It is easy enough to dismiss a comedy with music as not to be taken seriously, the plot just an excuse for the music. I know people who think that Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutti” is just that: a farce about feigned infidelity that the viewer puts up with so as to enjoy the wonderful music. My own opinion, not at all unusual, is that the plot delves very deeply into the nature of the relations between men and women and does not decide whether their differing roles in courtship are the result of nature or nurture, but does insist that women are not given enough credit for seeing through the men they deal with. But what if a comedy with music is indeed just a confection designed as a platform for its songs? Does that mean that a musical comedy has no meaning in the sense of a heavy moral unless it is Rodgers and Hammerstein pushing their ideas about racial tolerance? I want to pursue that question about a musical comedy that is clearly a romp, Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”, and suggest that what it puts together, if you consider its various devices of construction, is a kind of utopian community that makes the metaphysical parameters of our lives less confining. The audience might prefer to live in that condition even if only for the duration of the performance and in our memory of the performance, it adding a little lightness to what was described in “Singing in the Rain”, another of those musicals about nothing, as “the drabness of our lives”.
The first way in which trifling musical comedies make us feel at once liberated from everyday concerns at the same time as they make us feel comfortable with this new world is that they depend on stereotypical characterizations that are readily appreciated because they are the stock figures of the time. In “Anything Goes” that includes the gangster who is not really very dangerous at all and desperately wants to move up on the most wanted list into the top ten and eventually achieves his goal, for which he is applauded by everyone aboard the ship all these fools are using to cross the Atlantic. The gangster is turned loveable as if all it takes is turning an FBI label from an ignominy to an award. He is rendered harmless and so merely a comic diversion. So is Reno Sweeney, the female lead, who goes from being a golddigger out to marry a British noble, who is also just a stereotype of the silly upper crust Englishman who garbles his words and is concerned about nothing in particular, to being recognized as the often spurned lover who carries a torch for the no-good who she eventually conquers. The same comfort is provided by a dancing girl and a martinet ship captain. An audience feels proud that it can easily identify these people and so be superior before them and know that they will all stay true to form. Nothing outside their expectations is required: no surprise in character or plot or meaning. Social life is confined to the tried and true however much it may seem that people are violating customs by extolling the virtues of gangsters or sinful love. Noone will have their own perceptions of life trashed, which is also true of “La Boheme”, where an excursion into the life of Bohemians in Paris at the turn into the Twentieth Century will not make one want to abandon a bourgeois lifestyle but make one think artists and playwrights are rather pathetic people not even true to their callings in that the playwright throws his play on the flames in the very first scene, as if a true artist would be so cavalier with his productions. Wouldn’t it be nice if the perception of our real lives were so manageable and comprehensible?
The songs are another component for making the world of musical comedy so pleasant. Every singer becomes eloquent partly because they give emotion through rhythm to what they have to say and partly because the lyrics are far more eloquent that what passes for dialogue which is mostly meant just to keep the plot moving. Moreover, the music is far more complex and sophisticated than anything said in the plot and so it seems a more elevated enterprise than are its settings, and that is true of even heavy duty composers like Sondheim, whose “Barcelona”, for example, from “Company”, it not a particularly deep number, is syncopated to the point that it makes the plot seem routine even if the plot does, famously, make at least one allusion to homosexuality at a time when that was still a taboo reference even if the whole subtext of the comedy is that this guy, for some reason, will not marry. But hidden references are still hidden and undercut the conventionality of plot only for the careful reader out to search out clues. Overall, music lightens our step, makes us all singers, eloquent in our love and impressive even in our dreary workplaces. And so the plot of “Anything Goes” is indeed an excuse for the songs and those songs linger beyond the curtain and make the singers on stage as well as the hummers in the audience deeper than they are, at least for a moment. Think of these numbers that have come out of “Anything Goes”: “You’re The Top”, “Friendship”, “All Through the Night”, and the title song, “Anything Goes”. You know them or will remember them if your memory is refreshed. They each have complex melodies and create memorable feelings. That effect of music is the same as happens when listening to Beethoven or Mozart, the music making us think ourselves to be, for a moment, smarter and more wise than we are.
A third way musicals alter our sense of life for a moment from what we know it is really like is that the quick cuts in plot that are allowed by the need for artistic brevity, to move along the plot as expeditiously as possible so as to get on with the songs. That convention of musical comedy allows problems in the plot to be solved expeditiously, which is just the opposite of what happens in the well formed drama of O’Neill through Hellman through Chayefsky, where the audience is allowed to savor the slowness of development so as to appreciate the circumstances in which the characters find themselves, those situations more than the characters themselves, the objects of investigation. This practice goes back to Ibsen, and so one watches the family in “Watch on the Rhine” slowly move towards treason, as the family in “Little Foxes” moves towards an awful accident, and the family in “The Catered Affair” moves closer to financial disaster as if these things had their own inevitability, and that perception is not comic at all.
The way that quick cuts work in “Anything Goes” is delightful. Reno Sweeney’s lover just comes across a ticket and then a roommate; the real missionary is arrested by mistake so that the gangster can take his place; and the stuffy Englishman does not seem much put off by the fact that his fiancee has abandoned him for another. Another girl is bound to come along and does. How nice it would be if in life such useful plot twists also came along so that spurned lovers did not carry a torch, that one could shift identities at a whim, that life changing matters could go down so smoothly. It is the very metaphysics of the world that is at stake here, and that is what the musical comedy abolishes, much to our surprise, because we know better, but also because it is the way we wish it were except that it would probably be discombobulating to actually experience life in such a free form. We are more used to dealing with life as melodrama, where people are stuck with their stereotypes whether they like it or not and have time to lament their fates at great length. No wonder people felt they were indulging reality with those kitchen dramas of the Twenties through the Sixties. They were a lot to take, cut too close to home about actual rather than fanciful life.
