Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater 9781472475336

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Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater

Bringing together scholars from musicology, literature, childhood studies, and theater, this volume examines the ways in which children’s musicals tap into adult nostalgia for childhood while appealing to the needs and consumer potential of the child. The contributors take up a wide range of musicals, including works inspired by the books of children’s authors such as Roald Dahl, P.L. Travers, and Francis Hodgson Burnett; created by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lionel Bart, and other leading lights of musical theater; or conceived for a cast made up entirely of children. The collection examines musicals that propagate or complicate normative attitudes regarding what childhood is or should be. It also considers the child performer in movie musicals as well as in professional and amateur stage musicals. This far-ranging collection highlights the special place that musical theater occupies in the imaginations and lives of children as well as adults. The collection comes at a time of increased importance of musical theater in the lives of children and young adults. Donelle Ruwe is Professor and Chair of English at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic Era: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the editor of Culturing the Child 1660–1830: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers (2005). James Leve is Professor of Musicology at Northern Arizona University. He received a PhD in musicology from Yale University (1998). His musical theater publications include Kander and Ebb (Yale University Press, 2009) and American Musical Theater (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present

This series recognizes and supports innovative work on the child and on literature for children and adolescents that informs teaching and engages with current and emerging debates in the field. Proposals are welcome for interdisciplinary and comparative studies by humanities scholars working in a variety of fields, including literature; book history, periodicals history, and print culture and the sociology of texts; theater, film, musicology, and performance studies; history, including the history of education; gender studies; art history and visual culture; cultural studies; and religion. Recent titles in this series: Children’s Play in Literature Investigating the Strengths and the Subversions of the Playing Child Edited by Joyce Kelley Gaming Empire in Children’s British Board Games, 1836–1860 Megan A. Norcia Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel Sandra Dinter Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys’ Adventure Novel Michelle Elleray Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants Reproduction and the Future in Ibsen’s Late Plays Olivia Noble Gunn Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater Edited by Donelle Ruwe and James Leve For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater Edited by Donelle Ruwe and James Leve

Frontispiece, Photograph of Flagstaff Theatrikids production of The Wizard of Oz JR., 2016. Permission of editors.

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Donelle Ruwe and James Leve; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Donelle Ruwe and James Leve to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-4724-7533-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-57153-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Dedicated to James Quincy Leve

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors 1 Children, childhood, and musical theater: an introduction

ix xi 1

J A M E S L E V E A N D D O N E L L E RU W E

2 Beginning with Do Re Mi: childhood and The Sound of Music

20

RYA N B U N C H

3 Walt Disney, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and the Gospel of ideal childrearing: creating superlative nuclear families in Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks

39

WILLIAM A. EVERETT

4 Saving Mr. [Blank]: rescuing the father through song in children’s and family musicals

59

R AY M O N D K N A P P

5 Dickensian discourses: giving a (singing) voice to the child hero in Oliver! and Copperfield

80

M A RC N A P O L I TA N O

6 Ghetto chic: utopianism and the authentic child in The Me Nobody Knows (1970)

96

D O N E L L E RU W E

7 Little girls, big voices: Annie JA M E S LEV E

116

viii Contents 8 Urchins, unite: Newsies as an antidote to Annie 

138

M AR A H GU BAR

9 Agency, power, and the inner child: the “Revolting Children” of Matilda the Musical

164

H E L E N F R E S H WAT E R

10 Children’s musicals for educational and community settings

188

L AU R E N AC T O N



Bibliography of scholarly sources Index

237 249

Illustrations

Figures 1.1 1.2 2.1

2.2 6.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

Frontispiece, Photograph of Flagstaff Theatrikids production of The Wizard of Oz JR., 2016. Permission of editors Magic-marker Jamilton poster by James Quincy Leve. Permission of editors Photograph of Flagstaff Theatrikids production of The Wizard of Oz, Young Performer’s Edition, 2016. Permission of editors Mary Martin (Marier Rainer) with Evanna Lien (Gretl), Mary Susan Locke (Marta), Marilyn Rogers (Brigitta), Joseph Stewart (Kurt), Kathy Dunn (Louisa), William Snowden (Friedrich) and Lauri Peters (Liesl) in The Sound of Music, Broadway, 1959. Photo by Friedman-Abeles; © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Movie still from The Sound of Music, 20th Century Fox, 1965 Photo by Gjon Mili of the cast of The Me Nobody Knows. Life Magazine 1970, permission of Getty Images Overture to the musical Annie (1977), mm. 1–4, routined by Peter Howard and Charles Strouse and orchestrated by Philip J. Lang Overture to the musical Newsies (2012), mm. 1–4, routined by Michael Kosarin and orchestrated by Danny Troob Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie, October 22, 1932 Photo by Martha Swope ©Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New Public Library for the Performing Arts Photograph by Deen van Meer of the “Seize the Day” number in the Broadway production of Newsies (2012) ©Disney

iii 2 12

26 27 102 138 138 142 144 151

Table 7.1

Keys of Annie’s Songs in Annie

121

Contributors

Lauren Acton received her PhD in musicology at York University, Toronto. She is a musicologist, cultural theorist, and performer. She is faculty and program coordinator for the Performing Arts Fundamentals program and faculty for the Music Industry Arts and Performance program at Centennial College in Toronto, Canada. Her academic research and teaching interests embrace a range of topics: musicology, popular music studies, theater studies, performance studies, cultural theory, and aesthetic philosophy. Previous research publications addressed violence in Canadian musicals, analyzed the stage and screen versions of Show Boat, and examined the intersection between tourism and musicals at the Stratford Festival of Canada. Ryan Bunch  is a musicologist and PhD candidate in the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. His research on music, theater, and children’s cultures has been published in the journal Studies in Musical Theatre and the edited collections Contemporary Musical Film; iBroadway: Musical Theatre in the Digital Age; and The Wizard of Oz: Musical Adaptations from Baum to MGM and Beyond. He has taught courses in childhood studies, vocal performance, music history, and music theory at Rutgers, Temple University, the Community College of Philadelphia, and Holy Family University. His book Oz and the Musical: Performing the American Fairy Tale is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. William A. Everett is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory, where he teaches courses ranging from medieval music to American musical theater. His books include Sigmund Romberg (2007), Rudolf Friml (2008), and Music for the People: A History of the Kansas City Philharmonic Orchestra, 1933–82 (2015). He is contributing co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (2002; 2nd ed., 2008; 3rd ed., 2017) and The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers (2017).

xii Contributors Helen Freshwater  is a Reader in Theatre and Performance and Head of Literature at Newcastle University, UK. Her research focuses upon twentieth- century British theater and contemporary performance, with a particular interest in contemporary British performance made for, with, and about children. Past publications include Theatre & Audience and Theatre Censorship in Britain: Silencing, Censure and Suppression (both Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and articles for Theatre Research International, The Lion and the Unicorn, Poetics Today, and Performance Research. She is a contributing editor to New Theatre Quarterly and Performing Ethos, and is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s peer review college. Marah Gubar  earned a BFA in musical theater performance at the University of Michigan yet somehow ended up as an Associate Professor of Literature at MIT. As a performer, she peaked early, singing in the Indiana University Children’s Choir under the direction of Mary Goetze and starring in a local production of Really Rosie directed by Patricia Gleeson. As an academic, she married theater history with children’s literature studies in her book Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009), which won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award. Besides publishing essays on nineteenth-century child actors and audience members in journals such as PMLA, Victorian Studies, and American Quarterly, she also edited the first special issue on “Children and Theater” produced by a US children’s literature journal, the April 2012 installment of The Lion and the Unicorn. Raymond Knapp is Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Humanities at UCLA, where he is Academic Associate Dean for the Herb Alpert School of Music and Director of the Center for Musical Humanities. He has authored five books and co-edited two others, including The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005; winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (2006), The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (2011, with Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf), and Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism (2018). James Leve is Professor of Musicology at Northern Arizona University and the coordinator of music history. He received a PhD in musicology from Yale University (1998). His musical theater publications include Kander and Ebb (Yale University Press, 2009) and American Musical Theater (Oxford, 2016). Leve is currently completing a major study of disability musical theater. He has also published on early Italian comic opera, including an edition of the 1657 opera Il Potestà di Colognole. Leve is the recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships, the Virgil Thomson Fellowship, three NEH Summer Stipends, and an ACLS Fellowship.

Contributors  xiii Marc Napolitano is the Director of Faculty Development and an assistant professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy, where he also serves as an advisor for the student musical theater troupe, Blue Bards. His book, Oliver! A Dickensian Musical, was published by Oxford University Press and received the Society for Theatre Research Book Prize. In addition to Dickens and musical theater, his research interests include the Victorian novel, children’s literature, and project-based learning. Donelle Ruwe is Professor and Chair of English at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic Era: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the editor of Culturing the Child 1660–1830: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers (2005). She has published scholarly articles on children’s literature, Romantic poetics, and women writers in journals such as Writing Women, Eighteenth-Century Life, Lion and the Unicorn, English Journal, Children’s Literature, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Ruwe is co-president of the British Women Writers Association. Her chapbook Another Message You Miss the Point of (2005) received the 2006 Camber Press Poetry Prize and her chapbook Condiments received the 2001 Kinloch Rivers Award. Stacy Wolf  is Professor of Theatre, Director of the Program in Music Theater, and Director of the Princeton Arts Fellows at Princeton University. She is the author of Beyond Broadway: the Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre across America (Oxford University Press, 2019), Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford University Press, 2011) and A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (University of Michigan Press, 2002) and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (with Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, 2011).

1

Children, childhood, and musical theater An introduction James Leve and Donelle Ruwe

The impetus behind this collection is the recognition that musical theater plays an important part in young people’s lives. Paying attention to how children experience musical theater opens up new understandings of musical theater and children’s culture. The intersection of childhood cultural studies and musical theater studies is a new, albeit growing, area of research. Musical theater studies, itself a relatively young field, has produced historical accounts told through the lens of feminism, social history, African American studies, and even religion, but no sustained study that privileges the child has appeared, despite the abundance of musicals for children and musicals about them.1 The reasons for the scholarly neglect are historical and cultural. Historically, both children’s literature and musical theater have been viewed as inferior artistic genres. Gender bias lies behind much of the prejudice, for children’s literature and musical theater are both associated with the feminine. As Stacy Wolf, a contributor to this collection, has written, “musical theatre has always been the terrain of women and girls,” and the tastes of women, girls, and children have historically been devalued.2 Implicit in this bias is the belief that children are incapable of distinguishing good art from bad art. Further, musicals written primarily for children to perform are considered an inferior category of musical theater, seen as childish, local, ephemeral, amateurish, and artistically suspect. Children’s participation in musical theater would seem more appropriate for sociological or educational studies than aesthetic and artistic analysis.3 However, the educational scholarship about the impact of musical theater on children tends to be anecdotal and offers little measurable data to justify the inclusion of musical theater in the school curriculum beyond the obvious general benefits typically ascribed to arts education.4 To paraphrase Peter Hunt’s discussion of children’s literature, if “children” commonly connotes immaturity, and “musical theater” commonly connotes something light and frivolous, as it did for most of its history, then it is no wonder that children’s musical theater has been neglected.5 Children’s engagement with musical theater has evolved and increased along with new technologies. Children once enjoyed playing their favorite musicals on records, then CDs, and now MP3 players or the latest

2  James Leve and Donelle Ruwe digital format. Children today have a fluid experience with musical theater, one with greater access and agency. Children around the world experience musicals through sound clips, show-tune mashups, parodies, school and community performances, and doting parents’ uploaded videos of a child’s talent-show rendition of Frozen’s “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” When the fictional protagonist of Netflix’s Haters Back Off (2016–17), the clueless and talentless Miranda Sings (Coleen Ballinger), posts a YouTube recording of herself singing “Defying Gravity” from Wicked, she is exercising her right as an American kid with a computer to be a musical theater star of her own making. Such moments of hypermediation typify a child’s experiences with musical theater today. Children create their own musical theater forms through processes as varied as fanfiction postings to claymation spoofs on Facebook’s Vine Camera.6 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin note that hypermediacy “privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity,” and it emphasizes process over performance.7 For example, the poster in Figure 1.1 of a child’s felt-tipped, coloring marker drawing

Figure 1.1 Jamilton, a Magic-marker pointillism poster by nine-year-old James Quincy Leve. Permission of editors.

Children, childhood, and musical theater  3 titled “Jamilton” epitomizes children’s musical theater hypermediation as well as a transgressive crossing of disciplines. At the time the poster was created, the artist, James Quincy, was nineyears-old and a fan of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. When he was given an assignment to create a magic-marker pointillism poster for a 4th-grade art class, James Quincy chose to reimagine the poster and Playbill cover of the musical. The iconic image of Alexander Hamilton with a raised gun atop a golden star intersects with James Quincy’s fantasy world “Jamestopia.” He renames the musical Jamilton, the producer credit reads “a JAMESTOPIA MUSICAL,” the gun is replaced with a “J” flag, and the marquee reads “SJAMES.” In the bottom left corner, a seemingly random image appears (inspired by an internet meme) of a man crying with the word “WHY!!” within a dialogue bubble. Pointillism, Playbill, theater elements (the marquee), and internet memes are remediated, appearing in a single vibrant image. Our essay collection analyzes musicals as literary works as well as performance texts and sites of social practice. The ten contributors explore Broadway musicals and movie musicals that feature professional child actors as well as musicals written for children to perform in non-commercial (i.e., amateur theater) venues. We look at musical adaptations of children’s books. We also consider musical theater in the context of young adult audiences and performers. Musicals embraced by children, whether they qualify as “children’s musicals,” figure large in this volume, but they are only one facet of our discussion. We are equally concerned with what the discursive practice of musical theater has to say about childhood and the child. The range of essays in this book, therefore, reflects the complexity of the topic and the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of children’s studies and musical theater studies. The contributors examine real children as performers and as audience members, as well as idealized children as they are constructed in musical theater texts and productions. The collection recognizes that “doing” musical theater (writing musicals, performing in them, going to them, purchasing recordings of them, and blogging about them) is part of the cultural work of constructing childhood. The term “children’s musical” lacks a formal, universally accepted definition. Is it a musical written for children to watch, or is it a musical written for children to perform? Do musicals with only one or two parts for children, or those featuring children in leading roles such as Billy Elliot the Musical (2005) and Matilda the Musical (2010), count if those musicals are primarily directed to adult audiences? The term “children’s musical” appears in no index of a major musical theater history book, and there is little musicological research on children’s musical theater as of yet. Commercial producers avoid the term “children’s musicals” at all cost, lest they scare away adults, the primary ticket buyers. If by “children’s musical” one means something intended exclusively for children, then children’s musical theater is essentially an amateur phenomenon. However, commercial Broadway musicals are

4  James Leve and Donelle Ruwe now available in simplified child performance versions. Moreover, parents take their children to the full range of commercial musicals and not just those explicitly marketed to children. One of our first tasks, then, is to clarify what scholars mean by “children’s musicals.” This deceptively simple term leads quickly to contested terms, beginning with the complicated and unanswerable question of “what is a child?” For the purposes of this collection, we identify three broad, overlapping categories of children’s musical theater: the children’s musical, family musical, and young adult musical. The children’s musical, we argue, exists primarily in the world of amateur, non-commercial theater. It is written for children (pre-school and elementary school age) to perform or to be performed for them. The children’s musical includes both children’s theater (plays presented for child audiences) and “creative dramatics” or “recreational drama” (theater performed by children with the goal of experiential learning and child development).8 By contrast, the family musical is a commercial genre that appeals to both children and adults. The family musical is associated with the Rodgers and Hammerstein model and strongly appeals to the middle class. The family musical is such a core part of the canon that it is essentially synonymous with “mainstream musical.” Since children lack the means to attend Broadway theater on their own, most Broadway musicals considered “children’s musicals” are in fact family musicals. Family movie musicals such as State Fair (1945, 1962), The Music Man (1962), Mary Poppins (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) reached a massive audience that crossed generational lines. These musicals celebrate the heteronormative family and often affirm the father’s centrality within the family. As children’s literature scholar Ian WojcikAndrews notes, “most ‘children’s’ films are actually family films.”9 The young adult musical is one of the fastest growing segments of the musical theater industry. It is highly commercial (unlike the children’s musical), but unlike similarly commercial family musicals, young adult musicals speak to the sexual and social concerns of teens and young adults. While “young adult literature” is a thriving category of literary analysis, there is no musical theater equivalent as of yet, even though in practice the “young adult musical” is a very profitable genre as evidenced by Wicked (2003) and Dear Evan Hansen (2016).

The children’s musical It is safe to say that no Broadway musical has ever been written exclusively for children. Society defines the child as immature, inexperienced, and dependent upon adults. By extension, children’s musicals have generally been judged to be immature and unsophisticated. While scholars analyze theater for adults in terms of aesthetics, entertainment value, and theater history, theater for children evokes “an aesthetics of pedagogy as much as art.”10

Children, childhood, and musical theater  5 In the world of children’s musical theater, the distinction between high and low artistic status lies between commercial (i.e., works such as Annie) and amateur musicals, such as those designed purely for children’s amateur performances (e.g., The Christmas Bus and Bullies in the Hall).11 Commercial musical theater often targets young audiences but virtually never without serious consideration of the adults who will accompany these children to the theater. In a larger sense, musicals about childhood, such as Caroline, or Change (2003) and Fun Home (2015), or musicals based on children’s books, such as Cats (1981) and The Secret Garden (1991), appeal as much, if not more, to adults than to children. It might be best to consider only those musicals written expressly for children to perform in amateur, educational, and community theater venues as children’s musicals—in other words, musicals that no adults other than parents, friends, family, and teachers will attend. Our contributor Lauren Acton discusses the writing and performance of a group of such musicals in her essay about musical theater writers in Canada who have carved out a career creating musicals for school settings, summer camps, church groups, and other community theater venues. These writers take into account the performance abilities of children. For example, a summer-camp musical needs multiple speaking parts and multiple ensemble songs, a positive theme, and, as Acton reminds us, a limited vocal range in order to accommodate children’s voices. In recent years, amateur musical theater for children has been dominated by child-friendly adaptations of commercial musicals such as Aladdin and Seussical. Stacy Wolf’s contribution to this collection examines the process by which major leasing organizations abridge and then market Broadway musicals—especially Disney shows— for children to perform. Unlike amateur musicals created with children’s vocal and acting needs in mind, in these shows, the vocal range of the music, which was originally written for trained (mostly adult) professionals, is inappropriate for and potentially damaging to immature voices. The source material can help determine whether or not a work is a children’s musical. However, musicals based on children’s books are not necessarily children’s musicals. In fact, they are often written to appeal first and foremost to adults. For example, Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon’s The Secret Garden includes a tragic love triangle that was not in the original text. Cats emphasizes adult angst in songs such as “Memories.” Into the Woods features very mature content, just as did the original tales as collected by the Brothers Grimm. Nevertheless, as Stacy Wolf reminds us, Into the Woods was the first Broadway musical that MTI singled out for their new “Broadway JR.” series (although it was not the first “JR.” adaptation to be released, and ultimately it was labeled as a “School Edition”). Perhaps defining the term “children’s musical” is a fool’s errand, given the variety of ways that children experience musical theater and how musicals construct and reinforce ideologies of childhood. One could even argue that the label “children’s musical” is a marketing term rather than an

6  James Leve and Donelle Ruwe artistic category. The licensing company Pioneer Drama Service offers the following promotional blurb: When you pair the wonder and magic of children’s theater with the fun and excitement of quality music, you have the perfect hybrid of children’s musicals, sometimes referred to as children’s theater musicals. Producing one of our musicals for young audiences creates a wonderful experience for any school, community theater or professional theater wanting to give children a magical experience. Whether your production group is comprised of children, teens or adults, you’ll find the perfect children’s musical here!12 In other words, the children’s musical is almost anything that a company thinks will appeal to any potential market.

The family musical Perry Nodelman has argued that the “hidden adult” is omnipresent in children’s texts in that adult needs and desires are constituent elements of every adult-created work for children.13 In musical theater, the adult is in plain sight. An adult occupies the seat next to a child, and adults direct and choreograph the child’s performance. Children’s musicals on Broadway are really family musicals, for a successful show must appeal to parents as well as children. Jacqueline Rose’s argument that children’s literature “sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver)” is especially true of the family musical.14 Rebecca Warner has recently attempted to define the “family musical” by identifying its multi-generational appeal, constitutive elements, and market appeal.15 Warner tacitly accepts the generic label “family musical” and suggests that this genre must be analyzed with close attention to the shared adult–child experience of going to a musical. To quote scholar James Bohn on Disney animated films: family entertainment has a transgenerational appeal…Parents often want their children to see the same films they enjoyed in their youth. As children grow up, they begin to make their own choices concerning ticket purchases; thus, this sort of generational bonding over movies is most commonly reserved for family entertainment. For this reason, each successive generation is exposed to animated Disney features, some of which are more than seventy years old.16 While children experience musicals for the first time, adults who accompany children to the theater experience nostalgia for childhood along with “a sense of communion through shared discovery, which is also reflected

Children, childhood, and musical theater  7 in the show itself” (646). Adults reconnect with their inner child, and the child connects with the adult and with the theater-going experience. In her contribution to this collection, Helen Freshwater discusses how the title character in Matilda the Musical plays against adult fantasies of the child as a nostalgic figure of innocence. Matilda acts like an adult, while the actual adults in her life exhibit childish and childlike qualities. As Freshwater explains, Matilda was deliberately designed to appeal to crossover adult audiences by evoking adult desires to get in touch with “the inner child.” Commercial, mainstream musical theater traditionally centers on the marriage trope. By contrast, children’s books rarely follow romance plot conventions. Few commercial family musicals (or musicals about or for children) present kiddie romance. Instead, adult romance (if present) is part of a family dynamic: for example, in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Professor Emilius Browne accepts, simultaneously, his roles as a father figure, husband material, and protector of his country (he enlists in the British army). Family musicals participate in the overarching themes of the romance plot in that they belong within the broad category, “the genres of social integration.” In such genres, social institutions (families, schools, and communities) are affirmed, and threats to social institutions are removed. Matilda’s closing scenes, for example, restore both family and school (and thereby society) when Matilda creates a new home with Miss Honey, and Miss Honey becomes the new headmistress of the school. The rise of the “family musical” begins with Rodgers and Hammerstein and a particular configuration of the post-WWII American middle class. Characterized by a celebration of patriarchal, often small-town values and the American belief in ingenuity, hard work, and clean fun, family musicals such as Brigadoon (1947) and The Music Man (1957) offered entertainment for the whole family, and musical theater became mainstream popular entertainment, reaching a broad audience through recordings, film, and television. Films such as Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Mary Poppins (1964), and The Sound of Music (1965) captivated audiences of all ages. Interestingly, the so-called “adult musical” (such as the long-running erotic revue Oh! Calcutta!) exists in a binary relationship with the family musical rather than with the children’s musical. Elizabeth L. Wollman has argued that the opposite of the “adult musical” is “mainstream” musical theater, which consists of musicals devoid of explicit sexual content and other adult subjects. In effect, the binary opposition that Wollman establishes is not adult/child but rather adult/family.17 As contributors William Everett and Raymond Knapp both explore, family musicals are deeply rooted in a patriarchal understanding of the family. Everett traces the influence of Dr. Spock’s approach to parenting on the family musical’s construction of the idealized family in Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Knapp examines how musicals from the World War II era reflect America’s concern with re-establishing the role of the father, and he then traces how

8  James Leve and Donelle Ruwe the construction of the father evolves over the latter half of the twentieth century. Ryan Bunch’s essay examines how The Sound of Music presents female adolescence within a family dynamic and also reflects different philosophies of child development and education. Television played an important role in the fifties and sixties in spreading the popularity of musical theater to a broad audience across America. The networks broadcast live studio versions of Broadway musicals such as Peter Pan (NBC, 1955) and commissioned new works specifically for television, with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (1957) being the most famous and successful example. The 2013 Broadway adaptation of this version of Cinderella currently ranks among the most produced musicals in high schools. In 2013, NBC produced a live telecast of The Sound of Music starring country-music star Carrie Underwood in the role of Maria and has produced one live musical annually ever since. Today, the family musical is a juggernaut of commercial theater and is associated with the Disney invasion of Broadway. The extraordinary success of the stage versions of Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Aladdin, for example, made the family musical a lynchpin of the rejuvenation of the Times Square area, and Disney musicals monopolize community theater and school productions across America. The Disney imprimatur automatically implies that a musical is family oriented. As Thomas Schumacher, a theatrical producer and the president of the Disney Theatrical Group, acknowledges, Disney deliberately reaches for a much broader demographic than children. A survey that Disney conducted of its Broadway audience revealed that only 30% of sales were for groups that included children. Schumacher concluded that Disney was not in the business of creating Broadway shows for children. Instead, “you have to figure out, what is my grown-up idea at the core of this?”18 In fact, Schumacher discourages parents from bringing small children to Disney musicals on Broadway since the musicals are “too late at night and … too long,” and “not made” for children.19 Disney recognizes that Broadway musicals should be distinguished from children’s musical theater, and it markets to adults first and foremost, and then to children who come with their families.

The young adult musical The young adult musical is a growing phenomenon in youth culture. Musical theater studies has never explicitly differentiated young adult musical theater from children’s musical theater, but in practice, young adult musicals are a distinct and growing category. Musicals that appeal especially to this demographic (e.g., Wicked, Spring Awakening, and Dear Evan Hansen) attract adults, but the subject matter and the musical idioms (pop, rock, rap, hip hop) appeal to teens and young adults. In some cases, the driving force behind the creation of a musical is a teenage fan base. For example, in the case of the musical Newsies (2012), as Marah Gubar writes in her essay

Children, childhood, and musical theater  9 about politics and musical theater, the teenage fans of the original Disney movie made the development of a Broadway version a lucrative priority. In children’s literature studies, “children’s literature” and “young adult literature” have long been distinguished, even if the precise boundaries are contested. 20 In sociological approaches to youth studies, the young adult is a subject-in-process, neither child nor adult, but always in the process of becoming. The young adult differs from the child and the adult in terms of struggles, possibilities, desires, and needs. Like children, young adults are also a vulnerable group. They often exhibit disillusionment and rebellion, independence coupled with a yearning to belong. 21 Literary scholars suggest that young adult literature features characters who deal explicitly with issues of sex, identity, and societal pressure. Young adult literature often centers on the struggle to negotiate the levels of power in social institutions, and it features protagonists who confront social injustice and recognize that injustice is a fact of life. 22 The young adult musical Spring Awakening (based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play) presents teenage students who struggle with sexuality and impending adulthood; and rather than offer a happy ending, it involves suicide, incest, a botched abortion leading to death, and adults whose rigidity forces young adults into self-destructive choices. By contrast, early family musicals about teenagers (e.g., Bye Bye Birdie [1960]) spoof teenage romance and rock and roll culture rather than seriously explore the sexual, emotional, and social realities of adolescence. Like Broadway, television and film industries are capitalizing on young adult appetite for musical theater. Popular movies and TV shows emphasizing group singing in school settings include the Pitch Perfect films and the Disney High School Musical trilogy. 23 The writer David Kamp refers to the increase in student interest in singing and musical theater as the “Glee effect,” linking renewed interest in musical theater to the popular television series Glee, which uses performance as a means of personal realization and empowerment. Kamp notes that for today’s tweens and teens, “being a musical theatre nerd is cool and socially acceptable.”24 Musical theater can offer young adults something beyond pure aesthetic pleasure; it offers a community.

The historical context of children’s musical theater The history of early musical theater for children intersects with the history of the American Children’s Theater movement, although the subcategory of musical theater within that movement is mostly unexplored. The first major children’s theater organization, The Children’s Educational Theatre, was founded in New York in 1903, and in the 1910s and 1920s, the Junior Leagues of America were the primary sponsors of children’s theater.25 During the Depression, the Federal Theatre Project (part of the Workers Progress Administration) supported children’s theater throughout America. Its best known production for child audiences is Yasha Frank’s musical play

10  James Leve and Donelle Ruwe Pinocchio, which premiered in California in 1937 (where Walt Disney saw it), played in theaters across America, and opened on Broadway in 1938. 26 The Broadway musical theater repertory includes few major child roles prior to the 1940s. In the early part of the twentieth century, Broadway offered multiple extravaganzas featuring children, such as the British import Humpty Dumpty (1904), which included 50 children in its cast of 200.27 It is difficult to fully assess the performances of children in extravaganzas and early Broadway musicals, if only because original cast albums do not exist of early shows. Child characters in musicals either functioned as ornaments on an otherwise adult-oriented story, or they lent sentimental value, especially in works centered on the family. For instance, the character Kim in Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern’s Show Boat (1927) serves an important dramatic function, but her role is very small. Kim’s presence carries strong sentimental value, and in her major scene with her father, Ravenal, in the original version, she is passive, an object upon which Ravenal projects his emotions. During the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, when musical theater moved toward family-oriented entertainment, children became more central to musical theater story lines, although vocal solos for child actors were rare, and writers and producers were reluctant to make demands on child actors. Enock and Carrie Snow’s children in Carousel are present physically but not vocally. Children on Broadway were given few lines to sing by themselves, let alone an entire solo. When children did sing solos, their songs were typically diegetic (songs written into the plot as songs). Children’s diegetic songs include “Dites-Moi,” sung by Emile de Becque’s children in South Pacific (1949); “May We Entertain You?” performed in Baby June’s and Louise’s vaudeville act in Gypsy (1959); and “So Long, Farewell,” performed for adults by the von Trapp children in The Sound of Music (1959). The Music Man (1957) stands out in that young Winthrop has a pivotal role in both the book song “The Wells Fargo Wagon” and the diegetic “Gary, Indiana.” Early musicals, in other words, rarely center on a child protagonist, one who holds dramatic focus and commands considerable stage time and solos. The fact that children appear on stage but sing diegetic music rather than book songs indicates the child’s status as an object to be observed and enjoyed—a flat character rather than a protagonist with agency and a character-development arc. Some rock musicals from the late sixties and seventies were comprised of ensembles of child performers. The Me Nobody Knows (1970) staged actual student writings from New York City reform schools and the inner city, and Runaways (1978) used urban teenagers’ stories of trauma for the dramatic segments of a musical revue. However, such modular works do not have a standard plot with a narrative arc and character development. In other words, they feature children but do not have a child protagonist. As Donelle Ruwe discusses in her essay, The Me Nobody Knows complicates the typical top-down approach to children’s musicals in which adults are

Children, childhood, and musical theater  11 active creators and children are passive recipients. These shows feature the actual words and real experiences of children. Oliver! (London 1960; Broadway 1963) marks the beginning of musicals featuring a child protagonist. Oliver sings several book songs. As Marc Napolitano discusses in his essay, the character of Oliver Twist as written by Dickens is passive in that he “neither speaks up for himself nor drives the plot.” As the protagonist of the musical adaptation, Oliver is more assertive and in control of his destiny, and, as Napolitano suggests, his plaintive ballad “Where is Love” is the emotional crux of the show. Even with Oliver’s central position in the musical, he does not experience dynamic character growth; he starts sweetly innocent and remains innocent. His essential goodness is never challenged. No musical prior to 1977 relies on a child protagonist (and thus on the actor who plays her) to the degree that Annie does. As James Leve discusses in his essay, Annie is also the first musical theater child protagonist who belts. Unlike songs for a boy soprano such as Oliver or the trained voice of a female soprano, Annie’s songs are hypertheatrical and diva-performative. This aggressive type of singing, popularized by Ethel Merman, is now ubiquitous on Broadway and in children’s culture more generally. Musicals with child protagonists are becoming more frequent, such as Caroline, or Change, Billy Elliot, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Matilda, but the child protagonist is still a projection of adult fantasies and needs. An essential, though rarely discussed, element in the history of children’s musical theater is the rise of theater licensing companies. The leasing of Broadway musicals for amateur performance began in the 1920s, and American (i.e., native-made) musical theater scripts and scores began to be published. The founding of Tams-Witmark Music Library in 1925 reflects the emergence of an amateur market and the profit potential of this market. Today, the Tams-Witmark catalog numbers around 120 musicals, including some of the most popular works in the repertory, such as The Wizard of Oz, Bye Bye Birdie, and Hello, Dolly! In 1944, Rodgers and Hammerstein founded their own leasing company, R&H Theatricals. The Broadway composer Frank Loesser and the orchestrator Don Walker formed MTI (Musical Theatre International) in the early fifties. The latest addition to licensing companies is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, which is now part of the conglomerate Concord Theatricals. 28 Disney Theatrical Leasing controls all of the Disney properties, and it has partnered with MTI to lease production rights for its shows. MTI has led the way in creating performance editions of musicals for children of varying ages. MTI (which leases Disney’s musicals) offers three categories of musicals for young performers: the Broadway KIDS series (30-minute versions of famous shows such as The Lion King for very young children); the Broadway JR. collection (60-minute versions for upper grade, elementary-school and middle-school children); and School Editions (abridgements running about two hours). MTI leases these shows along

12  James Leve and Donelle Ruwe

Figure 1.2 Photograph of Flagstaff Theatrikids production of The Wizard of Oz: Young Performer’s Edition, 2016. Permission of editors.

with a package that includes study guides, a director’s guide, recordings and choreography videos. As one of MTI’s ads states, “producing a Disney musical has never been easier or more fun or as deeply rewarding.”29 Tams-Witmark and other companies have adopted MTI’s business model to create children’s performance editions of Broadway musicals. This practice transforms musicals into versions that might be called, if not “children’s musicals,” at least children’s versions of musicals. If a company such as MTI can create kid’s versions of adult musicals—even a work involving cannibalism and rape such as Sweeney Todd—then content does not seem to matter.30 Watering down adult musicals does not make them children’s musicals, but it does make them accessible to children as performers. Recently, MTI has developed new and original works for community and school licensing. These works, such as The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley JR. and a series of musicals based on the Magic Treehouse books, adapt popular children’s books or teacher favorites and thus have name recognition and a built-in market. MTI not only leases “Broadway KIDS” and “Broadway JR.” versions, but it also sponsors a major musical theater convention for kids and their teachers and show directors. As Stacy Wolf explores in her essay in this collection, this annual event promotes MTI’s shows while offering training workshops for directors, competitions for student performers, and opportunities to perform in the choreography videos that are included in the MTI leasing packages. MTI is a slick operation. The leasing of production rights for musicals is competitive and profitable. While MTI and others see tremendous opportunities in commissioning

Children, childhood, and musical theater  13 new musicals for amateur performance and in packaging Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals for amateur venues, other leasing companies such as Dramatists Play Service, Dramatic Publishing, and Samuel French have a long tradition of leasing non-commercial plays and musicals for amateur use. Most of these works have yet to be studied and are largely unknown. They cover historical, religious, seasonal, and issue-oriented topics and include many adaptations of classic works. Children’s novels in the public domain, such as The Secret Garden and Wind in the Willows, appear in various versions in multiple catalogs. Drama Source, another company specializing in non-commercial theater, introduces itself as follows: We at Drama Source desire to provide inspirational, family-friendly play[s], musicals, and scripts at a price affordable for a full production for everyone. We offer some scripts royalty free when a script is ordered for each performer. We also offer some of the lowest prices in the industry both for scripts, royalties, and other supporting material.31 Dramatic Publishing leases both commercial and non-commercial titles. Some of its musicals are intended for adults to perform for children, whereas some are clearly more appropriate for child performers. Dramatic Publishing has many works along the lines of The Amazing Adventures of Peter Rabbit and Einstein Is a Dummy. Dramatists Play Service offers a few commercial titles, albeit relatively obscure ones, but the lion’s share of its catalog falls under the amateur heading. These companies specializing in non-commercial offerings have followed the MTI model and have commissioned and adapted musicals for child performers of different ages. Miracle of 2 Productions identifies musicals for “Young Audiences” and “School Editions.” It also leases one-act musicals such as Pinkalicious and Stinky Kids. Samuel French represents several Broadway musicals, and it too mimics the MTI “JR” approach by offering abridged versions for children. For example, it offers a high school version of Grease and Heathers, the Musical and a 70-minute “Spring Version” of Marsha Norman’s and Lucy Simon’s The Secret Garden. Few major Broadway writers have contributed to the catalogs of these companies, with Charles Strouse, the composer of Bye Bye Birdie and Annie, being a major exception. Strouse wrote the music and lyrics for a middle-school adaptation of Charlotte’s Web and the music for an elementary-school musical, The Truth about Cinderella, for Dramatic Publishing. These companies, despite being a rich source of children’s theatrical works, do not necessarily specialize in “children’s musicals” but rather in amateur theater. In a sense, they focus on B-tier musicals and amateur or semi-professional works. They serve the important function of making relatively unknown works or the works of relatively unknown writers available for performance. They cannot compete with MTI, R&H, Tams-Witmark, and Samuel French, especially since R&H, Tams-Witmark, and Samuel

14  James Leve and Donelle Ruwe French have been bought out by the Concord Music conglomerate, which reaches all sectors of the market. We have suggested that access to the performing repertory of children’s musicals is provided by two different types of leasing companies. The first includes companies such as MTI that have thick catalogs of canonical commercial titles.32 The other includes companies such as Pioneer Drama Service that specialize in amateur theatrical offerings. The academic literature has not distinguished between these categories, but we propose that by their very distinct commercial models, artistic features, and performance histories, these two types of repertories constitute the traditional fault line between what we might call “children’s musicals” and commercial musicals for mixed-age audiences, or what we term the “family” musical. There is, of course, some overlap between these categories, especially since so many leasing companies are creating child performance versions of commercial Broadway works. The business of amateur musical theater has become very profitable, and countless young people around the world are engaged in it. Schools and community theaters use musical theater as a teaching tool. Teachers and directors select canonical, commercial, or highly familiar works, often at the whim of the director or the committee behind “artistic” decisions. There is little evidence that titles are chosen for their educational value, though lip service might be paid to an educational purpose. More often, what is taken into consideration is what will sell, as even amateur theaters hope to break even. Self-censorship also affects these decisions, and there have been high-profile cases of protests over amateur productions of musicals that might once have been considered sacrosanct.33

Professional child actors in musical theater Children appeared in a wide range of amateur and professional theater productions centuries before the rise of Broadway. School dramas were an essential element of boys’ educations in the 1500s and earlier. In the Enlightenment era, educational theater for children gained new impetus through the emphasis on environmental approaches to child education. French and British authors in particular promoted a “theatre of education” and argued that active forms of learning (such as performing in school and home plays) were a “dynamic pedagogical tool for the socialization of the young.”34 The late nineteenth century offered celebrated child roles, none more popular than little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Cedric in Little Lord Fauntleroy. Children also played adult characters, and some adult performers built entire careers playing child characters. A popular novelty was all-children Gilbert and Sullivan troupes. The popularity of child actors in the late nineteenth century reached so high a level that in 1893 the Association for the Protection of Stage Children was established.

Children, childhood, and musical theater  15 During the Depression, age 14 became the dividing line between children who could work and those who could not. However, a 1938 law permitted children younger than 14 to appear in live theater and film. As child film stars rose in popularity during the twenties and thirties, the issue of income earned from their work became complicated. In some cases, wealthy child film stars declared their parents as dependents on their tax forms. The passage in 1939 of the “Coogan Act” recognized that children and their incomes had to be protected, which, Viviana Zelizer argues, affirmed “the new cultural and economic contract between parent and child.”35 The issue of child wellbeing in the entertainment industry was pretty much ignored for much of the twentieth century. It was not until 1995 that “The First National Conference on Young Performers” took place. Sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild, it dealt primarily with actors in films. James R. Kincaid, who attended the conference and reported on it in Erotic Innocence, suggested that the conference was the equivalent of forming a committee to look into abuse as opposed to prosecuting abuse. Despite acknowledging that what many children had experienced was tantamount to abuse, the president of SAG insisted that “the Entertainment Industry is practically unique in its need for the use of minors.”36 Children were victims of a system that relied on exploitation. SAG could have taken a lesson from Daisy Eagan, the star of the 1991 Broadway hit The Secret Garden and the youngest girl actor ever to win a Tony Award. After The Secret Garden, Eagan suffered a breakdown and left the profession for years. One cannot escape the fact that the child on stage is objectified by the audience’s gaze and potentially eroticized. Kincaid argues that the sacrilization of the child is not an antidote to eroticism but a trigger for it (24–25). The more that adults sacrilize children, the more they desire them and, in extreme cases, molest them. Kincaid claims that the notion that all children are adorable is part of an American myth: Our culture demands that the official child be that way; it is mashed into our heritage, literary and otherwise. This idea has been epitomized in musical theater. I continue to ask why an adult would prefer to pay nearly $200 to hear a child sing when she or he can hear a more developed adult singer perform. The innovative aspect of Matilda might be the fact that she does not sing about being cute. Annie effectively does. She is presented as puppy-dog cute. (112) As Kincaid acknowledges, children are irresistibly cute, and their adorability holds the imagination and interest of adults, which he describes as “culture’s swoon before the adorable child” (113). The increased presence and importance of children in professional musicals have meant more demanding emotional, physical, and vocal challenges for professional child actors. In recent years, roles for children have grown in size and number, so much so that during the 2012–13 season, no fewer

16  James Leve and Donelle Ruwe than nine Broadway musicals and plays featured child actors according to a New York Times article “Broadway Babies.”37 Children are so ubiquitous on Broadway that they support an entire industry of child wranglers who supervise young actors backstage. As Robert Wilson, a child wrangler who has worked on Broadway shows such as Big (1996) and Billy Elliot the Musical (2005), explains: “My job is first, to care for a child working on a show and look out for his or her general well-being. Second, to fill in the gaps between whatever level of responsibility a child has achieved, and what they need in order to work professionally in the theatre.”38 The wrangler’s tasks include everything from making sure that young children have a safe work environment, to making sure that a child does not miss stage cues, to stopping children from sucking a grape lollipop right before going on stage. As children find greater relevance in musical theater to their own lives, scholars see the intrinsic value in examining the intersection of musical theater and children. The diversity of approaches used by our contributors— musicology, ethnomusicology, theater studies, and literary analysis— reveals the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of children’s studies and musical theater. Our collection barely scratches the surface. Musical theater will continue to play an important role in how children negotiate identity and achieve self-realization. Our contributors examine how musical theater performance affects the emotional and social development of children, how musicals construct ideologies of childhood, how musical theater aesthetics requires a new analytical language that incorporates textuality and performativity, how musicals reflect as well as shape the changing dynamics of family in America, and how the fault line between amateur and professional musical theater uncovers a myriad of issues about children’s participation in musical theater. All of these topics are important, and a better understanding of them can only be achieved through the application of multiple disciplinary approaches. If this collection has achieved only that, then it has achieved its most important goal.

Notes

Children, childhood, and musical theater  17

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20

Oxford University Press, 2019). Rajan accepts without question that musical theater provides good educational experiences for children. Peter Hunt, “Children’s Literature,” in Keywords for Children’s Literature, ed. Lissa Paul and Philip Nel (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 42–43. Fanfiction.com includes almost 400 Hamilton spin-offs and recreations— imaginary male–male love letters between John Laurens and Hamilton, a retelling from Angelica Schuyler’s point-of-view, and Hamilton: the Highschool Musical. Theater teacher Matthew Reason explores children’s creative responses to theater in “The Possibility of Theatre for Children,” in Theatre for Young Audiences: A Critical Handbook, ed. Tom Maguire and Karian Schuitema (London: Trentham Books, 2012), 32. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 31. Moses Goldberg defines categories of children’s theater in Children’s Theatre: A Philosophy and a Method (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974). Ian Wojcik-Andrews, “Film,” in The International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., volume 2, ed. Peter Hunt (London: Routledge, 2004), 714. Matthew Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experience of Theatre (Sterling, VA: Trentham Books, 2010), 3. The Christmas Bus and Bullies in the Hall are children’s musicals leased by Dramatic Publishing. www.pioneerdrama.com/Musical-Child.asp. See Perry Nodelman, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 1–2. Rebecca Warner, “Attracting the Family Market: Shows with Cross- Generational Appeal,” in The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, ed. Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 633–49. Warner’s list of constitutive elements of the family musical is too broad to be useful: poetry, substance, dramatic potential, transcendence, and perspective. James Bohn, Music in Disney’s Animated Features: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Jungle Book (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2017), 4. See Elizabeth L. Wollman, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). David Rooney, “Disney’s Top Theater Exec on ‘Frozen’ Musical Plans: ‘I’m Talking to Directors,’” October 16, 2014, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ disneys-top-theater-exec-frozen-740520. John Horn, “Disney’s Tom Schumacher on the Massive Success of The Lion King and How Broadway Has Changed over 20 Years,” November 20, 2014, www.vulture.com/2014/11/disneys-theatrical-head-on-broadways-changes. html. See Caroline Hunt’s definition in “Young Adult Literature Evades the Theorists,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 21, no. 1, (1996): 4–11. Early studies of young adult literature include Robyn McCallum’s Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Garland, 1999) and Roberta Seelinger Trites’s Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000). See also Lee A. Talley’s discussion of the historical use of “young adult” in Paul and Nel, Keywords for Children, 228–32. Recently, the

18  James Leve and Donelle Ruwe

21

22 23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

term “new adult” has appeared. According to Amy Pattee (in “Between Youth and Adulthood: Young Adult and New Adult Literature,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 42, no. 2 [2017]), “new adult” is a marketing category referring to “emerging” adults; new adult texts feature “the exploits of female protagonists in their late college or early post-college years working to establish themselves in the world of work while navigating a widening romantic landscape” (219). For an overview of sociological approaches to young adult studies, see “An Introduction to Seven Technologies of Youth Studies” by Susan Talburt and Nancy Lesko in Keywords in Youth Studies: Tracing Affects, Movements, Knowledges, ed. Nancy Lesko and Susan Talburt (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 1–10. See Thomas P. Crumpler and Linda Wedwick, “Readers, Texts, and Contents in the Middle,” in Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, ed. Shelby A. Wolf, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 63–75. Despite its title, High School Musical substitutes the musical theater idiom with a music video idiom. Coming on the heels of Glee, NBC’s musical drama Smash (2012–13) included a young adult character who attempts to break into Broadway. A stage adaptation of Smash is in the works. David Kamp, “The Glee Generation,” The New York Times, June 11, 2010. Kamp writes that the musical theater idiom “is enjoying what may be its greatest popularity among young people since the pre-rock era.” Bryony Gordon suggests using the label “Gleek” for people who are passionate about Glee. See Gordon, “The ‘Glee’ Effect,” The Telegraph, July 2, 2010. www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/tvandradio/7864145/The-Glee-effect.html. For similar discussions, see Leslie Goshko, “8 Signs You’re a Musical Theater Geek,” Huffington Post, August 27, 2013; updated December 6, 2017; and Stephanie Chen, “The ‘Glee’ Effect: Singing is Cool Again,” CNN, November 15, 2010. www.cnn. com/2010/LIVING/11/15/glee.effect.show.choir.comeback/index.html. See Roger L. Bedard, “Junior League Children’s Theatre: Debutantes Take the Stage,” in Spotlight on the Child: Studies in the History of American Children’s Theatre, ed. Roger L. Bedard and C. John Tolch, Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, no. 28 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 35–50. Pinocchio was forced to close in June 1939 when the House Un-American Activities Committee shut down the entire Federal Theatre Project. See Richard Wunderlich and Thomas J. Morrissey, Pinocchio Goes Postmodern: Perils of a Puppet in the United States (New York: Routledge: 2002), 87–94. See Laura Gardner Salazar, “Theatre for Young Audiences in New York City, 1900–1910: A Heritage of Jolly Productions,” in Bedard and Tolch, Spotlight on the Child, 26. For more information on children’s theater history, see Nellie McCaslin, Historical Guide to Children’s Theatre in America (New York: Greenwood, 1987). R&H is now a subsidiary of Concord Music’s theatrical licensing wing, Concord Theatricals, which also leases shows from Tams-Witmark and Samuel French. See www.rnh.com/news/1273/CONCORD-MUSIC-ANNOUNCES-THEFORMATION-OF-CONCORD-THEATRICALS. Accessed March 10, 2019. Stacy Wolf describes the history of MTI and its Broadway, JR. and KIDS catalog in “Not Only on Broadway: Disney JR. and Disney KIDS Across the USA,” in The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Approaches from Snow White to Frozen, ed. George Rodosthenous (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2017), 133–51. MTI licenses a “PG-13” version of Sweeney Todd in its “School Edition” series. See www.mtishows.com/sweeney-todd-school-edition. Accessed March 12, 2019.

