SMT 5 (1) pp.

13–34 Intellect Limited 2011

Studies in Musical Theatre

Volume 5 Number 1
© 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/smt.5.1.13_1

VAGELIS SIROPOULOS
Goldsmiths, University of London, Ghent University

Megamusicals, spectacle and

the postdramatic aesthetics
of late capitalism

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
One of the most controversial aspects of the megamusical is the stage spectacle it offers. megamusical
The aim of this article is to define this spectacle as an aesthetic category and analyse spectacle
the reasons for its vast popularity in postmodern culture. A cultural reading of the late capitalism
megamusical’s staging vocabulary will show that the genre’s prodigious emphasis postdramatic theatre
on the visual aspects of the performance is an integral part of a postmodern mass- fragmentation
cultural aesthetic that emphasizes aesthetic form instead of narrative content. This modernism
aesthetic, which has its roots in modernist and avant-garde practices, can be defined postmodernism
as ‘postdramatic’ and its commodification in postmodern culture is closely related to
the late-capitalist reorganization of social life in spectacular terms. Moreover, cultural
critics, from Walter Benjamin to Gut Debord and Fredric Jameson, have shown that this
spectacularization of social life has a century-long history and intensifies over the years.
Based on this theorization of spectacular transformation as an ongoing socio-economic
process, this article will also trace the history of the megamusical’s postdramatic
spectacle. It will show how capitalism, throughout the twentieth century, cultivated new
modes of perception that made possible the introduction on the musical stage of new
methods of postdramatic organization, which affected Broadway’s aesthetic production
from the book musical, dance musical and concept musical to the megamusical.

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 Vagelis Siropoulos

Despite record-breaking grosses that radicalized the economics of musical

theatre as a business, bold staging visions that redefined what the musical can
achieve as a theatre genre, and a large number of international, chart-topping
hit songs that became the standards of a new generation of theatregoers, the
megamusical has mostly met the scorn of critics and the neglect of scholars.
As Jessica Sternfeld (2006: 5), who provided the first thorough analysis
of the genre, points out, ‘critics […] dislike megamusicals by virtue of their
popularity’ and ‘theater scholars develop an arrogant, even disgusted tone
when mentioning the megamusical, if they mention it at all’. Still, even these
scholars, who summarily dismiss the megamusical as an aberration and
anomaly in the history of the Broadway musical, ‘seem to understand that the
material demands investigation, thanks to its success and impact; they simply
do not want to do the investigating themselves’ (2006: 6). The aim of this article
is to continue the investigating that Sternfeld began with her book and shed
some light on one of the most controversial aspects of the megamusical: the
stage spectacle it offers. Critics have turned the megamusical’s emphasis on
the visual aspects of the performance into a joke, by repeating ad nauseam
Clive Barnes’ witticism that you leave the theatre ‘humming the scenery’ (cited
in Sternfeld 2006: 80). However, this is a joke that needs to be taken seriously,
because it raises important questions. Why do we witness this turn to spectacle
in the late twentieth century? Why do audiences respond enthusiastically to
this spectacle? How can we define the spectacle that the megamusical offers
as an aesthetic category? Can we trace a history of Broadway spectacle that
leads to the megamusical? To answer these questions, I shall employ an
interdisciplinary method of analysis, combining theatre and cultural studies,
and so historicize from both a synchronic and diachronic point of view the
advent of the megamusical and its spectacular aesthetics.

POSTMODERN VISUAL LITERACY

In ‘Postmodernism and the Market’, Fredric Jameson (1996: 274) wonders
‘how the dreariness of business and private property, the dustiness of entre-
preneurship, and the well-nigh Dickensian flavour of title and appropriation,
coupon-clipping, mergers, investment banking, and other such transac-
tions […] should in our time have proved to be so sexy’. For Jameson, this
‘sexualization’ of capitalism, its bureaucratic machinery and ideologies, is
explained, if we take into consideration the role that is played by the media
‘in its largest contemporary and global sense (including an infrastructure of
all the latest media gadgets and high technology)’ (1996: 275). With elec-
tronic screens invading our living and working environs in the form of LCD
computer monitors, plasma TV displays, mobile touch-screen surfaces and
large-scale projection architectural hypersurfaces, everyday reality, includ-
ing the most banal economic transactions, acquires a high-tech aesthetic
gloss; while, at the same time, every form of ideologically mediated human
activity goes through an elaborate mise-en-scène and flashes before our eyes
as an irresistible, highly absorbent image. The omnipresence of the techno-
logically mediated image transforms late-capitalist economy into a predom-
inantly aesthetic phenomenon, as commodities are identified with their
image to the point that their representational value thoroughly determines
their exchange value; and, for this reason, the constant revolutionizing of
the aesthetic realm becomes as important as the revolutions in the realms of
production and distribution.

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 Megamusicals, spectacle and the postdramatic …

This synergy between a capitalist economy, technology and aesthet- 1. In her introduction
to Lehmann’s book,
ics creates a new kind of visual literacy and sophistication in postmodern Karen Jürs-Munby
culture that radically affects the conception and production of mass-cultural situates historically
artefacts. For example, nowadays, many blockbuster action films, including the emergence of
postdramatic theatre
fantasy adventures and comic-book adaptations, are visually conceived and in the 1960s, when neo-
directed by auteurs from the art-house film world. The corporations behind avant-garde art forms
these films hire visionaries, like Alfonso Cuarón, Ang Lee, Tim Burton, Chris such as happenings,
environments,
Nolan, Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer and Peter Jackson, and expect them with Fluxus events and
each film to radicalize the optical and acoustic potential of the cinematic performance art or
live art all resulted in
medium itself, by exploring and maximizing the affective power of a phenom- a renewed attention
enologically rich and financially expensive audio-visual image; a process that to the materiality
makes astronomical budgets and technological innovation the prerequisites of performance in
theatre and in renewed
for ambitious mises-en-scène. A similar merging of corporate economic inter- challenges to the
ests with cutting-edge aesthetic form has been witnessed in the realm of dominance of the
popular theatre, and specifically the megamusical, when Disney entrusted text, challenges that
had previously been
the 1997 stage version of the hit animated film musical, The Lion King (1994), championed by the
to the hands of Julie Taymor. Initially, Taymor’s much-publicized involve- historical avant-garde,
most prominently
ment in a Disney project raised a few eyebrows, because of her status as Antonin Artaud. (2006: 4)
one of the more prominent figures of the American avant-garde theatrical Taymor received her
scene, whose output comprised highly acclaimed surrealistic ritual perform- theatrical education
in this post-Artaudean
ances, like Juan Darien, a Carnival Mass (1988) and The Green Bird (1996). theatrical environment
However, the decision of Peter Schneider and Thomas Schumacher – the and was initiated
then newly appointed president and vice president of Walt Disney Theatrical to postdramatic
performance practices
Productions – to hire Taymor was a well-calculated move. Their aim was to by Jacques Lecoq,
make The Lion King ‘[n]ot just different’, but ‘[p]ush-the-envelope unique. Joseph Chaikin and
Herbert Blau.
Astonishing’ (Schumacher cited in Singer 2004: 170), a show whose cutting-
edge visual style would bring an almost avant-gardist sophistication to musi-
cal theatre’s staging practices and change the Broadway establishement’s
hostile perception of Disney. In the end, their experiment paid off. Taymor’s
radical visuals won over critics and sophisticated theatergoers, and gave the
company much-needed artistic credibility. At the same time, they did not
alienate family audiences, at which Disney’s products are mostly targeted,
as even small children currently acquire, through their exposure to digitally
animated films and video games, a visual sophistication unimaginable for
adult middle-class audiences 50 years ago.
To use a current term, Taymor’s directorial vocabulary can be described
as ‘postdramatic’. In his influential study, Postdramatic Theatre, Hans-Thies
Lehmann (2006: 51) labelled as postdramatic every kind of theatrical experi-
mentation that achieves the ‘retheatricalization’ of theatre through a renewed
emphasis on the theatricality and materiality of the performance image.1 In
postdramatic performances, the theatre is liberated from the dominance of the
dramatic text, which may be totally extinct or ‘merely a component with equal
rights in a gestic, musical, visual, etc., total composition’ (2006: 46). In The
Lion King, Taymor retained a dramatic dimension by using and even expand-
ing on the film’s popular narrative, but in true postdramatic fashion, the
narrative itself was not the main attraction of the show. Rather, it functioned
as a guideline in a visual labyrinth, which offered a journey to the African
landscape as seen through the eyes of Taymor’s postdramatic imagination.
Throughout The Lion King, Taymor frequently used her favourite technique of
‘integrat[ing] the human form mostly as an element in landscape-like spatial
structures’ (2006: 81). In this way, she achieved the de-anthropomorphiza-
tion of the theatrical space and its transformation into a vast canvas, upon