A fourth characteristic of musical comedies is that the people and performers, at least for a time, come across as happy and peppy and so the audience can luxuriate in the feeling that there was an identity between the performers and their roles. The audience feels the exhilaration of seeing a performer so perfectly step into a role. That works, of course, if the performance is indeed perfect and so the audience doesn’t have to strain to hope that the performers will be up to the job, which is the case with any number of high school performances of “Anything Goes”, a lot of which show up on You Tube. But watch true professionals such as Patti LePone or Sutton Foster perform the finale version of the song “Anything Goes”, complete with chorines and chorus boys tap dancing their hearts out and you will know that there is a magic moment of identification with the spirit of the production, which is that a good time was had by all.
Consider what these four characteristics of comedies with music have in common. They all make the audience aware of the fact that they are all artifices, which means ways of making the performance attractive. The audience knows it is being fooled, that life isn’t really like that, and enjoys the fact of being fooled. In fact, it is fair to say that the substance of the performance, what makes it attractive, is that it is so self-evidently a performance, a set of artifices. The audience takes pleasure in looking at the display of artifice. How is the plot to be moved along? That reversal of identity so that a bad guy is a good guy was clever! The performers lapsing into song heightens the performance, giving it an ethereal quality that we come to count on. You can’t go too long without a song or else the audience will get restless but if there is only singing the whole thing gets too heavy, turns into a facsimile opera, as is the case with “Les Miserables”, and so proves boring rather than elevating. The audience knows that it is settling for stereotyped characters but that is so they can be easily handled and what kind of response is expected, that not a “hidden persuader” of the audience but exactly the experience it is looking for. The audience cannot help but notice that the performers are having a good time because the performers work so hard to make it seem so.
I would go so far as to suggest that this analysis of comedies with music fits in very well with a distinction between art and entertainment. Art always makes a reference to something beyond itself that can be called its meaning. Everybody knows that. Literature explores the human condition or tells us of the ways of God in the world of people. Art shows us what people look like in all their moods and situations and Modern Art shows us what people really look like in that it displays their psychological internals, Matisse the way an environment feels, Picasso the way a personality gets exposed by putting their insides or whatever it is that Picasso puts into their bodies on the outside. Even music has meaning because, for reasons I don’t understand, it gives us a sense of the sublime or the tragic or the inevitable through its mechanisms. It is the emotions that are educated rather than the music showing off how it was produced.
Entertainment, on the other hand, delights in having its audiences delight at the spectacle of all those artifices being deployed for their-- entertainment. The audience wonders how the sword swallower manages to carry out that feat and is not disappointed to learn that it is a skill that can be mastered. There need be no real magic in a magician finding ways to fool his audience, which is amazed that he got away with it rather than angry that he is fooling his audience. Baseball and basketball players show off their skills and we sort of metaphorically call them heroes for having played schoolyard games with such excellence. And comedies with music are a hot item in American culture because they are so inventive at displaying their artifice. The audience knows its emotions are being manipulated, and here is the key point, the main emotion that comedies with music manipulate is love, not because they shed much light on that phenomenon so difficult to understand, but simply indulge it, unexplained, as an excuse for the plot, however much show tunes are used in real life as part of the courting ritual precisely because they evoke feeling without explaining it. You go to a date movie to feel romantic, not to understand your feelings.
Now it might seem that love does act as a theme and so a meaning for musical comedy, and so every time you see a new couple of characters fall in love expands your sense of what love is and the many forms it takes. Love is an inexhaustible subject, a universal query about human nature. But, I suggest, the association of musical comedy with romance is short lived, just a passing fancy, and so an artifact of its time, the first half of the Twentieth Century, rather than something intrinsic to musical comedy. It may well be that all of Shakespeare’s major comedies are tied to the resolution of romantic problems, but other comic writers, such as Aristophenes, Moliere, Shaw and Wilde, devote only some of their creations to romance, reserving others to discuss personal identity, politics, and the conflict between the social classes. Moreover, a different kind of musical comedy took over Broadway in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Think of “Gypsy”, “Cats”, “Sweeney Todd” and even “Fiddler on the Roof”, where the romances of Tevye’s three daughters takes a backseat to the fate of the Jewish community, a theme from beginning to end. These musicals do indeed go after meaning even if in a half hearted way that does not do too much damage to their value as entertainment, and even if some of Sondheim, like “Sunday in the Park with George” and “Into the Woods” does take on some of the weight that we would like to assign to opera.
The difference between art and entertainment, I would go so far as to say, lies at the heart of the distinction between high culture and popular culture. High culture is part of a quest for meaning, a body of objectified works that people access so as to apply its meanings to themselves and their world, which is what Georg Simmel meant by culture. Doing that is difficult and unnerving. It calls things into question. Entertainment, on the other hand, is affirming of life as it is in that it allows people a diversion from what they know are the truths of life. This distinction may not be universal but apply only to the modern world. The Golden Age poets of pre-Elizabethan England were aristocrats rather than men of the people. Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists invented a new and popular culture that did intrigue any who could buy their way into the theatres. Popular culture established itself in the Eighteenth Century in that the penny press published fictions among its many Believe It or Not articles. A newly embedded middle class could purchase diversions without the baggage of education that previous categories of art had required. The novel was a means of diversion until it became a matter of high art, very self-consciously, in the Eighteenth Century. This is a very controversial thesis, I know, and I will leave it as a statement that has not been fully defended.