Children, childhood, and musical theater  19









2

Beginning with Do Re Mi Childhood and The Sound of Music Ryan Bunch

I first learned “My Favorite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi” when Mrs. Molly started coming to our school with her guitar.1 She taught us all kinds of songs, but these were among my favorites. When I went home singing them, my mother and my adult sister revealed that they were from a musical called The Sound of Music (Broadway 1959; film 1965). Not only that, we had the record, too. After the album was retrieved from deep inside the family stereo console, I located the two songs I knew and listened to them repeatedly. While I listened, I studied the album cover, wondering who the young woman with the guitar case was and why the stern-looking gentleman seemed so disapproving of her exuberant romp with a bunch of children. The album became one of my favorites, and it was a momentous event the next time The Sound of Music was broadcast on television. We set the VCR to record, and soon, rewatching the movie became a cross-generational family ritual. The Sound of Music, which was no doubt nostalgic for my mother and sister, became a touchstone text in my own childhood experience of musicals. Like Maria introducing the von Trapp children to music for the first time, my family introduced me to the genre of the musical as a locus of common culture, pleasure, and understanding between children and adults. I offer my own experience with The Sound of Music as a particular manifestation of a special relationship between musicals and childhood. Although The Sound of Music was not strictly a children’s musical at its inception, it now holds a special place in children’s culture and adult nostalgia. Because it is a standard work of musical theater, and it is very much about both children and music, The Sound of Music is a “good place to start” in seeking a relationship between children and musicals. In addressing childhood subjects within the form of a musical, The Sound of Music affirms a cultural belief in children’s natural affinity for musical expression. I suggest that it is in part because of this belief in children’s natural musicality that musicals are thought to be a natural fit for children’s enjoyment and education. In The Sound of Music, the playfulness and pleasures of music acculturate the von Trapp children into a model childhood that leads to a normative adulthood. At the same time, the disruptive and queer

Beginning with Do Re Mi  21 potentialities of children and musical theater balance out this didactic function in their simultaneously innocent and subversive maneuvers. The temporal dislocations of the musical, particularly in its lyrical disruptions of linear narrative, promote the blurring of age boundaries and ultimately the distinction between musicals for adults and musicals for children. 2

Musicals, childhood, and The Sound of Music While the American musical has been studied for its relationship to gender, sexuality, and race, and despite frequent (sometimes derogatory3) acknowledgment of its appeal to young people, there has not until recently been sustained scholarly attention to the relationship between musicals and childhood. As Tyler Bickford has noted, commercial children’s music in the United States has historically come in two dominant strands: folk-revival music and music from (or influenced by) stage and screen musicals (The Sound of Music draws on both of these traditions and their ideologies in its construction of the musical child).4 When I was a child in the 1980s, musical theater was everywhere in children’s media—from Sesame Street to Disney films and the movie version of Annie (1982), which had been my musical theater obsession the year before I discovered The Sound of Music. With iconic films like The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz (1939) at the center of the musical canon and the popularity in contemporary youth culture of works such as Wicked (2003), High School Musical (2006), Glee (2009–15), Frozen (2013), Hamilton (2015), and Disney musicals, it seems obvious that there are certain musicals that are in some sense “for kids,” whether because they are intended for them or because they are embraced by them. Such musicals are important both for their importance in the cultures of actual young people and for their representations of childhood, adolescence, and generational relations. In the case of The Sound of Music, the portrayal of children as naturally creative and musical is a feature of the immediate historical context. In the era following World War II, idealized images of children in American popular culture were influenced by a national cultural politics embracing reassuring nostalgia, sentimentalized childhood, and cultural discourses of the naturally creative child as the promise of the future. The middle-class, sentimental image of childhood, according to Viviana Zelizer, had become dominant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the “emotionally priceless” child, with its “sentimental value,” replaced the economically “useful” child of the American working class.5 Added to this in the postwar era was the belief that children were naturally creative and that “natural” childrearing practices, such as those advocated by Benjamin Spock, which encouraged parents to trust both their own and their children’s natural impulses, were the best methods for raising children. The ideal of a good and natural childhood encouraged adults to invest in children as the hope of the future and insurance of democracy’s survival in the

22  Ryan Bunch Cold War.6 In this historical moment, children and their worlds were characterized in children’s literature and popular entertainment by what Henry Jenkins has described as “sentimental realism.”7 Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals, and the children who appear in them, seem to conform to this sentimental realism and its white, middleclass childhood. In a turn from the openly theatrical Broadway musical comedies of the prewar era, these “integrated” musical plays strove for theatrical and psychological realism, which combined with a tendency toward the sentimental treatment of children and family relationships—a tendency for which the musicals were criticized.8 As sentimentality embodied, the children in these musicals function largely as ciphers and muses in whose presence adults change for the better but who themselves remain eternally childlike. Emile’s biracial children in South Pacific (1949) teach Nellie to overcome her racial biases, Billy’s “Soliloquy” in Carousel (1945) expresses adults’ emotional investments in their children’s futures, and in The King and I (1951), the King of Siam’s children assist Anna in colonizing the country with her Western values, while her own son, Louis, is a projection of her fears, insecurities, and Western innocence. Children thus exist for the fulfillment of adult needs and desires, their presence cuing the desired emotional responses in the audience. These sentimentalized representations of children are naturalized by the realist aesthetic of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals, which, in spite of their professed left-of-center politics, seem to present family and social dynamics through the conservative lens of a nostalgia for imagined times and places.9 The Sound of Music’s story of the recuperation of a family deprived of joy and music by a widowed father of seven children relies on the same tropes of sentimental childhood and adult desire that previous Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals employed, but by placing children at the center of the story, the musical also centers sentimentality as its recuperative, motivating force. The representation of precious childhood in the white, blueeyed, blond von Trapp brood is reinforced by the fairy-tale quality of The Sound of Music’s Cinderella plot and picturesque European setting, as well as the casting of Mary Martin and Julie Andrews as Maria, respectively, on stage and screen. Each was already associated with musicals for children and families—Martin in Peter Pan (1954) and Andrews in Cinderella (1957) and Mary Poppins (1964).10 The sweetness of the story is even more prominent in the film version, which eliminates many of the stage show’s more explicit references to the politics surrounding the looming German annexation of Austria under the Third Reich. The Sound of Music’s intimate relationship with sentimental childhood may be embraced, resisted, or even ridiculed by audiences and critics. Walter Kerr, reviewing the original Broadway production for the Herald Tribune, called it a “cascade of sugar,” “not only too sweet for words but almost too sweet for music,” and declared that the “evening suffer[ed] from little children.” Judith Crist, reviewing the film version six years later,

Beginning with Do Re Mi  23 opined, “Everything is so icky-sticky purely ever-lovin’ The movie is for the five-to-seven set and their mommies who think their kids aren’t up to the stinging sophistication and biting wit of Mary Poppins.” While portraying Captain von Trapp in the film, Christopher Plummer referred to it as “The Sound of Mucus.”11 Songs from the show are emblematic of the musical genre’s presumed childish qualities. “My Favorite Things,” a list song enumerating simple pleasures, is strongly associated in its afterlife beyond The Sound of Music with childhood and Christmas.12 To some, it represents The Sound of Music’s intolerable preciousness—a trivial song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most trivial contribution to the musical genre, a trivial form of entertainment. Ironically, The Sound of Music’s sentimental book was written not by Oscar Hammerstein, as was the usual way of his collaborations with Rodgers, but by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, who were better known for their work on irreverent musical comedies like Anything Goes (1934). Filling in for an ailing Hammerstein and adapting to his style, the writers may have exaggerated his sentimental tendencies; as a result, Thomas Hischack has suggested that “in some ways The Sound of Music is a gentle parody of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.”13 The Sound of Music’s sentiments, however, are a reason for its success with audiences who find these sentiments pleasurable and empowering. Hammerstein himself responded to criticisms of sentimentality in his musicals by saying, In my book, there’s nothing wrong with sentiment because the things we’re sentimental about are the fundamental things in life, the birth of a child, the death of a child or of anybody, falling in love. I couldn’t be anything but sentimental about these basic things. I think to be anything but sentimental is being a “poseur.”14 Feminist critics have approached the sentimental in women’s literature and entertainment in a recuperative light, rejecting the biases against its presumed triviality in favor of recognizing its affective and political efficacies, and, as Richard Dyer has noted, The Sound of Music addresses specifically female problems and interests.15 The “intimate publics” or sense of belonging that Lauren Berlant finds in the American sentimental tradition for women might well apply to children and the families who form affective communities and a sense of belonging around musicals.16 For children and adults alike, responses to The Sound of Music and its sentiments may vary. Some may feel discomfort and resist succumbing to what are perceived as clichés and cues intended to illicit unearned emotional responses. Others may find these moments meaningful, cathartic, or even pleasurable. Kids may find The Sound of Music corny and old-fashioned or enjoyable and empowering. Its sentimentality can be taken at face value, rejected outright, or understood as camp.

24  Ryan Bunch That The Sound of Music can be loved by many and reviled by others points to the importance of reception in considering the musical’s relationship to audiences of all ages. Marah Gubar has noted that theater has long addressed adult and child audiences simultaneously, a view that meshes with her kinship model of childhood, in which children and adults are neither entirely distinct nor the same but related to each other in complex ways.17 Such a model gives us an opening to see musicals as available to both children and adults who may have mutual and diverging ways of appreciating them. Because of its status as a “family” musical appealing to audiences of both children and adults, The Sound of Music has become a part of children’s culture despite not being explicitly “for children.” The film version has been available for many years on television and home video, and for my generation, it was likely to be one of the first musicals a young person experienced, whether as a viewer or as a participant in a school or community theater production. That it was the first choice in the recent series of family friendly musical broadcasts on NBC (2013), followed by Peter Pan (2014), The Wiz (2015), and Hairspray (2016), is a confirmation of its status as a family musical. The phenomenal success of the film version (the highest grossing film of the pre-blockbuster era) has established The Sound of Music as a culturally dominant example of the genre while ensuring its preservation as part of childhood culture and family entertainment. That The Sound of Music is so important in childhood without claiming to be children’s entertainment may offer us an opportunity to understand that all “children’s” musicals exist in the gap between imagined categories of adult and child.

Musicality and upward growth in The Sound of Music The natural musicality of children and the usefulness of music in their education are central themes of The Sound of Music. The first child we encounter in The Sound of Music is Maria herself, who embodies music, nature, and youth. Both the stage and screen versions introduce Maria in the title song, in which she identifies music with nature: “The hills are alive with the sound of music.” Maria further identifies body and soul with both: “My heart wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees . . . to sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray.” The musical’s book describes Maria as sprawled out unladylike under a tree, but on stage, Mary Martin was perched in its branches.18 In the movie, which exploits the natural setting more vividly than the stage version can, the song follows a lengthy aerial shot of Alpine scenery, in which sounds of nature slowly blend with the sounds of an orchestra, form into melody, and establish music as a natural force.19 At the end of this sequence, the camera zooms in on Maria atop a mountain, where she spins around and bursts into song, seeming to spring forth from nature itself. What Richard Dyer calls romantic “nature-music” is embodied on Broadway by Martin’s

Beginning with Do Re Mi  25 earthy chest voice and on screen by Julie Andrews’s angelic soprano.20 Maria’s awakening into music in this number both evokes the unspoiled natural state of youth and anticipates the adolescent awakening she is about to go through, one delayed by her training to become a nun. Maria’s musicality is unproblematic in her natural habitat, but in the abbey it is a cause for concern, because it demonstrates her lack of maturity and inability to conform to the rules of the convent (“How do you solve a problem like Maria?”). Mother Abbess, who addresses Maria as “my child,” discusses with the other nuns Maria’s prospects for completing her vows. The nuns sing of their frustrations with Maria, invoking contradictory angel/demon tropes of childhood (“She’s a darling! She’s a demon! She’s a lamb! . . . She is gentle! She is wild!/She’s a riddle! She’s a child!/ She’s a headache! She’s an angel!/She’s a girl!”). Additionally, she is faulted for climbing trees and tearing her dress, but most significantly, Maria’s immaturity is musical—she has been seen waltzing on her way to mass and whistling and singing within the abbey walls. Her natural musicality is a sign of her youthfulness, and to tame her would be like trying to control nature: “How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? . . . How do you keep a wave upon the sand?” Perhaps to aid her maturation, or perhaps just to get her from underfoot, Mother Abbess sends Maria to serve as governess to the von Trapp children. 21 It soon becomes apparent that Maria’s task is to complete her maturation into adulthood, marriage, and motherhood by healing the dysfunctional von Trapp family home through her feminine gift of music. Captain von Trapp has not allowed his children to play or have music since his wife died. Instead, the Captain runs the home—usually the domain of women and children—as if it were a battleship. The semblance of work is imposed in the form of constant marching, and the children’s natural musicality is repressed. Maria, who brings nature, music, youth, and femininity, is the key to restoring happiness. After all, it is the loss of the mother that has caused the absence of music and distanced the Captain from his children. In contrast to the Captain’s regimented parenting style, Maria’s educational methods are natural, playful, and in harmony with Romantic beliefs about childhood and music assumed by music educators and child-rearing experts from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. These ideas are predicated on the conviction that children are naturally musical and able to make basic musical sounds and vocalizations before they learn music in a more formal, disciplined way. 22 Music education should build on these natural instincts. Both John Locke, operating from the idea of the child as a blank slate to be taught good habits of citizenship through pleasurable learning activities, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that the child should be reared according to the principles of nature, advocated that music education should take the form of simple, natural activities and materials resembling folk music. The idea that learning could be as natural as play was embraced in the twentieth century by influential composer-educators

26  Ryan Bunch Zoltán Kodály and Carl Orff. Both believed that children possessed natural musicality, and they based their respective methods on the notion of children’s natural play with music, which can be built upon in their formal education. These methods emphasized exploration through imitation, listening, and movement, and advocated the use of folk music because of its natural connection to the child’s culture. Maria employs these methods, encouraging the children’s natural musicality as she teaches them. In “Do-Re-Mi,” she correlates the rudiments of music with the rudiments of reading—the alphabet: “Let’s start at the very beginning / a very good place to start / when we read we begin with ABC / When we sing we begin with do re mi.” This opening verse leads into a music lesson that employs some well-worn techniques of music pedagogy. One is call and response: Maria models musical concepts, which the children repeat and learn by imitation. The other is the solfège system, which assigns a name to each note of the scale (“do, re, mi, fa, so and so on”). Maria introduces the names of the notes with a mnemonic device (“Doe, a deer,” etc.). As if embodying music itself, the children line up across the stage as Maria, patting their heads, plays them like a human xylophone or one of the “Orff instruments” often used in children’s music classes. There are seven solfège syllables representing the diatonic pitches of the major scale, and fortunately there are seven children, so each one takes a different note, from the youngest on do to the oldest on ti. At first, the children only shout the note names in response to Maria’s modeling and signaling,

Figure 2.1 “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music. Mary Martin (Marier Rainer) with Evanna Lien (Gretl), Mary Susan Locke (Marta), Marilyn Rogers (Brigitta), Joseph Stewart (Kurt), Kathy Dunn (Louisa), William Snowden (Friedrich) and Lauri Peters (Liesl) in The Sound of Music, Broadway, 1959. Photo by Friedman-Abeles; © Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Beginning with Do Re Mi  27 but soon they learn to sing them on pitch. As their lesson continues, the children learn more advanced applications, like singing the notes in different sequences to form a melody. As music induces an affective change in their movement from work to play, the marching to which the children are accustomed transforms into dance. The speed with which the children master their music lesson affirms their innate musical abilities. In the space of a single musical number, they progress from not knowing how to sing to mastering the solfège system, along with counterpoint and harmony. This rapid learning is made plausible by the conventions of the musical, in which songs can compress time and conceal the labor that goes into musical performance. This concealment of labor in musicals simulates the naturalness and spontaneity of folk performance, and like the folk, who are idealized and infantilized, the children execute their performances with little or no apparent rehearsal, accompanied by Maria’s guitar, a musical symbol of folk culture.23 The movie, especially, emphasizes the naturalness of the children and their musical performance through its outdoor setting while the stage show sets the song in music’s (and children’s) other natural setting, the home. “Do Re Me” presents in microcosm the trajectory of children’s growth and education, especially in the movie, in which the setting gradually moves from the wild to civilization, from the mountains to the city as the children’s mastery of music increases.24 The musical number begins with Maria tuning the guitar in octaves, suggesting that music is organized out of the sounds of nature and, like children in their natural state, must be molded and disciplined. The child’s perfection through playful education is represented by the climbing of the scale. The melody moves in stepwise motion, slowly climbing phrase by phrase from do to fa while alternating these scalar movements with childlike sung thirds (“a female deer,” “a name I call myself”), similar to the child’s calling voice. Then, starting

Figure 2.2 Movie still of Julie Andrews and the von Trapp children from The Sound of Music, 20th Century Fox, 1965.

28  Ryan Bunch with so, the melody leaps down and runs up the scale to each new pitch, creating sequences that climb, like students ascending the fabled steps of the Greek mountain Parnassus that have long symbolized the progress to achievement in music instruction books.25 While Martin in the role of Maria playfully sings down the scale into her low register at the end of “DoRe-Mi,” Andrews, followed by the children, literally climbs a stairway while ascending the scale in her lofty soprano to the high do, touching her head and pointing heavenward. Reinforcing the idea of ascending the musical scale to perfection, images of plants, trees, and climbing elsewhere in The Sound of Music suggest metaphors for growth and education. These include the tree in which Maria is perched at the beginning of the stage production, the tree from which we are told she was able to look into the abbey as a little girl, and the trellis that Liesl climbs like a vine to sneak into the house after her tryst with Rolf, symbolizing her ascent to sexual maturity. Much like Locke, who uses gardening metaphors throughout his Some Thoughts on Education, and Rousseau, who describes the education of the child in Emile as the cultivation of a plant that can be trained by pruning in accordance with, rather than against, nature, in “Do-Re-Mi,” the playful impulse to climb trees is redirected to education and growth by the structured play of music, which is simultaneously a sign of nature and a tool of discipline. Such growth-and-climbing metaphors symbolize the naturalness of “growing up,” treating the child as an adult-in-progress, whose romantic innocence in the meantime must be preserved. Indeed, the songs in The Sound of Music provide moral, sexual, and social instruction for both children and adults. “The Lonely Goatherd,” which Maria sings to calm the children during a thunderstorm, 26 enacts a fable of normative sexuality through the procreative union of girl and goatherd, using the naturalizing affect of folk music to convey just enough information about its model of sexuality for the children to understand what will be expected of them. The children show their natural folk abilities again in the movie’s rendition of the song, which has them not only singing and yodeling like pros, but also demonstrating astonishing mastery of the folk art of puppetry. The song’s folk credentials are reinforced when it later reappears as a Ländler, an Austrian folk dance, and the romantic connection between children and the folk is even more explicit when they perform in folk costume as the von Trapp Family Singers. The lessons of heterosexuality in “The Lonely Goatherd” serve not only to educate the children, but also to point the way to Maria’s assumption of motherhood by the middle of the musical. This education through music is the process through which everyone must mature—Maria, the Captain, the children, and ultimately the audience. Initially, the Captain is enraged when he discovers that the children have been making music in play clothes made of old curtains. Just when he has finished firing Maria, the children sing a reprise of “The Sound of

Beginning with Do Re Mi  29 Music.” This is the first time the Captain has been on stage or screen when there is diegetic music in the form of singing, and it transforms him. Because music and children are both sublime and close to God, and because of the children’s naïve musicality, properly cultivated by Maria and given sound by their angelic voices, the Captain is overcome with memories of his own childhood and joins in the singing, adding his baritone to the high voices of the children. In the movie, the purity of this moment is symbolized in the white edelweiss the children present to Baroness Schraeder after their performance. This scene also starts Maria on the road to her own normative growth and marriage. After the children have left the room, the Captain rehires Maria, and the two of them sing a duet on a segment of “The Sound of Music,” signifying that they are going to form a couple, her freedom balancing his discipline, and form a family unit with the children. Even if we’ve never seen the musical before (but we likely have), we know this will happen despite the Captain’s engagement to the Baroness. The conventions of the genre dictate it.27 The musical reconciliation of the Captain and Maria will ultimately bring balance to the household. If music is the key to raising good children, so too is the musical. In addition to demonstrating how music educates children and young adults, The Sound of Music fulfills an essential function of the musical genre as practiced by Rodgers and Hammerstein—to be a teaching tool in the education of the nation, especially its presumptive middle-class audience. Among other values, Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals teach social tolerance (an ideal to which the musicals themselves sometimes fail to live up narratively), as exemplified in South Pacific’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.”28 According to Raymond Knapp, The Sound of Music also teaches the importance of retaining childhood innocence into adulthood. When Austria is under the threat of German annexation, it is the innocence embodied in the children and their public performance at the festival (where the folk-like “Edelweiss” returns) that allows the von Trapp family to escape and symbolically assures the future of goodness in the world. 29 This adherence to innocence, however, is really a lesson to Americans, for whom The Sound of Music was written and whose postwar hopes and anxieties it addresses. All along, the children have been nurtured in an American conception of childhood, maturity, and citizenship under the tutelage of Maria, whose resourcefulness and social mobility code her with an American sensibility.30 Indeed, the real von Trapp family ultimately emigrated to the United States.31 At the end of the musical, the nuns (a disembodied chorus in the film) reprise “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” as the family ascends a new Parnassus to the American dream, whose bourgeois values are assured a future in the innocence of the children. It is notable that the innocence of the von Trapp children is a luxury of their class and race. The Captain’s initial reluctance to allow the children to sing in public likely reflects a desire to confine their activities to the private sphere, protecting them from the stigma of work and preserving their

30  Ryan Bunch innocent musicality in the bargain. This luxury is not shared by workingclass children (and encountering hard times, even the real von Trapp children worked as musicians, and the real Maria was a task-master). When the Captain sings his farewell to Austria in “Edelweiss,” we are presented again with the image of a white flower as a symbol of the innocence of the children, the family, and the nation. This whiteness naturalizes and universalizes white, middle-class childhood. As Caryl Flinn notes, The Sound of Music was a swansong to a passing era of white privilege in the context of the 1960s, but “for an even larger swathe of audiences, The Sound of Music left them out in the cold, never seeking to address them.”32

The musical’s incorrigible children Does this emphasis on the children’s normative futurity as adults-in-themaking leave them with any agency in the present? Do they have desires of their own, or are they, as suggested earlier, merely transcendent symbols who exist to fulfill the needs of adults? All of the songs sung by the children (with the notable exception of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”) are given to them by adults, usually Maria, at whose command they sing. Might we nonetheless see these performances as collaborations, in which children can negotiate their relations to adults and to each other, in which they might even rebel? In an infamous review of the movie for McCall’s, Pauline Kael criticized The Sound of Music’s “sugar-coated lie” of childish perfection: “wasn’t there perhaps one little von Trapp who didn’t want to sing his head off . . . or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage?”33 In response to Kael’s query, can we find moments when the children in The Sound of Music assert their own voices, act up, or push back against their scripted roles and compulsory sing-alongs? From the first time they meet Maria, the children knowingly play with the tropes of childhood innocence and naughtiness. Lined up in the strict formation mandated by their father, they playfully test their boundaries. Liesl, the oldest, declares that she does not need a governess. Louisa tries to trick Maria by pretending to be Marta. She is known for climbing the trellis to the governess’s room with a toad in her hand (a jar of spiders in the movie). Brigitta offers a brutally frank assessment of Maria’s dress, and Kurt is “incorrigible,” according to the movie. Although only Marta and Gretl, the two youngest, seem to display unspoiled sweetness, even the older children’s naughtiness is a mark of innocence as a natural part of childhood. Similar ideas of the child as either angels or wild creatures are juxtaposed later in the film when the Captain and his companions spy the children hanging from trees in their play clothes while the heavenly sounds of a choir are heard from the distance. While music is a method for the children’s education and development, musical expression also becomes a means of their resistance. As Alisa Clapp-Itnyre notes in her study of nineteenth-century British hymn-singing

Beginning with Do Re Mi  31 among children, “the very act of singing allows for creativity and agency . . . through musical interpretation and physical response: children may sing faster, louder, out of tune, with personal inflections, with passion and animated hand gestures, with distraction and ambivalence, even with insolence and rebelliousness. . . . using their singing to express the inexpressible, to defy without defiance.”34 When, as performers, children become collaborators in the songs written for them, they may slyly bend the songs to their own purposes or thumb their noses at adult imperatives through vocal mockery. Often in the very moments of song in which they are being instructed, the children in The Sound of Music can use their perceived innocence to push back at the boundary between childhood and adulthood and to influence adults for their own purposes. The children perhaps most knowingly defy the adult songbook within the festive atmosphere of the party that occurs near the end of act one. “So Long, Farewell,” sung at the insistence of Baroness Schraeder, attempts to regulate the social movements of the children, who must go to bed while the adults stay up late (the Baroness, of course, has reasons to get both the children and Maria out of the way for the evening). This scene musicalizes the ritual of children’s fleeting resistance and negotiations at bedtime. Some of the children are eager to go (“I fleetly flee, I fly”) or accept their place as natural (“the sun has gone to bed and so must I”), while others attempt to challenge the power structure. Liesl proposes staying up to have her first champagne (an idea that is firmly rejected). Friedrich or Kurt (depending on the stage or screen version) heaves a sigh “Goodbye” on a high, insolent falsetto note, a purely affective vocal gesture, taunting in its feigned innocence. He transgresses the categories of adult/child and male/female, and his insertion of the child’s disruptive voice within the adult-approved song demonstrates the prowess of the (pre)adolescent male voice. Learning that Kurt’s high note was dubbed by Darlene Carr in the movie only adds to its gender bending.35 The adults play along, and in the liminal atmosphere of the party, all of this is treated as harmless fun. The Captain poo-poos him with a wave of the hand. As Kathryn Bond Stockton notes, innocent childhood is queer in its state of not yet being (hetero)sexual, and here, this queer innocence excuses transgressions.36 In this carnivalesque environment, what could not previously be acknowledged finds expression. Long before Maria is prepared to recognize her attraction to the Captain, the children seem to enlist themselves in an effort to bring the two together. Along the way, they drop the mask of innocence, betraying their knowledge (or their desire to know) of love, sex, and other adult matters. The party provides a space of play for learning and demonstrating this knowledge. Kurt asks Maria to teach him the Ländler. This heterosexual courtship ritual is underscored by the Ländler’s connection to the folk-like “The Lonely Goatherd.” Kurt’s interest in the Ländler becomes a catalyst for adult romance when the Captain cuts in, dancing with Maria until they become aware of their feelings. After the Captain

32  Ryan Bunch invites Maria to cross class boundaries and sit with the guests, Brigitta (who Maria has said notices things and “always tells the truth—especially when you don’t want to hear it”) remarks that Maria is in love with the Captain. In this pivotal moment, the child shows her ability to influence the lives of the adults through the revelation of her knowledge (this is less true in the movie, in which it is the Baroness who confronts Maria). Too much has been revealed, however, and reality with its normal rules intrudes. The children must go to bed, and Maria must flee, as, effectively, the clock (in the movie at least) strikes twelve on this Cinderella story. If the children are compelled to retreat to the nursery, Maria is about to be thrust into adulthood. Her escape plan is to return to the same-sex haven of the abbey, but it is of no use. Even here, Maria is schooled in the virtues of compulsory heterosexuality. So far, education and growth have taken the form of playful rituals of climbing trees and trellises, but now bigger obstacles must be scaled. “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” is an inspirational anthem that, like “Do-Re-Mi,” climbs to lofty heights in scalar patterns (scalar movement being a hallmark of Rodgers’s compositional style), but with more complexity, changes of direction, and searching chromaticism.37 Invoking the same natural imagery that Maria embraced at the beginning of the musical (“follow every rainbow”), Mother Abbess sings with operatic authority and overwhelming conviction, calling Maria to adulthood and exhorting her to follow a dream. Although the lyric is non-specific about what this dream might be, Mother Abbess, eager as ever to nudge Maria out of the nest, has been clear. It is to return to the von Trapp home to explore her sexuality and find happiness in marriage to the Captain.38 Maria does, and the Baroness departs with surprisingly little fuss so that Maria and the Captain may declare their love for each other. There is one last nod to the agency of the children when, in acknowledgment of their role in bringing the couple together, Maria and the Captain agree to ask their permission for marriage. At the wedding, the nuns repeat “how do you solve a problem like Maria?” But we have our answer now, and unsurprisingly for the genre, the solution is heteronormative marriage. As Maria takes her place as the matriarch of the von Trapp family, her handling of Liesl’s romance with Rolf demonstrates her worthiness in the role. Unlike Maria, Liesl has been in a hurry to find love. As Rolf has sung earlier in “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” she’s “an empty page that men will want to write on,” and she seems eager for someone to fill in her tabula rasa. On the boundary between childhood and maturity, her performance with Rolf in this song and dance is play-practicing at the kind of relationship that Maria and the Captain, but not she, will be able to consummate by the end of the musical. Rolf asserts that Liesl needs someone “older and wiser,” conflating Liesl’s femininity with her immaturity even though Liesl is the aggressor in the stage version when they kiss at the end of the song. Early on, Maria has declared that she and a headstrong Liesl will “just be friends,” a gesture that, along with keeping Liesl’s meeting with Rolf a

Beginning with Do Re Mi  33 secret, helps her earn Liesl’s trust. On returning from her honeymoon in the role of mother, however, Maria offers a reprise of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” with some cautionary advice for Liesl to “wait a year or two” for romance. For now, Liesl must remain protected in her childhood status (and indeed, the movie’s Rolf turns out to be a threat). Although Liesl has had some enlivening experiences, and learned from them, her failed love plot seems primarily to serve the function of completing and justifying Maria’s, not her own, successful entry into sexual maturity.39 At the same time, in marriage, Maria’s own position is circumscribed. She defers to the Captain’s judgment on the political situation, a gesture that seems in accordance with her earlier acquiescence to his request, at the party, to wear the dress that makes her look “soft and white,” like the edelweiss that is the musical’s symbol of innocence (“small and white, clean and bright”). Only by becoming an “angel in the house” can Maria leave the nunnery and enter sexual maturity without a loss of innocence. It is in the musical space of the show between these institutions (there is very little new music after the wedding, mostly in formal performance at the festival) that Maria seems most free, the duration of the musical comprising a fleeting adolescence in which song and dance have allowed her, like Liesl in “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” to play in the spaces between childhood and adulthood.40 Thus, despite some playful acts of rebellion along the way, The Sound of Music seems to narratively sort its characters into normative, age-appropriate roles. Maria grows up but is still defined by her gender, Liesl stays a child along with the other children, and the Captain remains the undisputed head of the family. When Maria began her music lesson with the children, she insisted on starting “at the very beginning,” suggesting a corresponding purposeful end to education, musical or otherwise. Regarding The Sound of Music’s narrative alone, this end would seem to be accomplished.

How do you solve a problem like The Sound of Music? What then are the lessons we take away from this musical? After all the pleasures of song, dance, and youth, are we, like Maria, simply to fall in line with the status quo, adhering to the normative marriage plots so enthusiastically promoted by the family musical genre? Must we follow The Sound of Music’s gendered imperatives? Can normative ideas about growing up—so vividly imagined in Rousseau’s sprouting child, the musical’s steps to Parnassus, and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”—be challenged by alternate ways of growing? Child musicality, where it is compliant, has made this developmental journey to normative adulthood appear natural, but it is also musicality, especially the disruptive, rebellious musicality of childhood and adolescence, that might provide a way out. As Samuel Baltimore notes, when the musical closes a door, somewhere it opens a window.41 In spite of its generically conservative sexual politics, the Golden Age musical, in its affects, provides

34  Ryan Bunch access to a utopian space where resistance to linear narrative and upward growth is possible. According to Baltimore, our repetitive consumption of musicals (“often beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior” in kids) is a form of self-pedagogy allowing us to “escape from progression.” By opening “a window back to the carnival” of the musical comedy and its lyrical moments, we can evade the narrative lessons of gender and age expectations.42 Similarly, Flinn remarks that the songs in The Sound of Music have an “emotional remembrance” whose “staying power rivals if not surpasses that of the film itself.”43 We may sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” as an inspiring anthem divorced from its context in the musical, and it is the pleasurable adolescent glow of first love in “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” rather than its cautionary reprise, that lives on in our repeated listenings, sing-alongs, and reenactments. This repetitive, liminal lyricism, which Stacy Wolf and Sarah Ellis associate with queer temporality in musicals, seems also to unmoor age distinctions in its affective excesses, making children capable performers and adults playfully youthful.44 As Rick Altman suggests, the musical testifies to “our desire to retain the qualities of childhood past the age of maturity.”45 In the movie, Maria tells Mother Abbess, “I can’t seem to stop singing wherever I am. And what’s worse, I can’t seem to stop saying things. Everything and anything I think and feel . . .” This incessant expression through music seems the very encapsulation of a popular definition of musicals, and proof that adults can retain their disruptive musicality. In normative life, only children can publicly burst into song without attracting looks of disapproval, but in a genre that celebrates play, as the musical does in song and dance, grown men and women can romp in the rain and twirl around on mountains, and young people can be empowered by song.46 Musicals thus provide a playful space where youth and musicality are reanimated each time we return to them. Maria may “grow up” in the narrative, but in the memory, it is the vivacious, youthful, exuberant Maria of song and the mountains that persists. As Stacy Wolf observes, Maria is an eternally queer child “whose spunk outweighed her heterosexual transformation.”47 With the musical, we might grow queerly sideways, as described by Kathryn Bond Stockton, rather than up, into normative adulthood, as dictated by the scale.48 A certain playful self-awareness about our enjoyment of musicals allows us to make critical choices about what to take away from them. Not too long after my introduction to The Sound of Music, the winter 1985 issue of Muppet Magazine featured a parody of The Sound of Music in the form of a comic story called The Swine of Music. Miss Piggy played the role of Maria, with Kermit the Frog as Captain von Tripe, surely a reference to the film’s sentimental reputation. Fraulein Piggy is a bit fussier than the indulgent Maria. She instructs the children in proper skills of etiquette before getting to music, and her off-pitch singing is a menace to the village. The combination of affection and parody is evident in the magazine’s table of contents,

Beginning with Do Re Mi  35 which includes a note of apology to Julie Andrews. The parody lyrics from The Swine of Music took their place in my musical memory alongside the originals: “Climb ev’ry mountain / search through the fog  /  follow every rainbow/till you find your frog!” I still sometimes sing the alternate version of “Do-Re-Mi”: “Dough, to bake a loaf of bread / Ray, who owns the grocery store / Moi, a name I call myself . . .” Such parodies enable us to enjoy the musicals we love, and even be inspired by them, without investing fully in their representations or following their dictates about whether, when, and how to “grow up.” We may sing both the official lyrics and the parodic ones. Camp reception and reenactment of The Sound of Music and other musicals, as in Baltimore’s study of Sound of Music sing-alongs, serve a similar purpose.49 Like the von Trapp children singing against the grain of “So Long, Farewell,” we adapt the musical to our purposes. Musicals in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition, from Oklahoma! to the most recent Disney films, commonly make use of coming-of-age stories, using the affective registers of song and dance to resonate with the heightened physical and emotional experiences of adolescence.50 Such musicals appeal to both young people and adults, empowering the former and rekindling the youthful idealism of the latter. Musicals, like adolescence, are liminal. In the musical, we find not just a return to youth or preservation of childhood’s innocence but a destabilizing of the very categories of adult and child and an acknowledgment of the relational experiences that bind across generations. Before Maria leaves the abbey in the stage version of The Sound of Music, Mother Abbess asks her to sing “My Favorite Things” with her. She has heard Maria singing it but cannot quite recall it from her own youth in the mountains. In a foreshadowing of what Maria will do in her mentoring of the von Trapp children and recuperation of the Captain, Maria helps Mother Abbess remember her musical childhood by singing with her. Like Maria and Mother Abbess singing “My Favorite Things” together, many people undoubtedly sing the songs from The Sound of Music as a way of bringing the worlds of childhood and adulthood together, as I did in concert with teachers and family members. Whether we are children, adults, or in-between, the musical gives us permission to affirmatively embrace our permanent incompleteness with all the abandon of Maria spinning on a mountaintop, bursting into song with arms outstretched, body and voice gesturing rapturously toward an ever-expanding horizon of endless beginnings.

Notes

36  Ryan Bunch

3

4 5 6

7 8

9

10 11 12

Theatre 5, no. 2 (2011): 195–207; and “Doing the Time Warp: Queer Temporalities and Musical Theater” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2013). On how similar temporal practices relate to children and musicals, see Samuel Baltimore, “‘Do It Again’: Comic Repetition, Participatory Reception and Gendered Identity on Musical Comedy’s Margins” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2013). On the queerness of musicals generally, see David Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002) and Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); John Clum, Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); and D.A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Barry Keith Grant, The Hollywood Film Musical (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 36. Baltimore, 39–40, notes that the “child-centeredness” of the musical has been used to denigrate the form and explain its “infantile” appeal to gay men. Tyler Bickford, “The New ‘Tween’ Music Industry: The Disney Channel, Kidz Bop, and an Emerging Childhood Counterpublic,” Popular Music 31 (2012): 418. Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985). For more on idealized childhood in twentieth-century media, see Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). On discourses of children’s natural creativity in the postwar era, see Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Henry Jenkins, “Her Suffering Aristocratic Majesty: The Sentimental Value of Lassie,” in Kids’ Media Culture, ed. by Marsha Kinder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 69–101. On integration and realism, successful and not, in Rodgers and Hammerstein, see Millie Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (New York: Routledge, 2016), 4–7; and Andrea Most, “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (1998): 77–89. On sentimentality in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals, see Todd S. Purdum, Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2018), 15. The collusion of a naturalizing aesthetic and the instrumentalizing of childhood as an adult psychological need is a core of argument of Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984), which opened up ongoing debates on the status of children’s literature and its ability to belong to children. On the sentimental in children’s literature, see Clare Bradford, “Schmalz Is as Schmalz Does: Sentimentality and Picture Books,” Papers 3, no. 7 (1997): 17–32. On nostalgia as the collective memory of lost or nonexistent pasts projected toward the future, see Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). On nostalgia and The Sound of Music, see Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 213–14. Caryl Flinn (The Sound of Music [London: Palgrave, 2015]), 25, discusses the fairy tale elements of The Sound of Music. Altman identifies The Sound of Music primarily in the sub-genre of the fairy-tale musical, 377. Kerr, Crist, and Plummer are quoted in Max Wilk, The Making of The Sound of Music (New York: Routledge, 2007), 38, 78, 79–80. On the afterlives of The Sound of Music’s songs, including their association with the holidays, see Flinn, 99–105.

Beginning with Do Re Mi  37































38  Ryan Bunch 30 On Maria as American, see Altman, 341; Knapp, 236–38; and Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 223–24. 31 On The Sound of Music addressed to an American audience (at the expense of historical and cultural authenticity) see Knapp, 230–90; and Olaf Jubin, “The Hills Are Alive with . . . My Songs, My Dreams?: The Sound of Music in Germany and Austria,” Studies in Musical Theatre 7, no. (2013): 135–56. 32 Flinn, 22. On the historical whiteness of childhood innocence in the nineteenth century, of which the von Trapp children might be seen as a twentieth- century counterpart, see Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 4–8, 30–68. 33 Quoted in Laurence Maslon, The Sound of Music Companion (New York: Fireside, 2007), 148. Kael was fired from McCall’s after outcry from fans of the musical who were offended by her review. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, British Hymn Books for Children, 1900–1900: Re-tuning 34 the History of Childhood (Surrey: Ashgate, 2016), 7. 35 Flinn, 81. For more on the ability of the child’s vocal qualities to construct and negotiate categorical representations of the child, see James Leve, “Little Girls, Big Voices: Annie,” in this volume. 36 Stockton, 11–17. 37 On scalar patterns in Rodgers’s music, see Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 192–93; and Geoffrey Block, Richard Rodgers, Yale Broadway Master Series, ed. Geoffrey Block (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 33–29. 38 Knapp, 233, describes the song as an inspirational hymn in the musical language of Broadway. 39 See Knapp, 235, on the parallels between Rolf and the Captain, who both have the opportunity to be rescued from their stern outlooks by innocent women, with the Captain saved and Rolf lost. 40 See Flinn, 92–93, on how The Sound of Music becomes “seriously unfun” after the wedding, and Sam Baltimore on the refusal of sing-along audiences to allow this fact to prevent their audience participation in “Camping Out: Queer Communities and Public Sing-Alongs,” in Music and Camp, ed. Christopher Moore and Philip Purvis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018), 130. 41 Baltimore, “Camping Out,” 120. 42 Baltimore, “Do It Again,” 34, 170. Sarah T. Ellis also emphasizes the repetitive temporality of song in The Sound of Music’s performative musical construction of place in “Establishing (and Re-establishing) a Sense of Place: Musical Orientation in The Sound of Music,” Studies in Musical Theatre 3 (2009): 277–84. 43 Flinn, 13. 44 Sarah Taylor Ellis, “‘No Day But Today’: Queer Temporality in Rent,” Studies in Musical Theatre 5, no. 2 (2011): 195–207, and “Doing the Time Warp,” 1–15. See also Stacy Wolf, “’We’ll Always Be Bosom Buddies’: Female Duets and the Queering of Broadway Musical Theater,” GLQ 12 (2006): 359. 45 Altman, 58. 46 See Altman, 57–58, on Kelly as a childlike figure and the American musical’s reliance on child and childlike stars to glorify youth and “testify to our desire to retain the qualities of childhood past the age of maturity.” 47 Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 204, 223–24. 48 Stockton, 1. 49 Baltimore, “Camping Out,” 126–31. 50 For a discussion of musicals and adolescence, see Ryan Bunch: “‘My Corner of the Sky’: Adolescence and Coming of Age in the Musicals of Stephen Schwartz,” in The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary American Stage Musical, ed. Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth Wollman (London: Routledge, 2019), 39–47.

