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.
For decades, the performance of Jewishness in the American musical theater balanced assimilation to a predominant Christian Anglo-Saxon society while retaining an ethno-religious identity. Much of the drama and humor in the performance of Jewishness on the American musical stage depended on that balance and how much to one side a performer, a plot, or a song weighted. This article demonstrates that William Finn’s songs for his musical Falsettoland replace this Jewish anxiety with gay characters experiencing a similar tension. They live patriarchal lives with heterosexual gender dynamics, while still in search of a homosexual identity in the age of AIDS. While this “new” anxiety comprises the serious portions of Falsettoland, Finn uses the characters’ Jewish identity to create comic songs. This article ultimately considers the implications that Finn’s construction and representation in song of Jewishness as essentially comedic had in the American musical during and after the 1980s.
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