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 Vagelis Siropoulos

2. For an extensive which an impressionistic representation of the African savannahs and tropi-
description of
the postdramatic
cal jungles was painted, through the irreducible interactions of architectural
directorial vocabulary mobile structures, lighting, human bodies and stage props (mainly puppets
that Taymor employed and masks). Taymor’s phenomenologically dense and rich landscape struc-
in The Lion King, see
Siropoulos (2010b). tures subjected the musical stage to an aggressively pictorial and formalistic
directorial gaze, offering a ‘visual dramaturgy’ (2006: 93) that primarily draws
3. It must be noted
that Lloyd Webber attention to the overarching stylistic concept of a performance rather than its
always expands on his narrative organization.2
classical references
and transforms
them into something
unexpected and new. POSTDRAMATIC COMPOSITIONAL METHODS
See, for example,
Snelson’s analysis
Although Taymor’s radical visuals astounded both audiences and critics, the
(2004: 172–73) of Lloyd overall postdramatic sensibility that permeates the staging of The Lion King
Webber’s appropriation was not altogether new. Indeed, the megamusical seems to be defined by a
in ‘I Don’t Know
How to Love Him’ of postdramatic logic, one that backgrounds narrative structure and foregrounds
the slow and lyrical the visual aspects of the performance. The megamusical was first popularized
second movement of by the British composer and producer Andrew Lloyd Webber. His method
Mendelssohn’s Violin
Concerto in E minor. of musico-dramatic composition can be described more as postdramatic than
traditionally dramatic and, for this reason, lends itself very well to visually
driven stagings.
The postdramatic character of Lloyd Webber’s theatrical composi-
tions derives mainly from his tendency to think not so much in terms of
psychologically developed characters and strongly sustained narratives,
but rather in terms of semi-autonomous aural images and dramatic high-
lights, almost self-contained melodic and dramatic fragments. This empha-
sis on the relevant autonomy of the melodic and dramatic fragment betrays
the influence of the concept album, which was popularized by The Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and The Who’s Tommy (1969).
The influence of Tommy, in particular, is evident in the narrative organiza-
tion of Lloyd Webber’s first international hits, Jesus Christ Superstar (1971)
and Evita (1978), which were originally released as concept albums in 1970
and 1976, respectively. Both musicals follow Tommy’s example: they offer a
cycle of pop/rock songs that form a highly fragmented, episodic narrative,
which, from a theatrical point of view, creates a revue-like effect. Jesus Christ
Superstar gives us a series of vignettes from Jesus Christ’s last days on earth,
while Evita, as Director Harold Prince described it, is a ‘documentary revue’
(Ilson 2000: 266), not so much an examination of the central character as a
collection of fragmented highlights from her life. The revue effect is even
more pronounced in Cats (1981) and Starlight Express (1984), which present
the universe of anthropomorphic felines and trains respectively in a series of
loosely tied pop songs.
The influence of the album format is also manifested in the significance
that Lloyd Webber assigns to every individual song or melodic fragment. With
the exception of some more dissonant parts, every melody in his scores must
have hit potential: it must be able to grab the audience’s/listener’s attention,
create an immediate impression and provoke an instant reaction. Many of Lloyd
Webber’s oft-criticized compositional techniques derive from his tendency to
conceive his scores as a collection of immediately accessible, instantly memo-
rable tunes. For example, his reworking of classical melodies in a pop context
creates a feeling of security and familiarity: hearing a melody for the first time
and still feeling that you have heard it all before.3 Similar purposes also serves
his frequent use of pastiche. As a compositional technique, pastiche relies on

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 Megamusicals, spectacle and the postdramatic …

the audience’s familiarity with a specific genre in order to generate an immedi- 4. Mordden sees
pop-opera as the
ate reaction. Pastiche-driven shows, like Cats, Starlight Express and Joseph and descendent of ‘the big-
the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968), transform the aural experience of a emotion shows’ (2004:
musical score into a euphoric delirium, a perpetual ‘high’, because each song 90), like Show Boat
(1927) and the 1920s
fulfils to the extreme what Theodor Adorno (2001: 32) defines as the ultimate romantic operettas
goal of popular music: the delight in the isolated moment of enjoyment. by Romberg and Friml
Lloyd Webber is the indisputable master in achieving a ‘sensually rich and that employed a similar
grandiloquent lyricism.
full sonority’ (52) in the musical present. This ability is also manifested in the This lyricism is also
construction of his trademark power-pop ballads. These ballads appropriate evident in Rodgers’
more anthemic
an operatic, Romantic musical flavour that makes them sound like pop arias, ballads, like ‘You’ll
because they offer ‘an opera version of pop: building opera’s intensity out of Never Walk Alone’
the vernacular musical idiom’ (Mordden 2004: 82).4 For example, in ‘Memory’, from Carousel (1945)
and ‘Some Enchanted
one of Lloyd Webber’s most successful and prototypical big ballads, he starts Evening’ from South
with the tender statement of an extravagant, lush melodic hook phrase, Pacific (1949). The
moves to a first slight variation, then reinstates the hook phrase, orchestrated latter influenced Lloyd
Webber significantly
in an enriched and more dramatic manner. The next move is to push the song (Snelson 2004: 38).
into overdrive with a sudden instrumental break, an unexpected modulation
and a thunderous orchestral climax. The effect achieved is a virtual one: you
have the feeling that within less than four minutes you have travelled a long
musical distance, while you have actually remained at the same point, listen-
ing to the same melodic statement. The trick is, of course, that you do not
move horizontally, as metaphorically happens with the florid and curvilin-
ear melodic lines of many operatic arias, but vertically: as the same melody is
repeated with renewed affective momentum, you have the sense that you are
rapidly shooting up to the top floor of a skyscraper.
The recycling of his big melodies also serves the purpose of achiev-
ing this sensually rich sonority throughout the score. In The Phantom of the
Opera (1986), recycled fragments from Lloyd Webber’s big vocal ballads, as
well as a large number of recurring shorter but equally impressive themes and
motifs, allow him to move swiftly from one melodramatic highlight of Gaston
Leroux’s novel to the next, without sacrificing melodic momentum. However,
apart from a few instances in which the repeated melodies are used in order to
capture in broad strokes changing character attitudes, Lloyd Webber’s distri-
bution of the musical material does not obey a strict dramatic logic. Instead of
identifying characters with specific melodic phrases and following their devel-
opment through subtle alterations of the musical material, Lloyd Webber uses
his recurring melodies as interchangeable emotional landscapes that can be
freely re-employed and recombined in a variety of different dramatic contexts.
Lloyd Webber’s predilection for excessive fragmentation and occasionally
indiscriminate recycling of the musical material results in musico-dramatic
texts that may appear too elliptical, with underdeveloped and two-dimensional
characters and gaps in their dramatic construction. However, the composer
compensates for this subversion of the temporal development of character and
narrative as well as his disregard for the dramatically consistent distribution
of the musical material along a linear-successive, syntagmatic axis, by
proposing instead a spatial organizational logic and a vertical, paradigmatic
method of construction. His scores offer coherently constructed aural
environments, organized around an overarching stylistic or thematic concept.
For example, the combination of rock with Romantic music in Jesus Christ
Superstar creates a rock-operatic universe, which encapsulates in aural terms
the show’s organizing thematic concept: the juxtaposition of the sacred and
the profane, the divine and the secular (Siropoulos 2009a: 155). Similarly, in