3

Walt Disney, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and the Gospel of ideal childrearing Creating superlative nuclear families in Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks William A. Everett

A trio of children’s fantasy film musicals set in early twentieth-century England captured the attention and adoration of millions of children (and adults) in the 1960s and early 1970s: Mary Poppins (1964), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Though set in the past, these films endorse the 1950s and 1960s image of a “practically perfect” nuclear family: father, mother, and multiple children, stereotypically at least one son and one daughter. As Anne McLeer asserts, “films set in a different era or geographical location to their time and place of production often have as much, if not more, to say about that place and time than about their imaginary historical locales.”1 McLeer’s statement certainly rings true when it comes to these films’ constructions of healthy families. Walt Disney (1901–66), whose studio produced Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, strongly advocated this particular family construction in not only his films but also in his family-oriented theme parks. (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, though not an actual Disney product, unashamedly emulated the feel and flavor of Mary Poppins.) Disney embodied a cultural conservatism that was reflective of his Midwestern upbringing in Missouri and Illinois and resulted in what Steven Watts calls a “sentimental populism.”2 This traditional view of a nuclear family with defined gendered roles was central to his “colonization of childhood,”3 to use Nicolas Sammond’s term, and its promotion throughout the Disney enterprise. Indeed, as Henry A. Girioux asserts in The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, the primary message of Disney’s theme parks is that “the conventional nuclear family is secure.”4 This same endorsement concludes all three films under consideration here. Without strong nuclear families, according to the Disney view, the survival of society itself could be at risk. McLeer’s remarks regarding Mary Poppins and the 1965 film version of The Sound of Music apply equally well to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Bedknobs and Broomsticks: “the

40  William A. Everett family should position itself as the bedrock of politics and society. This strategy . . . established this nuclear-family formation as the exclusively correct structure on which to model public policies and institutions.”5 Central to the healthy nuclear family are the children and how they are raised in the home. Disney himself was extremely informed about current thought on child development, and he required that his employees also be versed in the field.6 Disney’s views of family structures were closely aligned with those of the famed pediatrician and author Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903–98).7 As Spock wrote in Problems of Parents (1962), published soon before the appearance of Disney’s Mary Poppins, “So a human being is a creature who must have a father and mother, and will create them if necessary” (underlining in original).8 This remark presages a central theme in the Mary Poppins film: the Banks children, whose parents are too preoccupied with their own pursuits to pay attention to them, must look to Bert and Mary as surrogate parents. A desire for parents likewise underscores Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, for the Potts children beg their father for a female figure to replace their deceased mother and decide on Truly Scrumptious. Finally, in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the Rawlins children charm their caretaker into becoming their mother and a loveable charlatan to be their father. Spock’s view of family structure is central to the overriding conclusions of all three films. At the beginning of the stories, this family foundation does not exist—the ersatz storyline in each of the films is to make it so. Thus, in accordance with Benjamin Spock, Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks promote the idea that a conventional nuclear family is essential for raising emotionally healthy children, ones who, in turn, will become responsible adults, beget their own nuclear families, and make positive contributions to society. These three films are all based on children’s literary works: Mary Poppins on stories by P. L. Travers, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on a book by Ian Fleming, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks on two books by Mary Norton. For their musical transformations, the first two are relocated to early twentieth- century England, Mary Poppins to London and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to a small village. (The original Mary Poppins tales are set in the 1930s and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the 1960s.) These two films are set intentionally in a nostalgic and somewhat mythical past not yet affected by tides of sweeping societal changes, women’s suffrage, two world wars, the civil rights movement, and conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Bedknobs and Broomsticks is slightly different. Its action takes place during World War II and concerns three children who have been evacuated from London and taken to Pepperinge Eye, a small village where they lodge under the care of the eccentric Miss Eglantine Price. The historical settings for all three films unveil another of Disney’s precepts. Giroux asserts, “Disney’s construction of historical memory, innocence, and family values points beyond the past while remaining firmly within it.”9 These tales, purposefully set in created (and somewhat

Creating superlative nuclear families  41 idealized) pasts, have contemporary resonances for families in the 1960s and 1970s: nuclear families are essential for survival in Cold War America. None of the tales could end happily were it not for the family units at the center of each story. The historical placement of the narratives creates an allegory for their contemporary audiences. Nuclear families have overcome adversity in the past and can continue to do so in the present. Many critics have blasted Disney for dumbing down complex source material, peddling false innocence, and avoiding complexities, nuances, and ambiguities in storytelling.10 While these charges, which all fall under the umbrella term “Disneyfication,” can certainly be applied to the works under consideration here, a simplification of details allows the fundamental messages of the works to ring through, whether on screen or on stage: in these cases, healthy families are essential for developing responsible children. The narratives also endorse Disney’s educational enterprise in promoting a specific view of family. Disney was an unapologetic advocate of social education. As Sammond asserts, it was a “common mid-1950s perception (or Disney’s hope) that everything Disney produced was educational.”11 This view continued into the following decades, when Mary Poppins and later Bedknobs and Broomsticks appeared on screen as a “fusing of entertainment and education,” to borrow Giroux’s description of the entire Disney enterprise.12 Popular media by the 1950s had become a platform for presenting utopian views of family, something Disney realized and of which he took full advantage. As Giroux relates, “At issue for parents, educators, and others is how culture, especially media culture, has become a substantial, if not the primary, educational force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms that offer up and legitimate subject positions” (2–3). Giroux views Disney’s animated films as “teaching machines” that “help children understand who they are, what societies are about, and what it means to construct a world of play and fantasy in an adult environment” (84). This statement is equally applicable to Disney’s live-action and mixed live-action/animated films. Giroux likewise asserts that “Disney’s appeal to pristine innocence and high adventure is profoundly pedagogical in its attempt to produce specific knowledge, values, and desires.”13 Disney is telling the parents and children in his audience that engaged parenting according to the principles of Benjamin Spock is essential in building not only healthy families but also solid, conservative societies. This approach fits into Perry Nodelman’s concept of children’s literature as a “doggedly conservative force. . . . One of its main purposes is to embed children within their culture, to make them both become like and to perceive themselves as what adults believe they should be.”14 According to Giroux, Disney’s animated films “constitute Disney’s conservative view of the world.”15 The same can be said for Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. In early 1960s America, the nuclear family was often viewed as a moral indicator of the times.16 If it eroded, the fabric

42  William A. Everett of democratic society might do the same. Disney’s mission was to keep the family, and therefore society, intact. The brothers Richard M. (b. 1928) and Robert B. Sherman (1925–2012) created the music for all three films. The Shermans were under contract to Walt Disney Studios in the 1960s and had achieved tremendous fame not only for their work in various Disney films but also for creating the hugely popular song “It’s a Small World.” They wrote the song in the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and it became the title song for the eponymous attraction in Disney theme parks. The catchy songs they crafted for these films were intended to be memorable and easily sung, and therefore a means through which the moral messages of the films could be reinforced.

Mary Poppins When Walt Disney asked the Sherman Brothers, “Do you know what a nanny is?” they replied, “It’s a goat.”17 Like most Americans in the early 1960s, the brothers did not realize that a nanny was a servant who looked after children and was often intimately involved with their upbringing. Nannies, a Victorian institution, had gone out of fashion by the end of World War II and were certainly not part of the middle-class culture of the 1960s, especially in America.18 This situation actually began to change after the appearance of Mary Poppins, for when children who grew up watching Mary Poppins became parents themselves, they invented a nanny culture of sorts inspired by images and expectations from the film.19 This nanny culture took a variety of forms, including live-in nannies who were responsible for all aspects of children’s lives, such as supervising homework, preparing meals, and accompanying them to their various activities, and those who were employed for several hours a day to look after children and provide assistance as needed. Mary Poppins represented the former model. Mary Poppins is based on stories taken from a series of books by P. L. (Pamela) Travers (1899–1996). 20 Travers began publishing her tales in 1934, and her final Mary Poppins volume appeared in 1998. Disney’s treatment offered a much more amiable version of the title character than Travers’s stern and caustic original, something that did not please the author.21 The Mary Poppins saga is at its heart a morality tale. It is a tale of redemption, as Travers herself asserted, not so much for the children but for the father, as the title of the Disney film about the creation of Mary Poppins, Saving Mr. Banks (2013), reveals. In Disney’s rendition of Mary Poppins, though, the focus is on the children. Travers herself may have been the impetus behind changing the time period of her stories from the 1930s to an earlier era for the film. 22 At one point, the Sherman brothers, whose involvement with Mary Poppins extended beyond just creating the songs, thought about setting the film during the Boer War (1899–1902) and making Mr. Banks physically absent

Creating superlative nuclear families  43 by having him serve with a regiment in South Africa. This scenario would allow for a happy ending when he returned safely home. Since the film opened less than ten years after the start of the Vietnam War, many American fathers were serving in the military. Far too many of them would not return, unlike the fictional Mr. Banks. The idea was abandoned. Keeping Mr. Banks in London and making him emotionally absent, according to Caitlin Flanagan, ultimately made for a more emotive and stronger message than sending him off to war. The film’s plot eventually landed in 1910, in the words of the Sherman brothers, “before the world became unglued.”23 They believed, rightly so, that the Edwardian setting would make the film more “story-bookish” and “add a sense of timelessness” (39). Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi created the screenplay based on the collective vision of Disney, the Sherman brothers, and Travers. 24 Because of the film’s tremendous popularity, its underlying message of building healthy nuclear families according to the Disney–Spock model reached millions. Caitlin Flanagan describes the family structure that Walt Disney championed in his output, including Mary Poppins, and indeed in his own life: “father at work, mother at home, children flourishing.” But the father’s life does not consist entirely of work—family time should be his top priority, and a job is merely the means to provide for his stay-at-home wife and thriving and happy children. For much of the film, this idealized picture does not apply to the Banks household. The father is a slave to his work, the mother dedicates herself to social causes outside the home, and the children, as a result, are out of control. The parents remain notably absent from their children’s upbringing and rely on a series of nannies with less-than-optimal results. The children constantly act out due to their familial insecurities. As Spock wrote in his best-selling and highly influential manual The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1957), “Basically, the thing that makes each child secure in the family is the feeling that his parents love him and accept him for himself, whether he is a boy or girl, smart or dull, handsome or homely.”25 He also asserted that “in the average family there is healthy balance between the feelings of father, mother, sons and daughters,” and “but for better or worse, the bringing up of child has to be shared by both parents in the long run” (361, 376). The Banks are not following Spock’s dictates, and the negative results are all too apparent. An engaged and present father is essential to Spock’s philosophy. Mr. Banks’s absence contributes to the poor behavior of the children. In the end, George Banks becomes a more attentive father and, after losing his job, is reinstated at the bank. He has achieved a balance between his family and his career. Mr. Banks’s role in the original books is minimal. His character, according to Margaret Mackey, “changes very little”; he is a static figure who goes off to work. 26 It appears to be the Shermans who enhanced the dramatic importance of Mr. Banks as a father who needed to connect

44  William A. Everett to his family in order to bring stability (12). The songwriting team thus infused the Spock-driven dimension into the story. Spock asserted that “a child, whether he’s young or old, boy or girl, needs to be friendly with other men if the father is not there.”27 Bert fills this role for the Banks children. He is a playmate of sorts, someone who pays attention to them, and as such becomes a foil for Mr. Banks. He is self-employed (when he chooses to work) and comes from a substantially lower social class than the Banks family. He loves the children and provides adventures and companionship for them. This aspect is shown to be more important than money, for in order for Mr. Banks to be able to be an effective father, he must first become like Bert—namely, unemployed. His firing from the bank becomes the impetus for his transformation toward an emotionally engaged father. Of course, he cannot remain unemployed—that would be unthinkable in a Disney film about idealized families—but his brief descent into the world of financial uncertainty, Bert’s world, enables him to become a better parent. Mrs. Banks is also absent from her children, for she is involved with the suffragette movement to the point that she ignores her children and their needs. She gives up her political activities, according to Flanagan, in order to assume her expected role as a subservient wife and attentive mother. Mrs. Banks demonstrates this change of attitude by tearing off her “Votes for Women” sash and making it the tail of the family kite (a scene original to the film and not in any of Travers’s stories). Now that both parents are involved with their children, the children will thrive. Good parenting, according to the film, is essential. Flanagan asserts that “in a sense, ‘Mary Poppins’ is an anti-nanny propaganda film, the ‘Reefer Madness’ of the working-mother set.” Taken in this context, the film offers a warning to parents about what will happen to their children if they, the parents, do not follow Spock’s dictates and assume an active role in their children’s upbringing. Though employing a nanny may appear to be a good solution, it is ultimately not in the best interest of a family. As Richard Sherman remarked, “We made it a story about a dysfunctional family, and in comes Mary Poppins—this necessary person—to heal them.”28 Mary Poppins is not a solution but rather a means to an end. The Sherman brothers conceived the musical score as integral to the storytelling. The memorable tunes constitute the life messages that Mary Poppins and Bert provide to the Banks children, lessons that the parents, because of their absence, cannot teach. From the jaunty “Jolly Holiday” and effervescent “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to the haunting “Feed the Birds,” it is the songs of the caretakers, not those of the parents, that educate the children to relish their time together and bring good to the world.29 These buoyant songs provide aural contrast to the martial stiffness of Mrs. Banks’s “Sister Suffragette” or her husband’s “The Life I Lead” and “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.” This musical characterization changes, though, in the film’s penultimate song, “A Man Has Dreams,” and the finale, “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.” Mr. Banks

Creating superlative nuclear families  45 begins “A Man Has Dreams” with the same sort of speech-singing as in his early songs, but without their metric rigidity. His martial rigor is dissipating, and after he discusses Mary Poppins with Bert, and Bert advises him on his parenting responsibilities (according to the engaged Spock model), he moves musically to the brightness of “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.” For this final number, the Sherman brothers envisioned the biggest thing Mr. Banks could do for his children, something that even Mary Poppins wouldn’t be able to accomplish.30 He is their parent, not Mary Poppins and not Bert. As the family’s patriarch according to the Spock–Disney model, he must take the lead role. The sprightly waltz with a flowing melody is more akin to the buoyancy of Mary Poppins’s and Bert’s songs than to the regimentation of “The Life I Lead.” Since order is restored and the Banks family is singing the buoyant “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” Mary Poppins can leave, for her work is finished. We know her job is done because Mr. and Mrs. Banks have left their rigid sound-worlds for the vivacity of Mary Poppins’s engaging music. The film featured a first-rate cast to tell the story and advance its inherent message. Julie Andrews, in her screen debut, charmed audiences through her embodiment of the title role in what has become an iconic performance, thanks to its permanence on film. Dick Van Dyke co-starred as Bert, a character who does not exist in Travers’s stories but was created as a conflation of the handyman Robertson Eye (whose role was restored in the 2004 stage musical), the chalk artist Bert, and the idea of a magical chimney sweep.31 Van Dyke’s skills as a dancer were central to the film’s success. Others in the cast included David Tomlinson and Glynis Johns as Mr. and Mrs. Banks, and Karen Dotrice and Matthew Graber as Jane and Michael. Mary Poppins was a popular and critical success. Of its 13 Oscar nominations, it won five—Best Actress (Andrews), Best Film Editing (Cotton Warburton), Best Visual Effects (Peter Ellenshaw, Eustace Lycett, and Hamilton Luske), Best Music Score (Sherman brothers), and Best Song (“Chim Chim Cher-ee,” Sherman brothers). The soundtrack won two Grammys— Best Film and Stage Score and Best Children’s Album. The film’s popularity remains immense, as has its Spock-inspired vision of an idealized family with engaged parents and flourishing children.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang In addition to his James Bond novels, Ian Fleming (1908–64) created a fantasy tale for children: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car, published in 1964. As in the Bond novels, an enhanced automobile creates excitement, though this one has surprising magical powers rather than impressive speed and high-tech weaponry. The male hero of Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, Caractacus Pott, 32 is not a James Bond-esque womanizer but rather a happily married man (his wife is called Mimsie) with two children.33 In Fleming’s book, the family travels to France, where they thwart the efforts of Joe the Monster and his gang. A thriving nuclear

46  William A. Everett family, according to Spock’s model, is capable of enjoying adventures and defeating villainy. The family unit is all-powerful in this regard. Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, who owned the rights to the Bond novels and brought many of them to the screen, also held the film rights for Chitty- Chitty-Bang-Bang. Wanting to bring the story of the magic car to the screen and being a huge fan of the Mary Poppins film, Broccoli contacted Walt Disney about a possible coproduction. Disney declined, stating that he already had enough going on. Furthermore, Disney always wanted the final say on films that bore his name, something that may or may not have happened with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.34 Going ahead with his plan without Disney as a partner, Broccoli invited as much of the Mary Poppins team as he could to join him on his new project. He tried to convince Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke to star in the film; both actors initially declined, though Van Dyke later agreed to play Caractacus Potts.35 The Sherman brothers had a provision in their contract with Disney that allowed them to accept one outside project, and they chose Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Mary Poppins alumni Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood joined the new film as choreographers, and Irwin Kostal joined as the music director.36 Someone not involved with Mary Poppins was Sally Ann Howes, the London-born actress who created the female lead, Truly Scrumptious. Other notable cast members included Lionel Jeffries as Grandpa Potts, Benny Hill as Toymaker, Robert Helpmann as Child Catcher, and Heather Ripley and Adrian Hall as the loveable twins Jemima and Jeremy. Although the novel is set in the contemporary world of 1964, the film takes place in the same pre-World War I era as Mary Poppins, perhaps intentionally forging another tie to the Disney production.37 Furthermore, in Fleming’s book, the Pott family is a textbook nuclear family, with father, mother, son, and daughter. The idea of not having such a unit at the beginning and creating it as the film progresses is original to Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes’s screenplay.38 It thus follows a similar Spock-inspired plot as Mary Poppins: secure family structures are essential for healthy children and the future of society. In the film, Caractacus Potts is an eccentric widowed inventor whose twin children, Jeremy and Jemima, have grown fond of an abandoned car they discovered in a shed. Caractacus enjoys spending time alone in his workshop building less-than-successful inventions and thus often takes little notice of his children, though he loves them dearly. (Like the Banks children, the Potts twins lack adequate parenting and as a result do not always behave appropriately.) During one of the twins’ truant escapades, they encounter the elegant Truly Scrumptious, daughter of a candy magnate. She takes them home and tells Caractacus that they need to be in school. After buying the abandoned car, Caractacus takes his children and Truly to a seaside picnic. On the way, they name the car after its distinctive sounds, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Caractacus tells his nascent family about

Creating superlative nuclear families  47 Baron Bomburst of Vulgaria, who wants the magical car for his own. The Potts family, along with Truly, journey to Vulgaria to rescue Caractacus’s unconventional father, whom the Vulgarians have kidnapped by mistake. As the family car goes over the cliffs of Beachy Head, it sprouts wings in a cinematically breathtaking moment. In Vulgaria, children are not allowed even basic freedoms, and Vulgarian parents keep their offspring secreted in an underground grotto. The evil Child Catcher, who has a hooked nose and dresses in black, sniffs out any children who lurk above ground. Eventually, the teamwork of Caractacus, Truly, Jeremy, Jemima, the resident Toymaker, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang results in the capture of the evildoers and the freedom of the children. The Pottses fly back to England, Truly accepts Caractacus’s marriage proposal—much to the delight of the children—and all ends happily. Vulgaria does not appear in Fleming’s book; Roald Dahl created the Cold War-inspired subplot and the malevolent Ruritanian region expressly for the film. The Vulgarian tale unfolds as an extended fantasy sequence— it is a product of Caractacus’s imagination, akin to his inventions. But when placed in the context of 1960s England and America, Vulgaria becomes much more than escapist fantasy. It becomes a foil for Communist Eastern Europe, for the film proffers a sharp message about the way families function in the democratic West as opposed to the Communist East. The Vulgarian approach to raising children is a thinly veiled Soviet system, which Margaret Mead and others viewed as a “regulated enterprise”39 in which government dictates replace families and parents. The Soviet family emerged as “a workshop for the production of plant citizens,” and this viewpoint is certainly visible in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Vulgaria (258). Vulgaria’s factory-inspired child-rearing process is easily thwarted when Caractacus and Truly successfully infiltrate the enterprise while impersonating life-sized dolls. When actual humans or irrational things that are not easily explained (such as magic or emotions) enter the picture, the system falls apart. Vulgarian scientists cannot replicate Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s inexplicable properties (including its celebratory eponymous song), and so the entire system collapses when it confronts the magical devices of a loving inventor-parent. By extension, mechanization and mass production are revealed as ineffective means for raising children.40 Caractacus’s tale, therefore, is not pure fantasy. Rather, it addresses very real sociocultural-political Cold War issues as far as family dynamics and child development are concerned. While the primary plot of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang concerns the restoration of the Potts family, the importance of family in a broader sense occurs in the Vulgarian sequence. In addition to creating their own family, the Potts reintegrate all families in Vulgaria. Children are freed, thus allowing healthy nuclear families to flourish. As Sammond asserts, healthy families and children and the entire field of child development were studied as part of Cold War culture in the 1950s and 1960s.41 He writes, “The child, properly studied and raised in

48  William A. Everett its natural environment, would be a Cold-War tool for the promotion of a healthy democratic capitalism, with the power to defuse international hostilities, see past petty nationalisms, and resist psychological persuasion” (255). Such ideas of childhood, when combined with Disney’s worldview, according to Sammond, “represent an effort to embody the ideal qualities of a democratic capitalist culture” (351). Children raised according to such principles become essential for the preservation of democracy. Jeremy and Jemima Potts, therefore, model a pro-Democratic and antiSoviet approach to child development. As Sammond asserts in this context, “Properly reared children were imagined as a potential prophylactic against the prospect of mass conformity and would also serve as a natural buffer against the next generation of Soviets, who were being raised to resist and disrupt the natural course of human evolution.”42 Through their combined efforts to rescue the grandfather Potts and effect political change in Vulgaria (restoring the rights of children to be free), Caractacus, Truly, Jeremy, and Jemima become a tight-knit nuclear family. The car, conveniently and intentionally, has four seats—one for each member of the Potts family. Actor Raul Esparza, who played Caractacus Potts in the stage musical of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on Broadway in 2005, spoke of what the car means in relation to Caractacus, “The car is an extension of his family. Symbolically he wishes that they could fly and all take off and heal from the death of his wife.”43 Furthermore, the seating arrangement endorses what Spock considered to be an ideal seating for automobile travel: “Arranging the passengers in the car can be important. Most parents prefer to be together in the front seat and let the small fry have the back.”44 Through Chitty and its acceptance of Truly, the Potts family is restored. The message is clear in the film—in order for Jemima and Jeremy to thrive, they need a two-parent family. Caractacus’s love for them, immense as it is, is not enough. As Spock wrote, “We know that a child wants both a father and a mother. A young child who lacks one or the other keeps asking the remaining parent for a replacement” (227). Jemima and Jeremy love Truly Scrumptious and encourage their father to bring her into their family. The children look to Truly as a mother figure and prove Spock’s point about families: the presence of a mother is necessary to complete a family unit. Caractacus adores his children and will do anything for them. As he puts them to bed, he sings them “Hushabye Mountain,” a gentle lullaby in which this single father’s deep care for his children is evident; he wants them to always remain safe and secure. “Hushabye Mountain” returns as a song of hope for the Vulgarian children who are forced to live underground and serves as a musical link between the musical’s two plotlines about restoring broken families. While the appearance of Truly Scrumptious normalizes the Potts family, Vulgaria requires a large-scale cultural transformation. This song indicates that it is the family values and ideas of child development according to Spock (and Disney) that will bring about this transformation.

Creating superlative nuclear families  49 The Pottses effect the change in family dynamics that causes the Vulgarian system to collapse in favor of a pro-Democratic approach in which parents raise their own children. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a film about restoring nuclear families, in the specific case of the Potts and in general for those living in Vulgaria. The movie’s cultural influence, like that of Mary Poppins, was immense.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks According to Martin Gottfried in his biography of Angela Lansbury, “Bedknobs and Broomsticks was palpably a Disney attempt to clone Mary Poppins, which had been a great success for the studio and its star, Julie Andrews.”45 While this assertion rang true when the new film appeared in 1971, Bedknobs and Broomsticks had in fact been Walt Disney’s backup plan in case he could not acquire the rights to Mary Poppins.46 The Sherman brothers began writing songs for Mary Poppins while Disney was still negotiating with Travers. Not certain if Travers would grant permission, Disney told the Sherman brothers that if the Mary Poppins project did not turn out, their songs could be used in another film with a magical theme, since he was already contemplating a film with the working title The Magic Bedpost.47 The film title eventually became Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Not surprisingly, the two films have a great deal in common, especially since Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi created the screenplays for both films. Like Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks employs fanciful cinematic techniques, including a blend of live action and animation, to tell a magic-infused tale of the importance of nuclear families. The film also draws on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in that a newly formed nuclear family defeats tyranny. In Bedknobs and Broomsticks, three siblings, a mother figure, and a father figure thwart a Nazi invasion of Britain during World War II. Like its cinematic siblings, Bedknobs and Broomsticks was based on children’s literature, in this case Mary Norton’s The Magic Bed-Knob (1945) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947). Plot devices inspired by both books appeared on screen. As with the original books, the film is set during the London Blitz. (For the film, World War II is a historical event, whereas it is contemporary to the novels.) The three Rawlings children—Charlie, almost 12; Carrie, a bit younger than Charlie; and Paul, around six—are evacuated to the small village of Pepperinge Eye and placed under the care of Miss Eglantine Price, a witch-in-training. In exchange for the children not divulging her secret, she casts a “transportation spell” on a bed knob that Paul has taken from his bed and that only he can use. When Miss Price receives the distressing news that the correspondence school through which she is studying witchcraft has closed, she convinces Paul to take her and his siblings to London to locate Professor Emilius Browne, the school’s headmaster. They discover him to be a showman charlatan, but a loveable one. The five of them, as a

50  William A. Everett newly formed nuclear family, travel to the remote island of Naboombu to locate the final spell for Eglantine’s course, “Substitutiary Locomotion.” After finding, recovering, and losing the spell, they learn that Paul had its key all along in one of his picture books. Back in Pepperinge Eye, news arrives that the children have been reassigned to another home. Miss Price implores them and Professor Browne to stay. She wants to keep her new-found family close at hand. The children are eager to remain with the eccentric witch, while Browne decides that he doesn’t want any sort of family obligations and will return to London. Soon thereafter, a Nazi platoon invades Miss Price’s house and imprisons her and the children in the local museum. Professor Browne, realizing that he wants and needs to be part of this new nuclear family, returns to help. Miss Price casts her “Substitutiary Locomotion” spell on the museum’s military exhibits, causing the suits of armor and military uniforms to come to life and chase away the Nazis. Miss Price’s workshop becomes a casualty of the battle, thus ending her potential career as a witch and, importantly, allowing her to become a full-time nurturing mother to three children who genuinely need her. Like Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins, she gives up her out-of-home activities to focus on raising children. Unlike in the other two films, however, a secure family unit is not in place at the end of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, for Professor Browne joins the local home guard in the war effort. The only reason he has summed up the courage to enlist, though, is because of the moral strength he has discovered in himself because of his new familial role as husband to Miss Price and father to three children. Of the three films under consideration here, Bedknobs and Broomsticks is the only one in which war forms an essential part of the story. Since the film appeared during the Vietnam conflict, its allegorical dimension for its audience is unmistakable. Like many children who watched the film in its initial theatrical release, the Rawlings children see their father (Professor Browne) march off to war. He must protect his family, for families are vital to national security. As McLeer reminds us, “the family was the basic unit of a secure society and strong nation was more than propaganda or political rhetoric. Many Americans believed in such a notion as a social truth. The public, politicians, the media, and experts extolled the virtues of nuclearfamily life.”48 The audience fervently hopes that Professor Browne will return safely to Miss Price and the children. It also knows that this reunion may never take place. Part of why we believe that Professor Browne loves his family and will do everything he can to return to them and assume his role as a loving father and husband is because of the actor who created the role on screen, David Tomlinson. As Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins, he portrayed an emotionally absent father who realizes the importance of his role in raising his children. Tomlinson assumes this same role in Bedknobs and Broomsticks: his primary obligation is to his family, and his temporary absence will be for their ultimate security. It is worth remembering that in early drafts of Mary Poppins, Mr. Banks was going to be away serving in the Boer War, but the creators decided against a physical absence in favor of an emotional one.

Creating superlative nuclear families  51 The anti-communist stance advocated by Spock and enacted in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is broadened here; the nuclear family becomes the keeper of a national, American (though the setting is British) way of life. At the center of this rhetoric, as told through Bedknobs and Broomsticks, is the raising of healthy children in as-ideal-as-possible nuclear families, given the reality of many fathers being called upon to serve their country overseas rather than remaining home as heads of their families. It is, after all, Professor Browne’s obligation to his new family that makes him fight for his country, merging love of nation with love of family. Miss Price, meanwhile, discovers her maternal instincts and learns to care for the three children. She also knows that she needs the normalcy of a husband in order to raise them effectively. Miss Price personifies one of Spock’s dictates: “It’s obvious that when a mother has no husband it will be more difficult to keep her relationship with her son as ordinary as it would otherwise be. She is apt to be lonelier.”49 Miss Price gives the spell to Paul, a boy and the youngest child. He thus occupies a special place in her emotional life. She would not have had her own adventures and helped to save England from a Nazi invasion were it not for Paul and the magic she gave him. She also knows that something needs to be done to normalize this special relationship and that it must come through Professor Browne. But she also realizes that he will be an absent father, at least in the immediate future. As Spock asserts: It would be foolish to say that his father’s absence or death makes no difference to a child, or that it’s easy for a mother to make it up to him in other ways. But if the job is well handled, the child, either boy or girl, can continue to grow up normal and well adjusted. The mother’s spirit is most important. She may feel lonely, imprisoned, or cross at times, and she will sometimes take it out on the child. This is all natural and won’t hurt him too much. The important thing is for her to go on being a normal human being.50 Taken literally, these last three words mean that Miss Price makes the right choice to give up her practice of witchcraft and be “normal.” She has proven herself up to the task of raising the children until Professor Browne (she hopes) returns. The most significant musical number in the context of this essay is “The Age of Not Believing.” The Sherman brothers considered this lilting song, which concerns the move from childhood to adolescence, to be autobiographical, and it secured them an Academy Award nomination. 51 The older Rawlings children are at a precarious time in their emotional development. Paul has not yet entered this phase; his belief in magic allows him to take the family on their adventures. Spock describes psychological changes that occur at puberty: “The fact is that the adolescent is also scared of growing up. He is very unsure about his capacity to be as knowledgeable, masterful, sophisticated and charming as

52  William A. Everett he would like. But he will never admit his doubts, least of all to his parents or to himself.”52 “The Age of Not Believing” encapsulates this attitude. As childhood dreams and heroes recede and a potentially overwhelming sense of doubt, including self-doubt, takes over, it is vital to believe in one’s selfworth. The gentle lyricism of the melody infuses the song with a sense of motherly advice that is caring, wise, and nurturing. In singing this song to the Rawlings children early in the film, Miss Price establishes an important maternal connection with them. After the immense success of Mary Poppins, Disney decided not to move forward with Bedknobs and Broomsticks, since the plots had so many commonalities, including an emphasis on healthy nuclear families. Plans for the film were further delayed by Disney’s death in 1966. Bedknobs and Broomsticks eventually moved into pre-production in 1969, and the Sherman Brothers began working in earnest on the score. Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson played the adult leads, while Ian Weighill, Cindy O’Callaghan, and Roy Snart appeared as the Rawlings children. The version that played on screens across America was not the film the Sherman Brothers and their collaborators envisioned, for over 30 minutes of the film were cut from its original length of nearly two and a half hours. Musical sequences and dialogue not essential to the plot became editing casualties, and the Sherman brothers were distressed that the film had become a “gimmicky special effects display” and that, aside from “The Age of Not Believing,” only the “trivial fun numbers” remained.53 They remarked, “Most of the warmth was taken right of the picture” (167). Film critic Roger Ebert noted this lack as well, writing that Bedknobs and Broomsticks “doesn’t have much of a heart, though, and toward the end you wonder why the Poppins team thought kids would like it much.” The excised warmth relates to the theme of this essay, for it reflects the strong endorsement of nuclear families. One song cut from the film, “Nobody’s Problems,” is central to this idea.54 It exemplifies an “I am” song, a musical theater staple in which, early on, characters express their core identities. The orphaned Rawlings children sing the first verse to express their desire not to be a burden to anyone. 55 Miss Price sings the second verse to reveal that she, too, feels that she is an encumbrance and destines herself to a life of being alone. The low register and repeated melodic pitches provide a sense of austerity. The inclusion of this song would have accentuated the characters’ deeply felt and self-denied need to be part of a family. At the end of the film, the Rawlings children and Miss Price have bonded, forming the basis of a nuclear family and invalidating the song’s initial premise.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins on stage Popular trends in early twenty-first century musical theater include musical adaptations of successful films.56 If the original film included songs, these are typically retained and positioned alongside new ones created expressly

Creating superlative nuclear families  53 for the stage. Such is the case with the live-action versions of the two most critically acclaimed films of the nuclear-family trio under investigation here, Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Bedknobs and Broomsticks has not yet been afforded a live treatment. The stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, adapted by Jeremy Sams and directed by Adrian Noble, was billed as “the most FANTASMAGORICAL stage musical in the history of everything.” It opened at the London Palladium on April 16, 2002, with musical theater icon Michael Ball as Caractacus Potts and newcomer Emma Williams as Truly Scrumptious.57 The Sherman brothers created five new songs for the stage musical and expanded several numbers from the original film, including the title song, for either theatrical treatment or reprises.58 The stage version received largely negative reviews, with many critics calling the flying car the only reason for seeing the show.59 Audience response trumped critical derision, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang played at the Palladium for three and a half years, closing on September 4, 2005, and grossing more than 70 million pounds.60 Its largely unsuccessful Broadway run at the Hilton Theatre (starring Raúl Esparza and Erin Dilly) opened on April 28, 2005, and lasted until December 31 of that year. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang chugged its way through several UK and US national tours and has played in Australia (2012), Germany (2014), and elsewhere. The Spock model of child raising did not possess the same resonance in 2002 as it did in the 1960s. This aspect of the musical, therefore, is diminished in favor of a love of a father for his children and the importance of an extended family, in this case a grandfather being involved with his grandchildren’s upbringing. The family model offered in the stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, in which a single parent receives assistance from one of their parents in raising children, echoed the structures of many families in the early twenty-first century. Parenting nonetheless can be a difficult responsibility on one’s own, a theme that is emphasized in the stage musical. One of the new songs, “Teamwork,” concerns overcoming adversity, whether it is being imprisoned in Vulgaria or raising a family. The song asserts that raising healthy and self-sufficient children requires social responsibility and that everyone in a community needs to play a role; Spock-defined nuclear families are no longer considered enough, as they were in the 1960s. We’ve moved from Spock to the idea that “it takes a village to raise a child.”61 The march-like song of societal obligation has resonances of social justice anthems such as “One Day More” from Les Misérables. The setting gives Caractacus the opportunity to sing a countermelody against the main choral component, something that offers an intertextual reference, for many in the London audience would have associated Michael Ball with the romantic revolutionary Marius in Les Misérables, a role he created. Mary Poppins landed at London’s Prince Edward Theatre on December 15, 2004 as the first coproduction of Walt Disney Productions and

54  William A. Everett Cameron Mackintosh, Ltd., two entities known for innovation in stage presentation. In the lavish display, Disney’s penchant for developing musicals based on its family-oriented film properties melded with Mackintosh’s keen approach to stage magic.62 The musical transferred to Broadway in 2006 for a multi-year run, followed by multiple national tours and international productions in various languages.63 The nature versus nurture debate in child psychology is foregrounded in this Mary Poppins, with the nurture side being the obvious winner.64 “Anything Can Happen,” the musical’s newly written final number, brings this point home. Mr. Banks, despite his upbringing, can become a loving father to thriving children. This particular convergence of approaches came about in part because Disney held the rights to its film, while Mackintosh had acquired the stage rights for the Travers stories. Mackintosh met Travers in 1994, and the producer impressed the author when he told her that he felt the story was about the redemption of Mr. Banks. Travers was delighted, a far cry from her reaction to Disney. Indeed, Travers was so distraught at aspects of the Disney film that she specified in her will that no one associated with the movie could be involved with the stage version and that everyone who was involved with the stage adaptation would have to be British.65 Mackintosh engaged noted period dramatist Julian Fellowes to create the book for the musical treatment, which was directed by Richard Eyre.66 Since Travers had specified that British authors must write any new Mary Poppins material, the songwriting team of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe created additional musical numbers in the style of the Sherman brothers and crafted new lyrics to pre-existing songs. The Sherman brothers were delighted with the result.

Who learns? When looking at these children’s musicals through the theoretical lenses of children’s literature approaches and Benjamin Spock, it becomes obvious that adults are also partakers in these educational enterprises. As Andrea Schwenke Wyile and Teya Rosenberg assert, “For adults, reading children’s literature is ultimately both an act of nostalgia and of self-examination.”67 The films and stage musicals provide not only entertainment for children and teach them what it means to be a responsible young person but also offer lessons for parents on their roles and responsibilities in raising healthy families. Following Disney’s dictates, parents’ actions not only affect their own immediate situations but can also have an impact on the future and preservation of democratic society. Nodelman reminds us that when it comes to the commodification of children’s literature, “The actual purchasers of children’s books are and always have been, overwhelmingly, not children but parents, teachers, librarians, and adults.”68 The same is true for Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Adults, not children, are the ones

Creating superlative nuclear families  55 who purchase copies of the films and by doing so, whether they realize it or not, are continuing Disney’s emblematic endorsement of nuclear families. Through their decisions to own copies of the films, they become part of Disney’s continuing educational and commercial enterprise. To quote Giroux, “at issue for parents, educators, and others is how culture, especially media culture, has become a substantial, if not the primary, educational force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms that offer up and legitimate subject positions.”69 Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks form part of this discourse, specifically as to the power of the nuclear family. Each tale chronicles the transformations of dysfunctional or incomplete families into ones that thrive. Walt Disney’s views on child development, echoing those of Dr. Benjamin Spock, infuse the productions, which suggests that supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and fantasmagorical children, even when they are at an “age of not believing,” are the products of engaged and proper parenting.

Notes





56  William A. Everett



























Creating superlative nuclear families  57

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56

57 58 59 60 61

in the film and stage versions, the Vulgarians. The historical Caractacus was a first-century British chieftain who led the native resistance to the Roman conquest. Sherman and Sherman, 150. Dick Van Dyke, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2011), 159. Sherman and Sherman, 150. Will McMorran, “From Quixote to Caractacus: Influence, Intertextuality, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 5 (2006): 774. For a critical discussion of Roald Dahl and children’s fiction, see Mark I. West, Roald Dahl (New York: Twayne, 1992). Sammond, 257. Roald Dahl offers another example of anti-industrialism in the factory in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1962), in which magic is a vital part of the assembly-line process. See Sammond, 252ff. for more on this topic. Sammond, 381. Linda Armstrong, “Cuban-American Heads Broadway’s ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’,” New York Amsterdam News, June 16, 2005, accessed July 27, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/390382564?accountid+14589. Spock, Problems of Parents, 68. Martin Gottfried, Balancing Act: The Authorized Biography of Angela Lansbury (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1999), 197. Sherman and Sherman, 162. Lorraine LoBlanco, “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” Turner Classic Movies Data Base, accessed November 17, 2016, www/tcmdb/title/68329/ Bedknobsand-Broomsticks/. One song written for Mary Poppins but not used in the film became “The Beautiful Briny” in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. McLeer, 83. Spock, Problems of Parents, 231. Spock, Common Sense Book, 576. Bedknobs and Broomsticks DVD Special Feature, “Music Magic: The Sherman Brothers,” Disney DVD 101638 (2009 release). Spock, Common Sense Book, 419. Sherman and Sherman, 167 The song appears on page 164 of Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman’s, “Walt’s Time: From Before to Beyond, and Angela Lansbury’s demo recording of the second verse is included on Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” Walt Disney Records 60784-7 CD (2002). The overt orphan element, which is not in the novel, does not appear in the film. For a partial list of these musicals, see Bud Coleman, “New Horizons: The Musical in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 3rd ed., ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 337. Ball left the show on July 19, 2003. (Willie Robertson, Michael Ball: The Biography [London: John Blake, 2012], 154). New songs include “Think Vulgar” (replaced by “Act English” beginning on March 15, 2003), “Kiddy-Widdy-Winkies,” “The Bombie Samba,” and “Teamwork.” Robertson, 153. Robertson, 154. This expression is an African proverb that exists in several versions across the continent and is the title of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

58  William A. Everett















4

Saving Mr. [Blank] Rescuing the father through song in children’s and family musicals Raymond Knapp “You think Mary Poppins has come to save the children, Mr. Disney? Oh, dear.” P. L. Travers, in Saving Mr. Banks

The 2013 Disney film Saving Mr. Banks dramatizes the deep resistance P. L. Travers had to Walt Disney’s persistent desire to produce a film based on her popular Mary Poppins book series,1 especially regarding his intention to include songs and an animation sequence. In one revealing moment in the film, cutting directly to the clash of sensibilities that fed Travers’s resistance, Disney appeals to her on behalf of “the children,” leaving her astounded that he could so badly miss the point of her books (see epigraph). As Disney finally realizes, and articulates during a last-ditch effort to persuade her to sign over the rights, “It’s not the children she comes to save. It’s their father.”2 So common it often passes unnoticed, this kind of plot diversion is a feature of many musicals, whether on stage or screen, that are positioned as children’s or family musicals. Although there are many variants on the trope, redemption for the father (or father figure) in these musicals—that is, achieving a more socially desired heteronormative and paternal masculinity— generally involves his realignment within a traditional family patriarchy, with him embracing or re-embracing the dual roles of father and husband/lover. In line with this gendered notion of redemption is its typical expression, in musicals, through song, with that element usually introduced by a feminine source (wife, daughter, nanny) and understood to be feminine in nature. I elsewhere describe a few examples of this trope in related terms; in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, for example, the very possibility of a believable redemption for Alonzo Smith (the father of five children) is first expressed through song, and, indeed, song guides every step of his path: 1

On his first appearance, Alonzo enters the house and immediately silences his two oldest daughters, who are exuberantly singing the title song, “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

I wish to thank many interlocutors for their help in planning and revising this essay, especially including Rachel and Zelda Knapp, Arreanna Rostosky, Elizabeth Upton, Mitchell Morris, Nina Treadwell, Sam Baltimore, James Leve, and Donelle Ruwe. A version of this essay was read at “Composing from Models: Looking Backward, Moving Forward: A Symposium in Honor of Christopher Reynolds,” University of California, Davis, April 14, 2018.

60  Raymond Knapp 2

3

Without having previously consulted with the family, Alonzo announces that his firm is transferring him to New York, and that the family will be moving there soon. At the height of the family crisis that ensues, his wife, Anna seats herself at the family piano and cajoles him into singing an old favorite of theirs, “You and I,” gently leading him forward through lowering the key and singing supporting harmony. This pivotal intervention pulls Alonzo out of himself and back into his family, helping restore equanimity to the household. Prompted by his daughter Tootie’s violent reaction to her older sister Esther’s heartrending performance of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (sung by Judy Garland to Margaret O’Brien), Alonzo decides to stay in St. Louis for the sake of his family.3

And, in Mary Poppins (1964 film), Mr. Banks undergoes a similar, if more elaborate transformation: 1

2

3 4

5

As Mr. Banks berates nanny Mary Poppins, by way of singing a reprise of his establishing song, “The Life I Lead,” she takes over the song and manipulates him into taking the children on an outing to the bank where he works. Arriving home after his inability to manage his children has led to a run on the bank, Mr. Banks seeks sympathy from Bert, who is cleaning the Banks’ chimney. But Bert diverts Mr. Banks’s dirge-like reprise of “The Life I Lead” into a reprise of Mary Poppins’s “A Spoonful of Sugar,” turning Mr. Banks from self-pity to a reconsideration of the role he plays in his children’s lives. (Bert thus does for Mr. Banks what Anna did for Alonzo in Meet Me in St. Louis.) Returning to the bank that evening to be cashiered, Mr. Banks passes St. Paul’s Cathedral, accompanied by a quasi-religious underscore based on Mary Poppins’s “Feed the Birds.” In a breakthrough fit of inspiration bordering on hysteria, Mr. Banks reacts to being cashiered by repeating Mary Poppins’s fantastical word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” which he had been unable to pronounce during his earlier confrontation with her. In the final sequence, Mr. Banks, having repaired his children’s kite, leads the cast in a lilting waltz song, “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” during which his position at the bank is restored, and he is made partner.4

In both these examples, the father’s redemption also resolves a conflict concerning the balance between career and family, but that is not the only way the trope can work. In The Music Man (1957 Broadway; 1962 film), Harold Hill makes the transition from scoundrel to father figure through exchanging his Sousa-inspired march (“Seventy-Six Trombones”) for Marion’s waltz version of the same tune (“Goodnight, My Someone”), while meeting the children halfway with Beethoven’s “Minuet in G.”5 And The Sound of

Saving Mr. [Blank]  61 Music (1959 Broadway; 1965 film) presents the classic version of the trope of fatherly redemption through song, grounded—if problematically—in Austrian nationalist sentiments, conveyed within the verbal and musical landscape imagery of the “The Sound of Music” and “Edelweiss.”6 As is readily apparent, there are many facets to the trope of fatherly redemption, which has the fundamental virtue of providing an adult perspective in a musical focused largely on children, which can otherwise seem limiting. The related notions of “dual address” and “cross-writing” have been a frequent subject of discussion within the field of children’s literature, although the phenomenon plays quite differently in musicals than in literary fiction. Non-musical stage and film adaptations of children’s literature represent a kind of middle-ground between the two arenas, but such adaptations also serve, through contrast, to highlight the ways in which music and the conventions of musicals matter to the project of addressing both children and adults at once. Music, most especially through song and dance, provides both bridges and barriers—not present, as such, in literature or “straight” drama—and can serve both to connect and to separate the children and adults who mutually engage with them. As part of providing an alternative, more adult point of entry in children’s and family musicals, the story of the father can layer symbolic perspectives onto the children’s story, and make it clearer through themes and plotting what is at stake longer-term for the children involved. In this way, the device places at least some emphasis on the generational dimension of the story, at times weaving legacy into its thematic fabric. To make the story more engaging for adults, the father’s story generally also incorporates a romantic element, conveying through redemptive song a capacity for heterosexual romance, understood to form the basis for family. Strongly reinforcing this default heterosexual perspective, even after homosexuality had more frequently become an explicit element in musicals, is the thematic emphasis on family dynamics and parenting in these musicals, coupled with the high level of “respectability” mandated by their dual appeal to adults and children. Finally, because of the referential back and forth between the worlds of adults and children, the crisis for the father (or father figure) generally has two components, involving his relationship to an adult woman and his relationship to children. What ultimately governs and regulates this trope is thus, to put it succinctly, the heterosexual angst of an adult male. In this essay, I will explore this multifaceted trope and its historical trajectory in various musicals (besides those already mentioned), including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968 film; 2002 London West End and 2005 Broadway), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971 film), Annie (1977 Broadway; 1982 film; 1999 television; 2014 film),7 Into the Woods (1987 Broadway; 2014 film), The Secret Garden (1991 Broadway), Wicked (2003 Broadway), Enchanted (2007 film), Matilda the Musical (2011 London West End), and Fun Home (2015 Broadway). In these discussions, arranged in chronological groups, I consider some of the roots and contours of the trope, some of the ways it

62  Raymond Knapp has provided a basis for reconsidering family dynamics, some of the ways it intertwines with other tropes, and, especially in more recent musicals, some of the ways it has itself been reconsidered, as a trope.

