“Why Aren't They Talking?”
The Sung-Through Musical from the 1980s to the 2010s

This Element explores the procedures and techniques through which music communicates drama when very little is spoken in a musical.

Alex Bádue (Author)

9781108791939, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 March 2022

75 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 0.4 cm, 0.13 kg

In the American musical theater, the most typical form of structuring musicals has been the book musical, in which songs interrupt spoken dialogue and add means to depict characters and dramatic situations. After 1980, a form of structuring musicals that expands upon the aesthetic conventions of the book musical came to prominence. Sung-through musicals challenged the balance between talking and singing in musical theater in scripts that are entirely or nearly entirely sung. Although often associated with British musicals, this Element focuses on American sung-through musicals composed and premiered between 1980 and 2019. Their creative teams have employed specific procedures and compositional techniques through which music establishes characterization and expression when either very little or nothing is spoken and thus define how the musical reinvented itself toward and in the twenty-first century.

Introduction
1. Opera or broadway musical: The human comedy
2. “You hear it sung . . . and the world seems different”: William Finn's sung-through
3. Scores
4. Nearly sung-through
5. “Maid for broadway”: The sung-through structure of Caroline, or change
6. “We sing it anyway”: The sung-through musical in the early twenty-first century
Epilogue: “What's this cheery singing all about?”
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Musicals [AVGM], Music: styles & genres [AVG], Theory of music & musicology [AVA]