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5. The show’s greatest The Phantom of the Opera, Lloyd Webber constructs one more unified musical
power is that it offers
a total environmental
universe, in which every melodic and harmonic phrase derives from the
experience, which world of opera: classical opera, romantic opera, light opera, modernist opera
transports the audience or his own unique pop-operatic sound. His overlapping, complex allusions
to a nineteenth-century
gothic phantasmagoric and references to the world of opera and classical music create a virtual aural
dreamland. Lloyd architecture, in which every phrase constitutes a portal to a different lush,
Webber’s success as extravagant soundscape (2010a: 156).5
a composer lies in the
fact that, despite the
show’s occasionally
stunning visuals, the POSTDRAMATIC MISE-EN-SCÈNE
score itself, as Sternfeld
(2006: 263) points out, Lloyd Webber’s tendency to construct overwhelming aural environments
‘does a great deal of the rather than coherent narratives and his redefinition of the musical theatre
transporting that an
audience experiences’ experience as a barrage of self-contained aural images and dramatic high-
through ‘the unity of lights have invited stagings that disregard the rules of scenic verisimilitude in
the sound, and the favour of a more imagistic mise-en-scène that exploits the affective power of
consistency of the rich
romantic atmosphere’. the visual image and the sensory impact of the theatrical space. For example,
Jesus Christ Superstar director Tom O’Horgan, who had been heralded as the
6. Artaud’s theories
and practices were ‘high priest of off-Broadway’ (cited in Horn 1991: 40), interpreted visually the
introduced to New score’s blend of hard-edged contemporary rock and broad-phrased Romantic
York’s avant-garde
theatre scene by the
lyricism as a combination of a post-hippie glam-rock show and a biblical epic.
founders of The Living To Lloyd Webber’s nonstop succession of arresting aural images, O’Horgan
Theatre, Julian Beck proposed a parade of haunting visual compositions. His avant-gardist dislike
and Judith Malina.
For the rise of the of fourth wall realism enabled him to explore the visual dynamics of the stage,
American experimental, by employing stage design in an abstract, architectural and symbolic manner,
performance theatre, and light design in a painterly and hallucinatory way. Every musical number
a quintessentially
postdramatic form of was conceived as a unique stage picture, combining epic grandeur and theat-
theatre, and O’Horgan’s rical gigantism with a suffocating Las Vegas glitz in order to represent Jesus
part in it, see Lester
(1968).
Christ as a contemporary mass media showstopper, devoured by a celebrity
culture that crucifies its idols with the same ease that deifies them. Like so
many avant-garde directors of the late 1960s, O’Horgan was influenced by
the theories of the French theatre Director Antonin Artaud,6 whose ‘theatre of
cruelty’ was aspiring to be a living nightmare, a ‘contagious delirium’ (Innes
1999: 143), embodied in a series of paroxysmic images able to ‘shake the
organism to its foundations and leave an ineffaceable scar’ (Artaud 1958: 77).
O’Horgan’s paroxysmic images of mass-media grotesqueness, vulgarity and
brutality in Superstar had the exact same effect, creating less a conventional
musical play than a postmodern carnival ritual.
In his staging of Evita, Prince was also influenced by avant-garde theat-
rical practices, and, more specifically, the German political avant-garde. His
choice was an appropriate one, because Evita is a political fairytale, a rags-
to-riches story played against a vast historical canvas, where political and
economic forces, like fascism, capitalism and communism, collide. Lloyd
Webber’s score captures all the wish-fulfilling elements inherent in this epic
fantasy of self-apotheosis, in a series of overtly emotional anthems and glossy
easy-listening ballads. At the same time, it exposes the horrifying emptiness
of Eva’s megalomania as well as her manipulation of the masses through the
penetrating use of modernist dissonance and melodic angularity (especially in
the use of tritones), which undermine the sentimental lyricism of the score’s
more emotional moments and create a sinister aural environment that befits
the overall cynicism of the story (Walsh 1997: 105). In order to represent
Eva as a Dior-clad embodiment of fascism, Prince drew on Erwin Piscator’s
epic theatre that depicts historical epochs in their totality and the clash of

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 Megamusicals, spectacle and the postdramatic …

political forces on a global scale. He employed Piscator’s multimedia tech-

niques, non-representational, abstract and constructivist scenic structures that
constantly reshape the playing area, and immersive sound design, and deliv-
ered a breathtaking montage of occasionally gigantic and intensely synaes-
thetic stage pictures. The sheer audio-visual power of numbers like ‘A New
Argentina’, depicting fascist spectacle in ways that suggested the Nuremberg
rallies (Citron 2001: 233), made Evita less a traditional musical than the theat-
rical equivalent of a massively staged political pageant.
Cats and Starlight Express, both directed by Trevor Nunn, the former
artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, pushed the postmodern
musical even more aggressively towards the direction of highly immersive and
synaesthetic experience. In Cats, which was based on T. S. Eliot’s poems for
children, Lloyd Webber avoided the use of exclusively period musical references
that might befit the poems’ 1930s London setting. Instead, he constructed a
fantastical aural topography, where music-hall ballads, 1980s synth-pop, Mick
Jagger, Henry Mancini and Puccini could harmoniously coexist. Nunn, along
with stage designer John Napier, interpreted this aural topography in visual
terms as a gigantic theme park, the theatrical equivalent of Disneyland, where
recycled visual and thematic references from high and pop culture could be
juxtaposed in a playfully dissonant manner: sci-fi films, modernist existential
angst, 1980s fads (leg warmers, punk haircuts, New Wave make-up),
classical ballet and modern dance. This theme-park aesthetic led to a more
environmental and interactive staging: the spectators were bombarded by the
cascading visuals and the heavily amplified sounds in order to be immersed
in the performance, which resembled a roller coaster ride. Starlight Express
recreated Cats’ environmental and interactive staging on such a gargantuan
scale that it made its predecessor look like an expensive school performance.
Lloyd Webber found an aural analogue for racing speed and high energy, that
could musically represent the universe of competing trains, in all the early
1980s heavily synthesized and rhythm-driven genres: FM rock, dance pop,
R&B, hip hop. Accordingly, Nunn communicated the excitement of racing
speed by putting the performers on roller skates and transforming the theatre
into a huge skating arena, offering ‘a vast experience-in-the-round’ (Walsh
1997: 159) of such a visceral impact that it could compete with the dizzying
rushes of speed that blockbuster films like Star Wars (1977) popularized.
Finally, with The Phantom of the Opera, Prince offered one of the most
iconic stagings of a megamusical. Lloyd Webber’s score is structured around
the juxtaposition of romantic melodies, representing in aural terms a world
of idealized romance that the titular hero can access only in fantasy, and an
occasionally raw and dissonant musical idiom, which alludes to Schoenberg,
Debussy and Stravinsky (Snelson 2004: 116), capturing the hero’s aggres-
sion and repressed sexuality, all the longing and suffering that the civilized
Parisian society refuses to see. Prince expressed visually the explosion of
these repressed emotions as a menacing darkness that spreads like a plague
from the subterranean depths and transforms the fictional opera world into
a dangerous, magical, cursed, haunted space with its own independent will.
The flying drapes, ascending and descending chandelier and quivering expres-
sionistic shadows create a gothic dreamland, constantly oscillating between
fantasy and reality. A hallucinatory atmosphere permeates the show and is
expressed in a series of enigmatically romantic images and sequences, like the
lake scene, in which the Phantom and Christine descend to the lower depths
of the opera house, and, shrouded in an eerie mist, sail across a subterranean

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 Vagelis Siropoulos

7. The category of the lake on a gondola, while dozens of glowing candles rise mysteriously out of
high-concept film
includes many genres,
the water. This scene gives us the pictorial staging aesthetic of the megamusi-
from comic-book cal at its very best. As the descending moving platform, sailing gondola and
adaptations, like rising candelabra are synchronized to the music, the set design is liberated
Batman (1989) and sci-fi
adventures, like Total from its immobility as a static frame of the stage action and is integrated in
Recall (1990), to action- an overall pattern of sound, colour and movement in order to create an all-
comedies, like Beverly encompassing stage picture, a three-dimensional dream image.
Hills Cop (1984), and
music-driven films, like What the account of these innovative staging visions shows is that
Flashdance (1983). For long before Taymor’s crossover to the mainstream, the megamusical had
an exhaustive analysis
of the high-concept
already been committed to revolutionizing popular theatre’s aesthetics.
film, see Wyatt (1994). Moreover, it is not accidental that these shows were staged by directors like
O’ Horgan and Nunn, whose aesthetic had been formed in the avant-garde
and subsidized theatre, and, for this reason, were able to bring a refreshing
directorial vocabulary to the mainstream. Even Prince, who was already an
established commercial director, was distinguished among his peers for his
idiosyncratic staging aesthetic, which was heavily influenced by the German
as well as the Russian avant-garde. However, despite its innovations, the
critics – especially the American ones – never favoured the megamusical,
especially shows by Lloyd Webber. These were constantly judged against
the aesthetic criteria set by the character- and narrative-driven musical
plays of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein; critics seemed to derive
particular pleasure from pointing out how Lloyd Webber fails in terms of
character development and overall narrative organization. They also tended
to separate the musico-dramatic texts from their stagings, which occasionally
drew favourable and, in the case of Prince, enthusiastic notices, without
taking into consideration that many of the directorial choices were dictated
by Lloyd Webber’s choices as a (post)dramatic composer. Finally, it became
fashionable to dismiss megamusicals as nothing but ‘spectacles’, comfortably
ignoring, until Taymor’s tour-de-force made it impossible to ignore, that
what summarily and derogatorily is dismissed as ‘spectacle’ may instead
have a different aesthetic value, which must be appreciated according not to
dramatic but rather to postdramatic evaluating standards.