Selected early versions of the trope: Meet Me in St. Louis, The Music Man, The Sound of Music These three musicals, while all driven by the notion that music is essential to and plays a powerful part in human life, deploy the trope of fatherly redemption with considerable differences regarding narrative perspective, historical situation, and family dynamic. Meet Me in St. Louis takes daughter Esther’s perspective as central, stemming from the story’s basis in a memoir by one of the real-life daughters in the “Smith” family,8 and reinforced by its star positioning of Judy Garland, lovingly managed by her soon-to-be husband, director Vincente Minnelli. St. Louis looks back the furthest of the three musicals, to 1903, somewhat self-consciously reminding its 1944 audiences of what was at stake in the unfolding world war (probably for this reason providing a happier ending than the real-life family was granted, at least regarding the threatened move to New York City). The Music Man, which looks back past both world wars to 1912 from the vantage point of the mid-1950s, while drawing loosely on Meredith Willson’s childhood experiences, is naturally enough focused primarily on the perspective of Harold Hill, the eponymous “music man.” And The Sound of Music, based on the first of several memoirs by Maria von Trapp,9 centers on her perspective during the critical years before World War II, even as it also diverges significantly from her account in many particulars. Reflecting these differences in perspective and historical situation, the households in these musicals are also constituted quite differently from each other. In St. Louis, an existing, fairly conventional family (albeit with four daughters and only one son) is threatened with instability, with both the move to New York and the impending World’s Fair serving as stand-ins for modernity, whose steady progress may be alternately feared and celebrated, but not stopped. In The Music Man, the father of the Paroo family has died, setting the stage for Harold Hill to step into that role for Winthrop as he becomes romantically involved with Winthrop’s older sister. And, in The Sound of Music, it is the mother who is gone, leaving a void that neither father nor governess has adequately filled at the time Maria enters the home. Long before it became relatively common for important roles in musicals (especially film musicals) to be played by non-singers, Meet Me in St. Louis cast Leon Ames as Alonzo Smith, an actor who, in the end, could not manage a creditable rendition of “You and I,” which was dubbed by Arthur Freed. Similarly, for the film version of The Sound of Music, Christopher Plummer’s singing voice was not up to the demands of the role of Georg von Trapp, and also had to be dubbed (by Bill Lee). And, even if Robert Preston in The Music Man could sing (as could Theodore Bikel, who

Saving Mr. [Blank]  63 originated Georg von Trapp in the stage version of The Sound of Music), he was a much better talker. These actors may or may not have been cast with their singing (dis)abilities in mind, but these choices are nevertheless emblematic, since the characters they play either had to learn to sing or to relearn to sing, as part of a trajectory in which singing serves as a marker for belonging to the relevant community, for becoming a better parent, and/ or for the capacity to express romantic love—in short, as a marker for the human, an area in which each father (or potential father figure) is initially found wanting. Thus it is that when Alonzo Smith arrives home near the beginning of the film and finds his daughters singing, he interrupts them with the demand, “For heaven’s sake, stop that screeching!”; that Harold Hill needs the response of a crowd to make the transition from rhythmic speech to singing in his early numbers; and that Georg von Trapp has to rediscover the human connections that singing facilitates. For Alonzo and Georg, the moment in which each begins to sing marks the moment of his redemption, in each case recovering something from his past that will establish a credible basis for romance and a strengthened connection with his children. For Alonzo, indeed, this moment is the first time that we see him in a romantic light, as someone who, as a youth, had courted Anna through song, and who now sings a once-familiar duet with her, in the process validating his position as head of the household. Georg’s return to song, midway through “The Sound of Music,” not only directly links him to his children, who began the song without him, but also reconnects him to Austria through the song’s lyrical content and forges a new bond with Maria, who taught the song to the children. It is important to note that Georg’s need for redemption in the first place is largely an invention of the musical, since his connection with his children, according to Maria’s memoir, was already strong. The musical’s use of the trope of fatherly redemption and its basis in song directly flow from the story’s being reconfigured so as to create a multifaceted problem for Maria to solve, an ironic reversal of the query expressed in “Maria” (thus, perhaps, “How do you pose a problem for Maria?”). The plot adjustments in The Sound of Music are diametrically reversed from those of Meet Me in St. Louis, where the memoir offers no purchase for the saving redemption provided by the film. That both films rewrote their inspirational memoirs to accommodate the trope of fatherly redemption is of special significance here, as is the fact that The Music Man finds room for the trope despite the fact that, in joining the Paroo family, Harold Hill would become Winthrop’s brother-in-law, not his step-father. Or would he? Conventions of musicals easily allow us to “read” the situation differently, understanding Marian Paroo to be Winthrop’s mother, a possibility denied outwardly in accordance with 1950s-era standards of respectability, but encouraged situationally, visually, and behaviorally, as well as by the song “The Sadderbut-Wiser Girl for Me.” The latter is prompted by rumors of a romantic link between Marian and “Old Miser Madison,” whose wealth built much

64  Raymond Knapp of the town’s infrastructure (including its library), and alludes saucily to Hester Prynne, the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), who, shamed by her Puritan community for bearing an out-ofwedlock child, refuses to identify the child’s father, a community leader. Hill, in singing “Sadder-but-Wiser,” implicitly accepts the rumors to be true, which drastically changes the significance, for him, of the fatherly role he assumes with regard to Winthrop. The Music Man, which places the adult male’s perspective in the forefront, is in the event also more complex regarding the emblematic nature of song. The passage from speech to song is much worried over in the show, not only in Hill’s patter songs (where song is an arrival point, achieved only through an infusion of reflected energy from the crowd/community), but also in the duet between Marian and her mother (“Piano Lesson,” where their song fits ongoing dialogue against the melody Amaryllis performs on the piano), and during Hill’s cultivation of the male quartet, to whom he describes singing as “just sustained talking” before launching them into sung repetitions of “ice cream,” and thence into the song “Sincere.” Song in The Music Man is not something Hill needs to learn or recover for himself, as with his counterparts in the other two musicals, but is instead what he has to offer River City, almost from the moment of his arrival. Music more broadly in the show is the cure for all that ails the town, just as it is for those parts of the world the von Trapps occupy that can be fixed, and in the end represents their ticket out of an intolerable political situation, after the Anschluss. Despite Hill’s professed mastery of music, however, he seems a fraud. His singing is less sincere than it is a diversion, his way of playing to the crowd, at least until his late duets with Marian, “Till There Was You” and the double reprise of “Seventy-Six Trombones” and “Goodnight, My Someone.” But the value of his earlier singing, despite the intent to defraud, is also reclaimed, when Marian, in her speech to the town in his defense, points out that all that he had promised did in fact come true. Redemption, for Hill, happens through a process of realizing that the person he has really been fooling is himself, and it comes not all at once, but as the culmination of a series of moments: with Marian at the footbridge, when she gives him the incriminating page from the Indiana Journal and launches the duet “Till There Was You”; with his admission to Winthrop, “For the first time in my life, I got my foot caught in the door”; with Marian’s speech to the community; and with the demonstration that his “think system” might actually work, after a fashion, as the band struggles through a rendition of Beethoven’s “Minuet in G.” Notably, these realizations address four crucial features of heteronormative male maturity: committing to a romantic relationship, accepting the responsibilities of fatherhood, achieving a place in the community, and establishing the potential for career success. Through each of these, it is Marian who sees through his charm and dishonorable intentions to his core capacity for good, and it is his dual commitment to

Saving Mr. [Blank]  65 Winthrop and Marian—his nascent commitment to family—that compels him to remain to face, and overcome, the wrath of an irate community.

Mary Poppins and her progeny: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Bedknobs and Broomsticks That the films Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Bedknobs and Broomsticks were conceived as something like sequels to Mary Poppins seems obvious enough, since each of them, like their apparent model, derives from a popular children’s book, mixes overt fantasy and realism freely, and includes a suite of songs by the Sherman Brothers; moreover, each film reconceives its pivotal father figure as someone who needs to be reclaimed and entrusts the role to one of the two adult male leads from Mary Poppins—Dick Van Dyke in Chitty and David Tomlinson in Bedknobs.10 As with Meet Me in St. Louis and The Sound of Music, the source stories for both “sequels” had to be significantly replotted to accommodate the trope, yet, despite their apparent modeling on Mary Poppins, the deployment of song as such does relatively little to advance the subplot of fatherly redemption nor, in either film, is song manipulated toward this particular end as deliberately as it is in Mary Poppins. Rather, each character in these “sequels” finds his own path toward redemption, with song setting out the governing dynamic for that redemption. Chitty is based on a children’s book by Ian Fleming, which recounts the adventures of a mildly eccentric but traditionally constituted family— inventor Caractacus Pott (thus, “Crack Pott”), his wife Mimsie, and their eight-year-old twins Jeremy and Jemima—who have a series of adventures in a renovated touring car that turns out to have magic qualities and a mind of its own, enabling them to persevere over traffic, weather, and criminals operating in France.11 In the film version, as rewritten by Roald Dahl (with some additional input from director Ken Hughes), there is no mother, and the competence of the father, either as inventor or caregiver, is placed in greater question—not least because of his even more eccentric father, who embarks on a series of elaborate “journeys” to exotic locales, all in appropriate costumes and entailing extended visits to what seems to be an outdoor privy. This odd subplot seems to be Dahl’s extension of Fleming’s stock-intrade locker-room humor, which may thus also explain some rather juvenile wordplay later in the film, regarding the confusion of the words “laboratory” and “lavatory” and including the throwaway suggestion that the elder Potts might be appointed “Privy Counselor.” Consistent with this kind of wordplay, which helps negotiate the dual perspectives of child and adult from a specifically male perspective, Dahl built an alliance of sorts between Ian Fleming’s and his own penchant for colorfully suggestive names (the latter’s “Pussy Galore,” for example, or his own “Willy Wonka”). Thus, Dahl respells Fleming’s Lord Skrumshus “Scrumptious” and gives him a

66  Raymond Knapp daughter named Truly (of appropriate age and disposition to become stepmother to the twins). “Pott” becomes “Potts,” presumably due to the addition of an eccentric grandfather, since there are now two “crack-potts.” And, in the new fantasy adventure that substitutes for Fleming’s more realistic run-in with gangsters, Baron Bomburst of Vulgaria has outlawed children and employs a nefarious Child Catcher to enforce the prohibition, who addresses the Baron as “Your Heinous.” Outlandish as Dahl’s conceits are, Fleming’s own wit in negotiating the play between adult and child perspectives was even more basic, since the very name of the book derives from a crude sexual reference.12 Because Dick Van Dyke carries forward into Chitty the easy way he has with children in Mary Poppins, the redemption of his character—that is, achieving a more socially desired heteronormative and paternal masculinity— does not require him to reconnect with his children, but rather to connect romantically with Truly Scrumptious, already primed from the opening sequence to assume the role of mother to the wayward twins (not least because of their shared blondness).13 Caractacus’s credentials as a model father, at least temperamentally, seem impeccable. Indeed, his early two songs with his children, “You Two” and “Hushabye Mountain,” seem almost borrowed in style and sensibility from Mary Poppins’s “Stay Awake” and “Feed the Birds,” with an admixture of melancholy for “Hushabye” deriving from Bert’s “Chim Chim Cher-ee” (both are minor-mode waltzes based on a chromatically descending tetrachord). It is this odd melancholic touch, especially, subtly hinting at the felt absence of the children’s mother, that opens the door for Truly to fall in love with him; thus, while she is at first at odds with Caractacus, she is soon enough singing about the “Lovely, Lonely Man” she sees him to be. Her “life plan” as laid out in this song, to “make him see, that I need him as much as he needs me,” comes across as a bit too pat, especially at this relatively early point in the film. But her plan is indeed the film’s main musical project, realized to some extent already through her participation in “Toot Sweets,” but more overtly advanced in “Doll on a Music Box” near the end of the film. In “Doll,” Truly’s need for rescue from a too orderly life is coupled with her passivity as a music-box doll, and placed side by side with Caractacus’s more active but chaotic state, as a clumsy puppet prone to careen out of control, until he is brought to heel through his adoration of her, layering a reprise of the twin’s “Truly Scrumptious” onto her reprise of “Doll,” as a combination song.14 The combined sequence thus redirects his chaotic energies in ways aligned with his paternal role, as he becomes entranced by Truly’s evocation of a passive femininity within a domestically enclosed space. Still to be overcome, even at this late point in the film, is Van Dyke’s uncomfortable asexuality, a perhaps necessary aspect of his Bert in Mary Poppins (tweaked by Mary in “Jolly Holiday” with lines such as “You’d never think of pressing your advantage” and “A lady needn’t fear when you are near”), which is here reinforced by his simpering, simpleton performance as a puppet. In the aftermath of this emasculating performance—however

Saving Mr. [Blank]  67 stunning in its way, and even efficacious in enabling the children’s rescue— his budding romance with Truly seems doomed, until it is rescued by the deus ex machina of a convenient plot twist: Truly’s and Caractacus’s fathers recognize each other from their war years when the former comes to offer Caractacus a contract for his previously rejected musical candies—which event also conveniently establishes Caratacus’s manly capacity to take on the role of principal breadwinner in his reconstituted family. David Tomlinson also carries forward something of his identity crisis in Mary Poppins to Bedknobs and Broomsticks, where Emelius Browne’s version of professional insecurity virtually defines his character, extending, as in Mary Poppins, beyond his professional capacities to include his potential as a parent. The redemptive project in Bedknobs involves Emelius overcoming his tentativeness, which is seen to be based in his inability to believe either in magic or in himself. He has little trouble with the romantic dimension, however, which is given a significant boost from “The Beautiful Briny,” a song originally intended for Mary Poppins, which ends with his underwater consort being awarded the dancing cup;15 it is this song, more than “Eglantine” (his more direct approach to wooing Miss Price), that sells us on their potential for romance. Mr. Browne’s crisis of (self-) belief is foreshadowed before he even appears, when Eglantine’s “The Age of Not Believing” explicitly points to self-belief as the crucial first step, a connection Emelius recalls twice during the film, in one instance exhorting his mirror reflection, “Just for once in your life, you’ve got to believe in something.” Notably, his fundamental capacity for belief is already established in his atmospheric “Portabello Road”—another minor-mode waltz song with a chromatic descending tetrachord—which describes the familiar outdoor market as a place of enchantment and marks a turning point in our (and the children’s) appraisal of his potential for redemption. But as with Chitty, the source material provides almost no basis for the film’s plot manipulations that set up a trajectory of fatherly redemption. “Substitutiary Locomotion,” the linchpin both for bringing Emelius and Eglantine together and for resolving the dramatic Nazi plot in the film, is described by her as “child’s play” in Mary Norton’s Bonfires and Broomsticks, where it is termed “intrasubstantiary locomotion” (presumably renamed for the film so that it could more readily be set to music). In Norton’s The Magic Bed-Knob, the children are not orphans, as in the film, but rather have a stable home, with parents and a mother who works. And Norton’s Emelius Jones (rechristened Browne for the film) resides in 1666 London during the time of the Great Fire, with Eglantine joining him in the past after she and the children rescue him from being burned alive for witchcraft.16 In different ways, these changes contribute crucially to Emelius Browne’s redemption plot, but they also transform Eglantine, who in the film is at the outset assigned the quasi-parental role of caretaker despite her protestation that “Children and I don’t get on.” For both adult trajectories, the presence

68  Raymond Knapp of a younger child is crucial in many ways, as six-year-old Paul more naïvely comes to see Eglantine and Emelius as the parents he never had, and is uninhibited in saying so. Indeed, children’s need for active parenting is a common driver for almost all of the musicals that share this trope and, as here, helps propel even the adult plots in these films. Thus, the parents in Mary Poppins seem to rekindle their romantic relationship as they reassume their parental roles, and both Chitty and Bedknobs base the potential for adult romance directly on the shared performance of parental roles by the romantic partners in question.

Reconsidering the familiar: Annie, Into the Woods, The Secret Garden If orphans already become the basis for building family in Bedknobs, for the set of musicals in this section, based on texts traditionally associated with child readers, parental death or abandonment becomes an even more active agent, the very starting point for the trope of fatherly redemption. To differing degrees, this thematic context combines with considerations of legacy, and involves for two of the three musicals the manifestation of ghosts, in the process giving legacy a musical presence. As with earlier examples of the trope, fatherly redemption remains the key plot element, crucial to the other narrative strands. Thus, while Annie is centrally about Annie herself and what befalls her, it is not really her developmental arc that propels the larger narrative, but that of Oliver Warbucks, who learns to love, and to act out of love, because of her. In the stage version of Into the Woods (in a plotline dropped from the 2014 film version), the show’s Narrator/Mysterious Man is revealed to have been the Baker’s father, the man whose theft caused the witch to curse the Baker and his wife “in the first place”; the father’s return in the second act figures crucially in the Baker’s capacity to assume the role of single parent after his wife’s death, to “tell the tale.” In The Secret Garden, ghosts create an aura of eerie optimism that allows apparently dead things—such as “wick” gardens, incapacitated children, and dormant fatherly love—to bloom anew. And in all three cases, the sense of reimagining a familiar story (or stories) is palpable.17 Annie is based on the long-popular comic strip Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray, which first appeared in 1924, ran for decades in newspapers nationwide, gradually declined in popularity following Gray’s death in 1968, and—after several subsequent artists tried their hands—was finally canceled in 2010. The comic-strip’s most familiar plot device was driven by a protracted conflict between Oliver Warbucks and his wife, and involved Annie being sent away on various adventures when “Daddy” Warbucks was on one of his many business trips. But there is no Mrs. Warbucks in the musical, allowing the reclamation of Mr. Warbucks to take center stage, with his attachment to Annie leading to a reversal of the strip’s reactionary politics. The musical concludes with Annie’s adoption by Warbucks, along

Saving Mr. [Blank]  69 with the strong implication that his assistant Grace Farrell will soon complete the family unit.18 The musical numbers associated with this plot line are straightforward to the point of being formulaic, an extension of the period pastiche that informs other numbers in the show, such as “You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile” and “Easy Street.” Shortly after Warbucks’s and Annie’s meeting, “N.Y.C.” establishes commonalities within the nascent nuclear family (Oliver, Grace, and Annie) while increasing buy-in to the emergent family dynamic by also playing to the hometown audience at a particularly fraught time in New York’s history. “Something Was Missing” then reveals Warbucks’s sensitive and vulnerable side, barely rescued from the merely sentimental (or the creepy, depending on how it is staged) by Warbucks’s characteristic braggadocio, which evaporates only with the final admission that the “something missing” is Annie.19 Avoiding sentimentality is also to the point in Annie and Warbucks’s duet “I Don’t Need Anything but You,” which deftly sidesteps the lurking specter of incipient pedophilia through being a pastiche of the vaudevillian “buddy song” rather than straight-ahead sentiment. But there is more involved than tone here; there are also reassuring hints in the surrounding scenes that Grace will soon join the family. Indeed, those hints are extended effectively in the 1999 television version when this “buddy” song, now a trio, replaces “Tomorrow” as the show’s finale—an ending that makes the main plot point of the two sequels beside the point (see n. 19). As I argue elsewhere, the return of the Baker’s father in the second act of Into the Woods, after his death in the first-act finale, “serves as a figure of the fact that consequences live on past the actions and actors that generated them.”20 “No More,” the duet between father and son that ensues, is thus both a ghostly intervention and a kind of reckoning that will try to balance past, present, and future. If redemption can sometimes appear (especially in fiction) as a kind of release akin to that offered by confession in Catholicism, allowing one to put aside the past and start afresh through an act of forgiveness or absolution, Into the Woods insists on facing and owning up to consequences. In this bleaker (and arguably more realistic) world, the hope of redemption becomes to some extent generational. If, in Mary Poppins, Bert warns Mr. Banks against a future when it will be “too late for [him] to give” to his children, generational contexts allow hope and redemption even in the face of “too late” and the bleak hopelessness embodied in that phrase.21 And, just as the stage version of Mary Poppins (London, 2004) reveals more of Mr. Banks’s progress by showing us the past he is overcoming, so, too, does the Baker in this scene gain insight into his father’s torment, his own feelings of abandonment, and his need to commit to his child rather than to flee as his father had done. Near the end of Into the Woods, he expresses that commitment through telling the tale of his adventures to his infant son, encouraged by those others who have left him in this situation, the Witch and the ghost of his dead wife. Thus, the latter urges him on: “Be father and

70  Raymond Knapp mother, you’ll know what to do . . . [sung] No one leaves for good. You are not alone. No one is alone,” whereas the Witch reminds him, [sung] “Careful the tale you tell. That is the spell. Children will listen.”22 The ghost story in The Secret Garden, for its part, is an elaboration of something that is only occasionally suggested in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s well-beloved book from 1911, which has been adapted often for stage and screen. With the book’s very familiarity and its many adaptive variants, not to mention its own basis in already familiar stories—Bluebeard, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast, among others—the story has much in common with the familiar characters and contours of both Little Orphan Annie and the fairy tales that form the basis for Into the Woods; it has in this sense become something of a folk tale in practice, readily amenable to reinterpretation and reconfiguration. But the original version matters much more than for Annie and Into the Woods, as is true for several other musicals considered here that, like The Secret Garden, are based on a text with a considerable and somewhat independent fan base from the musical, including especially Mary Poppins, Wicked, Matilda, and Fun Home. Seeing and hearing the musical version of The Secret Garden, readers of the book will remember the latter’s many references to ghosts. Although most of these are discounted or dismissed, more weight is given to the notion that Colin’s mother (Lilias in the book, changed to Lily in the musical) manipulates events so as to bring Colin to her garden as an intervention to restore his health (Ch. 21) and later appears to Archibald in a dream to bring him home (Ch. 27). This, in turn, activates a set of ghostly associations that involve Colin’s and Mary’s physical similarities to their dead mothers and the abiding notion that both house and garden are “haunted,” albeit in different ways. 23 The musical intensifies many elements that contribute to this network of ghostly associations. The musical’s Dr. Craven, who we now learn was secretly in love with Lily, is Archibald’s brother rather than cousin, and is more aggressively invested in Colin’s death, even villainously so. In the musical, Mary’s mother was sister to Mrs. Craven, so that Mary, and not just Colin, resembles Lily. And, most importantly for the way the musical works, a whole chorus of ghosts (the Dreamers) hovers over the action throughout, operating sometimes as narrator, sometimes as a kind of Greek chorus, sometimes (in the case of Lily) as a direct agent, but always so as to create a musical aura that saturates and supervises the foregrounded action, creating a web of enchantment that functions as a kind of interconnective substance, joining past to present through a process of healing, and joining present to future through the agency of hope. As with those few other musicals invested with this kind of governing musical aura, such as A Little Night Music (1973), with its Liebeslieder Singers, or Once on This Island (1990), with its Storytellers, a central effect is to give individuals within the foregrounded action less agency, imposing pre-determined outcomes as though through fate (however benign), or

Saving Mr. [Blank]  71 through augmenting the ritualistic element that often comes into play with the retelling of familiar stories. Dramatically, both Night Music and Secret Garden, in particular, need this element to operate as a kind of deus ex machina that works to free their characters from the various traps that have ensnared them, from which they seem incapable of rescuing themselves. 24 Yet, despite this weakening of agency, Secret Garden’s Archibald Craven is actually given more presence in the musical than in the book, due to his increased interaction with others and the tortured nature of those interactions, especially regarding his brother and Lily. As a result, much more of the dramatic arc of the musical is invested specifically in his redemption than the dramatic arc of the book, which foregrounds Colin’s reclamation through the life-affirming power of nature (as part of Burnett’s thinly veiled advocacy for Christian Science). Nevertheless, the real-world personal agent of redemption remains Mary, whose actions precipitate the restoration of the garden and Colin’s health. 25 This brings into play what we may term the “miracle child” trope, when the transformative potential of a child transmutes into actual magic or something very like it. The “miracle child”—a category that includes figures such as Annie, Elphaba, and Matilda—may or may not sustain the possibility of fatherly redemption, but a more basic element in many of these musicals is magic itself, which is pervasive in child-centered musicals. How magic intertwines with the trope of fatherly redemption depends greatly on where it resides and who has access.

Magic and miracles In the first grouping of musicals considered here, music itself functions as a kind of magic, with principal access accruing to the central protagonists, Esther, Harold, and Maria, as noted. But actual magic is central to many later musicals that involve fatherly redemption, and the witch’s cauldron can get stirred in a variety of ways. Mary Poppins, although conjured by the children, remains outside their control. Caractacus Potts’s magical car has a mind of its own, although he becomes increasingly adept at managing its magic. With Eglantine’s witchly powers, we see the stereotypical investiture of magic in a single person, so much so that much of the story revolves around her coming to terms with her own power, just as Elphaba in Wicked and the eponymous Matilda must do in later shows. While the miracles wrought by Annie and Mary Lennox do not depend on magic as such, the latter credits magic for Colin’s recovery (“Come Spirit, Come Charm”), if less strenuously in the musical than in the book. Like music in musicals, magic and miracles in children’s stories gesture toward a world with more possibilities than the world we know, capable of providing the deus ex machina that makes happy endings not only possible but also to be expected. And, because the trope of fatherly redemption crosses over into the adult world, it allows that magic to fall away as metaphoric scaffolding, leaving the

72  Raymond Knapp restored miracle of human connection, whether romantic or familial (or both), to remain in its place. In this way, magic in children’s musicals functions, for adults, like high camp sometimes does, allowing audiences to invest strongly in situations or events that stretch credulity, while remaining fully aware of their contrived basis. Indeed, in this sense, camp and magic can and often do overlap. More complicated are those instances where magic is wielded malignantly, as with the Witch in Into the Woods, whose magic has negative consequences both intended and unintended, as with Queen Narissa in Disney’s Enchanted, modeled on her counterparts in Disney films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), as with the Wizard’s cohort in Wicked. Perhaps oddly, though, evil magic also tends to facilitate happy endings, through two mechanisms: through the very presence of magic in these worlds, with its capacity to overturn given realities, and through the empowering struggle against that magic, which tends to bring into better focus images of the good and valuable, which motivate that struggle to begin with. Thus, when Queen Narissa follows Giselle and Prince Edward to New York City—chosen because it is, in her words “a place where there are no ‘happily ever afters’”—it is she who brings that impossibility to fruition, although it is nascent already in Giselle’s bubbling optimism.

Reconsidering the trope: Wicked, Enchanted, Matilda, Fun Home A hallmark of twenty-first-century evocations of the trope of fatherly redemption in musicals, at least so far, seems to be a strong tendency to call the trope itself into question.26 Wicked, for example, does so by aligning evil magic with Elphaba’s real father. Although the Wizard isn’t revealed to be her father until after Elphaba’s (faked) death, the booby trap has been well set by her idealizing him early on (“The Wizard and I”) and by his complicity in inciting the wrath of the people against her, knowing perfectly well that she does not deserve the label of “wicked” with which he has allowed her to be smeared. Enchanted, in spoofing Disney’s animated feature fairytales, uses fatherly redemption—still fully intact and as heteronormative as ever—as a means for giving the film a serious core, and as a lever for challenging more fundamentally the familiar fairytale trope of preordained happy endings sealed by “true love’s kiss.” Of necessity, Enchanted thus reclaims the trope of fatherly redemption more straightforwardly than the other musicals considered in this section, although, significantly, Robert’s daughter Morgan does not figure in the film’s climactic sequence, nor does she figure in any of the film’s musical numbers, two of which, “That’s How You Know” and “So Close,” establish more centrally the romantic trajectory of Robert and Giselle. Morgan’s bonding with Giselle is important, but ancillary; it is Morgan’s response to Giselle that first validates her as a more

Saving Mr. [Blank]  73 suitable mate for Robert than Nancy. “So Close”—a soft rock song that serves as the climactic “King and Queen’s Waltz”—clinches their romance, revealing Robert to be both dancer and singer (well, sort of) after he has declined to do either, as he briefly sings along with crooner Jon McLaughlin while “waltzing” (in duple time!) with Giselle. Matilda the Musical and Fun Home, for their part, even more fundamentally call the trope of fatherly redemption into question, to the extent of denying its possibility altogether. Matilda bequeaths the title character an irredeemable family, especially her father, who (among many other offenses) tears up a library book—the symbol of her independence from her family—in front of her. In the musical’s second number, “Naughty,” Matilda articulates the need for her to “change my story,” but she makes no effort to change her own family, to “put it right,” not even later when she discovers her capacity for magic. (Nor, of course, does the book’s Matilda imagine changing her family, although one may take her partiality to The Secret Garden—her favorite of the library’s children’s books—as an implicit identification with an empowering, quasi-magical girl capable of transforming a hopeless family dynamic.) Instead, she endeavors only to punish her father and, ultimately, to escape from him, and is content in the end to form a fatherless family unit with her teacher, Jenny Honey. Moreover, the musical is much more direct than Roald Dahl’s 1988 book in setting up but then refusing the narrative possibility of fatherly redemption for Matilda, by confronting her in the opening number with the exaggerated positive reinforcement that all of her classmates receive from their parents (a parody of parental indulgence with no counterpart in the book), which places Matilda’s unsupportive family situation in stark relief (“Miracle”). Yet, the central story in Matilda does concern a kind of parental redemption, conceived in trans-generational terms, involving Miss Honey, who as a child was abused by her aunt (Agatha Trunchbull) after both her parents died. Already in the book, and well-realized in the musical, Matilda’s extraordinary maturity and mental capacities inspire Miss Honey to a kind of internal redemption, giving her the motivation and courage to confront both her aunt (now the school’s Headmistress) and Matilda’s parents on the child’s behalf, if ineffectually (“Pathetic,” “This Little Girl”). To this narrative strand, the musical adds an unfolding story that Matilda tells the librarian, Mrs. Phelps, in four installments, about an escapologist and his acrobat wife, the latter dying as she gives birth to the child they both desperately wanted. This story seems to function at first as a kind of “family romance,” through which Matilda projects an alternative family origin for herself. But as we learn more about Miss Honey, and as Matilda’s unfolding story progresses, it becomes clear that it is actually Jenny’s story, somehow intuited by Matilda. While the larger story eschews fatherly redemption, this story within a story gestures strongly in that direction when the escapologist, who has left his daughter in the care of the same beastly aunt who had indirectly caused his wife’s death, determines to confront her and

74  Raymond Knapp reclaim his role as father (“I’m Here”), only to disappear forever. But even if we imagine this story as both Matilda’s family romance and Jenny’s actual history, replete with the imagined ghost of a nearly redeemed father, the musical’s resolution does away with father figures entirely, not only banishing Matilda’s family from her life, but also eliminating the book’s Mr. Trilby in favor of installing Miss Honey as Headmistress. One way of understanding the project of Fun Home (both book and musical) is as an attempt to impose the trope of fatherly redemption on a history that denies that trope in all particulars. The musical reduces somewhat the free-wheeling, cross-cutting temporality of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir by interspersing the perspectives of Alison at three ages: Alison as a child, Alison during her college years, and Alison as a middleaged adult, at the approximate age of her father when he stepped in front of a truck, four months after she came out to her family as a lesbian. One of the core narratives of Fun Home concerns Alison’s realization of her own sexual identity, making it not only the first major Broadway musical to present an openly lesbian protagonist, but also the first to integrate that experience fully into the show’s narrative, dealing centrally with her dawning sexual awareness, her sexual experiences, and her coming out. 27 Thus, central scenes in this narrative strand involve Small Alison reacting to the symbolic power of a butch delivery woman’s “Ring of Keys,” and Medium Alison waking up after her sexual initiation (“Changing My Major [to Joan]”). These two songs create extended moments of intense identification for audience members who have had similar experiences in their sexual journeys, while softening that intensity with gentle condescension toward the character’s relative naïveté. This affectionately humorous undertone is to some extent implicit, given the presence of adult Alison hovering behind the foregrounded action, but it is also supported musically, coming into sharpest focus on the title phrase for each song, which is marked on its first arrival with an unexpected key change. Most directly, the visceral shocks of these key changes trigger strong affective responses, but they also register as comic, even campy, indulgences in modern Broadway’s penchant for dramatic key changes, an effect sharpened here by the punning verbal assonance that accompanies each gesture (thus, changing keys on “Changing My Major” and “Ring of Keys” [italics mine]). But the crux of the story involves how this narrative of sexual awakening intersects with Alison’s problematic relationship with her father, and the efforts of the adult Alison, retrospectively, to resolve those problems redemptively. The sometimes desperate abjection implicit in this attempt lays bare the importance of abjection to the trope itself, since the very possibility of fatherly redemption depends first of all on a full admission of failure. Thus, in all of the instances of the trope considered here, fathers or would-be fathers first fail, and then recognize their failure as the first step toward redemption. As Alison details her father’s many failures to be the father she needed, she also takes those failures unto herself, especially his

Saving Mr. [Blank]  75 biggest failure, imagining that she was somehow culpable for her father’s final desperate act, almost as if her abjection could substitute for her father’s. Partly because of the dramatic compression demanded by the musical as a genre, and partly because of its focused mode of presentation, through song, the musical version of Fun Home ends up being less generous to Alison’s father than the book. In the latter, during the drive father and daughter take together shortly before his death, Alison’s private thought—“At the light. I’ll say it when the light turns green”—leads to a series of abject confessions from her father that bring him close to making the kind of connection with her that she needs. 28 Close, perhaps; but in the end this, too, fails, since his confessions do not result in an admission of father–daughter kinship, even though their few later encounters, through correspondence and during her final visit home before his death, seem to take such a kinship for granted. In the musical, Alison’s sense of desperation during the drive is intensified in retrospect by the fact that this was their last time together, and by a dramatic choice to have Adult Alison take that final ride rather than Medium Alison, interacting directly with the other characters for the first time.29 “Telephone Wire,” which reenacts that last drive, spins “At the light” into a refrain whose repetitions and returns bespeak the futility of connection, dramatizing her father’s inability to close the gap between them even when she has extended a bridge for him to do so, with the kind of breathtaking poignancy that is the stock and trade of musicals. Although he is indeed abject in recounting his own failures to be the man he should have been, he is incapable of acknowledging his failures as a father, and unable to see his daughter’s sexual trajectory except as a window into—and an implicit commentary on—his own. Nor does his suicide, which she has imagined she precipitated, provide a connection—not even a causal one, as she eventually decides: “Was it because of me? I’m afraid it wasn’t. That’s the crazy thing.”30 The book reveals something a little more complex between the car ride and his death, through both incident and through rendering his letter about Kate Millett as a gesture of reaching out to her, of acknowledging her. In the musical, that letter is yet another angst-ridden indulgence in self-obsession, one of many instances of her father’s potential for sympathy being undermined musically.31 If the book’s version feels more reflectively honest, however, perhaps the musical’s foreshortening gets it right: suicide is often understood as the ultimate act of self-obsession, and, while there may sometimes be redemptive features to suicide, it cannot play a part in fatherly redemption, which at the very least requires his continued presence. *** In problematizing the trope of fatherly redemption, Fun Home explores the line between (adult male) angst and self-obsession. The former is indeed one of the most frequent features of the trope of fatherly redemption,

76  Raymond Knapp and, as we have seen, often enough the father or father figure needs to be rescued from self-obsession, generally through the centrifugal pull of either children or romance. It is worth considering, however, that this dual pull can sometimes seem a tad creepy. I’ve already noted the careful counterbalancing required in Annie against the hint of pedophilia; other musicals involving either orphans or a teacher/mentoring relationship have to be just as carefully played. Gigi (1958 film) is an especially tricky case, since the angst-ridden flip-flops between rant and ballad in Gaston’s “Gigi” center around Gigi’s very youth, with pedophilia lurking behind every charge that she’s a babe/tot/snip/cub/papoose/child/brat/girl. But directly behind Gigi’s “Gigi” stands “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” the similarly constructed rant/ballad in My Fair Lady (1956 Broadway; like Gigi, its songs were written by Lerner and Loewe), and the parallels can be quite uncomfortable to ponder, especially when Eliza’s father’s suspicions are added to the equation. Creepy or not, the appeal of such scenes of adult male angst—and yes, self-obsession—probably figures prominently in the attraction musicals have for many young males, whether straight or gay, and it is an open question whether this presumptively adult dimension of children’s and family musicals is not core, as well, to the experience of many children.

Notes

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while consistent with Fleming’s other work, seems already somewhat dated by 1964, and is largely absent from the film. Notably, Bedknobs and Broomsticks indulges precisely the kind of gendered play Chitty omits, when—in a scene invented for the film—the children encounter a nursery in an abandoned mansion, where Carrie goes from dollhouse to dolls, young Paul rides a rocking horse, and his older brother Charlie, after exploring the room thoroughly, settles in with a train set. A somewhat different kind of doubleness than that between children and adults occurs in this song, where the Sherman Brothers insert a musical joke for those inclined to relish such things. Thus, the dip in register the first time she sings the phrase “wound by a key” becomes an actual key change when the phrase recurs, in timely preparation for the minor-mode excursion of the song’s “B” section. (See below regarding how Fun Home extends this kind of punning musical play.) One must imagine that “The Beautiful Briny” would have occupied the place in Mary Poppins eventually filled by the horse race that Mary wins while riding a merry-go-round horse, and that it was discarded because of its suggestion of a possible romance between Bert and Mary, a possibility already broached and deftly countered in “Jolly Holiday,” as noted. Mary Norton’s two books about the novice witch Eglantine Price, originally published in 1943 (The Magic Bed-Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons) and 1945 (Bonfires and Broomsticks), were in 1957 published together as Bed-Knob and Broomsticks, with the title for the first shortened to “The Magic Bed-Knob”). In a further difference between books and film, in Norton’s The Magic Bed-Knob, when Eglantine and the children visit a South Sea island, it is inhabited not by fanciful talking cartoon-animals, but by very real cannibals, from whom they just manage to escape after she wins a magic duel against the resident witch doctor. The songs of Into the Woods are by Stephen Sondheim; those of The Secret Garden are by Lucy Simon and Marsha Norman. Two sequels confirm this inference, although neither made it to Broadway; both Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge (1989) and the much more successful Annie Warbucks (1992–93) hinge on the plot device that Warbucks must marry if he is to be allowed to keep Annie. For more on the creepy cross-generational “romance” between Annie and Daddy Warbucks in Annie, see Zelda Knapp, “We Need to Talk about Annie,” http://aworkunfinishing.blogspot.com/2013/05/we-need-to-talk-about-annie. html, accessed October 10, 2015. Personal Identity, 155. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden rejects this phrase overtly, rejoining Archibald’s expressed fear that he may be “quite too late” with a narrative comment: “Of course this was the wrong Magic—to begin by saying ‘too late.’ Even Colin could have told him that,” The Secret Garden, ed. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (New York: Norton, 2006), 168. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Into the Woods, Vocal Score (Miami, FL: Warner Bros., 1989), 280 and 286. Regarding the ghostly dimension of the book, see Jen Cadwallader’s “The Three Veils: Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in The Secret Garden,” in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden: A Children’s Classic at 100, ed. Jackie C. Horne and Joe Sutliff Sanders (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 119–35. Cadwallader argues that this dimension reflects, in specific detail, Burnett’s own attempts to reconnect with her dead son through spiritualism. Indeed, A Little Night Music, which is plotted as a sex comedy, also plays through the trope of fatherly redemption regarding Frederik and Desiree’s

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26 27

28 29

30 31

daughter Fredrika, even if that subplot is oddly eclipsed by Frederik’s son running away with his young step-mother. Regarding the generational and gendered dimensions of Mary’s role in saving Colin and his father, see Maureen M. Martin’s “Healing National Manhood in The Secret Garden,” in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden: A Children’s Classic at 100, ed. Jackie C. Horne and Joe Sutliff Sanders (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 137–53. Martin takes the Craven estate to be a synecdoche for the nation, relating the household’s situation, allegorically, to a complex of issues relating to empire and an emergent crisis of English national identity at the turn of the last century. Wicked’s songs are by Stephen Schwartz; Enchanted’s by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz; Matilda’s by Tim Minchin; and Fun Home’s by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron. The experiences of queer children have been addressed with increasing frequency through both memoirs and studies. For a useful typology, see Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child; or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Regarding their place in children’s literature, see Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature, ed. Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011). Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Boston, MA: Houghtom Mifflin, 2006), 219. I am grateful to Zelda Knapp for pointing this out to me. As she describes this scene, “Adult Alison is sitting in the chair, half attending to the scene, half in her thoughts, and then her father addresses her, and—Beth Malone is just wonderful in this moment—she both draws in to herself and finally becomes present to those around her. She’s not used to being seen by her memories” (personal communication). The preponderance of evidence suggests that her father’s death was a suicide, although there are counter-indications, which Alison notes. As Arreanna Rostosky puts it, “The father’s music in Fun Home is more discordant than the material sung by any other character. ‘Edges of the World,’ toward the end of the show—essentially a mad song—is really our only opportunity to hear from him musically, and it doesn’t paint a flattering portrait” (personal communication). While his unflattering musical presence carries considerable pathos, appropriate to someone who has long been uncomfortable in his own skin—in this case someone whose sexual life has been twisted by the confines of a closet he is in the process of being forced out of—the fact remains that he has no song to win an audience over, certainly nothing to balance the books against Alison’s “Come to the Fun Home” (with her brothers), “Ring of Keys,” and “Changing My Major.”

5

Dickensian discourses Giving a (singing) voice to the child hero in Oliver! and Copperfield Marc Napolitano

In 1960, Lionel Bart’s Oliver! premiered in the West End; this landmark musical subsequently broke the record for the longest running English musical of all time (a record that it likewise broke on the other side of the Atlantic when it reached New York in 1963). In 1981, Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn’s musical adaptation of David Copperfield—simply called Copperfield—premiered on Broadway; it ran for 13 performances and then fell into obscurity. Frank Rich of the New York Times dismissed Copperfield as a blatant attempt to duplicate the formula of successful familyoriented musicals such as Oliver! and Annie: After sitting through “Copperfield,” the new musical at the ANTA, you may seriously question whether its creators have ever actually read their ostensible source material, Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield.” . . . But there’s one thing you won’t question. Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, who wrote this show’s book, music and lyrics, have definitely, but definitely, seen lots of hit Broadway musicals. “Copperfield” seems an almost scientific attempt to recreate, by slavish imitation, some of those familiar shows.1 As with Oliver! and Annie, Copperfield features a precocious child hero who transitions from bad fortune to good fortune while interacting with a wide array of memorable supporting characters; however, unlike Oliver and Annie, David does not remain a child. Rather than focus on the first 18 chapters of David Copperfield, Kasha and Hirschhorn trace the hero’s journey to adulthood. This creative choice necessitated many excisions given the broad scope of Dickens’s bildungsroman. Several of the novel’s supporting characters and story arcs, including the critical subplot involving James Steerforth’s seduction of Em’ly, were eliminated, and Kasha and Hirschhorn refocused the narrative on two elements of the Dickens text: David’s relationships with Agnes and Dora (reimagined as a love triangle) and Uriah Heep’s conspiracy against Mr. Wickfield. As Rich implied in his review, these modifications negatively impact the musical’s interpretation of its source text in several ways. To simplify David’s complicated relationships

Dickensian discourses  81 with Dora and Agnes into a clichéd love triangle is to sacrifice the nuance of the novel’s central theme—the undisciplined heart versus the disciplined heart. Furthermore, to place Uriah’s conspiring at the forefront of the narrative is to compromise the underhanded nature of his villainy. In spite of these issues, attributing Copperfield’s failure to its problematic relationship to David Copperfield is untenable. Bart was obliged to make many similar excisions in adapting Oliver Twist. While truncating Dickens’s sprawling stories is essential, perhaps the most significant cuts in the case of Oliver! and Copperfield relate to narrative discourse as opposed to plot. In their adaptations, Bart, Kasha, and Hirschhorn eliminate the role of the narrator: Bart does not attempt to translate Dickens’s omniscient narrator to the stage, and Kasha and Hirschhorn cut David’s narration and restrict the title character to his role as protagonist—he remains the centerpiece of the story, but he does not share his reflections on that story. The effect of the narrator’s absence on the role of the child protagonist is significant: by escaping Dickens’s narrator, Oliver attains greater autonomy and expressiveness than his textual predecessor. The voice of the child hero thus becomes much more prominent. However, in escaping the narrator of David Copperfield, David, the child protagonist, loses a great deal of his power. Perhaps this loss is inevitable, for in breaking with the narrator, David is, in fact, breaking with part of himself; it is only through the juxtaposing of the child protagonist and the adult-narrator that the reader gains an appreciation for the power of the child’s perspective. While Oliver’s voice is drowned out by the omniscient narrator of Oliver Twist, the narrative voice of the adult David promotes the power of the juvenile perspective. The transition from novelistic discourse to musical discourse thus allows Oliver to find his voice and to become the voice of the entire musical. Without his narratorial counterpart, the young David loses his discursive and thematic power.

