of the performance group The Open Theatre, the latter articulating the basic principles of the Witkiewicz’s imagined Theatre of Pure Form. The question both try to answer is—what is the “pure form” of the theater?

For Witkiewicz, the question is a frustrating one, doomed from the start, because theater is inherently a bastard art, lacking basic materials for formalism. He describes the problem as follows: “pure performance in time is possible only in the world of sounds, a theater without characters who act, no matter how outrageously and improbably, is inconceivable; simply because theater is a composite art, and does not have its own intrinsic, homogenous elements, like the pure arts: Painting and Music.” All we can do, he seems to argue, is to approach pure formalism as best we can, like a Zen “impossible task” that makes us stronger and better for the trying.

But hindsight reveals that Witkiewicz’s problem was staring him in the face. “A theater without characters who act” is indeed impossible, and that is why Joe Chaikin, in his search for the essence of theater, landed on the actor’s presence, the space between the actor and the audience, and the sounds and gestures that the actor makes as the essential building blocks of all theater. In other words, the space between the actor and the audience is the pure form that Witkiewicz, in his effort to unite the theatre with the formalism and Cubisms of music and visual art, could not find.

It is telling that Witkiewicz called his art a “Theatre of Pure Form.” The name suggests that there may yet be a theatre “of” something other than “pure form.” Chaikin, on the other hand, may be said to seek the Pure Form of the Theatre, or a form of which the theatre can be no other.

It just so happens that I am also reading Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre concurrent with both these performance theorists. Lehmann, in his neo-Hegelian glory, suggests a development in theatremaking from a text-based dramatic theatre to a formalist postdramatic theatre. Witkiewicz and Chaikin place themselves nicely on a continuum that leads ultimately to Kantor and Wilson. Indeed, Witkiewicz’s theatre of pure form begins as text, as a written play that is staged by actors and a director. Chaikin’s theatre, on the other hand, begins with the actor, out of whom sound, movement, and text are all generated as co-equal parts in the artistic whole. Purity, therefore, is within his reach as it is not, and never could be, within Witkiewicz’s.