HIGH CONCEPTS, POSTMODERN TEXTUALITY AND POSTDRAMATIC

FORMS OF NARRATIVE ORGANIZATION
We have already seen that the concept album, which influenced the mega-
musical, offered a new model of elliptical, highly fragmented narrative. In the
1980s, Hollywood’s so-called high-concept blockbuster films popularized a
similar model.7 With their character and narrative arcs reduced to telegraphic
shorthand, these films were pitched, funded, produced and marketed by using
a single ‘big idea’, a ‘high concept’, that could be boiled down to a simple
catch phrase – or, as in the case of Top Gun (1986), a single image: ‘two guys
in leather jackets and sunglasses standing in front of the biggest, fastest […]
airplane you ever saw in your life’ (Prosner cited in Shone 2004: 174). This
idea was elaborated excessively and obsessively in a series of rapidly edited
images, matched to a collection of high-energy pop songs or nearly continu-
ous symphonic scores. The audio-visual vocabulary of the high-concept film
was influenced by the aesthetic of MTV, which introduced in the early 1980s
new forms of non-linear, disjointed montage, privileging the rhythmical edit-
ing of brief shots to the musical tempo of a song for the achievement of the
highest possible aesthetic density and affective intensity in the minimum

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 Megamusicals, spectacle and the postdramatic …

amount of time. And, of course, MTV provides its own postdramatic form of 8. In the updated and
revised edition of
narrative organization with videos that give us in three or four minutes only Lehman Engel’s Words
the highlights of a plot, resembling the trailer of a feature film. with Music: Creating
Such telegraphic narratives, as well as the audience’s ability to identify the Broadway Musical
Libretto, Howard
with them, are only conceivable in postmodern culture, where the incessant Kissel observes how
dissemination and recycling of standardized narrative structures by the mass this telegraphic
media enables fragments from a plot or single images to emit in a telegraphic condensation of
narrative meaning
manner ‘a complete narrative message in [their] own right’ […] to soak up alters the dramatic
content and to project it in a kind of instant reflex’ (Jameson 1998: 160).8 It structure of the
postmodern musical
is this ability of images to project instantly narrative content that enables an as well as audience
essentially plotless show like Cats to communicate effectively, as Sternfeld reception: ‘Often
(2006: 129) points out, mainly through the actor’s gestures ‘a wealth of perfectly serviceable
books now strike us as
actions, characters, and relationships’. Similarly, Les Misérables (1985) must plodding because we’ve
be seen as a show that would have been impossible to be conceived, executed become so accustomed
and enthusiastically received before the advent of such postdramatic narrative to absorbing great
amounts of information
forms. Its libretto runs through Victor Hugo’s vast novel like a camera, selecting in flashing images’
for dramatization only high points in the action. Background information (2006: 69). Moreover, in
his discussion of The
and exposition are largely absent and the connections between the events Lion King, he recognizes
are occasionally provided through projections on a screen. Such fragmented the advent of a new
narrative structure achieves a breathless montage effect, a sweeping editing form of postdramatic
musical theatre that
that joins together all the big moments and the most dramatic of confrontations ‘succeed[s] largely
in the novel. This telegraphic condensation and simplification of narrative because of its visual
meaning is what enabled the directors Nunn and John Caird to create a theatre imagination’ (2006: 69).

of powerful stage pictures, dissolving gracefully into each other in order to

generate the total flow of images that ‘MTV’ first popularized.
Accordingly, Phantom must be seen as a characteristic product of the
1980s; probably, the ultimate high-concept megamusical. The show’s logo,
a white mask and red rose against a black background, immediately reveals
the high concept of the production: the transformation of the Phantom
from a gothic villain and hideous monster into a star-crossed lover of tragic
proportions. This concept is further elaborated in a series of evocative
images: from the Phantom’s first regal appearance in Christine’s mirror,
the lake scene and the subtly choreographed seduction of ‘The Music of
the Night’, to the humiliating public unmasking of the Phantom during the
performance of Don Juan Triumphant, and his climactic erotic union with
Christine, when she kisses him without any sign of revulsion. If we examine
the dramatic development of the show’s premise, the Phantom’s oscillation
between terrifying psychotic murderer and sympathetic tormented lover will
seem uneasy, making his characterization the synthesis of antithetical traits
that never results in a convincing psychological portrait. However, the lack
of a consistently developed character arc works in the show’s favour, as it
allows various interpretations of the Phantom, from a symbol of the repressed
sexual longings of Victorian middle-class society, to a diabolic Byronic hero, a
Nietzschean superman and a tormented modernist artist.
This interpretative polyvalence is further reinforced by various textual,
aural and visual references to the art and intellectual world of a European Belle
Epoque at the crossroads between romanticism and modernism: from the
histrionic heroics of Meyerbeer to the subtle suggestion of a forbidden sexuality
of Sadean excess, from the elegance of Degas’ ballerinas to the primitivism
of Stravinsky’s ballets and from gothic literature’s conventional oppositions
between the angelic and the demonic, the chaste and the corrupted, the pure
and the impure, the healthy and the polluted to a Nietzschean ethic beyond

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9. Although good and evil. In this way, a hypertextual narrative structure is created, in
Hammerstein’s ‘original
intention was to write
which mythical signals constitute gateways to various cultural texts, which
a universal story of are powerfully drawn in and open up the play of signification, by allowing
the life of a man from irreducible associations and combinations (Giannachi 2004: 14). This playful
birth to death’ (Fordin
1995: 251), in the end polysemy enables the ‘big idea’ that structures the musical to increase ‘its
he followed the life of stock as a source of meaning in some other place, as some other licensed
his hero, Joseph Taylor, version of itself, and as a part of someone else’s narrative’ (Allen 1999: 127).
Jr., until the age of 35,
when he abandons a Such systematic indeterminacy is important for the diversification of a text’s
successful career and demographic appeal and has become an integral part not only of high-concept
a luxurious lifestyle as
a doctor in the big city
blockbuster films and megamusicals, but also ‘MTV’ videos (Lady Gaga’s
in order to return to his vertiginous references to pop and high culture) and TV series (the hypertextual
hometown and devote maze of Lost).
his life to the service
of simple, ordinary The first musical that was conceived as the locus of infinite play was, of
people. For this reason, course, Cats, which exemplifies Roland Barthes’ (1977: 159–60) definition of the
the second act has a postmodern text: ‘a woven fabric’ of ‘quotations without inverted commas’ that
tighter narrative frame,
structured around does not try to articulate a specific message, but rather functions as ‘a system
the binary opposition with neither close nor centre’. For Barthes, the postmodern text exhibits its irrev-
between small and
big city values and
erent indifference to the order of the signified and the meaning, by foreground-
lifestyles, which ing not only the irreducible plurality of its weave of signifiers but their very
reduces significantly materiality as well; and Cats also illustrates this aspect of postmodern textuality.
the first act’s epic
scope and universal By releasing itself from a binding narrative authority, it was able to liberate the
tone. various scenic discourses (music, dance, stage, light and sound design) from
strictly dramatic functions and use them to produce aural and visual signifiers
that refuse to be inserted into meaningful sequence, foregrounding, thus, their
materiality, texture and sensory impact. It seems, then, that the megamusical is
emblematic of a postmodern logic that promotes postdramatic aesthetic form
instead of dramatic narrative content. In this way, it appears to be the antithesis
of Rodgers and Hammestein’s musical play, which established the Broadway
musical as a narrative medium, subjecting all the scenic discourses to dramatic
purposes and functions. It would be interesting, then, to go back to 1947 and
examine Allegro, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s peculiar attempt to move away
from the rules of the narrative- and character-driven musical play they estab-
lished in 1943 with Oklahoma! and redefine the musical as a nearly postdra-
matic, intensely synaesthetic and immersive experience.