Seen but not heard versus invisible and effusive: Dickens’s child characters and narrators The centrality of the child to the literary legacy of Charles Dickens—and to the Dickensian ethos—cannot be overestimated, and yet the role of the child in the Dickens canon is, like so many other elements of the author’s writing, paradoxical. Child heroes like Oliver Twist and Little Nell are champions of goodness in a cruel world; sickly and spiritual children like Tim Cratchit and Paul Dombey exert a redemptive effect on troubled adults; abused and neglected waifs like Smike and Jo epitomize the suffering of the downtrodden. For all of their memorable qualities, however, these child characters seldom speak in memorable terms. Of course, one could argue that “Please, sir, I want some more” and “God bless us, every one”—both lines spoken by children—are the two most memorable sentences in the entire Dickens canon. However, given the expressive idiosyncrasy that defines Dickens’s most memorable characters, the reticence of his child heroes stands out. 2

82  Marc Napolitano Oliver Twist is the first (and perhaps foremost) example of this trend, and he remains the most passive, the most static, and the most silent of Dickens’s major child characters. Furthermore, he lacks discursive power, which is hardly surprising given his dearth of dialogue. Anny Sadrin observes that “like a good child, he scarcely speaks unless spoken to and then gives the tersest of answers: ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Certainly, sir,’ make up nearly a third of his replies.”3 The very idea of Oliver telling his own story is absurd when one compares him to the narrator of the novel that bears his name. As Karin Lesnik-Oberstein writes, in contrast to Oliver’s lack of verbosity, “The narrator . . . is verbal language: fluent, confident, and playful. He puns, parodies, satirizes, criticizes, and digresses self-confessedly.”4 In Oliver Twist, Dickens juxtaposes his most passive and consistent protagonist against his most active and unpredictable narrator. In spite of his forceful personality and his frequent use of the first-person, the narrator of Oliver Twist is not a character.5 Characters in Oliver Twist are rigidly constructed, not only in terms of their specific physical and sartorial traits, but also in terms of the novel’s morally polarized universe (Nancy and Bates are the only characters who seem capable of personal growth). Meanwhile, the narrator is both invisible and inscrutable. He rapidly and repeatedly shifts from a sympathetic investment in the telling of Oliver’s story to a satirical detachment from Oliver. It is difficult to ascertain his values and ideals.6 As an unreliable narrator, he frequently speaks in opposition to Dickens, the implied author, yet his social criticism and satirical wit align closely with that author’s voice. These incongruities are just one example of the numerous contradictions that define the narrative, many of which can be traced back to the text’s chaotic publication history.7 Given the picaresque and peripatetic plot points of Dickens’s early works, the voice of the narrator oftentimes provides some semblance of continuity; still, in the case of Oliver Twist, the narrator seems less inclined to serve the text and more inclined to usurp control of the narrative. In his assessment of narratology, Gerald Prince claims that literary texts featuring unconventional or unreliable narrators “may lead us to conclude that the real subject of the narrative is the rendering of certain events rather than the events themselves and that the real hero is the narrator rather than any one of his characters.”8 Lesnik-Oberstein echoes this statement in her analysis of Oliver Twist, claiming that the “narrator is not so much an instrument in and for the novel as that the novel is a tool or instrument for him: that he in fact creates the narrative to tell his own tale, the tale of how he exists as narrator, what it means to be a ‘narrator.’”9 Not only does Oliver play a passive role in the story, but the story itself frequently seems to be of secondary importance to the narrator’s telling of that story, particularly during the workhouse chapters and the early London scenes that introduce Fagin’s gang. These chapters are much more conducive to the satirical commentary of the narrator than the middle and latter parts of the text, which shift the focus to the melodrama surrounding Oliver’s lost

Dickensian discourses  83 inheritance and his vengeful half-brother, Monks. As a result, the narrator becomes less ostentatious in the second half of the novel, though this shift does not allow Oliver to take center stage. Indeed, Oliver, like the narrator, recedes into the background throughout these chapters, which focus on the Maylie subplot or the more gripping Nancy subplot. In the early chapters, Oliver is a means by which the narrator can satirize the bureaucratic inhumanity of the workhouse board and the “respectability” of Fagin. Later, Oliver is presented as a symbol of the enduring power (and the inevitable triumph) of goodness, but this role places few demands upon him in regard to the movement of the story. The inheritance plot, which dominates the latter part of the novel, is built around a series of favorable coincidences, so Oliver need not be a heroic or active individual. As Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs suggest, the “providential plot” will do the work for him.10 While David begins his narration by wondering whether his story will prove him to be “the hero of [his] own life,”11 it is clear that Oliver is ill suited for this designation due to his fundamental inaction. The correlation between Oliver’s disappearance and the narrator’s sudden reticence implies a striking connection between these two individuals, as though the narrator’s sarcasm and forcefulness can only be appreciated when juxtaposed against Oliver’s naïve reserve; place Oliver in the background (or remove him from entire sequences of chapters), and the narrator suddenly becomes less flamboyant. Since Oliver neither speaks up for himself nor drives the plot forward, one could argue that it is left up to the narrator to speak on Oliver’s behalf and to guide the providential plot toward its happy ending. The problem with this interpretation, though, is that it discounts the fluctuations in the narrator’s position. Though the narrator eventually loses his satirical edge and tells the story with greater conviction—as the narrative shifts from a polemical satire to a melodramatic inheritance story—this shift contributes to his overall inconsistency and inscrutability. His defense of Oliver is erratic, and he frequently uses humor and exaggeration to distance the reader from the narrative (and from Oliver’s plight). While Oliver hardly ever speaks and then only speaks the truth, the narrator incessantly speaks and constantly obscures or distracts. Lesnik-Oberstein considers this contrast to be one of the fundamental paradoxes of the text, as the narrator’s ability to manipulate language links him to the novel’s villainous hypocrites. Fagin, Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Corney, and Mrs. Mann “make use of language as a tool for hypocrisy and as a distancing of themselves from experience and suffering.”12 Though the narrator’s sarcasm and pathos preclude his embodying the villainous qualities of the aforementioned characters, he remains divorced from Oliver’s angst, even when he tries to disclose it to the reader (92). Lesnik-Oberstein links speechlessness with truthful suffering, but it is important to recall that speechlessness is associated with childhood. Oliver’s morality, Nell’s innocence, and Paul’s spirituality are untainted by the corrupting influence

84  Marc Napolitano of language, and the result is that these characters seldom speak out. None of Dickens’s child heroes possess the verbal dexterity of a Sam Weller or a Mr. Micawber, though they simultaneously lack the hypocrisy of a Seth Pecksniff or a Uriah Heep. Given the excessive rhetorical flourishes of Dickens’s great hypocrites such as Bumble, Pecksniff, Heep, Skimpole, Bounderby, and Dorrit, Dickens was obviously aware of the power of rhetoricians to manipulate language. The simplicity and silence of his child characters can thus be interpreted as an indication of their fundamental morality. According to Sara Thornton, “The child is considered as a pure point of origin and is part of a fantasy that the child and the world are knowable in a direct and unmediated way. Children are often associated with a capacity for direct contact with the world, devoid of linguistic problems, or as possessing a purity of language which adults have lost.”13 The Dickensian child hero paradox takes on new dimensions in this framework: Dickens must rely on language, but he must also shield his child heroes from the corruptive influence of language. It is therefore not surprising that, in the major novels, the child never serves as the narrator.14 For Lesnik-Oberstein, Oliver and the narrator are essentially incompatible due to the fact that the narrator cannot adequately use language to define Oliver’s goodness and eventual happiness.15 Still, there would be no way of revealing any of Oliver’s characteristics without the narrator, especially given Oliver’s inability to tell his own story. This paradox is essential to the overall effect of Oliver Twist, but the text’s inconsistency, the protagonist’s lifelessness, and the narrator’s brashness can prove frustrating. Oliver! is a more coherent work due to Lionel Bart’s significant cuts to the story, but it is the discursive revisions, as demanded by the musical medium, that rectify several of the incongruities regarding Oliver, the narrator, and the narrative.

Justifying the exclamation point: adapting Dickens’s Oliver for Oliver! The musical genre necessitates several basic changes to Oliver’s character. Musical-Oliver is more assertive and more in control of his own destiny than his book counterpart. Unlike book-Oliver, the stage musical’s protagonist decides to ask for more of his own volition, and the deletion of Monks and the inheritance storyline eliminates the “providential” coincidences that govern book-Oliver’s fate. This excision necessitates that the impetus for the plot comes from Oliver himself (as opposed to its coming from Monks or from the larger providential forces that foil Monks), and, again, the musical medium proves helpful in this regard. Though book-Oliver has deep emotional needs, his passivity prevents him from acting to fulfill those needs, and the plot precludes his having to do so. Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs point out, “Oliver is utterly passive and helpless. He is not able to experience very much besides fear, loneliness,

Dickensian discourses  85 gratitude, and an aching need for love. No other Dickens hero so effortlessly gains, not only love, but a providential inheritance that provides him with a name, a preordained identity, and a ready-made world that enfolds him in the warmth and security he has never known.”16 Though Oliver’s “aching need for love” indicates that he is capable of profound yearnings, according to Hochman and Wachs, Oliver never actually strives toward his goals (55). This passivity is surprising given that he is the protagonist of a Victorian novel. Musicals tend to focus heavily on the yearnings of the main characters; however, the conventions of musical theater present these yearnings in unique ways. In musical theater, songs tend to serve a revelatory purpose, as characters—even unlikable or downright villainous characters like Billy Bigelow and Jud Fry—bare their souls and reveal their most intimate desires. In the case of many Golden Age musicals, these revelatory songs are strategically placed in the opening scenes so as to initiate the lead character’s story arc. Thus, most characters ultimately act upon the feelings expressed in these numbers: for example, Strouse and Charnin’s Annie makes her first escape attempt after singing “Maybe.” Still, songs about yearning do not always precede noteworthy actions; Tevye does not pursue a “get rich quick scheme” after singing “If I Were a Rich Man.” Indeed, in comparison to Annie, Tevye is much more passive (though, like Oliver, he is descended from a literary forebear who is reactive as opposed to proactive, and like the literary Oliver, he is defined largely by his enduring goodness in the face of unwarranted suffering).17 Still, it is difficult to view musical-Tevye as passive, for his singing and dancing are so dynamic. Indeed, while Annie’s follow-up actions seemingly indicate the transition from yearning to striving, the very act of singing the song constitutes striving on the part of the character. Consider the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of strive: “to endeavor vigorously, use strenuous effort.”18 On a physical level, the act of singing demands tremendous effort from the performer, and that effort is manifested through the character. In addition, on a more abstract level, the decision of a character to sing about his or her ambitions, goals, loves, and desires implies the sort of endeavoring defined above, whether or not it is followed by immediate action. In the stage musical, Oliver does not set out for London after singing “Where is Love?” Like Tevye, he does not take action upon concluding his yearning (“I want”) number. However, the discursive act of singing marks a transition away from his literary predecessor’s passive hoping and toward the active striving that defines many musical protagonists. It is important to consider the aforementioned transition in the case of “Where Is Love?” given that the melody and the lyrics seem to reinforce the passivity of the character. Oliver does not belt out the song with the confidence of Annie, nor does he display the pluck and playfulness of Tevye. Still, it is useful to compare Oliver’s singing of this song to the equivalent passage in the novel. In both instances, Oliver prepares to spend his first night in the

86  Marc Napolitano Sowerberries’ coffin shop: “He was alone in a strange place; . . . The boy had no friends to care for, or to care for him . . . [A]nd he wished, as he crept into his narrow bed, that that were his coffin, and that he could be lain in a calm and lasting sleep in the churchyard ground . . . .”19 This scene is one of the only moments in which book-Oliver comes close to achieving some sort of discursive power, though Dickens does not go so far as to utilize free-indirect discourse. Instead, the narrator places a great deal of emphasis on what Oliver is feeling in this scene, but he still dominates the narrative. Moreover, the death-drive that defines Oliver’s feelings at this particular moment is perhaps the ultimate indication of his passivity. 20 “Where Is Love?” captures the pathos of Dickens’s scene, but it frames that pathos in a different way. Though the song revolves around questions as opposed to answers—thus precluding Oliver’s setting specific goals or outlining courses of action regarding how best to achieve his heart’s desires—“Where is Love?” is not a passive ballad about resigning oneself to the death-drive. The first verse presents the overarching question of “where is love?” The second verse presents the more specific longing for the deceased mother and the loving ideal that she represents. In both cases, Oliver implies that he is willing to take action in order to find the answers to these questions. Though it is a daunting prospect, he is prepared to “travel far and wide,” and he will, in fact, do so over the course of the musical. The wants and yearnings may be the same in the two works, but musical-Oliver strives in a way that his literary predecessor does not. The singing—and the discursive power that accompanies it—is perhaps even more significant in this regard. Whatever the “passive” nature of the lyrics and the reserved quality of the music, it is impossible to describe the song as “passive,” for the very act of singing means that Oliver must assert and express himself. He need not rely on the narrator, and it is the absence of the Dickensian narrator—as demanded by the musical format—that allows him to speak on his own behalf. Though the musical, as a genre, does not require the elimination of a narrator, Scott McMillin argues that the presence of an omniscient narrator conflicts with the true discursive force in the musical, the orchestra.21 However, the orchestra, unlike Dickens’s narrator, willingly serves the narrative and its characters; in contrast to Lesnik-Oberstein’s description of Dickens’s narrator, the orchestra will not transform itself into the subject of the text. Musical-Oliver remains the central focus of the piece. Granted, he is arguably a less prominent character than Fagin and Nancy, both of whom dominate act 2; indeed, much as his literary predecessor retreats even further into the background during the middle and latter portion of the novel, musical-Oliver has far less to do in the second act, both narratively and musically. Still, Oliver largely controls the musical that bears his name due to the fact that “Where Is Love?” serves as the crux of the piece. Bart commented that “[m]usically, it’s the root theme for the rest of the songs . . . The songs, which are character songs, come off of that

Dickensian discourses  87 tune.”22 This assertion may seem suspect given that “Where is Love?” is so different from the other songs that constitute the score to Oliver! “Where is Love?” is one of the few numbers that eschews the music-hall idiom that defines the score (an idiom that supplements the overarching theme of cockney fellowship). Fagin and Nancy embrace this idiom in their own numbers. However, their story arcs are deeply intertwined with the theme of “Where is Love?” Indeed, act 2 sees Nancy shift from the music-hall idiom that defined her songs to the pop idiom of “Where is Love?” “As Long as He Needs Me” reflects her own desire for love, and her act 2 story arc is shaped heavily by her love for Oliver. While Fagin never truly embraces a pop idiom, his act 2 story arc is analogous to Nancy’s in that he is left to wrestle with conflicted feelings about his immoral choices. Moreover, as in the case of Nancy, Bill’s potential abuse of Oliver is a major source of these conflicted feelings: Nancy sings “As Long as He Needs Me” after a confrontation with Bill, and Fagin begins “Reviewing the Situation” after witnessing a similar confrontation. Oliver may not take center-stage in act 2, but the issues and themes that he raised in act 1 profoundly shape the characters who dominate this act. Moreover, the more serious and less celebratory tone of act 2 is in keeping with Oliver’s musical idiom. Though Bart grants musical-Oliver a significant amount of discursive power, the honesty of the Dickensian child is not compromised by this power because musical-Oliver is not dependent upon rhetoric. His means of communication are inherently honest, for when a musical theater character sings alone in front of an audience, the audience is given a privileged insight into that character’s interiority. The use of music and lyrics supplements the emotional intensity of the character and thus lends the character greater credibility. As Lehman Engel points out, the “unreality” of characters singing in musicals becomes moot “because music is able to create a special super-real world . . . . The unrealism . . . brings us to a higher truth.”23 These issues of reality and truthfulness are particularly striking in the case of Oliver!’s relationship to its source. Though Oliver Twist is remembered partly for its gritty violence and its unflinching representation of the underworld, the narrator’s hyperbole and sarcasm create a sense of “unrealism” that ultimately precludes the revelation of a higher truth. Instead, there is incongruity. Conversely, throughout “Where is Love?” the emotional transparency demanded by the song precludes the disingenuousness that so defines Dickens’s unreliable narrator. Furthermore, in spite of the use of repetition in the refrain and melody, the song seems to embody the “spontaneity” that Lesnik-Oberstein attributes to the honest discourse of the child: Oliver is singing as a means of expressing his powerful feelings, and he is also improvising a lullaby to console himself in a moment of severe despair. Unlike book-Oliver, who succumbs to an almost suicidal depression in the Sowerberries’ shop, musical-Oliver yearns for something greater and translates yearning to action through musical discourse. Furthermore, musical-Oliver can gain discursive power without sacrificing his

88  Marc Napolitano innocence and integrity. The narrative conventions of the musical thus help the Dickensian child protagonist to find his voice.

The loss of the grown-up-child voice in Copperfield While the contrasts between musical-Oliver’s attainment of discursive power and musical-David’s loss of discursive power are striking, it is important not to overstate the differences between these two Dickens musical adaptations regarding their relationships with their novelistic sources. The structure of Kasha and Hirschhorn’s book parallels Oliver! in several respects; like Bart, Kasha and Hirschhorn follow the early chapters of Dickens’s novel fairly closely but cut the majority of the middle and then jump to the climax and denouement. Much as Bart omitted the Maylie and Monks subplots, opting to focus on Bill as the central villain, Kasha and Hirschhorn omitted the Em’ly/Steerforth subplot (and the thematic focus on fallen women), leaving Uriah Heep as the primary antagonist. The book for the musical Oliver! is generally much more satisfying than the book for Copperfield, partially due to the fact that Oliver Twist is a shorter and more disjointed novel than David Copperfield; thus, Bart’s excisions do not detract from the Dickensian elements of the source and actually allow for a more coherent musical narrative to emerge. While the Steerforth/Em’ly plotline (as well as the less memorable Jack Maldon/Annie Strong plotline) is divorced from David’s own story arc, it exerts a significant effect on David’s maturation and characterization, as Steerforth becomes yet another lost idol from David’s youth. Notably, the significance of the many subplots of David Copperfield is felt primarily through David the narrator, as opposed to David the protagonist: that is, while these plotlines do not truly shape David’s journey toward middle-class success and domestic tranquility with Agnes, they have a pronounced effect on the tone and overall effect of David’s narrative voice. Unsurprisingly, it is the omission of that narration that proves to be the most problematic element of Copperfield in terms of its success as an adaptation. More specifically, the omission of the narrator compromises the significance of the child’s voice in Copperfield, despite the fact that it is the adult David who serves as the narrator of Dickens’s novel. Though many of Oliver’s traits can be found in subsequent Dickens children, his docility and reticence are a direct contrast to another iconic Dickens child hero, Master David Copperfield. Granted, the young David shares many of Oliver’s fundamental characteristics, including his sensitivity and his fixation on his mother, but, as Hochman and Wachs have noted, “David Copperfield reverses the organizing assumptions of Oliver Twist, and it does so in the service of the values of striving and renunciation that generate the conflict that informs Dickens’s greatest work. Twist lodges its hero in the shelter of inherited wealth and identity; Copperfield renounces inheritance as a buffer against the world and affirms striving as the way to make

Dickensian discourses  89 one’s way in the world.”24 David, in keeping with his ambitiousness and diligence, is a far more loquacious character than Oliver. In fact, he may be the most verbose character in the Dickens canon: David is a first-person narrator, and the story that he relates is longer than Pip’s narrative in Great Expectations and Esther’s narrative in Bleak House. Still, it is important to note a distinction between David, the adultnarrator looking back on his life, and David, the child hero who shares Oliver’s vulnerability and verbal reticence. As Malcolm Andrews observes, David Copperfield marks a turning point in the Dickens canon as it is the first novel to depict a child hero growing into adulthood. 25 This emphasis on maturation allows Dickens to explore new dimensions of the human psyche; it also allows him to experiment with narration and discourse. Specifically, David’s growth grants Dickens the opportunity to layer several different viewpoints and voices, including the voice of the implied author. Felicity Hughes writes that “The reader has not only Charles Dickens to attend to, but the narrator, David Copperfield (himself also a novelist), and his remembered self, young David the protagonist. In fact, from these three sources, three different interpretations of people and events are offered to the reader simultaneously.”26 Hughes argues that the older David’s narration presents something of a critique of his younger self’s perspective, while Dickens’s own perspective as an implied author presents an ironic critique of the older David: “Just as David Copperfield, novelist, communicates with the reader, so too does Charles Dickens, novelist, offering a comment on the interpretation given by his narrator, which is profoundly disquieting” (90). Here, Hughes rejects the ostensible “progress” of the story from innocence to experience (childhood to adulthood). David grows from a vulnerable and traumatized child into a mature and earnest man who is capable not only of being the hero of his own story, but also the narrator of that story. However, while David’s narrative voice provides a coherence that is lacking in Oliver Twist, David must nevertheless cope with irreconcilable value systems. 27 His narrative commentary ultimately endorses self-discipline, but that endorsement has come under scrutiny by critics who, like Hughes, maintain that there is a subtle conflict between David the narrator and Dickens the implied author. Kincaid, Hochman, and Wachs all argue that in spite of David’s attempts to promote the middle-class values that the story so validates, “he has terrible difficulty ever accepting these values.”28 Indeed, Kincaid affirms that the values David embraces are the opposite of the values promoted by the implied author; it is the undisciplined characters (most notably, Mr. Micawber, who foils the loathsome Heep, and Mr. Dick, who saves Dr. Strong and Annie’s marriage) that embody the true moral of the story. 29 This subtle conflict between the competing voices/value systems of the novel is one of the most difficult aspects to translate to other media (despite the novel’s continued popularity as a source for stage and film adaptations).

90  Marc Napolitano What is perhaps more significant is that the chapters featuring the undisciplined David—that is, the child David—have proved the most enduring. G. K. Chesterton writes that “the early pages of the book are in particular astonishingly vivid. Parts of it seem like fragments of our forgotten infancy.”30 The fact that the adult David is able to capture the beauty of childhood so poignantly is a testament to his primal connection to his younger self. It is not surprising that the moments in the novel when David, as narrator, seems to speak most honestly and openly are those moments where he replicates his child-self’s airy perspective. In spite of this celebration of the child’s point-of-view, however, David must move beyond the child’s perspective. Andrews notes that the narrative and narration in David Copperfield lose their innocent and abstract vitality upon Murdstone’s introduction.31 Indeed, Murdstone’s arrival shatters the child protagonist David’s idyllic world and forces the adult-narrator David to shift the style of the narration. As Graham Daldry suggests, “It begins with a childhood governed by the fictive, by fragmentation and by instinct, and only traces its transformation into a narrative sense as a rude awakening by a harsh reality whose terms then become the subject of the novel.”32 The shift from abstract observation to concrete narration reaffirms the problem of language for the Dickensian child hero as the child David’s perspective is lost in translation. What is more significant, however, is the fact that the adult David likewise shifts the overall purpose of the narrative in such a way as to underscore the moral of the story as he perceives it: that the disciplining of one’s heart is essential to one’s success and happiness. Returning to the issue of Murdstone’s introduction, William Lankford points out that, “As a child David is able to see through Murdstone’s pretense of gentility when his mother cannot, but he is unable to understand or rationalize his intuitive emotional reactions.”33 David is likewise unable to translate his feelings about Murdstone into words, though the adult-narrator compensates for his younger self through repeated attempts at self-justification and evasion when recounting his story.34 These tactics reinforce his separation from his younger and more emotionally honest self. As in Oliver Twist, the role of the narrator, and the potential conflict between his voice and the voice of the child protagonist, adds to the complexity of the text. In the case of David Copperfield, this situation is even more complicated given that the child and the narrator are two parts of the same person. In spite of the adult/narrator David’s attempts to create a linear progression for his younger self to follow via a clear narrative and a clear narratorial endorsement of self-discipline, the conflict within his own heart is apparent throughout the novel. These complex relationships between the multiple “voices” in the narrative are essential to the overall meaning of David Copperfield, and Kasha and Hirschhorn’s elimination of David’s narration thus weakens Copperfield in multiple respects. What is striking about this omission is that the musical genre, while not always

Dickensian discourses  91 conducive to the presence of a narrator, nevertheless allows for a layering of narratorial voices. In a musical, different characters can sing different lines and different melodies simultaneously. However, the adult David never assumes the role of narrator so as to interact with his younger self. In addition, the musical does not take advantage of the power of music to capture the montage-like effect of David’s retrospective chapters. In fact, the only instance in which the musical explores the temporal possibilities of song is when the young David transforms into the older David toward the latter part of act 1. During a song entitled “Here’s a Book,” the young David is encouraged in his reading habits by Aunt Betsey and Mr. Dick. A stack of books provides a clever device for allowing the actor playing older David to seamlessly take the place of his younger self: DAVID I’ll be marooned with Robinson Crusoe Wake up with Rip Van Winkle Find gold with Long John Silver Sherwood Forest is such fun Can I read books like Roderick Random? MR. DICK Books like Peregrine Pickle? (DAVID sits behind a desk where the books have piled up, and cover him.) ................... AUNT BETSEY & MR. DICK He’s growing—getting much bigger A tall, elegant figure He was once a boy in need We taught him what books to read (GROWNUP DAVID, now twenty-one, parts the tall stack of books and comes forward)35 Still, this emphasis on transition and transformation prefigures the utter abandonment of the child David, whose presence and perspective are no longer felt in the musical. 36 Without the retrospective voice, there is no way to stress a connection between the adult David and his former self. Furthermore, while the reader is granted the opportunity to scrutinize and question the older David’s abandonment of his initial perspective, and to read between the lines of the narrator’s discourse and the actual ethos of the novel, the musical’s elimination of David-as-narrator precludes this inquiry.

92  Marc Napolitano The musical interpretation thus places greater emphasis on the allegedly linear movement from childhood to adulthood than on the more complicated (and fluctuating) relationship between protagonist and narrator. This contrast is most evident in the musical’s utter dismissal of Dora Spenlow. As noted, the musical explores David’s relationships with Agnes and Dora as though the three characters were part of a love triangle, and the audience is clearly meant to take Agnes’s side in this regard. The writers use every possible cliché to justify this reading: David is oblivious to Agnes’s romantic feelings toward him and thus pines for Dora, while poor Agnes is stuck in the background; David dances with Dora in spite of Betsey’s assurances that he will give Agnes the first dance; Betsey speaks out against David’s relationship with Dora, thus prompting him to rebelliously pursue her. Agnes is even granted her own “I want” number midway through the show, “I Wish He Knew.” By giving Agnes the chance to sing of her feelings for David, Kasha and Hirschhorn reinforce the idea that these two characters are meant to be together, but in so doing, they undermine Dora’s significance, reducing her from a fully realized influence on David’s life to an unwanted hindrance to his relationship with Agnes. Whereas Dora’s death is framed tragically in the novel—despite the narrator’s repeated implications that his first marriage would have proved disastrous in the long run—the musical’s celebration of Agnes creates a disturbing sense of relief regarding Dora’s death. Now, David can marry Agnes like he was supposed to from the beginning. This portrayal of David’s relationships with Dora and Agnes is another consequence of the omission of the narrator’s voice and the rejection of the child’s perspective. Granted, the novel’s most important passage offers a problematic assessment of David and Dora’s marriage by David the narrator, and one could argue that his assessment aligns closely with the musical’s representation of Dora as a hindrance to a successful domestic life: “For I knew, now, that my own heart was undisciplined when it first loved Dora; and that if it had been disciplined, it never could have felt, when we were married, what it had felt in its secret experience.”37 Nevertheless, this disturbing assessment on the part of the adult-narrator belies the fact that the narrative continuously celebrates Dora. Dora takes center-stage during two of the four retrospect chapters: chapters 43 and 53. The fact that these chapters revolve around Dora reinforces her connection to the celebration of the childlike perspective, for these chapters reinforce the narrator’s connection to his younger self’s blithe, emotional openness and capacity for observation. The tragedy of Dora’s death is not only the loss of the “childwife” but also the loss of the childlike happiness that she represented; as in the case of his mother’s death, Dora’s death marks another fall from innocence.38 Though David recovers from Dora’s death and finds domestic bliss with Agnes—the angel in the house—Agnes can never represent the youthful ideal that Dora did. As Andrews notes, “the word ‘child’ is hardly at all used to describe [Agnes] . . . As far as one can tell, she seems to have been

Dickensian discourses  93 a competent housekeeper from her infancy. Dora, sensing her own inadequacy in this respect, wisely resolves not to compete with Agnes on Agnes’s terms for David’s respect. Instead she stakes her claim to his love and loyalty by asserting something Agnes never possessed, her candid childishness.”39 Though Andrews frames the issue as a competition, and though Dora does contrast herself unfavorably with Agnes, it is the musical that embraces the notion of a competition between the two women (and the competition is completely one-sided given the characterization of both individuals). Dickens celebrates Agnes for all that she represents, but he likewise celebrates Dora as part of the larger celebration of youth, innocence, and the voice of the child. The key conflict in David Copperfield is not the rivalry between Agnes and Dora, but rather the conflict within David (or perhaps, between David and his various selves) regarding his widely disparate marriages and their significance in his development. It is the complicated relationship between the competing value systems (and the competing ideals of David, the child protagonist, and David, the adult-narrator) that defines David Copperfield, and the relationship between David and his two great loves epitomizes this theme. The novel and the musical offer two entirely different experiences and offer two entirely different understandings of David. The elimination of the narrator and the correlating oversimplification of David’s relationships with Dora and Agnes thus weaken the musical’s emphasis on the child’s voice/ perspective and with it the overall meaning of the piece. The total rejection of Dora by Kasha and Hirschhorn is a rejection of the novel’s celebration of the undisciplined heart (and a rejection of the potential conflict between David the narrator and Dickens the implied author). Though bringing out this conflict in a stage musical would be incredibly difficult, the ability and opportunity to layer different voices in a musical, and/or to utilize reprises for thematic and character-based purposes, lend itself to an exploration of the multiple voices that define David Copperfield. Whereas Oliver! celebrates the perspective and discourse of the child through the elimination of the narrative voice, the omission of David’s narration has the opposite effect in Copperfield, for childhood is simply a time in one’s life that precedes maturity as opposed to an ongoing influence in one’s journey toward selfhood. Though these contrasts cannot, in and of themselves, account for the disparity between Oliver!’s huge success and Copperfield’s utter failure, it is fitting that a family musical that celebrates that perspective and voice of the Dickensian child has proved far more enduring than a family musical that abandons him, rejects his perspective, and renders him silent.

Notes

94  Marc Napolitano

3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

in their remarks, a frugal use of words which suggests the expression of universal truths.” Sara Thornton, “The Vanity of Childhood: Constructing, Deconstructing, and Destroying the Child in the Novel of the 1840s,” in Children in Culture, ed. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 131. Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 35. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, “Oliver Twist: The Narrator’s Tale,” Textual Practice 15, no.1 (2009): 88. In her scrutiny of Dickens’s concept of narratorial omniscience, Audrey Jaffe notes that “characters are constructed as psychological entities, with identifiable patterns of speech and behavior, and as physical entities, distinguished by bodily features and details of clothing . . . The omniscient narrator’s knowledge thus importantly depends on his immateriality or invisibility: the narrator remains indeterminate, exempt from the constructedness of character.” Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 13. James R. Kincaid writes that “It is impossible to define the characteristics or moral positions of the narrator in this novel, for they are continually shifting.” James R. Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 54. While serializing the novel in Bentley’s Miscellany, Dickens became embroiled in a bitter feud with his publisher, Richard Bentley: coming off the success of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens pressured Bentley into allowing Oliver Twist to fulfill two separate contractual obligations. Scholars continue to debate whether Dickens conceptualized Oliver Twist as a full-length novel, or whether he improvised during the chaotic publication period. Notably, the original serial establishes Oliver’s hometown as Mudfog, the fictional setting of a series of satirical sketches that Dickens published in Bentley’s Miscellany prior to (and during) Oliver Twist’s serialization. Paul Schlicke, ed., The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 437–38. Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (New York: Mouton, 1982), 13. Lesnik-Oberstein, 87. Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs, Dickens: The Orphan Condition (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 17–18. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (New York: Penguin, 1996), chapter 1. Lesnik-Oberstein, 92. Thornton, 130. Pip, David, and Esther—Dickens’s three major first-person narrators—display a remarkable capacity for embracing the viewpoint of the child, but they can only attain discursive power as adults. Furthermore, Pip’s overwhelming guilt frequently prompts him to misinterpret his own story; David’s conflicted endorsement of self-discipline implies that he does not wholeheartedly believe in the moral that he is putting forth; and Esther’s demureness is frequently interpreted by readers as coyness. In addition to wrestling with their psychological traumas, the adult-narrators invariably wrestle with language in a way that the child protagonists do not. Lesnik-Oberstein, 98. Hochman and Wachs, 32. Aleichem’s Tevye far surpasses Dickens’s Oliver in the realm of discursive power, however. Tevye serves as the narrator of his own stories and uses narration as a means of coping with his general helplessness in the face of events over which he has little or no control; he is thus much more similar to his musical counterpart than book-Oliver is to musical-Oliver. Much as book-Tevye uses

Dickensian discourses  95

18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

discourse and narration, musical-Tevye uses music and song to assert discursive power and to thus appear proactive despite an underlying passivity. “Strive,” OED.com, www.oed.com/view/Entry/191722?redirectedFrom= strive#eid. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (New York: Penguin, 2003), chapter 5. Hochman and Wachs astutely note that book-Oliver’s almost incessant bouts of physical sickness are framed positively because these moments of complete helplessness and vulnerability prompt caring characters such as Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Bedwin, the Maylies, and Dr. Losberne to take pity on him. For the first half of the novel, Oliver tends to be happiest when he is deathly ill, for it is in these moments that he is most lovingly cared for by other people, another indication of the character’s remarkable passivity (39). Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 151. Perhaps the ultimate example of the conflict between an omniscient character-narrator and the conventions of the musical is the narrator in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods: “Into the Woods has an author figure standing to the side of the stage . . . Sondheim has a joke up his sleeve, though. The Narrator is a deeply unwanted person in his omniscient complacency” (McMillin, 152). “Lionel Bart,” The South Bank Show, ITV (UK), December 11, 1994, Television. Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theatre: A Consideration (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 105. Hochman and Wachs, 55. Malcolm Andrews, Dickens and the Grown-Up Child (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 135. Felicity Hughes, “Narrative Complexity in David Copperfield,” ELH 41, no.1 (1974): 89. Andrews points out, David, the narrator “trusts and admires an open heart, a childlike simplicity and immediacy of emotional response, as a guarantee of moral integrity. But at the same time, his rites of passage out of childhood persuade him of the dangers of an ‘undisciplined heart.’ This dilemma lies at the core of the novel” (148). Kincaid, 164. See also Hochman and Wachs, 61. Kincaid, 163. G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: The Last of the Great Men (New York: Press of the Readers Club, 1942), 141. Andrews, 150. Graham Daldry, Charles Dickens and the Form of the Novel: Fiction and Narrative in Dickens’ Work (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1987), 101. William T. Lankford, “‘The Deep of Time’: Narrative Order in David Copperfield,” ELH 46, no. 3 (1979): 455. Lankford, 464–65. Al Kasha, Joel Hirschhorn, and Keith Perry, Copperfield (New York Public Library, JPB 89-33, March 11, 1981), 1-10-43. Several musicals utilize this convention of the child character transitioning to adulthood during a musical number. Notable examples include “Baby June and her Newsboys” in Gypsy, the “Opening Act Two” in Mame, “The Graveyard” in Jane Eyre, and “I Know It’s Today” in Shrek The Musical. This trend highlights the almost cinematic capacity of musical numbers to create a chronological “jump cut” in the narrative while preserving a sense of coherence and continuity. Dickens, David Copperfield, chapter 48. Kincaid, 188. Andrews, 145.

6

Ghetto chic Utopianism and the authentic child in The Me Nobody Knows (1970) Donelle Ruwe

The relationship between studies of children (childhood studies) and studies of the aesthetic work produced for children (children’s literature and culture studies) is frequently dysfunctional.1 Lynne Vallone describes a fissure between social science and humanistic approaches in which some scholars study “real” children and some study representations of children. This fissure is ultimately unsustainable, for, as Robin Bernstein writes, the “fleshy” or “real” child and the imaginative construct “childhood” are mutually constitutive. 2 They each give body to the other in a constantly evolving process of relations that is best understood as a performance (204). This notion of childhood as performance underlies my discussion of The Me Nobody Knows, a musical performed (and written in part) by children. The creative team behind The Me Nobody Knows (Off-Broadway 1969; Broadway 1970) adapted student writings from New York City ghetto kids into a revue-format show. In effect, this musical is a site of adult and child co-authorship in which the voice of the real or “fleshy” child is refracted through two cultural forces: the ideology of childhood and the dramatic conventions of musical theater. I begin my essay with the “fleshy” children who authored the poetry and prose collected in the anthology The Me Nobody Knows: Children’s Voices from the Ghetto, which is the source text of the musical. I historicize the racial and educational politics behind this anthology, placing it within socio-cultural and educational movements of the 1960s. I then explore the adaptation process as the text moves from a written collection of poetic works by inner-city children to a musical that reaches for utopian possibilities. I suggest that the musical pits an ideology of childhood innocence against the real-world effects of racism, urbanization, and poverty. Ultimately, I explore how commercial musical theater—a genre that typically provides audience pleasure through emotional music and uplifting or at least compelling stories—deals with authentic child experience and the guilt of socially produced trauma.

Ghetto chic  97

The 1960s and the anthology: The Me Nobody Knows: Children’s Voices from the Ghetto (1969) The musical The Me Nobody Knows is based on selections from an anthology, The Me Nobody Knows: Children’s Voices from the Ghetto (1969). This best-selling anthology (at least 200,000 copies were printed) is a collection of ghetto children’s poetic writings edited by Stephen M. Joseph. Joseph compiled the classroom writings of New York City children aged seven to eighteen, most of whom were African American or Puerto Rican. 3 This anthology is typical of late 1960s, anti-public education sentiment and a hyper-awareness of unequal education opportunities for children of color. The Civil Rights Movement brought national attention to the crucial role of education in helping disadvantaged, low-income, and minority children escape the cycle of poverty. The 1960s saw the creation of Head Start and the National Teacher Corps, both part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, which was a lynchpin of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Much of this new energy around education and racial inequity was inspired by The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), often referred to as the Moynihan Report. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was at that time the Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Johnson, argued that black families were “forced into a matriarchal structure,” which was problematic because such a structure did not fit the American patriarchal norm and thereby disadvantaged black male children.4 When the National Teacher Corps was created, one of its goals was to address the ills identified in the Moynihan Report. The Corps valorized teaching as missionary work, and it recruited highly educated (though not in education fields) individuals and mostly white males who the Corps thought could change the system. 5 Stephen M. Joseph, editor of The Me Nobody Knows anthology, described himself as part of “the 60’s alternative education movement,” and he worked as an inner-city substitute teacher in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.6 Joseph’s anthology participates in broad 1960s utopian efforts to effect socio-political change and restore children to an ideal state of innocence under the protection of a caring, nurturing society. More specifically, it reflects a 1960s movement in the teaching of English: writing instruction that valorized children’s lived experiences. Joseph believed that there is no innate good or evil in children and that behavior is determined by environment. In his preface, Joseph rails against “punitive, authoritarian” teachers who insist on “perfect spelling, micrometer margins, and neatness—in fact, a teacher who insists on anything—will get ‘What I Did Last Summer?’ and ‘We Should All Try to Be Good Citizens’ essays.”7 Instead, Joseph aimed to reveal the “authentic” child by surfacing the traumas experienced by ghetto children.

98  Donelle Ruwe Despite Joseph’s claim that his anthology features authentic childhood voices, many of the anthology’s selections are not driven by self-expression but are in fact teacher-driven assignments. For example, a group of poems are haiku assignments; another group consists of formulaic responses to a standard writing prompt: “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” Joseph claims that his anthology offers something new and radical, but in reality, experiential, expressive writing predates his anthology by 70 years.8 Even the title phrase of Joseph’s anthology, “The Me Nobody Knows,” reflects an experiential writing prompt that had been around for decades.9 These 1960s approaches to teaching participate in a Romantic narrative in which an English teacher transforms a child’s life through literacy. However, such narratives do not equate to social action, and thus they do not adequately address deep socio-economic barriers such as housing discrimination and unequal access to education. Further, they glorify the (mostly white) teacher as savior and martyr. This teacher-as-savior fantasy is pervasive in popular culture. As a Hollywood plot line, it whitewashes the effects of discrimination with a compelling story of American individualism, in which a single individual (played by a movie star) inspires broad social change. The English teacher is a particularly popular protagonist in this film genre. Notable examples include Blackboard Jungle (1955), To Sir, With Love (1967), Dangerous Minds (1995), and Freedom Writers (2007). Joseph’s anthology, in bringing forward the voices of ghetto children, reflects a broader cultural shift in the depiction of children from rural to urban.10 This anthology was but one of many volumes of children’s “ghetto” voices published at the end of the Civil Rights Era.11 Kenneth Koch’s Wishes Lies and Dreams (1970) is the most famous collection of urban children’s voices, but he does not present ghetto experiences.12 When Phillip Lopate, founder of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative writers-in-schools program, compared Koch’s and Joseph’s books, he noted that Koch’s kids produced verse that sounded like real poetry. By contrast, Joseph’s children were “angry muckrakers, frustrated, unable to think about anything but their neighborhood. They write from a tell-it-like-it-is, 2 × 4-foot mental cell, overlooking the lot with broken glass.”13 Lopate’s analysis is implicitly primitivist: he assumes that an authentic ghetto voice is an angry one, and that if ghetto children were to write “real” poetry (as in poetry informed by Western aesthetic traditions), it would be inauthentic. However, an angry poetic voice is, in fact, an aesthetic choice, and expressing rage was integral to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, what Larry Neal describes as “poems that shoot guns.”14 According to Neal, such poetry spoke directly to African Americans and confronted their painful historical realities and current conditions. Lopate’s assumption that angry verse reflects underprivileged communities aligns with Neal’s descriptions of the Black Arts Movement, but Lopate’s assumption that this kind of verse must come from an uninformed and instinctive writer is false.

Ghetto chic  99 Indeed, one of the young “voices from the ghetto” in Joseph’s anthology, the 17-year-old Frank Cleveland, was already an activist and public speaker with a strong political voice. He had recited his verse in coffee houses since age 14. He was a published author long before appearing in Joseph’s anthology. Indeed, Cleveland considers himself to be one of the founding voices of the Black Arts Movement. In a phone interview, Cleveland emphatically stated: “I influenced the Black Arts Movement” and not the other way around. Cleveland, after talking with friends about the Blank Panther movement, adopted the pen-name “Clorox” as a protest reference to Black people “bleaching” their identities to fit in with white culture.15 Once again, we see how the fleshy child and the culturally constructed child intersect. Lopate’s authentic (i.e., fleshy) ghetto child is primitive: an angry victim whose true voice is emotive, primitive, and uneducated. Actual ghetto children’s voices, however, are not separate from adult influence, and they can reflect a deep awareness of formal aesthetic traditions or, as in the case of Cleveland, they can be part of the creation of an aesthetic tradition. The musical uses the complete text of two of Cleveland’s anthologized poems, the darkly ironic “Rejoice Children” and the angry monologue “What Am I?” The poem begins boldly: “I HAVE NO MANHOOD— WHAT AM I? / YOU MADE MY WOMAN HEAD OF THE HOUSE— WHAT AM I? / YOU HAVE ORIENTED ME SO THAT I HATE AND DISTRUST  MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS—WHAT AM I?”16 Cleveland, in line with the Moynihan Report, decries matriarchal family structures. He confronts self-loathing, suggesting that African Americans have internalized the white culture’s racist attitude so that they distrust their “brothers and sisters” instead of banding together. His poem addresses the tradition of rejecting slave names and taking names from an African heritage, names that white America mispronounces. He addresses miscegenation, “I AM THE UNWANTED SONS AND DAUGHTERS IN-LAWS.” He confronts education inequities: “YOU GIVE ME A DILAPIDATED EDUCATION SYSTEM AND EXPECT ME TO COMPETE WITH YOU—WHAT AM I?” The poem ends dramatically by answering the repeated rhetorical question “What am I” with the “N” word: “I MAY BE YOUR DESTRUCTION, BUT ABOVE ALL I AM, AS YOU SO CRUDELY PUT IT, YOUR NIGGER.” Cleveland’s voice is strong, confident, political, and mature. The specific details of Cleveland’s life offer a powerful corrective to anyone who might make assumptions about the underprivileged, impoverished, ghetto child as victim. Frank Cleveland was, indeed, raised in a Harlem ghetto and was only 15 when he wrote this poem. However, he was no victim of society. He had been deeply engaged in the Coffee House circuit as a student activist since age 14. He was attending the prestigious Boys High School in Brooklyn (alums include Isaac Asimov, Howard Cosell, Norman Mailer, and Aaron Copland) when he was tapped by Gladys Harberger to

100  Donelle Ruwe join the National Conference of Christians and Jews.17 He and other young people went around New York City speaking about their different views as part of a “Panel of America” project. He showed Gladys his verse, and she published it in the Columbia University magazine What’s Happening, where Joseph then came across it. Our desire to see childhood in the raw, to celebrate the rustic and untutored child as a poetic ideal, is, of course, the “Romantic ideology of the child,” in which the child is metonymically linked to nature, innocence, purity, honesty, simplicity, and the uncultured. The expectation of childhood innocence and untutored expression is a particularly strong force in audience responses to Joseph’s anthology. Its association with adultassigned writing tasks, political movements, and language arts pedagogy went unremarked.

The Me Nobody Knows: from anthology to musical theater The journey of the show’s creation—from Joseph’s anthology, to an award-winning Off-Broadway musical, and then to Broadway, touring companies, regional theaters, and around the world—begins with a New Jersey guerilla theater work. In 1969, Herb Schapiro was the director of a theater program at a small New Jersey college. Schapiro’s normal venue for shows was undergoing construction, so he staged theater events at onsite locations in Trenton. He had an idea for an experimental work using authentic young adult voices, “in which the people of the divide, primarily the students at Central High, might be led to write about their feelings and attitudes in their own voices. We would then create a representative theatrical work made of their writing and tour it through the streets and parks.”18 When Schapiro discovered Joseph’s anthology, it became his source text instead, and he developed a 30-minute performance piece. At the time, Schapiro had been collaborating with the composer Gary William Friedman on an eco-political opera, and Schapiro recruited Friedman to work on a full-length musical adaptation of Joseph’s anthology.19 Friedman was a trained composer: he had studied composition at Brooklyn College and electronic music composition at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. He had also earned a post-graduate degree in education. When Schapiro tapped him to compose music for The Me Nobody Knows, Friedman was working as a jazz saxophonist and a licensed public school teacher in the “ADNS” (All Day Neighborhood School) initiative. Friedman taught English and late-afternoon jazz band class. He also composed instrumental music for his students. Despite Friedman’s experience with young people as a high school teacher and as a credentialed educator, and despite the fact that the source text for the musical The Me Nobody Knows consisted of children’s voices, when Friedman began writing the music, he did not consider children’s vocal needs and, indeed, did not conceive of the music as something for children to

Ghetto chic  101 sing.20 Instead, he let his own responses to the material guide his composition process. Schapiro brought three sets of lyrics to Friedman—“Dream Babies,” “This World,” and “Something Beautiful”—and Friedman began setting them to music. Friedman also made his own selections from the anthology, finding pieces to which he had a strong reaction. For example, as Friedman tells the story, the poem “Rejoice Children” felt so basic and visceral that “the music came to [him] immediately,” and he had an instant feel for a “funky rhythm.” He loved the children’s haiku poems and “White Horse,” a text about heroin. Although Friedman did not see himself as writing a children’s musical, his approach to the material indicates some deeply rooted assumptions about what constitutes an authentic child voice. He was drawn to selections that expressed “depth, innocence, and beauty,” or that expressed the dissonance between childhood innocence and how poverty prematurely strips away childhood innocence. At a certain point, Schapiro and Friedman felt that they needed more material, and they brought in Will Holt to write additional lyrics, and Schapiro’s halfhour guerilla theater work became a full-length musical. Like another late 1960s work portraying urban youth culture—the hippie countercultural movement in Hair (1968)—The Me Nobody Knows was in the vanguard of what soon became a popular cultural phenomenon, ghetto chic. The Me Nobody Knows started Off-Broadway, winning an Obie in 1969, and then moved to Broadway in 1970. Like other Off-Broadway shows of this era adopting a revue format (e.g., Hair), The Me Nobody Knows uses a modular format in which various individual pieces (spoken poems, slice-oflife monologues, epigrammatic statements, songs, and dances) form a loose narrative arc. The spoken portions of the show are excerpts taken verbatim from Joseph’s anthology. The song lyrics of 20 of the revue’s 21 songs are adapted almost verbatim from the anthology (although, as I discuss later, Holt and Schapiro take full credit for writing the words to all but four of the musical’s songs). Of the 12 young actors who performed in the Broadway production, eight were of color. Friedman recalled that casting decisions were based on the ages of the student writers as identified in the anthology, so there was at least some attempt to match the child actor to the child author behind the spoken text. However, since at least half of the cast was between 20 and 25 years old, the performers were “acting down” in order to appear as teenagers (see Figure 6.1). 21 There are no adult characters—no parents, teachers, or authorities—in the show. Even “Mr. Grady,” a supportive teacher who is the recipient of multiple letters written by an adolescent in a juvenile detention center, does not appear. The boy’s letters to Mr. Grady are staged as dramatic monologues spoken to a non-responsive adult. The creators of the musical, whether intentionally or not, made similar music and set design choices as another urban-centered children’s work, Sesame Street. 22 The TV show’s gritty New York City set of brownstones and garbage cans was inspired by a 1968 Public Service Announcement

102  Donelle Ruwe

Figure 6.1 Photo by Gjon Mili of the cast of The Me Nobody Knows. Life Magazine 1970, permission of Getty Images.

showing kids from Harlem spending summer break in the inner city, and it ended with the words “Give Jobs, Give Money, Give a Damn.”23 Sesame Street’s set was a complete departure from the brightly colorful, fake-looking sets of other kid TV shows in the 1960s, such as Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo. The music for Sesame Street (with its use of the then revolutionary Fender Rhodes electric piano) was also atypical for a children’s show, which usually adopted a folk-pop mode.24 Though Friedman resists the label “rock,” much of the score of The Me Nobody Knows fits the mode of early rock musicals like Hair (1968). As a genre, rock was associated with adolescent angst, teen desire for freedom, and elements of 1960s youth culture and the countercultural left (sex, drugs, social change). By the 1969 Off-Broadway opening of The Me Nobody Knows, however, “Broadway rock” had begun to develop a distinctive sound, a “pop-dominated, rock-inflected” mode that is heartfelt, passionate, and compelling, but not raging or particularly edgy. 25 The creative team wanted the non-book show to tell a story, to have a narrative arc of some sort, and so the group arranged their selections to build toward a climax. The action moves from morning, to noon, to night, beginning with the “light” sections (like “Light Sings”) and moving toward more tragic pieces. The show finale is a rousing ensemble number of hope, “Let Me Come In.” Schapiro explained that he wanted the show’s structure to give a sense of “the large meaning for kids of a ghetto day: too much experience too soon.”26 However, the producer Jeff Britton insisted that

Ghetto chic  103 the show had to entertain first and give its message only obliquely: after all, “You can’t ask people to pay $5 to come and cringe.”27 Friedman’s composition process was responsive to the demands of the revue genre. He needed to create a coherent score to serve as the revue’s “overall cementing element” while remaining true to the varied texts by the children, Holt, and Schapiro.28 He used musical sounds to unify disparate pieces in the musical: for example, the bass line of “Black” is echoed in the closing song, “Let Me Come In.” Friedman was classically trained, and his powerful, often challenging, score for The Me Nobody Knows felt unprecedented. The musical’s creative team unified the disparate selections from Joseph’s anthology by creating parallel numbers for the show’s opening and closing. The opening monologue’s compelling plea, “if anything, I wanted in,” is echoed in the closing finale, a reprise of the song “Let Me Come In.” “Dream Babies,” the first song in the show, parallels the penultimate number, “War Babies.” Unlike “Dream Babies” (which has original words by Schapiro), the lyrics to “War Babies” are taken almost verbatim from a poem by 18-year-old Charles Franklin, with only one word changed: “fresh-dugged” into “fresh-dug.” Charles Franklin was never credited with the song lyrics. None of the child authors are named in the script, score, or Playbill, though they are identified in Joseph’s anthology by real name or nom de plume. By contrast, when Life magazine ran a feature about the musical, in September of 1970, it reproduced poetry selections from the show and anthology, and it credited each child author. 29 The Broadway Playbill states that the lyrics to only four of the songs are “exactly as the children wrote them” (and then explicitly states that three others “were written by Herb Schapiro” and the rest were “by Will Holt”). On the contrary, many of the song lyrics are closely tied to the children’s texts. The words to “Black,” for example, were clearly written by 16-year-old R. C., although Holt is identified as the lyricist in the published sheet music and elsewhere.30 Holt’s contribution to R.C.’s lyrics is more properly described as “adapted for music” in that his alterations to the source text include one original line and a tweaking of a few phrases. Franklin Cleveland’s experiences suggest that the creative team behind the musical never reached out to the real children behind the anthology, and, indeed, were only interested in the words and not the “fleshy” child. Even though a character named “Clorox” (Cleveland’s pseudonym) is one of the musical’s major parts, and even though Cleveland is identified in the anthology, he is never acknowledged by the musical’s creators. Cleveland received a substantial royalty check for Joseph’s anthology, $1,500, but nothing for the show. Cleveland was never even informed that an adaptation of the anthology was underway, much less that the adaptation would feature his poems. By the time the show opened, he had graduated from Boys High School and was attending Kansas State University, where he eventually completed a degree in history and political science.31 He heard about the musical from a fellow student who had seen the show during spring break

104  Donelle Ruwe and who asked for his autograph. When Cleveland was in New York that summer, he had a chance to attend the musical (Joseph got him tickets). He saw Carl Thoma doing a “yeoman’s job” playing Clorox (the character based on Cleveland), and he got to meet him backstage. Many years later, Cleveland spoke to a lawyer about recouping royalties from the musical. Cleveland’s poems were in the Library of Congress under his name—part of the initial stages of making a case for compensation—but since the producers had not set aside anything from the show’s profits for compensating the child authors, it was difficult to pursue remuneration. In other words, the production takes the work of multiple children and erases all markers of child ownership—their work is truly colonized and reassigned to a corporate author variously identified in the Playbill as “original idea by Herb Schapiro” and “based on the book The Me Nobody Knows edited by Stephen M. Joseph.” The children are lumped together as ghetto voices: “written by children between the ages of 7–18 attending New York City public schools in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Harlem, Jamaica, Manhattan, and the Youth House in the Bronx.”32 The authenticity of the fleshy child, the inner-city kids who wrote the words, is increasingly attenuated: they write for teachers, are published in Joseph’s anthology which has its own agenda, and are discussed by critics as if they had no artistic control over their aesthetic choices. Their voices are then usurped by the musical’s creative team and, for the most part, adult actors rather than real children performed their identities on stage.

The Me Nobody Knows and utopian musical theater conventions Utopian performatives describes small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense.33 —Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance The particular colonization of childhood, class, and race in The Me Nobody Knows intersects with utopian dreams of racial equality and economic prosperity and, further, with the particular utopianism that saturates the entire genre of commercial musical theater. As Warren Hoffman writes in his book on race in Broadway musicals, the musical is an essentially utopic genre, for it imagines a world in which tap dance can create social unity or love can conquer all.34 However, as Hoffman points out, this utopic possibility as expressed musically is a white privilege. Musicals “seem so frivolous [that] they can only be about race, gender, class, or other issues of social importance when they explicitly tell us that they are.”35 According to Richard Dyer, one can burst free from the confinement of life by singing

Ghetto chic  105 and dancing one’s heart out, but to do so requires a particular relation to both physical space and cultural space: “Dancing is by definition about bodies in space.”36 Black bodies historically have had limited space, limited freedom of movement, and limited freedom to express desire. In the big stage musicals of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, utopianism is depicted in all-white communities such as in Oklahoma! and The Music Man; nonwhite characters are defined by race as with the Sharks in West Side Story. In other words, in the genre of musical theater, people of color are too often treated as problems that the plot must solve. Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens, and Robyn McCallum suggest that the productive effects of utopianism are a driving force in contemporary works written for children. “Utopian dreamings,” they explain, following the theoretical work of Lyman Tower Sargent, are social acts by which groups of people arrange their lives in order to effect radical social change: “Utopian thought . . . informs social, political and cultural practices: it enables processes whereby intentional communities determine material practices; it shapes visions for improved world orders; and it pervades cultural production (including film, artwork, fiction, and drama) which engages with utopian and dystopian ideas.”37 The Me Nobody Knows anthology is already utopian in that Joseph gives voice to the victims of urban poverty, and, in bearing witness to their trauma, hopes to bring about political and cultural change. The musical adaptation of the anthology offers an additional element of utopian writing. Utopian traditions consistently look beyond families and locate the good place (the utopia) within society.38 In other words, utopian dreamings depict perfect societies rather than perfect families. No parents appear in the musical, and the musical does not suggest that having a functional family is the answer to racism and urban poverty. Rather, the musical addresses the audience directly in its closing number: “Out on the outside / That’s where I’ve been / Mother and Father / Let me come in.” In a utopic gesture, in the swelling final moments of the finale, the ensemble gestures outwardly toward society, as represented by the theater-going public. “Let Me Come in” asks audiences to open their hearts; it calls upon them to be mothers and fathers. The musical ends with a performative utterance as defined by J. L. Austin—a plea. But it is a failed performative utterance. Let the children come in, but to where? They are already in the light (the spotlight); the audience is in the darkness. The plea is just that, a plea, and the musical ends without expecting a response other than heartfelt applause. In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein identifies a historical pattern of representation of childhood and innocence: the white child in America was generally depicted as innocent, while the black child was “increasingly and overwhelmingly evacuated of innocence” and “redefined as a nonchild—a pickaninny” who was depicted as wild, animalistic, and unable to feel pain.39 The belief that black children had neither the capacity for tender empathy nor the ability to be hurt shaped the artifacts and toys of childhood. Children who played with these artifacts internalized racial

106  Donelle Ruwe prejudices. Bernstein focuses, in particular, on the way in which certain dolls associated with black culture (such as the Raggedy Ann doll, which was inspired by the blackface, minstrel-show character Golliwog) were marketed as indestructible and then treated carelessly and even violently. Though by 1970 presenting black children as animalistic and insensate to pain was no longer broadly tenable, the harmful legacy persisted in living memory and cultural artifacts. For example, Claudia, the child protagonist of Toni Morrison’s 1970 The Bluest Eye, a novel which appeared the same year as the Broadway premiere of The Me Nobody Knows, was “revolted by and secretly frightened” of the Raggedy Ann dolls that others expected her to play with.40 Claudia recognizes the violent potential of the script written into the shape and texture of these dolls, that little black girls are not valuable and are made to be treated roughly and carelessly. The creators of the musical were working with difficult material. The “voices of the ghetto” from Joseph’s anthology are knowledgeable, not innocent, children: they write of street drugs, violence, abusive parents, and prison life. For this show to be politically and emotionally compelling, for it to participate in the essentially utopian genre of commercial musical theater in which suffering brings hope and redemption, the creative team needed to forcefully establish that its ghetto children were innocent victims who felt pain. In The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Kathryn Bond Stockton describes a particular pattern of innocence available to the child of color. The child who is ‘queered by color’ is one who is presumed to have experienced too much and therefore is granted lost innocence through representations of abuse.41 The musical’s opening song, the pop-rock ballad “Dream Babies,” establishes childhood innocence as well as the utopian impulse of the show. The lyrics of “Dream Babies” are almost entirely by Schapiro and not the child authors, the only such piece in the show.42 The opening monologues and song establish utopian dreams while presenting children “queered by color” who are granted innocence through representations of privation and trauma. The show opens with no overture. It is 4:00 a.m., and six children give brief monologues about their nighttime thoughts: everything from windy skies to the Vietnam War. The first monologue establishes the show’s mood: “I have felt lonely, forgotten or even left out, set apart from the rest of the world. I never wanted out. If anything, I wanted in.”43 A 17- or 18-year-old black character named Melba, a maternal figure who is described as being responsible for younger children, sings “Dream Babies” to lull the children back to sleep. In a series of rhetorical questions, she asks the children, “What do you dream?” She wonders if anything seems real, if everything is wrong, and if anything is right. The lyrics allude to iconic Civil Rights phrases: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Had a Dream” speech and the rhetorical questions of Langston Hughes’s “A Dream Deferred.”44 To emphasize the innocence of the ghetto children, Melba calls them “babies,”

Ghetto chic  107 despite the fact that according to the Playbill the youngest performer was 11, and most were in their teens or early twenties. This opening number sends contradictory signals about child innocence. None of the young singers in the show produce the sort of child-soprano voice that is associated with innocence and purity, such as with the very white and very pure Oliver in Oliver! or the von Trapp children who mostly sing with legitimate voices rather than belting. By contrast, Gerri Dean, the soloist in “Dream Babies,” has a fully mature voice, and the highest sustained note that she sings in “Dream Babies” is an A above middle C, and the tessitura of the song is mostly constricted to an octave. Prior to The Me Nobody Knows, Dean had been a featured singer with the Billy Williams Revue, Snub Mosley Revue, and The Vonettes, and she had given concerts at the Apollo and Carnegie Hall. Although the score is eclectic and uses popular music idioms (rather than hard rock with its “rage against the machine” aggressiveness), the young performers of The Me Nobody Knows—black, white, Cuban, and Philippino—are racialized by the use of chest voice, the urban setting, the label “ghetto,” and the way the musical itself insists that, because its source text is authentic, the adaptation is too.45 As a rule, the music and lyrics in The Me Nobody Knows are more upbeat, uplifting, and philosophical than the spoken text, which, though upbeat and humorous at times, presents darker street-life imagery. The spoken text covers a juvenile penitentiary, pigeon shit, homeless drunks, the court system, and the Brothers of Islam. By contrast, the songs veer away from topical descriptions and into archetypal imagery—light, night, dreams, trees, and windows, for example. Oftentimes, the more uplifting imagery is inserted by Will Holt. The song “Light Sings” is adapted from “Darkness,” a poem by J. S., a 15-year-old student writer. Holt kept one of J. S.’s lines, “Light sings all over the world,” and created almost every other line from scratch. Whereas J. S. begins his piece with “The sun goes down and the moon comes up,” Holt offers “the sun comes up—the moon goes down,” the opposite sentiment of J. S.’s line.46 Where J. S. offers matter-of-fact exposition about his family’s nighttime rituals of going to bed—his brother doing homework, his mother in the kitchen, his father going to sleep—Holt has the children shout, “Mother and Father get up” and “Brothers and sisters come out.” Holt turns J. S.’s “Darkness” to a celebration of possibilities and a new day. This pattern of uplifting music trading off with darker prose speeches continues throughout the musical. The hopeful “Dream Babies” and exuberant “Light Sings”—songs that move the opening of the show from night to the dawn of a new day—are followed by emotionally wrenching bits of dialogue, such as Lillian’s comment that she has no swings in her junky back yard and Donald’s statement that his father is always “beating on” him.47 These expressions of childhood deprivation and abuse are

108  Donelle Ruwe immediately followed by the inspirational song “This World,” which is about how children’s minds hold the world in their hands and make a “sunny tomorrow.” That these lyrics evoke the popular gospel “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” only intensifies the irony of the children’s hope in the face of the deprivation that bookends the song. One of the most optimistic songs is the finale of act 1, “If I had a Million Dollars.” The children who sing the different verses wish for material objects such as a special bicycle, but the song builds toward brotherly acts of love, such as Melba’s choice to give something to everyone and Lillian’s desire to buy wine for the folks in the welfare line. In the rousing final lines, the utopian promise of the lyrics is enhanced by the musical arrangement: no longer singing solos, the children join together, singing about how, with a million dollars, there would be “nobody / better than me.”48 The song “Black,” based on a text by R. C., epitomizes the force of utopianism as a convention in musical theater and in cultural constructions of childhood. It also demonstrates how the authentic voice of the fleshy child—already adulterated by multiple layers of adult and cultural interventions such as Joseph’s editorial work and Holt’s adaptations—is further transformed by a musical setting. Holt uses the entirety of R. C.’s poem and adds only one original line: “Black! Defy With pride Inside We rise.” Holt’s addition associates the child’s voice with Black Pride and Civil Rights. Holt tweaks R. C.’s line “Black is our skin and / We want to be free,” creating “Black is our color and we gonna be free.”49 He shifts the emphasis from desire (“want to be”) to assertion (“gonna be”). He also changes R. C.’s proper English to an urban black dialect. This line is marked by a key change and is set as an ostinato, a repeated musical phrase that, in this case, is sung incessantly until the final lines of the song. As the children repeat “Black is our color and we gonna be free,” harmonies and counter melodies are added onto the phrase. In what is the most aggressively rocklike number on the cast recording, the eight black performers in the musical (that this song uses only the black performers is another symbol of black pride and solidarity) shout the words using staggered entrances, with different voices beginning the ostinato phrase at different times. The effect is a cacophony, as if the voices are competing to be heard over the heavy electronic instrumentation, the white noise of society, and each other, until, at the resolution of this section, the multiple voices come together in unison. On the original cast recording, the lead singer (the youngest cast member, the 11-year-old Douglas Grant) has an audible crack in his voice, as if the intensity of the song’s range and volume has strained his voice. The song’s final words, “This cannot die,” are sung on a startling, powerful, and dissonant chord. The children sustain the chord over multiple measures until the orchestra plays out, and they then shout—“Yeah!” The political nature of a musical that features children’s voices from the ghetto opens up a fundamental paradox of the post-romantic world. Sianne Ngai (working with Theodor Adorno’s philosophy of the aesthetic)

Ghetto chic  109 contends that aesthetic work today is increasingly removed from political action, and that the powerful emotions evoked by overtly political art do not lead to political action so much as to a recognition of the inability of art to effect change.50 Unlike spoken plays, musicals have the added capacity to evoke emotion through music and song, through interludes that Scott McMillan calls lyric time.51 In lyric time, the repetitive phrases and refrains of a song freeze the horizontal forward action of plot and move vertically instead, deepening emotional aspects of a show. The freezing of plot and action implies that political action is frozen as well. In other words, in The Me Nobody Knows the audience wallows in feelings but does not act. And so, in powerfully affective songs such as “Let Me Come In,” which occurs twice in act 2, the children sing about standing in darkness while looking in through the window at the light, or standing outside knocking on the door, asking for reassurance that the door will open and that someone will let them come in. The children never do come in, though. The musical closes with the children reaching out, repeating the plea. It is a dramatic closure—at a moment of heightened emotion, the plot is unresolved, and the audience is put on the spot. Will they let the children come in? The Me Nobody Knows emphasizes utopianism, but the child actors in the show experienced an impenetrable and racialized class difference in their stage careers. Giancarlo Esposito, who was an understudy in the original Broadway production, described his childhood experiences on Broadway in the 1960s and 1970s: All the characters that I played were very low in the class structure. In my first Broadway show [Maggie Flynn] I played a slave, an orphaned slave. It was a musical about ten orphan children . . . during the Civil War and the white woman who was taking care of them. I was nine years old. At that time I had no idea that was not a great thing to do. I really wanted to work. I had a solo and everything. . . After that I was in The Me Nobody Knows. . . It was a really sad show. The children came home and had no parents, or their parents were on drugs on the street somewhere. There were a few whites in it, but the whole cast was basically black and Hispanic. So there again, I was playing a character who is less than I really am.52 Esposito, who is best known today for his work on the AMC series Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and his roles in multiple Spike Lee films, approaches his own history as a child actor of color from multiple points of access. Esposito is, himself, from a privileged and cosmopolitan background (he was born in Denmark to an Italian father and an African American mother, an opera singer), and he understands that, despite his international and interracial background, the roles available to him were lower-class, underprivileged black children. The young Esposito existed in multiple subject positions: privileged cosmopolitan child and racially marked other.

110  Donelle Ruwe By performing stereotypes, though Esposito did not consciously think it through at the time, he learned that ghetto-ness was a performance, and he learned (to paraphrase Judith Butler) the “norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer.”53 The children of color who performed in the show had limited opportunities to perform as anything other than ethnically identified parts such as street kids.54 Like Esposito, Irene Cara and Douglas Grant moved from Maggie Flynn to The Me Nobody Knows. Two other actors came from the Off-Broadway play Sambo. But here too, the story is complex: these “fleshy” child actors loved The Me Nobody Knows, and though we can project exploitation onto this production, the real children who performed in it loved their Broadway experience.

After The Me Nobody Knows The Me Nobody Knows was one of the first Broadway shows to capitalize on the ghetto as chic. When it closed in November 1971, Melvin Van Peebles had just opened his musical of spoken word poetry vignettes of life in the black ghetto, Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death. Four years later, Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, moved from Off-Broadway at the Public Theater to Broadway in 1976. The Me Nobody Knows had a strong showing with traveling companies, regional productions, and revivals. A 1971 German recording of The Me Nobody Knows featured a young Donna Summers, and she later recorded “How I Feel” for the 1990s Help Haiti campaign. In 1973, the musical was presented at a London Fringe theater. In the 1980s, Showtime aired the musical, with an introduction by James Earl Jones. The Staple Singers recorded a hit single of “This World,” and the Fifth Dimension included “Light Sings” on their album Up, Up and Away. Most recently, the Broadway choreographer Taye Diggs staged industry readings of the musical in 2014, the first step toward launching a Broadway revival. Friedman contributed new arrangements to Diggs’s readings, and additional material from Joseph’s anthology was worked into the show. Diggs assembled his cast entirely from students in the Broadway Dreams Foundation, a national non-profit performing arts training program that offers performance camps for young adults throughout the country.55 For many of the young performers in the original The Me Nobody Knows, the musical led to excellent performance opportunities. Northern Calloway starred in Sesame Street; Melanie Henderson, Hattie Winston, Douglas Grant, and Irene Cara moved to Electric Company. Composer Friedman was hired to Electric Company’s replace the music director in 1975. In reminiscing about this time, Friedman said that it felt as if the entire Broadway cast had moved to Electric Company. 56

Ghetto chic  111 The Me Nobody Knows is yet to receive a Broadway revival, and its most enduring legacy is the other musicals that it, in some measure, made possible. In 1971, the children’s poet Eve Merriam turned her collection of gritty (and frequently banned) children’s poems The Inner City Mother Goose, into the musical revue Inner City: a Street Cantata (lyrics Merriam, score Helen Miller). It was directed by Tom O’Horgan, director of the hits Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar (which also opened on Broadway in 1971). Inner City lasted only 97 performances. It did garner a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Linda Hopkins. The most notable 1970s show in the style of The Me Nobody Knows is Elizabeth Swados’s Runaways, which featured real and fictionalized accounts of teenagers. Runaways opened Off-Broadway in 1978 at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater before moving to Broadway. Like The Me Nobody Knows, Runaways uses a revue format, and she, like Stephen Joseph, was inspired to work with children’s texts by her political activism. Swados had been reading Weeping in the Playtime of Others, an exposé about child incarceration and reform schools. Swados wanted to show the authentic lives of underprivileged kids, so she looked for young actors and actual runaways in various places in New York City. Through a theater-games approach, she built the show around her adaptations of fictive narratives, true stories, and the personal accounts of her young actors. In 2003, Swados again attempted a musical play based on the words of adolescents: Jewish Girlz was inspired and performed by12 adolescent girls at the Upper Westside JCC. Much of what made the musical The Me Nobody Knows so successful was its freshness and vibrancy. Here were real kids on stage offering the words of real children from the ghetto, and that raw energy is captured on the original cast recording. However, performances of the real words of real children are no longer unique, particularly since the advent of the largely youth-driven Slam Poetry and Spoken Word Poetry scene.57 In the mid-1980s, poetry slams opened in Chicago and at the Nuyorican Café in New York, and by the mid-1990s poetry slams and spoken word competitions were so common that states began holding poetry-slam competitions for high schoolers. Today, even the act of creating musical theater works based on the real writings of real kids is not unusual. For example, at the University of Virginia, the Nuyorican writer Patricia Herrera works with kids to adapt their voices into musicals. Friedman, Schapiro, and Holt tried to recapture the success of The Me Nobody Knows with other modular-format shows featuring the autobiographical writings of marginalized groups. Friedman and Holt collaborated on Taking My Turn, a musical adaptation of the personal writings of 29 elderly people. Unlike the young people whose words were used in the musical The Me Nobody Knows, these 29 adults are fully credited by name. Opening at the Entermedia Theatre in New York’s East Village in 1983, Taking My Turn was a success, running for almost a full year.58

112  Donelle Ruwe In 1993, the American Stage Company in residence at Fairleigh Dickinson University staged an updated version of The Me Nobody Knows with some new cultural references as well as new writings solicited from New Jersey school kids, grades 5 through 12. It was not successful and was described as an “untogether, sanitized show” in the New York Times.59 The following year, Friedman and Schapiro tried a new show featuring inner-city writings, Bring in the Morning. The creative team again worked with texts written by urban youths aged 16–20 who had participated in the Poets in Public Service project. This project sent professional writers into schools, hospitals, rehab centers, prisons, houses for unwed mothers, and juvenile detention centers. Bring in the Morning so closely resembles The Me Nobody Knows that Friedman calls it “Part II” and “the son of The Me Nobody Knows.” Following the lead of Runaways and its darker material, and coming on the heels of the New York Theatre Workshop production of an early version of Rent in 1994, Bring in the Morning showed urban youths dealing with AIDS, crack, hand guns, and pregnancy. However, Bring in the Morning never found its audience. Stephen Holden identified the problem in his review of the 1994 production at Variety Arts Theater. Given the well-known hazards and traumas of street life and urban teens, an “inspirational” musical like Bring in the Morning came across as a “candy- covered exercise in denial.”60 Despite the tougher, grittier content, this type of commercial musical was no longer viable. It seems that the moment of ghetto chic was over.

Notes

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114  Donelle Ruwe

22 23

24

25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

by Douglas Grant should be between the ages of 10 and 11. Giancarlo Esposito, one of the understudies, was only 10. When asked about Sesame Street, Friedman stated that it was not a direct inspiration, though he acknowledged that it must have made some impact on The Me Nobody Knows, for in hindsight, he could see connections between them. Edward L. Palmer and Shalom M. Fisch, “The Beginnings of Sesame Street Research,” in “G” is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, ed. Shalom M. Fisch and Rosemarie T. Truglio (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001), 3–25. Michael Davis, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street (New York: Penguin, 2008), 161. The musical director and main composer for Sesame Street, Joe Raposo, had little experience with children’s texts other than a stint as the musical director of the Off-Broadway revue The Mad Show (1966), loosely based on Mad Magazine. James Leve, American Musical Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 342. See chapter 16, “Rock on Broadway” for discussion of the “rock” musical. According to Friedman, the Atlantic Recording Corporation, the producer of the original cast recording, was very conservative. It included only those songs from the show that fit a generic rock sound and left off the more complex, avant-garde works. Herb Schapiro as quoted in Betty Dunn, “Rats, Heroin and Loneliness,” LIFE, September 4, 1970, 42. Jeff Britton, quoted in Dunn, 42. Friedman, The Me Nobody Knows liner notes. The Me Nobody Knows was Friedman’s first Broadway show, and he was extremely hands-on. Friedman did not farm out the dance arrangements, orchestration, vocal arrangements, and incidental music. Instead, Friedman did it all. He is, in his own words, “a complete musician” and a “complete composer.” He attributes the unified sound of the show to his involvement with all aspects of the score. See “The Me Nobody Knows,” LIFE, September 4, 1970, 34–41. See vocal selections in The Me Nobody Knows (New York: New York Times Music Corporation, Sunbeam Music, 1970), 3. Cleveland eventually started law school and became a drug and alcohol counselor from 1974 to 79. From 1984 until his retirement in 2017, he was a high school history teacher. Playbill of The Me Nobody Knows (September 1971), 18. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 5–6. Warren Hoffman, The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 6. Hoffman, 2. Richard Dyer, “Colour of Entertainment,” in Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond, ed. by Bill Marshall and Robynn Jeananne Stilwell (Exeter: Intellect, 2000), 25. Clare Bradford et al., New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 2. Bradford et al., 106. Bernstein, 34. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 1970), 20. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). See chapter 5 for a full discussion of “queered by color” (183).

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7

Little girls, big voices Annie James Leve

Introduction The 1977 musical Annie forever altered the way that little girls sang in Broadway musicals. Prior to Annie, children in musicals mostly sang in a light natural voice, shifting between the chest and head registers when the melody called for it. Generally speaking, they neither belted nor produced the refined tones associated with “legit” vocal technique cultivated by classically trained singers.1 This untutored child singing—virtually an extension of the natural speaking voice—imitated the way that children sang in their everyday music-making activities. Moreover, Broadway composers did not place unreasonable vocal demands on child singers, writing music with a relatively narrow range that rarely extended to the upper or lower extremes. Charles Strouse’s music for Annie therefore stands out for the extraordinary demands it places on the child voice. The character of Annie blazed a new path for girls on Broadway. Not only does she belt her songs (eight times a week), but she is also the show’s protagonist. She has a commanding vocal presence, singing two major solos and reprises thereof, sharing one duet, and participating in several ensemble numbers. This essay explores the relationship between Annie’s diva-like vocal feats and the ideology of the sacred child that the plot of Annie propagates. It argues that Annie’s belting permanently changed the construction of girlhood in musicals. For decades, Broadway musicals attempted to portray the singing child as a product of nature rather than as a polished professional performer.2 The singing child on Broadway reflected the nineteenth-century view of childhood as a time of innocence. This Romantic-era ideology shaped attitudes about education and play, including music making. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), an opera composer as well as a leading thinker on child education, advocated interaction with the natural environment over regimented instruction. Children, he believed, should develop moral and ethical awareness through direct experience rather than the superimposition of social conventions and values dictated by adults. Most children initially engage in the physical act of singing in an experiential way, without

Little girls, big voices  117 any instruction whatsoever. For example, the ability to sing the birthday song precedes any knowledge about vocal production. Premature formal vocal training imposes the binary aesthetic judgments of adults (e.g., beautiful versus ugly) onto the child. Today, belting dominates American popular music, from the national anthem at sporting events to American Idol, but in the past belting was not a common feature of white popular musical entertainment. It did not become a standard vocal style for leading ladies in musical theater until Ethel Merman burst on the scene in the thirties. In the early decades of the twentieth century, musical theater favored a more “legitimate” vocal style, and not only for operetta. Female musical comedy stars such as Marilyn Miller sang in a relatively light lyrical soprano voice. “Legit” singing emphasizes proper vocal placement, breath control, development of the head voice and upper range, and the ability to sustain long lines on open vowels and with measured vibrato. This type of singing has its origins in sacred and secular art music (e.g., motets and opera). Until recently, formal vocal training emphasized “legit” singing over popular styles. Even today, voice teachers stress the ability to vocalize smoothly through the natural breaks (passaggi) between registers of the voice, especially the chest voice (i.e., the register for belting) and head voice.3 As already noted, children on Broadway rarely sang in this manner. Broadway musicals avoided the appearance of highly trained and polished child singers, lest they come across as precocious or inauthentic. In the twenties, as composers began to pay closer attention to the meaning of the words, vocal performance moved toward a “more speechified presentation of song lyrics—which required a lower compass and a lower tessitura,” to quote Mark Grant.4 This shift toward the chest voice ensured that the lyrics were understood. It also set the stage for Ethel Merman. Even female vocalists who, strictly speaking, did not belt favored their lower vocal range. Singers such as Helen Forrest, Martha Tilton, and Doris Day cultivated a rich velvety timbre in their middle register. On Broadway “legit” and belting were sometimes heard side by side, often depending on the characters’ respective disposition. For example, the two leading female characters in Guys and Dolls, Sarah, a legit soprano and a morally impeccable character, and Adelaide, a nightclub entertainer, are defined by their singing as much as by their clothes, lexicon, and demeanor. Despite the growing popularity of belting in the thirties, the advent of child belting was decades off, and it was not merely a matter of child singers catching up to adult singers. Widespread child belting in musicals was nothing short of an aesthetic paradigm shift. Annie may have provided the spark, but several other factors—such as peer pressure and the limited exposure to music and musical performance beyond what the popular media provided—ensured that girl belting was more than just a passing fade. For most girls today, belting is a given. Only girls who participate in formal choral activities beyond sixth grade, such as school choir, receive structured

118  James Leve opportunities to develop their head voices and upper range. The barrage of popular music with a narrow range of pitches has limited the exposure to other types of vocal production. Most popular female singers rarely if ever use their head voice. As women singers became more present in the pop and rock music scene, girls became accustomed “to hearing female vocals at conversational pitch . . . [The] vulnerable upper register [is] simply not exposed in the mainstream pop output,” as Laurie Stras observes.5 The songs that later generations of young people hear today at rock concerts, in Disney films, on reality TV talent shows, and in Broadway musicals favor a low tessitura and often a fairly limited pitch content. As a result, girls today default to the chest voice and often produce a full-out belt, and they do so without developing proper vocal technique.

Belting Belting engages the muscles of the vocal instrument differently from other types of singing (i.e., chest voice, head voice, mixed voice, and falsetto). During belting, the thyroartenoid muscles (which control the thickening and shortening of the vocal fold) dominate over the cricothyroid muscles (which thin and lengthen the vocal fold). Young children are neither physically nor, some would argue, emotionally mature enough to belt for any sustained length of time without risking vocal damage. Some young belters report early burn out.6 In fact, many vocal teachers refuse to take on young students precisely because their muscles are not ready for the rigorous physical work of vocal instruction. However, there is no consensus over when a child should begin formal voice lessons, and there is even less agreement over whether they should belt at all. The practice of belting preceded the technical understanding of it. Moreover, the social stigma encountered by boys who sing drove researchers and music teachers to focus disproportionately on boys’ voices at the expense of girls’ voices. The reticence of boys to sing, let alone in musical theater, persists today. In fact, in its advertising for movies such as Tangled, Disney downplays or entirely conceals the fact that they are musicals, lest boys stay away. Recent scholarship on girls’ voices provides some understanding of the young female vocal instrument and the changes it undergoes before, during, and after puberty. Adolescent girls experience many of the same vocal changes as boys: they develop abrupt breaks between registers and experience a lowering of the tessitura, breathiness, and inconsistency of pitch.7 These unsettling changes in the maturing female vocal instrument are at their most pronounced precisely at the prime age for playing Annie. There is no explicit requirement that Annie belt. In fact, some girls (especially in amateur productions) have sung the role largely in their head voice. Musical theater composers generally do not indicate the vocal register for any given character, in effect leaving the decision up to the performer (along with input from the creative staff). Published musical theater scores rarely

Little girls, big voices  119 list vocal types, although leasing organizations such as MTI now identify the voice types and ranges for the shows in their catalog. MTI describes Annie as follows: A street-wise orphan; she is eventually taken in by Oliver Warbucks. Spunky, friendly, big-voiced. Gender: female Age: 10 to 12 Vocal range top: G5 Vocal range bottom: A38 That MTI uses the colloquial label “big-voiced” as opposed to belter is perhaps intended to make allowances for non-belters (or music teachers who proscribe belting). The inherited performance tradition of a given role is usually based on the original production and traditionally passed down vis-à-vis the original cast recording, although the vocal register of a character has sometimes changed from one performer to another. In any case, belting is an unwritten requirement for Annie. But, as we shall see, not all Annies are alike.

History of girls in musicals The role of Annie disrupted a longstanding tradition of incorporating children into musicals for their sentimental value and of limiting their singing to duets and group numbers. Children had appeared in Broadway musicals from the beginning, but they had rarely played a leading role. Post-war popular entertainment milked the emotional importance attached to childhood (as epitomized by the children in the film It’s a Wonderful Life); and during the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, musical theater became a more family-oriented form of entertainment. The presence of children on stage increased, even if the size of their roles remained relatively small. These changes bolstered the middle-class ideology of the nuclear family. Children characters rarely sang solos, although they sometimes sang duets with adult characters (as Patrick does in Mame). The adults provided the vocal talent, while the children engendered warm feelings and a nostalgia for childhood. Notable exceptions include Gypsy (1959) and Oliver! (1960). As described earlier, child characters on Broadway gave the impression of singing without artifice, creating the illusion that they were ordinary children, not trained professional performers. For example, in Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Annie Oakley’s three younger sisters and younger brother echo the refrain at the end of each verse in “Doin’ What Comes Natural’ly.” Their very appearance during the song as unrefined angels tempers Oakley’s tomboyish swagger. The children on the original cast recording sing in a light voice, shifting between the head and chest registers. Their unpolished singing is a striking contrast to Ethel Merman’s belting. The role of Annie

120  James Leve Oakley was created expressly for Merman. In South Pacific (1949), Emile de Becque’s bi-racial son and daughter appear in the musical’s bookend scenes. On both occasions, they sing “Dites-Moi,” the first time with their father and later with Nellie, their future stepmother. The boy and girl on the original cast recording effectively capture the childlike spontaneity portrayed in these scenes, but a pronounced vibrato belies the children’s seemingly untutored singing. In recent revivals of both Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific, the children have pushed their chest voice—sometimes in keys deliberately lowered to facilitate the change. The 1959–60 Broadway season marks a turning point for children in musicals. Gypsy and The Sound of Music both opened that season and presented two very different constructions of childhood. In The Sound of Music, the von Trapp children sing in one manner in their private lives and in a different manner in their public lives, using the chest voice and head voice, respectively. The story involves Maria’s efforts to bring these two spheres together into a healthy balance. In “Do-Re-Mi,” the children sing primarily in their chest voice and approach an actual belt as they begin to let down their guard and connect emotionally to Maria. However, their later appearance as the professional von Trapp Family Singers demands more refined and polished (i.e., legit) singing. In stark contrast to the von Trapp children, Rose’s daughters in Gypsy are denied a formal education, childhood, and traditional family. The curtain rises in medias res as June and Louise are auditioning for Uncle Jocko’s Kiddie Show. In one of Broadway’s most famous star entrances, Rose, another role written for Ethel Merman, barrels down the aisle of the theater, shouting, “Sing out, Louise”—in other words, belt! Baby June, Louise’s sister, who needs no such encouragement, sings “May We Entertain You” in a shrill nasal belt intended to accentuate her cuteness. Her mechanical delivery, though, reveals the hand of Rose. Louise can barely sustain a phrase. Later in act 1, Louise receives a lamb for her birthday from Rose and Herbie. Alone with her new pet, Louise, who has been infantilized by Rose, sings the sweet lullaby “Little Lamb” in her head voice. Although “Little Lamb” is performed by the adult actress who plays Louise for the remainder of the show, the lyrical rendition reveals the child’s emotional interiority. The near-modal melody is a striking contrast to June’s high-voltage vaudeville music as well as Louise’s own belting after she becomes an adult stripper. Between 1960 and 1977, Broadway offered more opportunities for boys than for girls, who had to wait until Annie for another role of such dramatic and musical significance.

Annie’s songs Annie’s vocal profile became fully apparent during the original 1976 summer run of Annie at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. Most of her songs existed before auditions were held, but the full extent of her

Little girls, big voices  121 belting had not yet emerged. The girls who auditioned were too polished for Martin Charnin, who conceived, wrote the lyrics for, and directed Annie. Kristin Vigard was originally chosen to play Annie, but after only a few performances, she was replaced by Andrea McArdle, who gave the role a tougher veneer (reminiscent of the Our Gang kids) while conveying vulnerability without sentimentality. And McArdle’s belting exceeded everyone’s wildest imagination. She transformed the writers’ initial conception of Annie as a spirited but vocally average little girl into a Broadway diva. McArdle came off less like an untutored little girl and more like a Broadway professional. Vigard, by contrast, could not maintain a strong belt throughout “Maybe,” let alone “Tomorrow.”9 McArdle’s vocal strength became one of the show’s assets and identifying features. In fact, the keys of her songs were raised in order to highlight her belt, first for the remainder of the Goodspeed run and then again for the Broadway production (see Table 7.1). Table 7.1 The Keys of Annie’s Songs*

“Maybe” “Tomorrow” “I Think I’m Gonna Life It Here” “I Don’t Need Anything but You”

Vigard (Goodspeed)

McArdle (Goodspeed)

McArdle (Broadway)

A F D-flat C

A G-flat D D-flat

B-flat G-flat E-flat D

* Annie also sings in “It’s the Hard-Knock Life,” the key of which was also raised, from A to B-flat and finally to B.

“Tomorrow” holds a special place as Annie’s anthem of optimism.10 Strouse composed “Tomorrow” as a contemporary pop ballad rather than a pastiche evocative of the story’s thirties timeframe. The song emulates the simple phrases and rubato style of a folk song or pop ballad. However, by the end of the song, at least in its original context, “Tomorrow” blooms into a rousing song of survival, the type of number associated with Broadway divas. “Tomorrow” extends the AABA phrase structure of a traditional Broadway ballad, resulting in an AABAʹCC structure. The four-measure A phrase progresses through a series of median-related chords (mostly minor chords) and ends on a half cadence. The B phrase (“When I’m stuck with a day . . .”) begins directly in the minor tonic key, casting a gray cloud of melancholy. A sequence of the melody reestablishes the major key, on “stick out my chin,” landing on B-double-flat major (III b), an unusual dominant preparation. Up until this point, the vocal line has occupied a low tessitura, incorporated mediant harmonic movement, and expressed Annie’s sadness. The song’s harmony and backbeat emphasis are seventies pop-rock idioms. Listeners are therefore unprepared for the ringing affirmative fanfare and diva-like climax to come in the C phrase. Annie reaches the top of her belting range during this phrase. Stated twice, the C phrase provides registral

122  James Leve contrast to the low tessitura of the A phrase. A dominant prolongation on the antepenultimate and penultimate syllables (“day a[way]”) prepares the climactic final note of the song, the fifth of the tonic chord and the highest note available to Annie (a perfect authentic cadence [PAC] would have resulted in a precipitous drop in energy). “Tomorrow” is the litmus test for any Annie. The countless girls who have recreated the role on stage have emulated McArdle’s rendition of the song. However, some of them projected more vulnerability than others; some seem more innocent, high-spirited, or intransigent. McArdle still holds the distinction as the most vocally self-assured Annie. On the original cast recording and live video footage, she belts effortlessly and smoothly throughout her entire range. Four other girls played Annie in the original Broadway production. Shelly Bruce, who replaced McArdle, had the huskiest voice of the five, accentuating Annie’s tomboyish nature over her cuteness. Allison Smith, who was only ten when she stepped into the role, sang with a bright nasal tone. On a video recording of her performance, her tempo wavers, and she overindulges in behind-the-beat singing. Sarah Jessica Parker, who replaced Smith, can be heard singing “Tomorrow” on YouTube.11 Toward the end of the song, she struggles to sustain a good tone at the top of her range. Parker admits that she never felt entirely vocally confident in the role.12 Girls appearing in revivals of Annie have had a big voice to fill. Marissa O’Donnell, who starred in the 30th anniversary national tour, delivers the most competitive and even over-eager rendition of “Tomorrow.” Her performance is tailored for a large Broadway theater. She sustains the final syllable for a record 13 seconds, four seconds longer than even McArdle.13 Lilla Crawford played Annie in the 2012 Broadway revival. The director of this production, James Lapine, allegedly hired Crawford because she personified “innocence.” Yet, he insisted that she work on producing a more powerful belt.14 Crawford used a generic and rather forced New York working-class accent (like the newsboys in Newsies). The accent grates on the ear and ultimately detracts from her strong albeit mechanical rendition of the song. The three movie versions of Annie toned down Annie’s belting. In the first film, released in 1982, Aileen Quinn, who won the title role in a national search, uses her chest voice but does not really belt at all. John Huston, who directed, and Ray Stark, who produced, felt that the theatricality of the stage version was incompatible with the more realistic film medium. Indeed, all three movie adaptations achieved a degree of verisimilitude by toning down the show’s musical comedy staginess, but they lost much of what made the stage version of Annie so exciting. Moreover, Huston relegated “Tomorrow” to the opening credits and included backup singers, thus minimizing its narrative importance.15 During the FDR cabinet scene, Quinn delivers the reprise of “Tomorrow” in her head voice and a cappella, charming the president through sweetness rather than strength. Alicia Morton, who starred in the 1999 Disney television version of Annie, reinstated belting as part of Annie’s musical identity, although she too

Little girls, big voices  123 tempered her singing for the small-screen medium. The third movie incarnation of Annie (2014) complicates the story by updating it and featuring an African American Annie and Warbucks (renamed Stacks), played by Quvenzhané Wallis and Jamie Foxx, respectively. Wallis belts a small portion of “Tomorrow,” but she abstains from going full-diva. Moreover, the interpolation of a new song, “Opportunity,” diminishes “Tomorrow” in terms of importance. “Opportunity” is a more personal and introspective solo for Annie. It is also diegetic, performed at a benefit held at the Guggenheim Museum. Wallis sings “Opportunity” in her head voice but builds up to a belt. However, she ends quietly and speaks the final line, “I guarantee.” The makers of this film rejected Annie as diva and opted instead for a relatable girl for twenty-first-century audiences. “Maybe” is just as important as “Tomorrow.” It is Annie’s first musical utterance and thus shapes the audience’s emotional connection to Annie. Voice type and register can convey knowledge about a character’s class, race, age, and temperament. As noted earlier, composers have strategically drawn sharp distinctions between characters using contrasting vocal registers, as exemplified in the earlier Guys and Dolls example. The musical Oliver! provides a striking example involving child characters. Oliver sings in a pure soprano voice (evoking the sound of an English boys’ choir), but the Artful Dodger belts in the style of bawdy British music hall entertainment. In the seventies, audiences still expected white girls to sing in the untutored manner described at the beginning of this essay. “Maybe,” therefore, represents a seminal moment in the portrayal of childhood in musical theater. The song not only conveys knowledge about Annie, but it also introduced a new type of girl character to musical theater.