MODERNIST EXPERIMENTATIONS
With Allegro, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s aim was not so much to create a
conventional dramatic narrative, with exposition, ascending action, climax and
resolution, but document in a sweeping manner the life of an ordinary indi-
vidual, passing by rapidly, flashing before the spectators’ eyes.9 Responding
to their vision, choreographer-director Agnes de Mille, along with scenic and
light designer Jo Mielziner, avoided elaborate, cumbersome set changes that
would delay the action. Her stage area was almost completely bare apart from
projections on a cyclorama to set mood and location, and a limited number of
props, which were zoomed in and out on treadmills. What she tried to achieve
was fully choreographed movement, the sense of a stage in continuous motion.
This was delivered not only through the four extended balletic set-pieces, but
through a combination of a more atmospheric, painterly and architectural use
of light with a synchronized prop-choreography that effortlessly redefined
and reshaped the playing area, achieving rapid shifts of perspective and an
abrupt editing not only between the numbers, but within the same number as

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 Megamusicals, spectacle and the postdramatic …

well. In this way, Allegro resembled less a traditional Broadway musical than 10. From 1939 to 1951,
Piscator was living
a unique piece of hyperkinetic spatial art, integrating all the aspects of musical and working in New
staging into a unified synaesthetic theatrical experience. York. He was the
Despite its stylistic uniqueness, the show was never a commercial or head of the Dramatic
Workshop of the New
critical success, never achieved the status of a classic and is remembered by School and some of his
most musical-theatre historians as an ambitious but bizarre theatrical experi- students became later
ment. ‘Modernist’ is probably a more appropriate word. A modernist touch prominent figures of
the American theatre,
permeates Allegro, as the whole staging concept betrays the influence of among them Tennessee
Piscator: platforms, treadmills, multimedia effects and sweeping stage edit- Williams. For Piscator’s
American period
ing.10 Piscator’s epic theatre was one of the many modernist variations on and his influence on
the Wagnerian ideal of total theatre, the synaesthetic artwork that achieves Broadway see Chapter
the integration of all arts and the immersion of the audience in the theatri- 8, Willet (1986b).
cal performance (Innes 1972: 149–51). From Max Reinhardt, Adolphe Appia
and Edward Gordon Craig to Piscator, Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Bauhaus and
Artaud, modernist theatrical experimentation offered many different methods
for synthesizing the various arts into one symphonic and intensely synaes-
thetic work. What these different versions of total theatrical performance have
in common is that they open up the path to a postdramatic kind of theatre
that privileges the texture, materiality and sensory impact of a dynamic aural
and visual stage imagery, and so ‘liberate’ theatre from the domination of the
dramatic text. All these attempts towards the creation of a total, synaesthetic
and immersive theatre during the first half of the twentieth century are not
accidental, but obey a historical necessity. They are aesthetic responses to the
new phenomenological experiences that emerge in this period in every metro-
politan centre of the advanced western world and are connected to what we
identified at the beginning of this article as the aestheticization of capitalism.
The aestheticization of capitalism is by no means a new phenomenon.
Walter Benjamin studied extensively the transformation of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth-century cityscape into a three-dimensional stage, upon
which the spectacle of mass consumerism is enacted: shop-signs, advertising
images, billboards, window displays, mannequins, illuminations and palatial
department stores offer a phantasmagoric and immersive urban experience,
as a plethora of onrushing stimulations bombard the senses (Siropoulos
2010a: 140). In this way, public space tends to become a total aesthetic envi-
ronment and social life gradually approximates the form of total theatre (Buck-
Morss 1989: 78–109). Modernist theatre responds to and accommodates these
new phenomenological experiences, and its synaesthetic experimentations
initially appear too indulgent for commercial mainstream aesthetics because
the new urban experiences, which give rise to modernist theatre, have a trau-
matic effect. Benjamin has showed that the sensory overload, provoked by the
dreamlike theatricalization of public space, has a traumatic impact on a psychic
level, because it undermines the authority of the middle-class ego, which used
to be an agent of synthesis and unity, systematizing the external data and
controlling the internal instincts with a view to the future (Siropoulos 2010a:
140). The new phenomenological experiences that consumer capitalism intro-
duces challenge such attempts at cognitive, perceptual and affective mastery,
and thus, any kind of artistic experimentation that has the same effects is
perceived to be too dissonant and almost anti-social. For this reason, in the
first half of the twentieth century, popular theatre retains a model of narrative
realism, which abstracts from the theatrical experience only what can be used
for a narrative end, leaving the more aggressive formal experimentations to
more ‘elitist’ kinds of modernist theatre.

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 Vagelis Siropoulos

11. In the second chapter The absorption of this modernist aesthetic almost single-handedly guaranteed
of his book, entitled
‘Prehistories’, Lehmann
Allegro’s commercial failure. However, as we have seen, this modernist
(2006: 61–62) includes aesthetic, which once seemed so resistant to commodification, appears to be
variety entertainment thoroughly commodified in postmodern culture. Obviously, commodification
in the various forms
of modernist and indicates certain changes in the process of audience reception, as the spectators
avant-garde theatrical can now attain a surplus pleasure from their exposure to autonomized and
experimentation that foregrounded aesthetic form that can often become the main pleasure, with
are distinguished for
their subversion of the narrative content occasionally functioning almost as a pretext for a barrage
conventional dramatic of audio-visual thrills. It seems that now the spectators’ perceptual apparatus is
organization, and
so foreshadow the
perfectly adapted to the sensory overload and spatiotemporal shocks that urban
advent of postdramatic life provokes, so that they can enjoy delocalized, inassimilable, free-floating
theatre. It is exactly affective intensities, which escape consciousness and refuse to be subjected to
this inclusion of variety
in the prehistory of narrative function or be inserted into meaningful sequence (Massumi 2002: 25).
postdramatic theatre By the late 1960s, the advanced societies of the western world had become so
that enables us to thoroughly penetrated by the technologically mediated image and organized
use the concept of
the ‘postdramatic’ around the sense of sight, that for French cultural theorist Guy Debord (1994)
in the analysis of a capitalist society had to be redefined as ‘society of the spectacle’. It is only in
commercial art form
like the Broadway
such a spectacular society that a fascination with the surface qualities of the
musical. In general, image, its materiality and texture, can flourish and ‘the promise of rich sight’
Lehmann is too or ‘sight itself as richness’ can gradually become ‘the ground for extensive
modernist a scholar to
accept the erosion of experience’ (Polan cited in Mulvey 1996: 12).
boundaries between
the aesthetic practices
of high and mass THE POSTDRAMATIC DIMENSION OF THE BROADWAY MUSICAL
culture described
earlier in this article, This process of gradual commodification of an aggressively pictorial aesthetic
and so recognize
the postdramatic
raises important questions: How do we move from Allegro to Cats? Is there any
organization of many evidence that the innovations introduced by Allegro gradually became an indis-
postmodern mass- pensable part of musical theatre staging? If so, was Allegro the first instance of
cultural artifacts.
For a more detailed the Broadway musical’s absorption of a modernist aesthetic that foreshadows
discussion of why further and more radical postdramatic experimentations? In other words, could
Lehmann’s theories we postulate that the Broadway musical had always contained a postdramatic
should be used for the
analysis of postmodern dimension that intensified over the years? In order to answer these questions
commercial art forms, we can look back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which
see Siropoulos (2010a:
136–41).
we witness the first instances of a commodified modernist aesthetic in the vari-
ous forms of variety entertainment, especially vaudeville and the revue.11
Variety is the first popular form of theatre that cultivated an aesthetic of
fragmentation, by breaking down theatrical time into ever more tiny, intense
moments, which are released from their connections to a dramatic past or
their extensions to a dramatic future, and pass in rapid succession in front
of the spectator’s eyes. This aesthetic of fragmentation transforms the musi-
cal number into an art form in its own right, a frame-like, clearly demarcated
and aesthetically complete mini-sequence, which, in its most ambitious,
aspires to be a minimalist version of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunst (Siropoulos
2009b: 88–89). This aspiration is particularly evident in Flo Ziegfeld’s big
production numbers, in which statuesque beauties were transformed into
surrealistic kinetic sculptures, sexually charged installations. Variety’s structure
around self-contained aesthetic fragments is directly linked to the fragmenta-
tion of human experience, which is the outcome of the onrushing stimulations
that the phantasmagoric capitalist cityscape provokes, as well as of the inva-
sion of everyday life by capitalism’s new technological forces, electricity and
automatic movement. Moreover, the new phenomenological experiences that
the modern cityscape generates cultivate a panoramic mode of perception,