Why does Annie belt? Jacqueline Warwick asserts that Annie’s musical language “is beautifully suited to the female pre-pubescent voice.”16 This statement, however, does not square with the role’s excessively wide vocal range and taxing melodies. Annie’s music generates excitement and arouses sentimentality, but it is hardly “beautifully suited” for girls’ voices. Warwick attempts to explain Annie in relation to two opposite girl archetypes: the urchin (“spunky girl”) and the angel. Urchins have “great big voice[s]” (i.e., they belt), and angels have sweet “angelic voice[s]” (i.e., they produce light and lyrical tones). Warwick traces these contrasting models of girlhood back to Eva and Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and thereby associates belting and “legit” singing with class and race. This reading privileges the nineteenth-century ideology of vocal practices: working- and lower-class girls’ voices are loud and chesty, whereas middle- and upper-class girls’ voices exude refinement and lyricism. However, the further one delves into the twentieth century, the less valid this interpretation becomes. Because belting is so ubiquitous today, it no longer carries the same racial, ethnic, or generational connotations that it once did. When girls (and girl characters) from all walks of life belt, as is

124  James Leve indeed the case today, then vocal register no longer distinguishes between a princess and a pauper. Annie’s belting was always associated with her demeanor rather than her class (which is fluid). Notably, when Annie enters the nouveau riche vis-à-vis adoption, she continues to belt. She remains the “spunky girl of the street,” not “the waiflike figure that stimulates a sentimental reaction and tendency to protect, coddle, and cosset.” Joseph Zornado had earlier ascribed an “angelic voice” to Annie, basing his analysis on Aileen Quinn’s version of Annie. Neither Andrea McArdle nor any of the subsequent stage Annies aimed for “sweet” singing.17 Warwick seizes on Zornado’s notion of Annie’s angelic voice and sense of optimism, and she too bases her interpretation more on Aileen Quinn’s rendition of Annie than McArdle’s. But, Annie, Warwick argues, brings the urchin and the angel together into a single character “through combining vulnerability with toughness.” This reading, however, is not supported by Annie’s singing. Annie has the street smarts that come from being an abused and exploited girl in Depression-era New York, and, as Warwick suggests, her “great big voice” conveys her toughness, but she is never angelic. Annie’s belting also taps into Warbucks’s nostalgia for his Hell’s Kitchen upbringing and cultural preferences, which are decidedly more ­Coney Island than Metropolitan Opera. Placing Annie at the intersection of the most important female icons in American popular culture during the thirties—namely, Ethel Merman and Shirley Temple—explains Annie’s nature better than relating her to the nineteenth-century Topsy and Eva models. Belting is as much a part of Annie’s identity as it was of Merman’s. In many other respects, though, Annie has a precedent in Shirley Temple. Temple often played an orphan and sang and danced her way into the hearts of single white men. In celebrating the restoration of the nuclear family, Temple’s films appealed to women, entertained children, and pulled men out of the doldrums of the Depression. Temple often found herself in a relationship with an older man, but she always displaced the sexualizing male gaze by finding a suitable woman for the lonely gentleman in her life or by turning him into a paternal figure. Likewise, Annie smooths Oliver Warbucks’s rough edges (like Annie Oakley’s siblings do for her); and Grace Farrell mitigates any latent sexual tension between adult and child. As Annie does in act 2, in real life, Temple met FDR, and she received several kidnapping threats. Shirley Temple introduced children’s voices into the popular soundscape when “talkies” were rapidly gaining popularity. Temple did not belt, though, and her vocal talents were minimal. But when coupled with her devastating cuteness and irresistible smile, her singing became part of the marketable and loveable package known as Shirley Temple. She sang in a light mixed or head voice, rarely in her full chest voice; and the music she sang never taxed her limited vocal talents. For instance, one of her signature songs, “Animal Crackers,” introduced in Curly Top (1935), consists entirely of short rhythms, is limited to an octave, and lies near the bottom of her range. Temple’s character (Elizabeth Blair) sings the song while

Little girls, big voices  125 entertaining friends at an orphanage, but a stern trustee admonishes her for singing and calls her a “wicked child.” While the plot of Annie recalls Temple’s films, Annie’s vocal style and temperament are inspired by Merman. Like “the Merm,” Annie is quick with sassy repartee, projects a tough façade, and delights the people around her through her humor and singing. Annie even appears, like Dolly Levi (a role created for and briefly played by Merman), in a red dress while making an entrance down a long staircase. And like Broadway’s most celebrated female diva roles, Annie triumphs over adversity. Whereas Marilyn Miller was the darling of Broadway in the twenties, Merman embodied a different sort of woman for the thirties. Merman’s live singing was a striking contrast to the crooning of male singers on the radio in the thirties. The radio, it should be noted, plays an important role in the plot of Annie and provides a historical context in which to hear Annie’s belting (and girl belting in general), as well as to connect her to FDR, whose legendary “Fireside Chats” lifted Americans’ spirits as well as radio sales. At the top of act 2, Annie and Warbucks appear together on the Oxydent Smiles Hour Radio starring Bert Healey, a stand-in for Rudy Vallee. Tensions involving singing, age, gender, and class lurk just beneath the surface of this scene. Like FDR and Shirley Temple, Annie uses the airwaves in order to appeal to the American public. As the scene begins, she is singing a reprise of “Maybe” (inexplicably using the book song diegetically). Bert Healey then croons “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile.” Like any new technology, at first the radio caused consternation. On the one hand, radio entertained masses of unemployed Americans in the thirties; on the other hand, it also fostered crooning, which critics attacked as a corrupting influence on American masculinity. As Allison McCracken points out, “pleading voices marked crooners as sissies who had no right to the adulation they received from white women.”18 When, in the following scene, the orphans belt a reprise of “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile,” they are simultaneously imitating and mocking Bert Healey and by extension white middle-class maleness. In this sequence, Warbucks, too, is emasculated by the new technology as well as Annie. The 11-year-old Annie sings into the studio microphone as instructed, but Warbucks seems utterly confounded by the technology and fumbles with the script pages he is holding in his hand. Against this small bit of comic business, Annie stands out for her competence and confidence.

Later models for the little girls playing Annie Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, belters both, were still living Broadway legends in the seventies, but they were beyond their prime and relatively unknown to 11-year-old girls at the time. In 1977, the vocal influences for the girls in Annie came from elsewhere. Barbra Streisand, who was in her prime, had abandoned Broadway for Hollywood and appealed to older audiences. She was perhaps too unique, or idiosyncratic, to have

126  James Leve been a model for a young girl. Barbara Cook, who was among the most respected Broadway sopranos in the fifties and sixties, starring in Candide, The Music Man, and others, was unknown to Annie’s demographic in the seventies. Whatever their exposure to musical theater, girls growing up in the seventies received mixed signals with regard to vocal decorum. The public image, behavior, and vocalism of female singers were radically changing. Girls had exposure to Julie Andrews, who was still the quintessential musical theater ingenue (even though she had ventured beyond the genre) and the most famous “legit” (i.e., lyrical soprano) musical theater vocalist at the time.19 She was a major influence on this generation of girls, but not vocally. Andrews, who had been a child performer in England, is a poster child for the mid-century professional child actor, often exploited to boost a parent’s ego or financial gain. As a child, Andrews received formal vocal training and performed operatic arias with flashy coloratura passages on the radio, in front of the royal family, and in pantomime.20 In fact, her teacher “did not let [her] use a chest voice at all at first.” Andrews only started to use her chest voice when she “sang more and more musical theater.” To baby-boomer Americans, she represented musical and middleclass respectability. Her lyrical soprano voice perfectly suited the roles she made famous: Eliza Doolittle, Cinderella, Guinevere, Mary Poppins, and Maria von Trapp, all of them tied to England or continental Europe. Had Annie been a fifties musical, the eponymous orphan would have sung more like Andrews than Merman. As it is, only Grace Farrell, Warbucks’s secretary, emulates Andrews’s singing style, which distinguishes her from Hannigan and Lily St. Regis. Her posh demeanor, refined speech, and “legit” singing stand in sharp relief to Hannigan’s crassness and belting and to Annie’s naïveté and childlike exuberance. Byrnn O’Malley, the American actress hired to play Grace in the 2012 revival of Annie, adopted Andrews’s English accent and lyrical vocal style (the role had been traditionally played as American). The girls auditioning for the original Annie belonged to the first fullfledged rock generation, experiencing the first wave of female rock stars such as Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, and Patti Smith. In the mid-seventies, Joplin was a force to be reckoned with, wild, strange, intelligent, sexual, overweight, outspoken, and literally rough skinned. Her belting was guttural, unrefined, and edgy. She was mythic, a “liberated rock goddess.”21 Annie somehow brought these two disparate worlds of belting (musical theater and rock) together to create a new type of American child. In doing so, she also anticipated the young female rock star phenomenon of today.

Annie in 1977 Annie opened amid rising fears over the loss of childhood innocence. The squalor of Times Square dulled some of the luster of attending a Broadway show, and parents could not shelter children from exposure to the

Little girls, big voices  127 crime and porn venues just down the block from the legitimate theaters. In fact, just days before Annie opened on Broadway, an article by Gloria Steinem appeared in Ms. Magazine, which brought a sense of urgency to the issue of child pornography. 22 At the same time, social conservatives felt that feminism, the increase in pornography, and changing attitudes about homosexuality threatened the family. Anita Bryant launched her “Save Our Children” campaign and attacked the gay pride movement. As scholar Kristen Hatch notes, “childhood in general seemed to be under threat as a result of changes engendered by the women’s movement.”23 Against this backdrop, Andrea McArdle’s 11-year-old Annie provided a foil to Brooke Shields’s 12-year-old Violet, the child prostitute she played in Louis Malle’s film Pretty Baby. Shields’s provocative on-screen performance, which included nudity, fueled anxiety about promiscuity among girls. As a presexual girl in the manner of Dorothy Gale, Annie provided an alternative not only to Brooke Shields’s model of girlhood (featured again in the 1980 movie Blue Lagoon) but to other teenage stars then in the public eye, including Natassja Kinski, Tatum O’Neal, Kristy McNichols, and Jodie Foster. Unlike the tomboys that these girls played in their films, Annie has no interest in boys. Annie’s pro-family ideology was a source of comfort for middle America. In fact, Annie’s belting helped to preserve her innocence. Rather than eroticize Annie, belting reinforced her tomboyish excess and youthful queerness. Moreover, the musical draws together three unrelated people—Annie, Warbucks, and Grace—into an idealized family unit comprised from disparate elements but united by love. Annie also avoids the pedophilic eroticization often discussed in the scholarly literature on Shirley Temple and the leers of the sleezy men in the vaudeville houses where Gypsy’s Baby June does her splits. Annie never crosses the thin line between child adoration (child loving, to use James Kincaid’s term) and child sexualization. Golden Age musicals such as South Pacific and The Sound of Music propagated the patriarchal view that a girl reached “sexual maturity through her relationship to an older man, usually her father.”24 Warbucks seems entirely indifferent to Grace Farrell as a woman; however, he dances with Annie, hugs her, coos with her when she takes a bath, kisses her, and adopts her. In fact, Annie meets all the conditions for a more sinister motive on Warbucks’s part, but the musical manages to avoid the latent lascivious aspects of Temple’s films. Annie desires a father, not a boyfriend—not yet, anyway. Her untutored belting never takes the form of a suggestive tease or come on, as Baby June’s does. Nor does Annie ever sing a diegetic song (with the exception of the aforementioned reprise of “Maybe”) or appear on stage like the von Trapp children, Rose’s daughters, and Shirley Temple. 25 Rather than emulating a seductive chanteuse (like Ethel Merman at the beginning of her career or Jodie Foster in Bugsy Malone), Annie remains a tomboy. Tatum O’Neal’s Amanda Whurlitzer, the tomboy in the film Bad News Bears, which was released just days before the premiere of Annie, is on the verge of blooming into a

128  James Leve boy-crazy teenager. The only thing that Andrea McArdle’s Annie shared with Kristy McNichols and Tatum O’Neal was the shag hairstyle, and only up until Warbucks decides to adopt her, after which she sports the curly red hair depicted in Harold Gray’s original comic strip. Annie’s belting and optimism are inseparable. In fact, they are the reason that the success of Annie became a symbol of New York’s economic resurgence in general and the revitalization of Times Square in particular. Annie’s arrival on Broadway coincided with the launching of the “I Love New York” campaign.26 Musical theater in the seventies did not cater much to children, and, as observed above, the seedy environs made bringing the family to a Broadway show unpleasant or even dangerous. The real Annie might not have been intimidated to walk the seedy streets of the theater district in the late seventies (and the young cast members of Annie literally treated this zone of New York as their playground), but the young girls from the suburbs who went to see Annie on Broadway were vulnerable. Even when parents were willing to bring their kids to the theater, the number of musicals appropriate for children were few. 27 Annie drew families, especially parents and their daughters, back to Broadway. Annie spoke directly to these girls, influenced their singing, and sparked their interest in musical theater. The singing child on Broadway From the moment child labor laws were enacted at the turn of the twentieth century, the theater industry sought special dispensation. Prodded by producers, legislators conveniently ignored fundamental objections to child labor. Producers trumpeted the supposed intrinsic benefits to children of working in the theater and argued that the theater gave children a better education than what they could receive elsewhere (the same specious argument is made today). 28 The toll that working in the theater professionally took on child performers never seemed to arouse much concern. Whatever the reasons, adults derive as much pleasure from watching children sing, dance, and act in Broadway musicals as children do. Children naturally relate to child performers and the characters they play. They project their own desires, deficiencies, and aspirations onto their talented peers. However, generally speaking, an 11-year-old-singer, let alone belter, cannot generate the vocal excitement of an adult. Women’s voices are more developed, more flexible, and more polished than girls’ voices. Similarly, child dancers cannot compete with adult dancers. However, children bring something to their performance that transcends singing and dancing: authenticity.29 Whatever technical expertise they lack, they make up for in the sentimental dividends they generate. While belting or executing a pirouette, a little girl embodies hope and optimism. When children perform, adults react not so much to the difficult melody or triple time step as to the execution of these feats by a voice and body that should not be able to pull them

Little girls, big voices  129 off. McArdle’s performance implied a degree of freakery, something out of the ordinary that solicits amazement. Vocal prodigies such as Charlotte Church and Jackie Evancho aspired toward adult diva status. By contrast, McArdle, like Shirley Temple, played the character of a child. Adults have played children in musicals, sometimes to good effect. But Martin Charnin instinctively understood that Annie needed real girls in order to achieve its full emotional impact. Charles Strouse initially declined Charnin’s offer to collaborate on Annie precisely because he assumed that Annie would be played by an adult such as Bernadette Peters and come off as camp. He changed his mind only after Charnin assured him that he had a sentimental story with real girls in mind, not a satirical romp intended for adults. Charnin’s leap of faith in hiring young girls made the difference between a hit and a forgettable spoof of Little Orphan Annie. Ironically, Annie was originally intended for adults, but during the Goodspeed run, when parents returned to the show with their children, the writers realized that they had a bona fide family musical on their hands.

Annie’s legacy: the sequels The character of Annie reappeared unchanged in a failed sequel entitled Miss Hannigan’s Revenge (1989) and in a second sequel entitled Annie Warbucks (world premiere in 1992; Off-Broadway production in 1993). Miss Hannigan’s Revenge (sometimes referred to as Annie II) involves Hannigan’s attempt to hoodwink Warbucks and rub out Annie. It folded after its pre-Broadway tryout in Washington, D.C. Annie Warbucks repurposes several songs from Hannigan’s Revenge in the service of a different plotline. The action picks up where Annie left off, during the Christmas party at Warbucks’s mansion in 1933. Harriet Doyle, the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Child Welfare, informs Warbucks that an ordinance involving adoptions requires him to be married if he wants to keep Annie. Reminiscent of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Of Thee I Sing (which also had an unsuccessful sequel), this news triggers a complicated search for an appropriate bride. That Warbucks ends up marrying Grace comes as no surprise, and in one last bit of absurdity, he and Grace adopt all the orphans. The sequel lacks the charm and freshness of the original, and the score suffers an identity crisis. Absent “Maybe” and “Tomorrow,” Annie has no defining musical moment, and even Annie’s belting seems contrived, as does FDR’s inexplicable popping in and out of scenes. Annie sings six songs, including ensemble numbers, with an aggregate range of A-E b (the upper limit a third lower than in Annie). On the recording of the show, Kathryn Zaremba, who played Annie, belts with gusto, but she does not stand out from the earlier Annies. The original Annie strikes a perfect balance between Annie and Hannigan (in fact, the actresses who played these parts both received Tony Award nominations for Best Performance by a Leading

130  James Leve Actress in a Musical). And Annie is really the only woman in Warbucks’s life. In the sequel, Harriet Doyle overshadows Annie. In an attempt to flesh out Warbucks as a character, the writers lost sight of what made him so endearing in the first place. His gruffness was always part of his charm. Here, his love for Annie has turned into gushing, sentimental, and even physical adoration. Absent his bravado and outbursts of candidness, Warbucks is reduced to a milquetoast. When not whimpering over the possibility of losing Annie, he is pining like a schoolboy for Grace. His musical duties have increased, but the role does not benefit from the maudlin ballad “A Younger Man.” Warbucks’s midlife crisis, as revealed in this ballad, is incongruous for a tycoon raised in Hell’s Kitchen. Warbucks might be many things, but a self-deprecating and insecure suitor is not one of them. Grace’s parallel insecurity, as expressed in “He Doesn’t Know I’m Alive,” is no more convincing. Harve Presnell threw himself into the role and sang with the same masculine vocality that he had produced in the stage and film versions of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, but there was little he could do to redeem the role. One particularly troubling plot twist involves Annie’s running away to the country. She hops a freight train to Tennessee (invoking the life of a hobo) and is taken in by a poor rural black family, the Patersons. This episode recalls the paternalistic relationship between Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. That Annie champions stray animals and the poor is part of her indomitable charm in the original Annie, but her patronizing guardianship here borders on bad taste. Annie even sings a Motowninflected duet with the family’s daughter, Charlene Grace Paterson, and during a party in a later scene, the entire family is shoehorned into performing for the white guests, even though they are themselves guests. Until recently, Annie (especially on Broadway) looked like a thin, cute, middle-class white girl. It took decades for non-traditional casting to apply to the role of Annie. Notably, the plot sequence about the Patersons in the sequel reaffirmed Annie’s whiteness. Ironically, the ethnic and racial makeup of the orphans became more diverse before that of the eponymous star, and both Hannigan and Grace were played by African American actors well before Annie was. The planned Broadway production of Annie Warbucks never took place. Instead, it opened Off-Broadway and played for 200 performances. It has never caught on. In fact, MTI listed only one production for 2019.

After Annie Many adult female actors cite Annie as the reason they became interested in musical theater in the first place. The professional actress Sharon Wheatley was ten years old when Annie premiered in 1977. She epitomizes Annie’s original target demographic: white, tween, suburban girl with an affinity

Little girls, big voices  131 for singing and musical theater. Wheatley’s memoir, Til the Fat Girl Sings: From an Overweight Nobody to a Broadway Somebody, recounts her struggles as an overweight girl with musical theater aspirations. When she belted “Edelweiss” at a school audition, her music teacher agreed to take her on as a voice student providing that she only sing in her head voice. Wheatley felt that her weight disqualified her from playing Annie: “I made myself sing ‘Tomorrow’ . . . while watching myself in the mirror, just so I could see how ridiculous I looked.” Being overweight and forbidden to belt, she even went through an opera phase as a way of justifying her eating and size, resigning herself to the stereotype that all successful opera singers are fat. Wheatley’s story serves as a cautionary tale. It also exposes how in the late 1970s girls still had to negotiate belting. Wheatley never appeared in Annie, but she did become a successful professional working actress. By contrast, most of the girls who appeared in Annie on Broadway or in one of the national touring productions never went on to professional theater careers, and some of them have struggled to come to terms with their unfulfilled dreams. Life After Tomorrow, a film documentary featuring several of these women, exposes this dark side of Annie.30 As young girls, they had never asked themselves, What will happen when there is no Annie to go to eight times a week? The theater industry is ill-equipped to help girls readjust to life without Annie. A girl’s time in Annie is necessarily limited, for she quickly ages out of the role. In fact, girls appearing in major productions of Annie are periodically subjected to height measurements akin to a boxer’s weigh-in. Once a girl exceeds a certain height limit, she is summarily dismissed from the show. The musical theater in the eighties offered few roles suitable for teenage girls, leaving most of the unemployed former Annies with no choice but to retransition back to their “normal” lives. Julie Stevens’s voiceover at the beginning of Life After Tomorrow explains, “As luck would have it, we ended up in the show . . . Many of us left our families, friends, and school . . . Just as quickly as it seemed to arrive, it was all gone. When our contracts ended, nobody prepared us for our return back home or what was to come. Twenty years later, I’m still trying to figure it out.” Robyn Finn-Moosey, a particularly outspoken former orphan, explains, “I was stuck in this little girl thing, probably up to my thirties, quite frankly. Up until I had kids. I always saw myself as this little girl playing Annie. And that’s how I lived my life.” Because any girl who is vocally and emotionally mature enough to handle the role of Annie will soon age out of it, no one girl owns the role of Annie the way Merman owned her roles. No one understands this bittersweet reality more than McArdle, who stepped into the role when she was 13, the “sweet spot” for playing Annie, barely young enough to meet the physical requirements of the part but just old enough to handle it vocally. She had the stamina to endure eight performances a week in a hit musical. As the first Broadway Annie, McArdle is more identified with the

132  James Leve role than anyone else, even though relatively few people saw her play Annie. Her view on the optimal age for Annie is worth quoting. It’s hard to find a girl who is seasoned enough as far as common sense and maturity. You can’t put a thirteen-year-old against an eight-yearold. The eight-year-old, no matter how good, it’s going to be one dimensional . . . The best time to get a girl to play Annie is right before they can [handle the role physically] when they look like they have three or four months to do it. Because then they have the head. McArdle emphasizes personality above everything else, even vocal talent. “Even if you can’t sing, [exuding personality is] your first job. They have to love you.” Of course, McArdle knows that only girls with a formidable belt will be taken seriously for the role. Most of the girls who want to be in Annie never get past the grueling audition process. National searches for the ideal Annie have been held for most of the show’s history, starting with the 1982 film. The intensive coverage by the media has sensationalized these auditions and turned them into reality television, mercilessly exploiting the girls at their most emotionally vulnerable. During auditions for the film, before singing a note, the girls were told, “Some of you are physically wrong, you’re going to be too big when we start the film . . . That doesn’t mean that we don’t like you, or that you can’t sing or you can’t dance or you can’t act.”31 Many of the girls who audition for Annie cannot meet the score’s vocal demands. “Tomorrow” is practically designed to expose the most vulnerable part of an adolescent girl’s voice. The long note on “come what may” lies along the fault line between a girl’s chest voice and head voice. In a video clip of one of the auditions, a girl cracks on this note and slips into her head voice, unable to maintain or hold the belt. Her instinct to shift into her head voice is the correct one, but naturally she does not land the part. Two particularly infamous episodes involving Annie standout for their brutality. As already mentioned, Kristin Vigard was abruptly replaced by Andrea McArdle during the first week of performances in 1976. She remained in the show and went on to work in other musicals, but she carries the scars and shame from her experience.32 But Vigard’s disappointment cannot compare to that of Joanna Pacitti, whose firing from the 1996 production was a scandal du jour widely covered in the media. Pacitti won the role of Annie in an audition contest sponsored by Macy’s Department Store. She clocked 106 performances, but in Boston she came down with bronchitis and was replaced by Brittny Kissinger. Barbara Walters covered the story, and in one segment of her show, Pacitti cries out, “I’m Annie no more, and it’s not going to be me coming down the stairs in my Annie dress and the red wig. It’s not going to be me [as] Annie no more . . . I just gotta remember that I’m the real Annie, and the sun‘l come out tomorrow.”33 Whether Pacitti’s bronchitis was an excuse or the actual reason for her

Little girls, big voices  133 dismissal, a statement released by the producers claimed, “The actress and the part never quite came together the way we felt they needed to.” At eightyears-old, Kissinger was the youngest Annie. Publicly, Charnin claimed, “by virtue of her size and her age and her smallness [she is] a much more vulnerable Annie than any Annie that we ever had.” True or not, this view does not warrant the suffering inflicted on Pacitti.

Whatever ever happened to Andrea? Rather than disassociating herself from Annie, Andrea McArdle, who refused to appear in the documentary Life After Tomorrow, uses Annie to bolster her Broadway credentials. She takes ownership of the narrative about her life as the former Annie and when possible parleys it into new opportunities. For decades, McArdle has participated in publicity events to promote the musical. In 1982, she appeared on a television special dressed in a pink athletic suit and sang “Tomorrow” while the hipster magician Doug Henning performed an illusion. While singing, McArdle hurled herself down a covered slide, but Allison Smith, dressed in the same pink outfit and singing “Tomorrow,” emerged from the other end of the covered shoot as Henning announced, “Here is Broadway’s 1982 Annie!” McArdle even appeared in a cameo role in the 1999 television movie version of Annie, and she continues to sing “Tomorrow,” just as Merman performed her signature songs throughout her long career. Today, McArdle takes ironic pleasure from casting agents for Annie who explain, “We’d like somebody like Andrea McArdle.” Now in her late fifties and divorced, she has reached the prime age for playing some of the repertory’s coveted diva roles, and doing so would further connect her to Merman. McArdle has played Miss Hannigan twice, in 2010 and 2018, one time opposite her daughter’s Annie. She still belts, but her voice has become husky, and her vocal stylization is stuck in the eighties. Kristin Vigard has enjoyed a more diverse singing career, and she eventually became active in the alternative rock scene.

Annie today One does not hear Annie the same way today as 40 years ago. Because child belting has gone from being a novelty to being the de facto vocal mode for most girls, Annie has taken on the aura of a rock star in different clothing. Playing the role of Annie has acquired greater intrinsic and extrinsic meaning because singing and musical theater have themselves gained importance in the lives of adolescents, who listen to music several hours a day. Today, more than ever, singing plays an important role in girls’ identity development.34 Indeed, a girl playing Annie and a girl imitating a pop singer such as Taylor Swift are both trying out a role.35 Annie gives voice to several popular youth themes—be true to yourself, stand up to bullies and

134  James Leve celebrate the underdog, and remain optimistic in the face of adversity—but these themes are so generic that to give them too much weight is to overlook something more fundamental to the experience of playing Annie. Getting cast in a major role in a musical is a very big deal for a child. The role of Annie represents an opportunity for self-actualization, to experience being center stage just like female rock stars, however fleetingly. No child role before or since has offered so much cultural capital. When queried about the ideal Annie, McArdle recalled a girl she had seen on America’s Got Talent who “sings and plays like Alicia Keys [and] looks like one of the Disney heroines . . . ”36 McArdle’s reference to Disney and Keys is noteworthy, for one can see the outlines of Annie in the Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera of the 1990s Mickey Mouse Club as well as Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus). These onetime teen stars who began on the Disney Channel, and were once confined to it, eventually succeeded in making the jump into the mainstream music industry. This phenomenon might help to explain Annie’s resilience. If a girl can make it as Annie, she can aspire to the success of someone like Miley Cyrus. In 1977, Annie may have paid homage to Ethel Merman and Shirley Temple, but she also anticipated these young belters. In 2020, young girls still watch Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, but they would rather belt like Taylor Swift than sing like Julie Andrews. Emily Blunt’s recent performance as Mary Poppins (2018) evokes the singing of Andrews in the role, but the sequel was aimed at very young children and their parents raised on the 1964 original. Ironically, in the seventies, Annie was the first major musical for children that offered an alternative to classic Disney. First, the character of Annie is very different from the princesses of Disney’s heyday, marriable young women who sing in a soprano register. Strouse and Charnin’s score ventured outside the safe territory and relatively conservative musical style of the Sherman Brothers (Mary Poppins, Winnie the Pooh, et al.), Disney’s in-house songwriters during the sixties and seventies. The score of Annie draws from the Golden Age musical theater tradition associated with the Sherman Brothers and anticipates the contemporary pop-rock aesthetic that the Disney channel cultivated in the nineties. It offers something other than the easy-listening aesthetic, familiarity, and Sesame Street diatonicism of many children’s musicals. When Disney reemerged in the nineties as the leader of the movie musical, it succeeded in part by moving in the direction of Annie. It began to create musicals with young female characters who sang more like Annie than Snow White. In fact, Andrea McArdle played Belle in the Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast, which featured more belting than the 1991 movie. Disney television was cultivating more contemporary musical styles and launched the careers of young female vocal role models such as Christina Aguilera. It spoke (or sung) to the same tween demographic as Annie. Disney eventually coopted the Annie franchise when it coproduced the 1999 television version.

Little girls, big voices  135 Since the turn of the century, Disney has tried to have it both ways, presenting generic princesses whose main goal in life is to find (and perhaps educate) her prince but also modernizing its young female protagonists in order to make them more “relatable” to contemporary girls. But Belle, Tiana, and Rapunzel are all Cinderellas by any other name. They are more politically engaged (“woke”) than their earlier counterparts, but they still desire and eventually attain their prince, not just any prince but one of their own design. Since its premiere, Annie has offered girls an alternative to this limited gender stereotype. The role of Annie represents the possibility of fulfilling a dream—to become a star—and not some distant future to dream about, as is the case for most of Disney’s ingenues. In the decades since Annie first appeared on Broadway, her status as the most coveted girl character in the repertory has never been seriously contested. Matilda, though a major role, posed something of a challenge to Annie’s preeminence, but she does not rely on her voice as a vehicle for achieving self-actualization. Nor has Annie merely receded into the standard performing repertory. The MTI website listed 495 amateur productions of Annie for 2019 (about two-hundred more than Matilda). The most interesting girl role in recent years is young Alison in Fun Home, a decidedly mature musical. School of Rock opened in 2015 and reinforced the notion that rock on Broadway was as suitable for children as for older audiences, young adults, and adults, but the point-of-view character is an adult male. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s self-referential score for School of Rock lacks the authenticity to make any deep impression. The music is rock between scare quotes. What does Annie mean for girls in the twenty-first century? Girlhood today is as fraught and complex a stage as ever. Her story, music, and dialogue are almost the same today as they were in 1977. However, amid the radical changes in the construction of girlhood and musical tastes, Annie has acquired new meaning. For the most part, girls can only admire their cultural heroes (such as Adele, Katie Perry, or Taylor Swift) from afar, as fans. However, if they hurry, they might actually get an opportunity to play Annie and thereby turn a vicarious pleasure into a lived experience. Annie represents an opportunity for a girl to achieve a sense of agency and selfexpression. She appeals across decades, across generations, across genders, across borders, and across musical tastes. Always a belter, she is the voice of today, and of tomorrow.

Notes

136  James Leve









Little girls, big voices  137





























8

Urchins, unite Newsies as an antidote to Annie Marah Gubar

Figure 8.1 Overture to the musical Annie (1977), mm. 1–4, routined by Peter Howard and Charles Strouse and orchestrated by Philip J. Lang.

How better to open an essay about musicals than with an overture? This is the first phrase of the blockbuster musical comedy Annie, which debuted on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre in 1977 (Figure 8.1). A solo trumpet— joined a few bars later by a trombone—intones the first line of Annie’s famous anthem, “Tomorrow.” Newsies, which opened on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre in 2012, begins in a very similar way: a trumpet— soon joined by a trombone—picks out the first few notes of “Seize the Day,” a melody that is likewise built around an ascending B-flat-major triad (Figure 8.2).

Figure 8.2 Overture to the musical Newsies (2012), mm. 1–4, routined by Michael Kosarin and orchestrated by Danny Troob.

Sitting in the dark, listening to these plaintive notes float out from the orchestra pit, we might feel like we’re being cued to compare Newsies Heartfelt thanks to Robin Bernstein, Tyler Bickford, Ryan Bunch, Ken Cerniglia, Jennifer Fleeger, Don Gray, Susan Gubar, James Leve, Martin Marks, Michelle H. Martin, Marc Napolitano, Emily Richmond Pollock, Donelle Ruwe, Kieran Setiya, and Alexandra Valint for their helpful comments, questions, and research assistance at various stages of my work on Annie and Newsies. Thanks, also, to John Calhoun and other staff members at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. This essay is dedicated with love and gratitude to the marvelously exacting Patricia Gleeson (1944–2019), founder and director of Acting Up, an amateur children’s theater company that I performed in as a child.

Urchins, unite  139 to Annie. Both solos have a simple air, more meditative than razzmatazz, and thus very different from the brash trumpet fanfares that kick off other musicals such as Gypsy and Funny Girl.1 Reviewers of Newsies were not slow to pick up on this hint. Even though leading actor Jeremy Jordan was more than a decade older than the actress who originated the role of Annie, the New York Post’s critic quipped, “Put a red wig on him and he could be a male Andrea McArdle,” while the New York Times dismissed Disney’s newest theatrical venture as a cynical attempt to cash in on what reviewer Ben Brantley memorably dubbed “Urchin Appeal,” the sentimental allure of the familiar plot whereby a downtrodden orphan triumphs over tough circumstances. 2 Brantley and other reviewers were right to notice that a pattern of surface similarities links the musical crafted by Alan Menken, Jack Feldman, and Harvey Fierstein to the one penned by Charles Strouse, Martin Charnin, and Thomas Meehan. But far from reiterating the ethos of its famous predecessor, Newsies ingeniously revises Annie, radicalizing its politics by transforming a thinly disguised valentine to big business into a rousing celebration of working-class solidarity and the power of collective action. In this essay, I first trace how Annie promotes a comforting fantasy about individual agency and the American way: namely, that our socioeconomic system works swell, since the intervention of an idealistic child is all that it takes to get capitalist kingpins and democratic lawmakers working together to ensure the wellbeing of all Americans. On the surface, Newsies seems to adhere to this formula, too, since both shows feature a plucky young person bringing a wealthy businessman into contact with a politician named Roosevelt. Yet, I contend that Newsies actually functions as an antidote to Annie by insisting that the individual is not strong enough to change the world; collective action is necessary to force the self-interested powers-that-be to share the wealth that working-class labor helps to generate. A celebration of joint effort—rather than individual heroics— manifests itself not only in the plot of Newsies but also in Christopher Gattelli’s choreography and many of the musical choices made by composer Alan Menken, vocal arranger Michael Kosarin, and orchestrator Danny Troob. Besides tracing how Newsies revises Annie, I also pay attention to the shifts in emphasis that occur as source texts get adapted and musicals move from one medium to another. As we will see, the creators of Annie tried to eschew the reactionary conservatism of their source material, Harold Gray’s popular comic strip Little Orphan Annie (1924– 68). 3 After theater critic Walter Kerr slammed a pre-Broadway version of the musical for sliding “dizzily” back and forth between Gray’s politics (“somewhere to the far right of Genghis Khan”) and a more liberal worldview,4 its chastened creators added a few more pointedly progressive moments. Yet, the ease with which the 1982 film version of Annie strips away these aspects of the show reveals that Charnin and company never fully

140  Marah Gubar transmuted the arch-conservatism of their source text. In contrast, Newsies began life as a movie musical whose progressive, pro-union message was weakened by the filmmakers’ lingering commitment to the nostalgic myth of American self-reliance. But when Disney gave the go-ahead for Newsies to be transformed into a stage musical, the creative team made a series of clever revisions that brought almost every aspect of the show into harmony with its message that agency is not the same thing as autonomy: because individual people are vulnerable, flawed, and dependent on one another to survive and thrive, making the world a better and fairer place depends on collective effort. The success of Menken, Feldman, Fierstein, and company reminds us that just because a show is bankrolled by the mighty Disney corporation, we cannot simply assume that it is politically retrogressive or artistically suspect. At the same time, the story of why and how Newsies morphed into a Broadway hit provides a potent corrective to accounts of youth culture that characterize it as a top-down phenomenon in which powerful adults impose cultural artifacts onto passive children. Like the real-life newsboys who pressured mighty newspaper publishers to give in to their demands—whose actions serve as the basis for Newsies’s plot—young people played an active role in persuading the gun-shy Walt Disney Company to produce a stage version of a film that had been a flop at the box office in 1992. The impetus to bring Newsies back in a new format came not from corporate executives but from avid fans, many of whom had seen the film on the Disney Channel or home video as children or teenagers. For years, high schoolers, college students, camp counselors, educators, and community groups pressured Disney to release a script of Newsies so that young people could perform it. Unable to ignore the fact that the film had become one of “the top-requested titles for stage adaptations,” Disney convened a creative team to draft a show that it planned to license for regional, amateur, and school productions after they worked out the kinks with a short run at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.5 But the critical and popular reaction to this production was so positive that Disney decided to spring for a limited Broadway engagement, which was eventually extended to an open-ended run when “fansies” of all ages turned out in force despite mixed reviews. It is not a new insight that the musical is a highly collaborative art form. Yet as Jim Lovensheimer notes, “How many times have the phrases ‘Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story’ (what would Jerome Robbins have said about that?) or ‘a Stephen Sondheim musical’ been used to identify a work that in actuality was the result of a collaborative team?”6 Part of the reason why this problem persists is logistical. Even if we aim to allocate credit more generously, cramming in references to everyone involved in the making of a musical is no easy task. I speak from experience. In tracing how Annie and Newsies have evolved over time, across genres, and in response to the reactions of fans and critics, my goal is to treat the musical not just as a broadly collaborative endeavor but also as a wonderfully vivid example of non-autonomous creative agency. Yet, I found it impossible to wedge into

Urchins, unite  141 my opening paragraphs an acknowledgment of how deeply the Newsies musical draws on the work of Bob Tzudiker and Noni White (who wrote the original screenplay for the Newsies film) and Kenny Ortega (who directed and—along with Peggy Holmes—choreographed it). Better late than never. That said, I doubt that simple logistics fully account for the persistence of this problem. Inhabiting a capitalist culture based on individual ownership of private property, I suspect, makes us prone to gloss over rather than celebrate the messiness of an artistic process whereby different members of (sometimes multiple) creative teams collectively generate an artwork that does not cohere into a singular, immutable final product.7 The show must go on—and on, and on, as a cast reenacts it night after night or a new creative team reconceives it for another time and place. Even academics like me are not wholly excluded from this delightfully unruly process. Tzudiker credits the scholarship of historian David Nasaw for inspiring him and White to write about the 1899 newsboy strike in the first place,8 while after-the-fact analysis by film critics, literary critics, and theater historians has the potential to affect future productions in small but meaningful ways. However implausible that outcome may seem, I cherish its possibility and conclude this essay by suggesting a few ways in which revivals of Annie and Newsies might take my criticisms into account.

Annie’s mixed messages The little orphan known as Annie has been mixed up with newsies for a long time. Long before she was refashioned into a Broadway belter, Annie starred in a comic strip drawn by Harold Gray, in which she tangled with a large newspaper seller named Lug. In a series of strips from 1932, lazy Lug goes on strike for better pay, prompting industrious Annie to cross his picket line as she declares, “It’s a free country—you’ve got no right to spoil a good job for some one else who is willin’ to work!”9 When Lug protests, Annie beats him up, takes his job, and works so hard that her new boss, Mr. Agate, spontaneously decides to pay her 50% more than what Lug was getting (see Figure 8.3). Guided by his conviction that individual initiative is all you need to succeed in a capitalist economy, Gray invites us to sympathize with a scab and her new boss rather than a striker. Since generous magnates like Mr. Agate will voluntarily give their workers “a square deal,”10 Gray repeatedly stressed, there was no need for the “New Deal” proposed by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which included legislation that protected the rights of workers to unionize and children to refrain from laboring and attend free public schools. Gray sided instead with FDR’s Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover, who had argued that a mixture of self-help and private philanthropy would lift the country out of the Great Depression without the need for systemic governmental intervention. Convinced that providing direct assistance to poor families would “injur[e] the spiritual responses of American people,” Hoover declined to fund even a single program aimed at

142  Marah Gubar

Figure 8.3 Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie, October 22, 1932.

improving the health and education of American young people, ignoring the pledges made in the “Children’s Charter” that emerged from a White House conference that he himself had sponsored on child welfare.11 Only after FDR took office in 1933 did the US government move beyond merely paying lip service to the wellbeing of children and start passing legislation that outlawed the most exploitative forms of child labor and aimed to “eliminate basic inequities in opportunity among young citizens.”12 As Gray’s contemporaries recognized, his characterization of Annie and Daddy Warbucks amounted to nothing less than a full-blown defense of Hoover’s faith in personal initiative, small government, and laissez-faire capitalism.13 In strip after strip, Gray attempted to persuade his audience that the social safety net proposed by FDR and the Democrats would impair the rugged self-reliance that he regarded as integral to the American character. For example, Gray has 11-year-old Annie scorn the opportunity to attend a public school by exclaiming, “‘Free!’ Huh—Nothin’ is free—It all costs somebody—Too many people are livin’ ‘free’ off o’ other people—I’ll keep tryin’ to earn my way.”14 As this remark and Annie’s success at supporting herself as a newsie indicate, Gray’s little orphan functions less like Daddy’s dependent than as his double: both are hard-working, resilient figures who fight their way up from rags to riches, not once but many times over the run of Gray’s strip. Since drawing attention to the vulnerability of children had historically been a way to expose the excesses and failures of capitalism, representing a young girl as “tougher than hell, with a heart of gold and a fast left”— Gray’s famous description of his little heroine—makes this financial system seem perfectly humane, as does Daddy’s much-vaunted philanthropy.15

Urchins, unite  143 “Sure—‘Daddy’ earns billions—an’ gives away billions of his own money, to help Americans! So that’s bad?” demands Annie in one strip.16 At a time when a wide gap between haves and have-nots caused many other cartoonists and commentators to portray the rich as greedy “fat cats” (a phrase coined in the 1920s), Gray insists that income inequality does not constitute a significant problem, because individual initiative is all it takes to solve it: work hard enough, and you will prosper, not least because “most good business men” (according to Daddy) will voluntarily offer to share the wealth with their employees.17 To further defuse concern about the gap between rich and poor, Gray repeatedly harps on the truism that “Money doesn’t buy happiness” and plays down the difficulties and drawbacks of being poor. When Martin Charnin, Thomas Meehan, and Charles Strouse decided to base a musical on Gray’s strip, they were uncomfortable enough with Gray’s politics that they had their Daddy Warbucks spearhead the New Deal rather than attack it. In the out-of-town try-out of Annie at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut, Daddy calls on FDR to come up with a new plan to combat poverty, then celebrates the president’s legislative accomplishments in the rah-rah finale “A New Deal for Christmas.” Yet, as I noted earlier, Walter Kerr nevertheless faulted the show for oscillating wildly between Gray’s conservatism and a more liberal ideology.18 When Annie went to Washington for another pre-Broadway try-out, Charnin and company heeded Kerr’s warning that “we had better get our politics straight” by inserting a new scene set in a Hooverville that swings the show further leftward.19 In the bitingly sarcastic song “We’d Like to Thank You (Herbert Hoover),” the hard-up inhabitants of this shantytown make clear that they were doing all right economically before the former president’s policies “made us what we are today” (1.3). 20 In other words, these people are poor not because they personally made unwise life choices but because of large-scale problems such as weak financial regulation and mass unemployment that a Republican-led government failed to fix. The opening verse of this musical complaint consists of a pounding march that implicitly associates the Hooverville-ites with soldiers and patriots, making it tough for audiences to dismiss them as lazy, un-American whiners. Set in a minor key, this march sounds more agonized than aggressive, recalling the Depression-era anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” As a result, when the chorus shifts into a major-key soft shoe, the musical bonhomie feels ironic, a perfect match for lyrics in which the poverty-stricken Hooverville-ites thank the former president for “really showing us the way” to prosperity. In part because this song is performed mostly in unison, a strong and appealing sense of working-class solidarity informs the Hooverville scene. Even though these have-nots—including an unsuccessful apple-seller—are desperately poor, they willingly share their inadequate dinner with Annie, and she, in turn, defends them when a couple of policemen violently evict them and destroy their makeshift homes (see Figure 8.4).

144  Marah Gubar

Figure 8.4 Photograph by Martha Swope of the Hooverville scene in the Broadway production of Annie (1977) ©Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

This sudden crackdown by the state comes across as a cruelly unjust example of “blaming the victim,” a powerful indictment of the American regulatory system as embodied by the callous cops. Now that the creators of Annie were representing poverty as a systemic problem in act 1, it made more sense to conclude act 2 by proposing a systemic solution. “A New Deal for Christmas” lauds FDR and his cabinet members as “Santa’s… brand new assistants” whose good works will “build every city up / Cheer every kiddy up” (2.6). Kerr revised his opinion, and Annie became a blockbuster hit, running for nearly six years on Broadway and spawning national tours, regional productions, and revivals. 21 Nevertheless, Annie continued to send ideologically mixed messages. Genuinely progressive moments in the original Broadway version of the show coexist uneasily with deeply conservative sentiments about personal autonomy and laissez-faire capitalism that are antithetical to FDR’s agenda and drawn directly from Gray’s comic strip. For example, the limp American flag affixed to one of the Hooverville hovels in Annie conveys skepticism about the socalled “American Dream”: the optimistic notion that any person, no matter how poor, can pull themself up by their own bootstraps. But this fantasy gets reinstated a few scenes later when Daddy tells Annie about his origins: WARBUCKS: I was born into a very poor family in what they call Hell’s Kitchen, right here in New York. Both of my parents died before I was

Urchins, unite  145 ten. And I made a promise to myself—some day, one way or another, I was going to be rich. Very rich. ANNIE: That was a good idea. WARBUCKS: By the time I was twenty-three I’d made my first million. Then, in ten years, I turned that into a hundred million…But, I’ve lately realized something. No matter how many Rembrandts or Duessenbergs you’ve got, if you have no one to share your life with, if you’re alone, then you might as well be broke and back in Hell’s Kitchen. (1.7) Celebrating unrestrained capitalist accumulation while simultaneously insisting that money doesn’t matter is a classic Gray gesture, as is the decision to imply that individuals can simply decide to be wealthy and make that happen all on their own. In both strip and musical, Daddy presents himself as an entirely self-made man. To be sure, audiences often giggle at Annie’s naïvely enthusiastic response to Warbucks’s vow to amass immense wealth, as they do when Miss Hannigan grumbles, “Why any kid would want to be an orphan, I’ll never know” (1.1)—another line that exaggerates how much personal choice people have over their own destinies. But the musical itself winds up sharing Annie’s ingenuous excitement about living high on the hog. No matter how much praise you heap on FDR for his egalitarian legislative agenda, the fact remains that you can’t send a truly progressive message about income equality if your narrative solution to the problem of poverty involves taking a single poor person and elevating her to the status of a billionaire. “Nothing but the best for you, Annie,” Warbucks tells her (1.5), which means that if she wants tennis lessons, Grand Slam champion Don Budge will drop everything to teach her; if she needs to find her parents, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI are at her service. In other words, although early numbers such as “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” and “We’d Like To Thank You (Herbert Hoover)” prod us to regard the yawning gap between rich and poor as a problem, the moment Annie arrives at Warbucks’s mansion, we are invited to revel in the fact that some people are so wealthy that they reside in houses as big as train stations where everyone around them caters to their every whim. “I think I’m gonna like it here” (1.5), sings Annie as Warbucks’s staff cavorts around her in a classic meet-the-servants scene, my term for those delusive moments when working-class laborers line up to express to an adorable young person the thrill they take in serving them, a trope we can trace back to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and forward to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991). 22 Watching Warbucks’s staff dance around gaily with their mops and dusters is especially jarring given that Annie and other orphans, just a few scenes earlier, have portrayed housework as the bane of their “hard-knock life.” Meet-the-servants scenes refuse to admit that there could be any such thing as working-class solidarity by indulging in the fantasy that lowerclass adults embrace their subservient position so enthusiastically that they

146  Marah Gubar cannot distinguish themselves from their jobs, their boss’s interests from their own. The sentiments expressed by the Beast’s ecstatic attendants in Disney’s “Be Our Guest”—“Life is so unnerving / To a servant who’s not serving / He’s not whole without a soul to wait upon”23 —echo the moment in “I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here” when Warbucks’s servants enthusiastically assure Annie that “We have but one request / Please put us to the test.” Tellingly, the household staff in Annie bursts into song just after Warbucks’s secretary Grace assures Annie that “You’re our guest,” a line that signals just how closely Grace identifies with her boss, even in his absence. Following her lead, the other servants exult, “We’ve never had a little girl,” as if they themselves have adopted Annie into their hearts as a source of intense emotional pleasure, rather than recognizing that her arrival effectively doubles their workload (1.5). “Since you came our way,” they later sing to Annie, “It’s Christmas . . . every day” (2.5). What gets erased here is the possibility that workers might have a different perspective than their boss (e.g., Warbucks’s servants might have children of their own to treasure rather than investing themselves so passionately in the wellbeing of their boss’s ward). Much like “plantation myth” narratives that justify slavery by pretending that African Americans were treated (and regarded themselves) as cherished members of white families, stories that feature meet-the-servants scenes rationalize economic inequality by romanticizing the relationship between boss and workers, a rose-colored vision of inter-class harmony that the creators of Annie embrace so fully that they have Warbucks fall in love with his secretary. As the show goes on, the creators of Annie repeatedly undercut the powerful critique of economic inequality sent by the Hooverville scene. Take for example the stop-and-go showstopper “Easy Street,” performed by Annie’s former caretaker Miss Hannigan, her conniving brother Rooster, and his girlfriend. As if these working-class characters lack the initiative to keep dancing and singing full-out, the hootchy-kootchy chorus of this number is repeatedly put on pause for dialogue, not to mention a second iteration of the song’s verse in which Rooster and Miss Hannigan whine about how unfair it is that they have to “scrounge / For three or four bucks,” working hard for “peanuts” while Annie is “livin’ fat” with Warbucks (1.7). Whereas the Hooverville scene portrays the gap between rich and poor as unjust, “Easy Street” disavows this critique by putting it into the mouths of the show’s villains. In order to side with the good guys, audience members must now reject the idea that income inequality is a problem. Only greedy, lazy scoundrels, this song implies, would object to the fact that poor people earn “peanuts,” while rich ones rake in the dough. Economists note that capitalism generates substantial inequalities in wealth and income unless specifically egalitarian policies are put into place. Yet, “Easy Street” suggests that it is working-class people who “fix the game / with something shady,” who “stack the aces” and “load the dice.” Projecting this libel onto poor characters permits us to sympathize even more fully with the show’s resident fat cat, whose extravagant lifestyle we might otherwise question.