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 Megamusicals, spectacle and the postdramatic …

which, according to Benjamin, raises montage to the overall organizing prin- 12. For an extensive
analysis of the
ciple of a new urban experience that privileges acceleration, simultaneity and, paradigmatic
above all, fragmentation and discontinuity (Buck-Morss 1989: 74). Variety’s organization of the film
form of theatrical montage redefined the spectacle that the Broadway musi- musical, see Altman
(1981).
cal offers as a more cinematic experience, and further distinguished it from
more traditionally theatrical spectacle offered by previous forms of musical
entertainment, like opera or nineteenth-century operetta. To a certain extent,
the problems of integration that Broadway’s musical comedies face in the first
four decades of the twentieth century result from this fragmentation, which
promotes a variety-like organization of the material, with both the musical
numbers and the book sequences claiming an extraordinary autonomy and
refusing to obey a narrative necessity.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical plays offered the theatrical equiva-
lent of what in cinematic language is called organic montage (i.e. the edit-
ing of image-fragments along a syntagmatic narrative chain), by editing the
book scenes along a progressive narrative line and using the musical numbers
as a means of affective punctuation, illuminating meaningful and emotional
moments, and occasionally providing psychological closeups of the characters’
inner worlds. However, as Allegro indicates, Rodgers and Hammerstein were
also aware of the powers of non-linear montage and the paradigmatic organi-
zation of the material around overarching themes that the revue systemat-
ically explored. In fact, Hammerstein experimented with the latter in Show
Boat (1927), in which we can trace the existence of a vertical, paradigmatic
axis (in addition to the linear, syntagmatic one), along which many numbers
are organized in revue-like fashion. The thematic motif of the evolution of
show business allows the interpolation of many numbers, which are unrelated
to the primary plot line (Magnolia’s life story), presenting, instead, show-
business rituals and the development of mass-cultural aesthetic forms. These
numbers do not obey the strict causal laws of dramatic narrative and have a
significantly greater autonomy vis-à-vis the whole than the plot numbers; they
rather constitute a set of loosely related units, which function as equivalents
in relation to their principle of selection, the thematic motif. For Lehmann
(2006: 84), such a paradigmatic organization that privileges equivalence over
causality characterizes more pictorial, postdramatic kinds of theatre.12
With Allegro, the paradigmatic organization of the action around an over-
arching theme (the documentation of an ordinary man’s life) dominates and
reduces to the minimum the network of causal connections that a fully devel-
oped plot requires, allowing for a more panoramic and pictorially extensive
form of theatrical representation. In fact, as the violation of the rules of narra-
tive realism and scenic verisimilitude extends to the whole show, Allegro
resembles a gigantic production number, delivering an unprecedented assault
on the senses that probably made it appear too indulgent to its contemporary
audiences. However, all the innovations it introduced gradually became an
indispensable part of the musical theatre staging during the genre’s ‘golden’
era and beyond. For example, it helped make possible the rise of the chore-
ographer–director, since it was the first musical to be directed by a chore-
ographer. After de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse, Gower
Champion, and more recently, Michael Bennett, Tommy Tune and Susan
Stroman accelerated the rhythm of the Broadway musical by framing the
whole of the dramatic action with almost continuous movement. Such a prac-
tice tends to stretch the traditional book musical to its limits, and the proto-
typical example here is West Side Story (1957).

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 Vagelis Siropoulos

Moreover, for Ethan Mordden (1999: 212–35), Allegro can be considered

the first concept musical – the genre that pushed even more aggressively
the Broadway musical towards a postdramatic direction during the late
1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the concept musical reconceives musical theatre
as a predominantly ‘imagistic medium’, in which the ‘performance field is
rearticulated as a visual field’ and the musical performance itself ‘reflects[s]
an essentially scenographic conception’ (Garner 1994: 53–54). Allegro
deserves the title ‘concept musical’, because, as we have seen, it was visually
conceived and structured according to an all-encompassing staging plan,
which replaced the established temporal laws of narrative organization with
spatial, immanent ones, specifically devised for the production of the show.
In the concept musical, the traditional linear-successive organization of the
musical numbers and the book scenes along a narrative line is replaced by a
paradigmatic organizational axis that structures the show around overarching
thematic motifs, generating an extremely fragmented, occasionally revue-
like aesthetic form. A sense of aesthetic totality is provided not by the linear
unfolding of a narrative but by the unification of staging concept and thematic
motif; the way in which the various scenic discourses are combined in order to
create a unique image that informs the production in its totality and becomes
the most accurate visual translation of the show’s theme. For example, in
Company (1970), the prototypical concept musical of the 1970s, the theme
of emotional alienation and narcissistic isolation in the postmodern urban
centres of the western world is visually communicated through an abstract
representation of New York as ‘one enormous cubist painting’ (Aronson cited
in Ilson 2000: 166); an urban jungle, in which the revue-like representations
of rituals from everyday married life are derealized, denaturalized and acquire
an air of absurdity, a ghostly unreality, further reinforced by the absolute lack
of chronological order and dramatic progression and the overlapping, almost
stream-of-consciousness organization of scenes and musical numbers.

POSTMODERNISM, OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE-CAPITALIST

MUSICAL THEATRE
According to Martin Gottfried, the concept musical can be defined as a show
‘based on a stage idea, not a story, but a look, a tone – what the show will
be like as a stage animal’ (cited in Jones 2003: 270–71). Although Gottfried’s
definition may seem abstract and general, it is useful because it draws our
attention to the concept musical’s postdramatic foregrounding of its aesthetic
form. However, this concentration on the visual aspects of the performance
does not divorce the concept musical from representational ends, from an
obligation to represent, even obliquely, the external world. The concept musi-
cal still closes on a signified, a social theme, which is expressed through a
visual signifier, the thematically illustrative staging plan. With the megamusi-
cal, and especially with Cats, the distinction between theme and visual style,
content and form, collapses; and ‘meaning – the signified – is problematized’,
as we are introduced to a typically postmodern ‘random play of signifiers’ that
‘ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts […] in some new and
heightened bricolage’ (Jameson 1996: 96).
At the same time, Cats introduces a totally new scenographic aesthetic.
The concept musicals of the 1970s are still permeated by a modernist archi-
tectural conception of space, which is geometric, functionalist and abstract –
Company’s colourless plexiglas and metallic cubist structure, for example. By

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 Megamusicals, spectacle and the postdramatic …

contrast, Cats reveals the influence of a postmodern architectural logic, which 13. Jameson alludes here
to Robert Venturi,
is more populist and exploits a ‘commercial sign system’, whose ‘lexicon and Denise Scott Brown
syntax […] [have] been emblematically “learned from Las Vegas”’ (1996: 39).13 and Steven Izenour’s
Hence, the megamusical’s preference for over-saturated and flashy colours famous book Learning
from Las Vegas (1972),
and high-tech special effects, which evoke the sense of a techno-capital- which analyzed the
ist sublime, as it is expressed in the Las Vegas architecture and showman- advent of a new form
ship. Moreover, the megamusical’s almost holographic use of lighting, which of architecture that
employs symbolism
reconceives, through the use of high-speed and high-intensity light fixtures, from popular culture
the stage as ‘an omni-directional space […] constantly var[ying] its angles and and attempts to create
a total environmental
co-ordinates’, reflects the influence of the video image (Deleuze 2005: 254). experience.
As Jameson points out, video is ‘so closely related to the dominant compu- Megamusicals like Cats
ter and information technology’ that it ‘has a powerful claim for being the and Starlight Express,
which accommodated
art form par excellence of late capitalism’ (1996: 76). Video presents us with this spatial aesthetic,
‘an incessant stream of messages’; and megamusicals, like Cats or Starlight can be considered
Express, simulate video technique by generating a total flow of images, which precursors of the
Cirque du Soleil
almost transforms the stage into ‘a table of information’, a surface on which shows, which
‘data’ is inscribed (Deleuze 2005: 254). brought a new visual
sophistication to Las
The influence of the video image shows that the rise of the megamu- Vegas showmanship.
sical is coterminous with the digital revolution and the advent of informa- Currently, Taymor
tion technologies, which transform the technologically mediated spectacle with her $70 million
behemoth, Spider-
from an object of contemplation confined in the cinema and TV screen into Man: Turn Off the
a lived experience. With digital technology invading our everyday activities, Dark, attempts to
the human environment becomes a thoroughly aestheticized, hypermediated bring to Broadway the
aesthetics of cirque
space, what Jameson defines as ‘hyperspace’: an immense affective encom- nouveau.
passer that embodies the utopian prospect of ‘expand[ing] our sensorium
and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossi-
ble, dimensions’ (1996: 39). This mutation in the aesthetics of social space
is particularly evident in the megamusical’s consistent efforts to overwhelm
the senses, especially through its infamous computerized set changes. The
latter have enabled an awe-inducing choreography, setting the whole stage
world into motion through the perfect synchronization of vocal and orchestral
music with the appearance and disappearance of new scenic structures that
rapidly zoom in and out, roll on and off, and fly in and out, offering a series of
spatial – or, rather, hyperspatial – anamorphoses and metamorphoses.
For Jameson, the hyperspatial anamorphosis of social space is one of
the reasons why we witness in postmodern culture a schizo-fragmentation
of temporal organization, as isolated multimedia experiences in the present
‘engulf the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception
properly overwhelming’ (1996: 27), shortening one’s time horizons to the
point where the present is all there is. This obsessive concentration of post-
modern culture on the present, the isolated moment of enjoyment, is largely
responsible for the proliferation of many mass-cultural products, including
the megamusical, that undermine systematically linear-successive narra-
tive temporality in order to expand prodigiously spectacular time and trans-
form the aesthetic experience into a collection of overwhelming moments of
extreme audio-visual intensity. This tendency is reflected in Lloyd Webber’s
compositional method and the staging aesthetic of his shows, and is further
pronounced in The Lion King, which consistently spatializes dramatic action,
by transforming almost every major plot point into a musical number, every
musical number into a big production number and the whole musical into a
succession of massive landscape structures, a collection of scenographically
elaborate, phenomenologically rich and aesthetically complete fragments.

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 Vagelis Siropoulos

TOWARDS A DIALECTICAL METHOD FOR THE ANALYSIS

OF (MEGA)MUSICALS
The above sociological contextualization of the megamusical tried to detect
the ideology of the genre’s aesthetic form, to grasp, as Jameson points out,
‘formal processes as sedimented content in their own right’ (1983: 99). In this
way, seemingly accidental formal choices, like the megamusical’s undermin-
ing of a show’s dramatic dimension, the privileging of a postdramatic organi-
zation and the incorporation of digital technology, become the expression of
specific socio-historical content. This synchronic analysis of the megamusical
has been supplemented with a diachronic one that highlights the contribu-
tion of this critically maligned and academically neglected genre to the devel-
opment of twentieth-century musical theatre. What this diachronic analysis
has shown is that the megamusical develops already existing aesthetic trends,
which reflect how spectacle as a socio-economic, cultural, phenomenological
and existential category reorganizes human experience and gradually modifies
Broadway’s aesthetic production in the twentieth century.
Gottfried was one of the first to understand that the megamusical devel-
ops already existing trends. In Broadway Musicals (1979), his evaluation of the
Broadway masters is determined by their contribution to the attainment of a
certain aesthetic goal: the creation of a thoroughly integrated musical theatre,
in which music blends with dialogue, lyrics, dance and scenery in one unified,
uninterrupted continuum. In other words, for Gottfried, the development of
the Broadway musical has a teleological orientation and it is according to this
orientation that he rethinks the history of the genre. In his book, Gottfried
(1979:126) repeats the standard critical reaction to Evita: that it was a medio-
cre musical piece given groundbreaking staging by the most conceptual of
all musical theatre directors. However, in More Broadway Musicals: Since
1980, Gottfried’s (1991: 53–77) perception of Lloyd Webber radically changed.
Here, he accepts him not only as an economic necessity, but also a revitalizing
aesthetic force, as his compositional method and the overall staging aesthetic
of his shows constitute an important step towards the creation of a thoroughly
musical theatre, where all the scenic discourses harmoniously merge.
In 2006, Scott McMillin, in The Musical as Drama, perceives a similar
continuity between musical theatre aesthetics from the ‘golden’ era to Lloyd
Webber, but views the historical development of aesthetic forms from a more
panoramic perspective. He argues that the aesthetic goal towards which the
experimentation from the integrated musical to the megamusical leads is
the Wagnerian ideal of total theatre: the creation of the great synaesthetic
work of art, in which all the different arts merge. As we have seen, this ideal
is far more than an aesthetic theory; it is an aesthetic response to the total
theatricalization of social life brought by consumer capitalism. The prob-
lem with McMillin’s (2006: 165) analysis is that although he recognizes the
existence of a certain underlying logic in the development of the aesthetic
form from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Lloyd Webber, he undermines
the power of his argument, obviously because he dislikes megamusicals.
So he tries to discover an ‘authentic’ form of musical theatre, which can
function theoretically as the antidote to the megamusical. Since McMillin
recognizes the similarities between the critically glorified integrated musi-
cals by Rodgers and Hammerstein and the degraded megamusicals, he finds
a model of ‘authentic’ musical theatre in all the instances of differentiation
and compartmentalization of song, dance and drama.

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 Megamusicals, spectacle and the postdramatic …

Such efforts to discover a transhistorical essence of musical theatre in 14. My method of

periodization derives
one of its aesthetic manifestations facilitates binary evaluating systems and from Jameson’s
oppositional categorizations between good and bad forms of musical thea- understanding of
tre (2006: 173), based solely on personal preferences and the ideologies that capitalism as an
ever-evolving and ever-
contribute to their formation. For this reason, we need a more dialectical mutating economic
method of analysis, which Jameson describes as one that ‘transcend[s] the system, producing
categories into which our existence as individual subjects necessarily locks in each one of its
moments of expansion
us and open[s] up the radically distinct transindividual perspectives of […] a different cultural
historical process’ (1983: 116). In the present article, I have pointed towards logic: (1) nineteenth-
century free-market
such a method of a dialectical historical analysis, by evoking a historical proc- capitalism produces
ess of mass-cultural aesthetic development that highlights how capitalism realism (2) early to
creates hegemonic modes not only of ideology, but also of perception and mid-twentieth-century
monopoly capitalism
representation; in other words, hegemonic modes of cultural production that, produces modernism
in their turn, shape aesthetic production and against which the development and (3) late twentieth-
of musical theatre throughout the twentieth century could be analysed. century multinational
capitalism produces
Against such a Gestalt field of aesthetic, cultural and socio-economic postmodernism.
interrelatedness, McMillin’s argument acquires new poignancy. McMillin
is right to argue that a somewhat rigid division between prose and song-
and-dance sequences defines the Broadway musical. However, this rigid
compartmentalization does not define the Broadway musical in its entirety,
but rather in a specific era, the modernist one. Modernism is characterized by a
rigid division between mass and high culture, which is further reflected in the
opposition between content and form, dramatic narrative and postdramatic
spectacle. What makes the classic Broadway musical a fascinating object for
theatrical and cultural analysis is that it occupies neither pole in this opposition,
constantly oscillating between them, by redoubling this opposition in its
representational structure. Thus, on the one hand, it presents us with a fully
developed narrative, whose linear-successive, cause-and-effect organization
reflects the instrumental, means/ends rationality of a middle-class capitalist
mentality. On the other hand, it undermines the unified character of this
narrative through musical numbers that refuse to be integrated in its fabric
or that are organized around a paradigmatic rather than a syntagmatic axis or
that weigh down and spatialize dramatic development, by standing out and
drawing attention to themselves as autonomous performance pieces. These
disruptions are manifestations in the aesthetic realm of new phenomenological
experiences that the aestheticization of capitalism brings about and undermine
linear-successive organization by producing a seemingly random pluralism
of many overlapping fragmented experiences in the present: a variety of
punctual, immediate subjective experiences, which cannot be easily reduced
or defused by their assimilation to totalizing temporal, linear-successive
structures (Jameson 1990: 160). For this reason, McMillin’s thesis that the
Broadway musical has never been an integrated form is correct, as even in
the cases where the musical numbers are meticulously integrated along a
linear axis, so as to amplify the emotional points, flesh out the ideological
subtext and clarify the characterization, a cumbersome stop-and-go structure
still remains: the prose and musical sequences tend to be two separate
texts continuously interrupting each other, never finding a way to be truly
integrated in a seamlessly unfolding continuum.
This integration is achieved when the Broadway musical enters its post-
modern phase, which coincides with the end of the ‘golden’ era in the
late 1960s.14 The thorough penetration of everyday life by technology and
the more aggressive organization of social life in spectacular terms allows the

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 Vagelis Siropoulos

shrinking of dramatic narrative time and the expansion of postdramatic spec-

tacular time, through the absorption of avant-garde aesthetic experimenta-
tions with total forms of theatre that unite dramatic action, music, dance, light
and set design into one uninterrupted continuum. Thus, O’Horgan intro-
duces to the mainstream Artaud’s paroxysmic ‘poetry in space’ in both Hair
(1968) and Jesus Christ Superstar. Prince exploits the directorial vocabulary of
the German and Russian avant-garde in the concept musicals of the 1970s
as well as Evita. Nunn blends in Cats environmental and physical theatre
with Disney’s theme-park aesthetic and Las Vegas’ hyperspatial architectural
visions. And Taymor, with The Lion King, redefines and upgrades aestheti-
cally Disney’s theme-park aesthetics through her unique combination of ritual
theatre and Gordon Craig’s über-marionette.
At the same time, we can detect vestiges from the aesthetic practices of
the more traditionally dramatic Broadway musical in the various manifesta-
tions of postmodern musical theatre. For example, Stephen Sondheim, despite
his experimentation with extremely fragmented forms of narrative, has always
retained a strong dramatic dimension, especially in the representation of
character. Songs like ‘Now’, ‘Later’, ‘Soon’, from A Little Night Music (1973),
exhibit an almost Chekhovian psychological depth that betray the influence
of his mentor, Hammerstein, who reconceived the musical number as char-
acter essay in Carousel’s ‘Soliloquy’ (1945). Rock musicals, like Hair and Rent
(1996), exhibit keen socio-political awareness and the same can be said for
certain megamusicals. For example, Wicked (2003), despite its theme-park
aesthetic that brings Cats to mind, consistently invites a political reading, by
presenting Oz as a ‘21st-century America clenched in post-9/11 apprehension’
(Holden cited in Sternfeld 2006: 350).
This coexistence of both dramatic and postdramatic elements in the post-
modern musical indicates that the transition from one period to the next must not
be considered as a mechanical succession from one synchronic cultural system
to the next, making historical analysis appear as ‘a purely typological or classifi-
catory operation’ (Jameson 1983: 93), whereby cultural artefacts are dropped to
their appropriate historical compartment. By contrast, the historical period must
be considered a dynamic category, including vestiges from a previous mode
of cultural production as well as ‘anticipatory tendencies which are potentially
inconsistent with the existing system but have not yet generated an autonomous
space of their own’ (1983: 95). In this way, ‘texts emerge in a space in which we
may expect them to be crisscrossed and intersected by a variety of impulses from
contradictory modes of cultural production all at once’ (1983: 95).
This more dynamic conception of the historical period allowed us to trace
such anticipatory postdramatic tendencies in the Broadway musical’s ‘golden’
era that prove a certain continuity between the classic Broadway musical
and the megamusical. It can also help us evaluate the contribution of Lloyd
Webber’s compositional method to the development of twentieth-century
musical theatre. In the 1980s, when the megamusical dominated Broadway,
it was popular to think that the through-composed musical was an imported
European art form and had nothing to do with the Broadway musical, consti-
tuting a throwback to older forms of musical theatre, like nineteenth-century
opera and operetta. But the postmodern through-composed musical must be
seen as the culmination of an aesthetic of fragmentation that is endemic in the
development of the twentieth-century musical theatre.
As we have seen, the Broadway musical, responding to new forms of frag-
mented perception, adopted from the first decades of the twentieth century

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 Megamusicals, spectacle and the postdramatic …

the multi-scene dramatic structure, which results in the acceleration and frag- 15. Bennett experimented
with this form in the
mentation of the action in rapidly changing scenes. The rise of the director as a almost through-sung
powerful creative force in musical theatre contributed significantly to the revo- Dreamgirls (1981) and
lutionizing of stage editing. For Gottfried, George Abbot was first to establish Chess (1986), which he
was forced to abandon
speed and tight structure as the rules of musical staging: ‘No scene could be for health reasons.
too brief for him’; and his devotion to sweeping action and movement ‘led to
16. If we also take into
the constant scene changes that so affected the look and rhythm of musicals consideration the big
during his heyday’ (1979: 87). Prince and Bennett with their concept musicals production values of
of the 1970s experimented with even shorter books and further explored a most of these shows
we may speak of a new
sweeping cinematic editing in and between musical numbers; and it is not form of megamusical
accidental that both of them embraced the through-composed musical,15 comedy, whose
prototype is probably
because, in the form as it was popularized by Lloyd Webber, the continuous Lloyd Webber’s 1991
musicalization of stage action opens up new possibilities for stage montage. mega-revival of Joseph
In his two concept albums and his two revusicals, the pop/rock song and the Amazing
Technicolor Dreamcoat.
replaces the musical scene as the main organizational unit of the score and
prose sequences are totally eliminated, enabling a montage driven mise-en-scène
structured around the succession of self-contained musical sequences. In The
Phantom of the Opera, the rather abrupt editing of self-contained musical
numbers gives way to a total flow of aural images gracefully dissolving into
each other. Finally, with Aspects of Love (1989), fragmentation becomes
extreme, as the melodic hook phrase replaces the pop song as the main
organizational unit of the score. Melodic cells are autonomized and acquire
a life of their own as they are constantly reinstated in new combinations in
order to create a kaleidoscopic succession of rapidly edited romantic images,
which resemble less dramatic scenes than miniscule video shots.
With Sunset Boulevard (1993), Lloyd Webber moved away from this
extreme mode of fragmentation and attempted a synthesis of the through-
composed megamusical and the book musical through the use of underscored
dialogue, which becomes part of extended musical sequences, consisting of
recitative-like, melodically amorphous motifs, fully developed numbers and
recycled fragments from the melodic set-pieces. These extended sequences
allow for a more thorough exposition and development, but, at the same
time, are fluid enough to create the total musical flow of grand aural images
that is the trademark of his mode of composition (Siropoulos 2009a: 160).
Similar combinations of the musico-dramatic techniques of the through-
composed megamusical with those of the book musical have been attempted
by the Disney shows as well as Wicked. As megamusicals adopt techniques
from the book musical, book musicals, in their turn, absorb the megamusical’s
predilection for nearly continuous musical action. As Mordden points out,
‘[t]he nonstop musical structure’ and ‘the free recycling of musical passages’
have become commonplace (2004: 90), creating a very interesting cross-
fertilization of aesthetic forms. Jukebox musicals, like Mamma Mia! (1999) and
Jersey Boys (2005), and comedies like The Producers (2001), Hairspray (2002)
and Spamalot (2005), conceive their dramatic action mainly in terms of song
and dance, trying to insert in their books as many musical numbers as possible.
As musical numbers absorb in telegraphic manner a great amount of narrative
content, prose sequences shrink to the minimum and the book musical is
transformed into a montage of song and dance sequences that approximates
the continuous musical structure of the through-composed musical.16
This absorption of techniques associated with the megamusical by forms
of musical theatre that are largely considered to be the antidote to the mega-
musical, must not be considered so much a self-conscious borrowing as a

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 Vagelis Siropoulos

response to the thorough spectacularization of social life. As late capitalism

fragments human experience in order to reorganize it into a series of multime-
dia ecstasies, mass-cultural aesthetic forms accordingly go through a process
of internal differentiation, decomposition and autonomization, so that they
can be restructured as an anthology of intense, aesthetically complete frag-
ments. As we have seen, this process of systematic fragmentation dates back
to the early twentieth century and produces a crisis in dramatic representation
that opens up the path for postdramatic experimentation. Due to the historical
moment of its emergence, the megamusical overthrew the Broadway musi-
cal’s delicate balance between dramatic narrative and postdramatic spectacle.
For this reason, critics are correct to argue that in some of its manifestations
the megamusical offers nothing but spectacle. However, the spectacle it offers
represents the culmination of the Broadway musical’s development as the
most spectacular popular theatrical form of the twentieth century.

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Siropoulos, V. (2011), ‘Megamusicals, spectacle and the postdramatic
aesthetics of late capitalism’, Studies in Musical Theatre 5: 1, pp. 13–34,
doi: 10.1386/smt.5.1.13_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Vagelis Siropoulos received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the School of
English of Aristotle University, Greece. His Ph.D. thesis offers a historical
culturally informed analysis of megamusical aesthetics. He is currently a visit-
ing lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London, and postdoctoral research
fellow at Ghent University, Belgium. His interest in musicals extends beyond
the theoretical domain. He owns his own production company in Greece that
specializes in postmodern forms of musical theatre and spectacle.

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