Urchins, unite  147 But perhaps the most egregious betrayal of the egalitarian ethos of the Hooverville scene occurs in a catchy duet late in act 2 that finds Annie and her new guardian celebrating how invulnerable they are to material circumstances. The only love song shared by two people in the show, “I Don’t Need Anything But You,” opens with Daddy beginning sentences (“We’re tying a knot”) that Annie finishes (“they never can sever”). Later, in a lyric whose importance is elevated by the fact that they sing it in harmony, they add, “And if tomorrow, / I’m an apple-seller, too— / I don’t need anything but you” (2.5). Are we actually supposed to believe that if only the hard-up apple-seller featured in the Hooverville scene had a little girl like Annie to love, he wouldn’t mind being broke and destitute? The sentiment is lifted straight out of Gray’s strip, but it clearly constitutes a case of wishful thinking, particularly given the high rates of parental desertion during the 1930s, a fact that helps explain why Annie is available for Warbucks to adopt in the first place. And speaking of Annie’s parents, if money really doesn’t matter to her, then shouldn’t she be more excited when they finally show up? In her opening song, “Maybe,” Annie prays to be reunited with her mother and father and evinces unconcern about their material circumstances: “Don’t really care / As long as they’re mine!” (1.1). But in act 2, when a couple arrive bearing seemingly decisive proof that they are her long-lost parents, Annie’s desire to rejoin her biological family evaporates. As audience members, we know that this twosome is actually Rooster and his girlfriend in disguise, but Annie doesn’t. All she knows about them is that they “ain’t got much” money and plan to raise her on a little pig farm in New Jersey (2.5). Faced with the actual prospect of growing up poor, our normally optimistic heroine fails to persuade herself that she’ll find her new digs “as nice as right here”—Daddy’s Manhattan mansion (2.6). So “maybe” money matters to her more than she and her creators are willing to admit. Because the stage version of Annie retains so much of Gray’s original enthusiasm about laissez-faire capitalism and personal autonomy, the makers of the 1982 Columbia film version of the musical had no trouble stripping off its progressive veneer to reveal its conservative core. Working under the direction of John Huston, writers Carol Sobieski and Thomas Meehan (author of the original book of Annie) simply cut the anti-Hoover and pro-FDR songs, even as they added moments that extol the glories of capitalism. When a crazy Russian lobs a bomb into Warbucks’s study, for example, Grace explains to Annie that her boss is under attack because “he’s living proof that the American system really works, and the Bolsheviks don’t want anybody to know about that.” Rather than acknowledge how many people had been thrust into penury under this supposedly successful system, the creators of the film eliminate the Hooverville scene, thereby inviting us to forget about the millions of adults rendered destitute during the Great Depression, not to mention the structural issues that contributed to their plight. Indeed, this film represents the problem of poverty and its solution in relentlessly individualistic terms. We are invited to care only about a single

148  Marah Gubar poor child who needs to be rescued from a couple of clearly identifiable villains whose lowly class status signals that working-class adults function either as loyal, happy underlings or lazy, resentful criminals (given that the third option represented by Hooverville-ites has vanished). The film’s memorable climax, wherein our heroine climbs up a railway bridge to escape Rooster’s clutches, brings Annie fully in line with Gray’s (and Hoover’s) faith that private philanthropy beats systemic reform. “Fear not, poor child,” this scene seems to say, “for surely some rich person—and his devoted minions—will voluntarily airlift you out of poverty!” As if further proof were needed of the regressive politics of the film, Huston and his collaborators reinstate Daddy’s violent and mysterious henchmen, Punjab and the Asp, who embody racist stereotypes of Oriental otherness (and who Charnin and company had purposefully excluded from the stage version of Annie). 24 To be sure, the 1982 film does include the scene in which Annie goes to Washington and persuades Warbucks to help FDR administer the New Deal. But rather than attesting to any kind of informed investment in particular policies, this scene merely promotes what Lauren Berlant calls “infantile citizenship”: the notion that the ideal American is a naïvely patriotic, childlike figure. 25 Because Annie’s clueless optimism charms Democrats and Republicans into working together, she closely resembles the idealistic, inexperienced characters Berlant describes, whose pilgrimages to Washington ultimately prove that “the system works!”26 Even more than the film’s climax, this scene suggests that large-scale problems such as poverty and partisan gridlock can be solved by the singular interventions of powerfully influential individuals. A small, parentless child preaching optimism is all that it takes to persuade a few good men from opposite sides of the political spectrum to work together to solve America’s economic crisis. As part of this glorification of individual agency, Annie cues its audience members to invest emotionally in only a few characters. The closing scenes of the film don’t even bother to tell us what becomes of the other orphans; instead, we get multiple songs celebrating Annie and her personal bond with Warbucks, including “We Got Annie” and “I Don’t Need Anything But You.” This tight focus on one very special girl harkens back to Gray’s comic strip: “There’s only one little Annie,” his Warbucks gloats, “and she’s mine.”27 As this line indicates, Gray regards the child as a personal possession who satisfies the emotional needs of particular adults rather than as a member of an especially vulnerable class of people whose youth might require their society to put into place special protections to ensure their wellbeing, support their development, and guard against their economic exploitation. Like Gray, the creators of Annie (show and film) portray their eponymous heroine as a Teflon Kid, my term for fictional children who are sweet and tender yet also miraculously tough, impervious to negative experiences such as growing up poor, hungry, and unloved, which magically bounce

Urchins, unite  149 off them without leaving a mark.28 Despite having grown up parentless in a punishing institutional environment, Annie carries no physical or emotional scars. She is perfectly healthy, cheerily optimistic, loving, trusting, polite, well-spoken, and so on. Teflon Kids invite adults to indulge in the fantasy that we can embrace a sentimental vision of childhood as vulnerable and precious while simultaneously refusing any civic, ethical, or economic responsibilities that might naturally be expected to go along with it. As we will see, the theatrical version of Newsies rejects this self-serving fantasy in favor of insisting on the shared vulnerability of all human beings and the need for young and old to band together to function as active and informed, not infantile, citizens. Newsies and the 99% Newsies is that rare thing: a movie musical refashioned into a far more artistically coherent and successful stage show. Based on the true story of a strike organized by New York City newsboys in 1899, film and show share the same central plot. Gouged out of their already-meager earnings by greedy publishing titans, the newsies band together into a union and compel Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst to give them a squarer deal, backing the tycoons into a corner by threatening them with the prospect of a city-wide children’s strike. Inspired by historian David Nasaw’s fascinating account of the 1899 strike in his book Children of the City (1985), screenwriters Bob Tzudiker and Noni White created a film musical that is as vocal in its support of organized labor as 1930s stage shows such as The Cradle Will Rock and Pins and Needles. Yet, the film version of Newsies dilutes the force of this invigorating message about the power of collective action due to its lingering attachment to the same sort of heroic individualism that informs Annie. Under the direction of Kenny Ortega, the creative team makes its investment in the distinctly American ideal of the self-reliant individual evident in the opening frames of the film. After a title informs viewers that Tzudiker and White’s story “is based on actual events,” we see a sequence of sepia-toned images of the actors who play the newsies, accompanied by a voiceover narration that explains what their lives were like in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City. So far, so good, but then the voiceover concludes by solemnly informing us that the newsies “were a ragged army without a leader. Until one day, all that changed.” At this point, the camera zooms in on the face of Christian Bale, who plays the leading role of Jack Kelly, thereby (incorrectly) suggesting that the film will revolve around a singular hero. The filmmakers then reinforce this individualist ethos by cutting to a plaque on a statue of Horace Greeley that features the injunction made famous by this nineteenth-century spokesman for self-reliance: “GO WEST YOUNG MAN.” Raised by a poor family that was too proud to accept a charitable offer that would have enabled their son to attend high school

150  Marah Gubar and college, Greeley began working as a printer’s apprentice at age 15 and eventually gained fame as an influential newspaper editor.29 In his editorials, he exhorted boys and men to strike out on their own to a frontier he characterized as a golden land of opportunity where “your capacities are sure to be appreciated, and your energy and industry rewarded.”30 Neither the movie nor the stage version of Newsies ultimately allows Jack to follow through on his dream to head west, as expressed in the soaring ballad “Santa Fe.” But the filmmakers nevertheless remain attached to Greeley’s lone ranger mentality, as indicated by their decision to nickname Jack “Cowboy” and portray him as an immature kid who is nevertheless tough enough to win his way through the world with his fists, much like Gray’s Annie. The first quarter of the film features Jack reveling in a bloody boxing match and beating up older, larger men. In contrast, the stage version of Newsies immediately distances itself from the mythos of the indomitable individual. Book writer Harvey Fierstein and his collaborators strip away Jack’s “Cowboy” nickname and fondness for fisticuffs in favor of portraying him as a sensitive, introspective young man who likes to draw and paint. They also choose to open their show not with the up-tempo newsie number “Carrying the Banner” but rather with a quiet prologue that stresses Jack’s vulnerability and interconnectedness with other people. Like the first few bars of the overture, this prologue invites audiences to compare the show to Annie, since both musicals open in a tenement-filled area of Manhattan so late at night that it’s almost morning, as a poor orphan fantasizes about finding a better life elsewhere. But whereas Annie prays in “Maybe” that her parents will show up and usher her back into the privacy of her own home, Jack’s dream of striking out for “Santa Fe” is shared: unlike film Jack, stage Jack sings this song to and with his best friend Crutchie, whom he invites to accompany him out west. This duet’s quiet close involves Jack asking his limping pal, “Don’t you know that we’s a fam’ly? / Would I let ya down? / No way!”31 Besides setting up the theme of brotherly solidarity that runs through the rest of the show, these lines also prompt us to realize how little we are invited to care about Annie’s compatriots. As its singular title suggests, Annie isn’t really about multiple orphans. Pepper, Duffy, and Kate have such small parts that they are hard for audience members to keep straight. In contrast, the creators of Newsies follow through on their pointedly plural title by shaping their show not just around the question of what will happen to Jack but also around Crutchie’s fate. His mauling at the hands of strike-breakers and cops precipitates the climax of act 1, prompting a terrified Jack to quit the strike. Then, late in act 2, Crutchie’s rescue from the cruelly unsafe “Refuge” and reunion with his fellow newsies constitutes a key component of the show’s happy ending. As a result, even before the creators of Newsies took the remarkable step of adding a second-act solo for Crutchie to the national tour of the show (“Letter from the Refuge”), he was already a far more developed character than Annie’s poorly differentiated peers.

Urchins, unite  151 The stingy apportioning of solo lines and individualized dance moves to non-red-haired orphans in Annie makes sense, given that the show’s purported celebration of democracy masks an essentially oligarchic world view, whereby a small group of well-connected people control the country and dominate the airwaves. In contrast, the creators of Newsies craft a more truly egalitarian show in which even the newsie ensemble functions not as an undifferentiated mob but as a collection of distinguishable characters who have their own tics and talents. Specs, Romeo, Spot Conlon: these and other minor characters get the chance to showcase their individual skills, whether by cracking jokes, singing solos, or performing virtuoso dance moves and spectacular tumbling runs. Meanwhile, lead characters in Newsies very often sing the same notes and dance the same steps as chorus members (see Figure 8.5). Having chorus members act like leads and leads act like chorus members not only infuses an egalitarian ethos into the show, but it also subtly assuages any audience anxiety that supporting worker’s rights means embracing socialism, since the non-interchangeability of these players hints that even within tightknit collectives there is still plenty of room for individual initiative and achievement. Yet even as the creators of Newsies celebrate young people’s impressive personal abilities and collective power to change the world, they never indulge in the fantasy that these kids are totally autonomous agents. To begin with, consider their treatment of disability, which departs from the film in key ways. Onscreen, Crutchie vehemently informs Jack that “I don’t want nobody carryin’ me. Never, d’ya hear?”—and no subsequent event or line undercuts this defiant declaration of independence. Onstage, Crutchie

Figure 8.5 Photograph by Deen van Meer of the “Seize the Day” number in the Broadway production of Newsies (2012) ©Disney.

152  Marah Gubar worries less about autonomy than about how his culture treats people whom it considers disabled. In the rooftop dialogue that opens the show, Crutchie tells Jack that he has gotten up early so that he can beat the other kids down to the street and hopefully prevent anyone from noticing his injury: if “someone gets the idea I can’t make it on my own,” he explains, “they’ll lock me up in The Refuge for good. Be a pal, Jack, Help me down” (1.1). At this point, Crutchie suddenly loses his footing and almost falls from the rooftop; Jack comes to his rescue by fishing him up again. Right from the start, Newsies shows us that individual initiative is by no means irreconcilable with asking for and receiving help. Crutchie has plenty of agency, but he is not, nor should he have to be, a fully autonomous agent who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps. Crutchie’s injury also invokes Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim, a character whose disability was meant to highlight how capitalism had fostered extreme income disparities and related injustices such as unequal access to medical care. Such figures remind us that poverty has debilitating effects on bodies and minds. Crutchie, in other words, is not a Teflon Kid—and crucially, neither is Jack. Despite his status as “the best” newsie in the business, Jack is by no means portrayed as an infallible, independent superhero (1.1). In another clever bit of foreshadowing, practically the first thing we see him do on the job is partner up with Davey and Les, two brothers new to the business. The three boys join forces not just because Les and his brother want to profit from Jack’s experience but also because Jack knows that Les’s innocent face will enable them to sell more papers. Even the great Jack Kelly could use a little help. Moreover, although Jack plays an integral role in persuading the other newsies to rebel against their exploitative bosses, his limitations as a leader become painfully clear as the action unfolds. At the end of act 1, a panicked Jack quits the strike after seeing his friends get beaten up by the cops. Midway through act 2, a re-committed Jack loses hope yet again and betrays the newsies’ cause. After unexpectedly using his speech at the big newsie rally to urge the other boys to vote against striking, Jack darts to the side of the stage to accept a bribe from Pulitzer, selling out his friends for the price of a first-class train ticket to Santa Fe. The nature and scale of Jack’s failure in this scene is so shocking that it demands some kind of explanation. Katherine, an aspiring reporter who helps publicize the strike, provides one when she discovers Jack’s sketchbook, which depicts the details of his deprived childhood at the Refuge. This scene shows us that, unlike Teflon Annie, Jack has not escaped his underprivileged upbringing unscathed. Years of living rough have undermined his belief that he can beat the system, as has the cautionary tale of his father. In the brief, brilliant prologue that I have already discussed, Jack relates this story to Crutchie in order to explain why he wants to leave New York for a new life out west: JACK: Them streets down there sucked the life right outta my old man. Years of rotten jobs, stomped on by bosses. And when they finally

Urchins, unite  153 broke him, they tossed him to the curb like yesterday’s paper. Well, they ain’t doin’ that to me. CRUTCHIE: But everyone wants to come here. JACK: New York’s fine for those what can afford a big strong door to lock it out. It’s hard not to read this moment as a swipe at Annie’s celebration of “N.Y.C.” as a golden land of opportunity that is equally appealing to rich and poor, “Dapper Dan” and “hobo man” alike (2.1)—and this at a time (the late 1970s) when the Big Apple was grappling with a fiscal crisis, failing infrastructure, police corruption, and high crime rates. Besides reminding us that people from disparate income brackets experience the same city in radically different ways, Jack and Crutchie’s opening exchange foreshadows the fact that Jack’s father is not the only Kelly whose insecure existence has drained him of resilience and self-confidence. Notably, when Jack loses faith that he and his working-class buddies can successfully stand up to the powers-that-be, the characters who lend him the strength to rejoin the fight both hail from more stable homes: Davey has two parents and a roof over his head, while Katherine was raised in a wealthy household. The newsies and their supporters win the day not solely because of Jack’s charismatic leadership, but also because they work together as a group. In both versions of Newsies, after Pulitzer raises the price the boys must pay for papers, Jack gleans information about strikes and unions from the better-informed Davey. In dialogue that leads smoothly into the raucous call-and-response opening of “The World Will Know,” Jack discovers from Davey that forming a union helps workers to pressure their bosses for safer working conditions, shorter hours, and better wages. He then translates Davey’s words into shouted slogans better calculated to appeal to the crowd of working- class kids. In other words, even Jack’s oratorical power, arguably his biggest strength, depends on outside assistance. In choosing to rebel against their bosses, he and the other newsies have the freedom to exercise significant agency, as Davey recognizes when he notes that “we’re not enslaved to them. We’re free agents” (1.5). And yet, no newsie is portrayed as a fully independent and invulnerable being, nor are the newsies as a group portrayed as sufficient unto themselves. Over and over again, their success hinges on getting assistance not only from one another (as when Spot Conlon and his fellow Brooklynites finally join the strike) but also from adults (as when Medda Larkin, a vaudeville star, lends them her theater for their rally). The stage musical doubles down on this point by giving characters other than Jack more credit for helping to initiate, sustain, and conclude the strike than the film does. Take Davey, for instance. The movie version of “The World Will Know” features a doubtful Davey trailing silently behind Jack as his more vocal friend exhorts the Manhattan newsies to take action from a perch high atop the statue of Greeley before leading them through the streets to Pulitzer’s office to demand better treatment. Persuaded by the

154  Marah Gubar end of this number to join Jack’s cause, Davey nevertheless does not participate in the meeting with Pulitzer because “you’re the leader, Jack.” Music, choreography, and lines like this one identify film Jack as the sole instigator of the strike. No wonder, then, that the reporter character, a grown man named Bryan Denton in this version, later describes the strike’s origins in singular terms: “Sometimes, all it takes is a voice. One voice, that becomes a hundred, and then a thousand.” In contrast, the stage version of “The World Will Know” features Jack and Davey working as a team to persuade the Manhattan newsies to form a union; several of Jack’s solos are changed to duets with Davey, and the song’s climax finds the two boys linking arms to venture into Pulitzer’s office together, along with little Les. Similarly, the reporter morphs from an onlooker who occasionally lends a helping hand (Bryan) into a more integral part of the group that leads the strike (Katherine). No wonder, then, that the makers of the stage musical cut the line about the power of a single voice and replaced it with one that stresses the collective nature of this industrial action: Katherine, an impressively assertive female character, informs Jack, “The strike was your idea. The rally was Davey’s. And now my plan will take us to the finish line” (2.5). Indeed, Fierstein and his colleagues repeatedly transform moments of macho unilateralism into scenes that stress the vulnerability of individuals and the importance of collaboration and compromise. Consider, for example, how they rewrite the first and final confrontations between labor and management. In the film, the newsies’ strike gets off to a rousing start when the boys miraculously manage to beat up a heavily armed mob of Pulitzer’s stooges and corrupt cops. Elated by their virile victory, they compare Jack to “a general” and claim for themselves, one by one, the (singular) title of “King of New York” in a bouncy and boastful song-and-dance number led by Jack. Fierstein and company retain this toe-tapping routine for the stage version, but the context for its performance could not be more different: the boys have been soundly and savagely defeated by Pulitzer’s men, causing a panicked Jack to quit the strike and go into hiding. The other newsies muster the confidence to remobilize not because Jack reappears to inspire them, but because Katherine turns up and shows them that she has gotten their story into print despite Pulitzer’s declaration of a blackout on strike news. With Katherine taking Jack’s place at the center of the action, a panegyric to male power is transformed into a celebration of teamwork between the boys and a smart, ambitious girl. The strike’s resolution gets a makeover, too. The film portrays it as a unilateral rout: instead of depicting a negotiation between labor and management, the moviemakers skip straight to Jack’s emerging from Pulitzer’s office and announcing, “We beat ’em!” (And the crowd goes wild.) In the stage version, by contrast, we witness the messy give-and-take between politicians, bosses, and workers that produces a workable compromise: a scene of collective bargaining rather than one in which one side gloats over

Urchins, unite  155 having defeated the other.32 In Annie, the heroine’s singular resilience and loving bond with a big businessman indicate that the child and capitalism are a match made in heaven. Newsies, by contrast, emphasizes how easily “life’s little guys”—a group that includes working-class parents as well as children—can be harmed and exploited if they don’t band together with each other and allies of various ages, classes, and genders (2.7). Jack’s drawing of tiny newsies getting crushed under the heel of a giant Pulitzer attests to this point, as does the moment in “The World Will Know” when Jack, Davey, and Les march into Pulitzer’s office to demand that he give them what Jack later describes as “a square deal” (1.8). Far from being amply rewarded for their hard work and chutzpah, as Little Orphan Annie strips like “The Square Deal” (July 11, 1935) would predict, they are kicked out on their keisters. Only when the newsies unite with other urchins, Katherine, and some powerful adult supporters—including Governor Teddy Roosevelt—do they finally manage to extort a hard-won, imperfect, but mutually acceptable compromise from their boss. In Annie, too, a politician named Roosevelt steps forward to champion the well-being of America’s working-class children. But the representation of democracy in these two shows is worlds apart. Whereas Annie peddles the consolatory fantasy that great men like FDR and Daddy Warbucks can be trusted to collaborate with one another for the common good, Newsies takes a much less idealistic view, as indicated by the fact that Katherine’s anxiety-fueled patter song “Watch What Happens” finds her quoting a bit of Lord Acton’s famous statement that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”33 Corruption is indeed openly acknowledged as a systemic problem in Newsies: the main message of the climactic encounter between Teddy Roosevelt, Pulitzer, and the newsies is not that great men will work together for the common good, but rather that self-interest is such a powerful motivator for both businessmen and politicians that only vigorous grassroots efforts can protect the interests of ordinary people. After all, this meeting only occurs because the newsies have collectively managed to back Pulitzer into a corner with their city-wide children’s strike. At this late stage, Roosevelt finally appears and lends his support by threatening to investigate Pulitzer’s employment practices if he refuses to negotiate with Jack. Notably, the Governor intercedes not merely out of the goodness of his heart, but also because he bears a grudge against Pulitzer for campaigning to keep him out of office. Further, the implication here is that Pulitzer’s other unfair labor practices will be allowed to stand so long as he capitulates on this one point. More proof that democratic capitalism is not a perfectly fair and self-regulating system comes in the closing moments of the show, when Pulitzer gets back at Roosevelt by inviting Jack to contribute “a daily political cartoon” to his paper that will “expose the

156  Marah Gubar [shady] dealings in our own government back rooms” (2.7). Rather than endorsing the comforting fantasy that people of all classes can trust the powers-that-be to treat them fairly, Newsies suggests that ordinary Americans need to get involved and take action on their own behalf. Following Jack’s lead, we should educate ourselves about our options, join together with other oppressed parties, and work to rectify wrongs. Any lingering doubt about whether Newsies’s advocacy for an informed, vigilant American citizenry constitutes a corrective to Annie can be assuaged by comparing the newsies’ song “Seize the Day” to Annie’s anthem “Tomorrow,” as the opening bars of the Newsies overture invite us to do. In keeping with the cheerful acceptance of the socioeconomic status quo evident elsewhere in Annie, “Tomorrow” glorifies inaction. If times are tough, this famous tune suggests, don’t do anything to the world around you. Just adjust your attitude by saying to yourself that things will be brighter when a new day dawns and then “hang on” until that happy moment arrives (1.2). Ah yes, the inspirational message that you should passively wait for things to improve, which will happen not because you take any kind of positive action, but just because things generally tend to improve as naturally as the sun rises in the east. What seems like optimism here is actually blind faith, a perfectly content-less brand of confidence that even the song itself characterizes as illusory. Charnin’s lyrics reassure us that the future will be better than the present while simultaneously hinting that this brighter future will never actually arrive, since it’s “always a day away.” Meanwhile, Strouse’s music makes such endless deferral feel unproblematic, because Annie’s impressive ability to belt out this vocally challenging solo implies that she can single-handedly cope with anything the world throws at her. Since Teflon Kids magically combine tenderness and toughness, belting is the perfect mode of musical expression for them: when their little, delicate bodies suddenly produce big, brassy sounds, it makes Annie and the other orphans seem simultaneously fragile and indomitable.34 How appropriate, then, that “Tomorrow” functions both as a quiet, prayer-like lullaby that Annie sings to her dog and as a rousing public anthem declaimed in the Oval Office. The creators of Newsies counter the enervating notion that oppressed people should patiently wait “till tomorrow” with a compelling call to action: “Now is the time to seize the day” (1.8). At the same time, they acknowledge that the work of challenging entrenched power structures is too difficult and frightening to do alone. In keeping with the show’s egalitarian ethos, it is Davey rather than Jack who quietly sings this opening lyric because his friend is failing to persuade the nervous newsies to carry on with the strike given that reinforcements from other boroughs have not arrived. The “tick-tock, tick-tock” of alternating eighth notes in the accompaniment lends urgency to this gentle opening, as do chimes that indicate that the moment for action has arrived. In other words, music and lyrics alike insist that time is of the essence. If the newsies hope to improve their situation, they cannot merely sit around and vaguely hope that circumstances will

Urchins, unite  157 improve. Yet, defying “those with power / Safe in their tower” is no easy feat, as Davey admits in this opening solo when he sings, “Courage cannot erase our fear. / Courage is when we face our fear.” The vocal arrangement of “Seize the Day” bolsters the lyrics’ message that strength can be found in numbers. One voice, singing quietly about fear, is eventually joined by a second voice, as Jack and Davey together describe feeling braver because they are “side by side,” though they are still “too few in number” to effect change. As more and more newsies chime in, their voices grow increasingly stronger, and their words reflect a greater determination to act with alacrity: “If we stand as one, / Someday becomes somehow, / And a prayer becomes a vow, / And the strike starts right damn now!” Whereas “Tomorrow” and “Maybe” focus our attention on a lone orphan fantasizing that a happier fate will one day befall her, “Seize the Day” shows us a scared but determined group taking concrete steps to bring a better tomorrow into being: “Wrongs will be righted / If we’re united! / Let us seize the day!” (1.8). In his Tony-award-winning choreography for Newsies, Gattelli reinforces this point about the power of solidarity. Earlier numbers such as “Carrying the Banner” feature the not-yet-unionized newsies darting forward a few at a time to execute individualized dance steps based on different street activities, such as hopscotch and kicking the curb. But then, in “Seize the Day,” these same urchins begin moving as a unified group, stepping forward together in phalanx formations like the one pictured in Figure  8.5. Aaron J. Albano, who originated the role of Finch, notes that Gattelli “wanted none of us to be dancing the same thing until ‘Seize the Day.’ Ever. There is some unison movement, but it’s angry, explosive, unstructured, and unfocused. We have individual expressions of energy on our own. It’s not refined. We’re just separate guys until ‘Seize the Day,’ when we become the army, the union.”35 While Gattelli and his collaborators did indeed craft military-inspired moves and music for one section of “Seize the Day,” they also make a point of stressing that violence will not help the newsies to win their war. Perhaps the most moving part of “Seize the Day” comes when Davey and Jack urge their fellow strikers not to accost newsies who have not yet joined the strike: “Then say to the others / Who did not follow through, / ‘You’re still our brothers, / And we will fight for you’” (1.8). Egalitarian, nonviolent progressivism notwithstanding, it could be argued that Newsies romanticizes relations between the classes in much the same way that Annie does. Just like Warbucks’s love affair with his secretary, Jack’s romance with Katherine feels implausible, particularly when we learn that Katherine—in a surprise twist that might have embarrassed even Dickens—is Pulitzer’s daughter. Moreover, support for the young strikers comes not only from Katherine but also from other rich kids who likewise act against the interests of their own wealthy families. The notion that the bonds of age will magically trump those of class seems like wishful thinking.

158  Marah Gubar Yet, Newsies nevertheless manages to be much more honest than Annie about how class status affects intimate relationships. “I’m not an idiot,” Jack tells Katherine. “I know girls like you don’t wind up with guys like me” (2.5). Here and elsewhere, the creators of Newsies mark the fantasy that people can effortlessly transcend their class position as a fantasy. The sheer absurdity of the coincidence that, in a city filled with millions of girls, Jack happens to meet and fall in love with his boss’s daughter prompts us to recognize what an unlikely story this is. To be sure, as scholars have pointed out, musicals often throw together mismatched lovers who pour out their ambivalence about their relationship in a “conditional love song” in act 1 before reconciling themselves to rapture in act 2.36 But in Newsies, the coupling is so unlikely that the only romantic duet Jack and Katherine share comes late in act 2 and features the same uneasy mixture of hope and doubt that fuels conditional love songs such as “If I Loved You” from Carousel. Early in act 1, Carousel’s Billy and Julie anxiously imagine how they would feel if they fell in love with each other. Jack and Katherine have already fallen in love, yet rather than dwelling on their current state of infatuation in their wistful duet “Something to Believe In,” they mentally zoom forward by considering how they would feel if their relationship failed in the future. In the recurring chorus of this lyrical tune, Jack and Katherine take turns assuring each other that even if their romance only lasts for “a night,” …that’s all right. That’s all right. And if you’re gone tomorrow, What was ours still will be: I have something to believe in, Now that I know you believed in me. (2.5) Not only do these two lovers seem uncertain about whether their relationship will succeed, but they also seem more invested in the idea of being loved than in this particular relationship. After all, they sing the praises not of a special, idiosyncratic someone, but rather of “something to believe in”: love itself, perhaps, or even their own personal potential, as if they are saying, “Now that I know you believed in me, I can believe in myself and my own ability to change the world.” Tellingly, the most specific compliment Jack pays to Katherine in this song is to call her “an angel come to save me,” an image as trite and idealized as the Santa Fe cowboy that this version of Newsies so clearly marks as an imaginary being, a fantasy of masculinity rather than an accurate reflection of who Jack is. The female counterpart to such macho figures in the late nineteenth century was the self-denying “angel in the house,” an icon of traditional womanhood that bears very little resemblance to Katherine. Her unabashed ambition to break journalism’s glass ceiling by reporting

Urchins, unite  159 hard news marks her instead as a nascent “New Woman,” as does the typewriter that she sits at during “Watch What Happens.” Widely available for the first time in the 1880s, this machine was strongly associated with women leaving the home to pursue office careers.37 Menken and company highlight the inadequacy of Jack’s hyper-traditional language by upending a musical gender norm in “Something to Believe In.” Rather than having the soprano sing the melody and the tenor the supporting harmony, Jack’s ethereal melody floats above Katherine’s bracing harmony. As this arrangement indicates, Katherine could easily wind up supporting Jack rather than vice versa, given her wealthy background and potentially more lucrative choice of job. Thus, although the indisputably happy ending of Newsies presents Jack and Katherine as a couple prepared to face the future together, the sole love song they sing together hints that Jack’s initial instinct might well be correct: while the newsies’ union has definitely succeeded, theirs may yet fail due to their lack of knowledge of each other’s true characters, radically different backgrounds, or inability to cope with the consequences of Katherine’s professional ambitions. Other key moments in Newsies likewise draw attention to the ways in which money matters. For example, while Annie ignores the fact that capitalism tends to make the rich richer, the lead-in to “King of New York” highlights how fortunate folk sometimes profit merely from being fortunate. “Ya don’t need money when you’re famous,” Race explains to the other boys, “They gives ya whatever ya want gratis!” (2.1). The boys then begin listing all the things they desire that—for them—only money can buy, such as “a pair of new shoes with matchin’ laces” and “a permanent box at the Sheepshead races.” Similarly, Medda’s slyly humorous song “That’s Rich” undercuts Annie’s insistence that people “don’t need anything” but love. Medda begins this tune by lamenting that despite her wealth, “the thing I want most”—a man who got away—“I can’t get” (1.4). This lyric implies that what follows will echo the sentimentality of Warbucks’s wistful solo “Something Was Missing.” Yet, a comic turn at the song’s bridge finds Medda recognizing that she can “learn to make do”: heartbreak is “rough,” but happily “the mansion, the oil well, the diamonds, [and] the yacht” make life much easier to endure! To pretend otherwise would be both naïve and disingenuous. Despite the many ways in which Newsies successfully rewrites the problematic aspects of Annie, it is not without shortcomings. For example, even though the historian consulted by screenwriters Tzudiker and White estimates that “maybe one in fifteen [newsies] were girls,”38 the filmmakers nevertheless decided to feature an all-male ensemble, a choice that the creators of the stage show left unchallenged, even as they made the laudably feminist decision to transform the reporter figure into a groundbreaking girl. The show’s treatment of race is similarly both admirable and problematic. On the one hand, I find it heartening that every version of Newsies

160  Marah Gubar so far has featured a multiethnic ensemble, and that during the run-up to Broadway, the show’s creative team decided to base the character of Medda not on Swedish singer Jenny Lind but rather on African American vaudeville star Aida Overton Walker (1880–1914). This thoughtful and inclusive alteration tacitly acknowledges that “around the turn of the century, musical theatre became one of the few avenues of black mobility” in a profoundly racist culture.39 On the other hand, because the black characters in Newsies seem totally untouched by the injustices of the Jim Crow era, the show effectively invites audiences to forget that racism was (and remains) a corrosive force in American society. Medda’s final line of dialogue, in which she coquettishly propositions Governor Roosevelt as they stroll offstage together, is particularly problematic. It generally gets a big laugh, but when voiced by a black actress, it papers over the ugly fact that white panic about interracial mixing was so intense in the United States that anti-­ miscegenation laws remained on the books all the way up until 1967. Luckily, theater is not a static medium, which means that drama criticism has the potential to affect future versions of shows. Now that Disney has made Newsies available for amateur and professional productions, directors can try to fix these problems by casting girls as newsies and figuring out direct or indirect ways to correct the impression that black people during this era could remain oblivious to structural oppression in a racist culture. If an African American actress is playing Medda, for example, she could be invited to follow up her flirtatious overture to Governor Roosevelt by slyly apprising him of her plan to introduce him to her pal W. E. B. DuBois (who really did have a—rather volatile—relationship with the future president that began in the period after Newsies ends). If the ensemble is multiethnic, perhaps staging choices and set designs could silently remind audiences about segregation. And so on. In contrast, when I try to envision what a less problematic iteration of Annie would look like, I imagine a production that acknowledges the show’s shortcomings (rather than trying to fix them). Consider, for instance, what would happen if a director chose to cast all the orphan roles—including Annie—with adult women. Pepper and company could then double as Warbucks’s servants, so as to highlight the show’s double standard regarding domestic labor. At the same time, an adult Annie could force audiences to notice the creepily romantic overtones of her relationship with Warbucks. (Let’s face it: the secretary is just a beard.) And finally, replacing all the children with adults could prompt audiences to think about why blockbusters like Annie can afford to bank on the appeal of child performers. What does their presence add, and what does it mean that our culture continues to condone and celebrate professional child performers, even though we have outlawed so many other forms of child labor? As if the creative team behind Newsies had seen the troubling documentary Life After Tomorrow (2006), in which former Annies recall the stresses of carrying a high-pressure show on their small shoulders, they

Urchins, unite  161 chose to feature just one character—Les—who had to be played by a very young child on Broadway and the subsequent national tour. Or rather, by two children, since director Jeff Calhoun double-cast this part to reduce the workload on the boys. But notice that plot-wise, the show’s finale finds all the boys—including little Les—cheerfully continuing to work for Pulitzer, a denouement that seems to substantiate Richard Dyer’s concern that musicals “point to gaps or inadequacies in capitalism, but only those gaps or inadequacies that capitalism proposes itself to deal with.”40 Does the happiness of this happy ending serve to justify the Walt Disney Company’s own dependence on the labor of children and teens in its relentless pursuit of profit in the entertainment business (including film, television, theater, music, etc.)? Maybe so, but in all honesty this worry did not trouble me in the spring of 2012, as I sat in the Nederlander Theatre with tears streaming down my face as an audience packed with young people wildly cheered the very real and too often forgotten victories that the US labor movement has won for workers. Early on in the show, Finch dismisses the trolley workers strike as a “snoozer” of a story that neither the boys nor their customers care about (1.1). The humor of this moment becomes fully apparent only in retrospect, after we realize that the entire plot of Newsies revolves around persuading children and teens—on stage and in the audience—that strikes represent an exciting opportunity for an underprivileged majority to force a superrich minority to treat them more fairly. Musicals, Dyer worries, acknowledge social problems only to suffuse them with a consolatory utopian sensibility that tends to support rather than destabilize the status quo. But as Newsies’s own cast members recognized, the message of their show was beautifully in tune with the radicalism of the “Occupy Wall Street” protest happening a mere 20-minute subway ride away in Zuccotti Park at the very moment when Newsies opened on Broadway. Jeremy Jordan, who originated the role of Jack, made explicit what the Disney publicity machine played down by telling a reporter that “The newsboys are the 99% and Pulitzer is the 1%.”41 Despite its shortcomings, Newsies both reflects and enables a new willingness on the part of growing numbers of Americans to recognize the pressing problem of income inequality. More than that, the show outlines concrete steps that can be taken to address this dilemma head-on. In the process, it reminds us that optimism is not always a snare and delusion. Sometimes, it is a precondition for activism.

Notes

162  Marah Gubar

Urchins, unite  163

9

Agency, power, and the inner child The “Revolting Children” of Matilda the Musical Helen Freshwater Children spend so much time wanting to grow up, but you’re never done growing up. This is a really sad song. But Matilda gives us hope. :)

This comment, posted below a YouTube recording of the 2012 Royal Variety Performance of Matilda the Musical’s “When I Grow Up,” reveals that belief in the child as a source of hope and redemption is still alive and well in the twenty-first century.1 The portrayal of child as redeemer has a long cultural history. As Kimberley Reynolds notes, it finds its fullest literary expression in Romantic literature and in nineteenth-century Evangelical literature which proposes that the innocence, frankness, and goodness of children are capable of restoring “the moral wellbeing of adults and society.”2 The work of Carolyn Steedman and Claudia Nelson also makes it clear that the blurring of adult and child identities, and the connection between the figure of the child and an interiorized sense of self, can be traced back to the Victorian period and beyond.3 But the viewer quoted above is also drawing upon a relatively recent concept that now enjoys an extraordinary level of cultural ubiquity, that of the inner child.4 This chapter opens with a discussion of the prevalence of the concept of the inner child in contemporary self-help literature and interrogates the way in which the production of Matilda the Musical has been designed to appeal to “crossover” adult audiences through its invocation of the “inner child.” It analyzes how the literary tradition of child as redeemer is reconfigured in the musical and discusses the work of Carol Chillington Rutter and Robin Bernstein as it explores what might be meant by “childness” as a performative, theatrical tradition. The essay closes with an analysis of childhood agency in the musical.

Truth, purity, and authenticity: the appeal of the inner child The idea that “you’re never done growing up” or that adults all possess an “inner child” is a twentieth-century invention. First articulated in the 1960s, the notion that there is a “sort of child” in adults—an “inner child”—who has

Agency, power, and the inner child  165 a role to play in resolving present difficulties has now reached such a high level of popular acceptance that the phrase provides authors with a verbal springboard for new book titles that appeal to the reader’s “Inner Genius,” “Inner Ecosystem,” “Inner GPS,” “Inner Entrepreneur,” and even their “Inner King Kong.”5 The writings of practicing psychotherapists and counselors provide a measure of why this idea might have gained such traction. They indicate how powerfully, for some, the “inner child” is now associated with truth, purity, innocence, and authenticity. For example, Denver-based counselor Kate Daigle proclaims, “I believe that within each of us is our authentic and true self, and that our inner child is the purest form of who we are . . . . Through counseling, support, and love, our inner children can be freed and healed.”6 An article published in 2008 by practicing Los Angeles-based psychotherapist Stephen A. Diamond provides another evocative summary of the therapeutic investment in the concept of the inner child. Diamond opens his article by asking readers whether their adult self has “spent time with your inner child today?” and goes on to explain why they should do so. The problem, according to Diamond, is that many adults are unaware that they are not fully adult. He avers, “True adulthood hinges on acknowledging, accepting, and taking responsibility for loving and parenting one’s own inner child. For most adults, this never happens. Instead, their inner child has been denied, neglected, disparaged, abandoned or rejected.” Diamond then asserts that this abandonment is the product of social pressure to leave childhood and childish behavior behind us as we become adult. As he observes, “we’ve been taught that our inner child . . . must be stifled, quarantined or even killed.” The acts of violent suppression implied by Diamond’s choice of metaphors encourage his readers to anticipate the dire consequences of this process. For Diamond, this silencing matters not only because the inner child represents “our child-like capacity for innocence, wonder, awe, joy, sensitivity and playfulness” but also because it “holds our accumulated childhood hurts, traumas, fears and angers.” He proposes that challenges arise for these “so-called grown-ups or adults” as they become aware that they have not really left these feelings behind, and that their behavior is being “covertly controlled by this unconscious inner child.” Diamond’s use of language encourages his readers to visualize this damaged “inner child” as residing within the adult body. He asks us to imagine a “five-year-old running around in a forty-year-old frame,” attempting to make “adult decisions,” “to do a man’s or woman’s job,” or “to engage in grown-up relationships.” Diamond lists the affective outcomes of this mismatch between adult demands and child capacities, and he argues that this mismatch is the reason Why we feel so anxious. Afraid. Insecure. Inferior. Small. Lost. Lonely. But think about it: How else would any child feel having to fend for themselves [sic] in an apparently adult world? Without proper parental supervision, protection, structure or support?

166  Helen Freshwater He proposes that readers can deal with this problem by becoming conscious of their inner child, listening carefully to its needs, and learning to respond. Developing this consciousness and an appropriate response enables the realization of “true adulthood.” And this, as Diamond states, is all about becoming a better parent to one’s inner child: “Authentic adulthood requires both accepting the painful past and the primary responsibility for taking care of that inner child’s needs, for being a ‘good enough’ parent to him or her now—and in the future.”7 These two samples from the reams of writing circulating in this field provide some indication of why the concept is so appealing. Diamond presents a narrative which highlights the violent injustice of the silencing of the inner child, while Daigle foregrounds the delights that lie in store should one decide to engage with this therapeutic approach: freedom, healing, truth, and purity. The numerous self-help publications in this area outline the techniques and strategies that can be used to contact and connect with one’s inner child. These range from visualization and meditation to writing letters to one’s inner child or drawing with one’s non-dominant hand.8 Rachel Falconer makes connections between “the cult of ‘the inner child’” and the burgeoning adult readership for children’s literature in the years 1997–2007 in The Crossover Novel.9 She also highlights crossover fiction’s self-conscious acknowledgment of its appeal to an adult readership and proposes that this appeal requires a reconfiguration of some of the assumptions that have become central to the study of children’s literature and culture. Though scholars may still wish to ask, following Jacqueline Rose’s seminal study The Case of Peter Pan, “what it is that adults, through literature, want or demand of the child,” adult interest in children’s literature is no longer primarily unconscious or covert.10 Instead, it is one of the more visible symptoms of a much wider shift in social attitudes toward youth, age, and identity. Nevertheless, as Falconer demonstrates, the enormous growth in the adult market for children’s literature during the 2000s and the highly visible popular success of the works of J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman was also accompanied by critical controversy. She argues convincingly that the “cacophonous mixture of outrage, disgust, defensiveness, and conspiratorial solidarity” that greeted the blurring of child and adult spheres in the cultural realm can be attributed to broader anxieties about the dissolution of traditional distinctions and boundaries between childhood and adulthood.11 Falconer’s reading of the critical controversies that surrounded crossover fiction in the years during the development of Matilda the Musical provides a useful explanation of why the creative team behind the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaption of Roald Dahl’s novel Matilda emphasized the sophistication of the show, as well as its crossover appeal, as it made the move from the RSC’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon, where it premiered in 2010, to London’s West End in 2011. A promotional video which gathers clips from red-carpet interviews with the creative team and

Agency, power, and the inner child  167 celebrity guests at the opening of the show at London’s Cambridge Theatre in 2011 is clearly designed to drive home the message that the production appeals to adults as well as to children, as the interviewees bear witness to the profundity, quality, and complexity of the production. Indeed, listening to this chorus of approving adult voices, it may seem as if the production is not really for children at all. British actor James Dreyfus enthusiastically— but rather paradoxically—observes, “this is so not a kids’ show. This is for everybody,” while composer Tim Minchin uses his interview to state that the production “really taps into our loss of childhood, our sense of loss of innocence that we all carry around with us like a burden. And it makes adults laugh and cry.”12 Matilda the Musical has come a long way since 2011. A North American  version of the production opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre in 2013, and 2015 saw the launch of a US tour, and the opening of another iteration of the show in Sydney, Australia. In March 2016, the RSC published Matilda the Musical’s latest vital statistics: over 4.8 million audience members and over 3,500 performances worldwide.13 The show has enjoyed exceptional critical acclaim along the way, gathering numerous awards and rapturous reviews. From one perspective, this success may seem surprising. As director Matthew Warchus acknowledged in an interview as the show opened in the West End, the novel is, on one level, “a story about child abuse.”14 Yet, the child at the center of this story is no victim, and the novel presents some of our most profound hopes and aspirations for children and childhood, as well as some of our strongest fears and anxieties. Dahl gave his child readers a heroine who demonstrates that quick wits, courage, and self-belief are qualities to be proud of. Matilda displays remarkable self-control and emotional maturity, as well as exceptional intelligence. She is neither innocent nor especially vulnerable. She has seen adult cruelty, dishonesty, and self-interest first hand and has found ways of dealing with the neglect and abuse she is experiencing. She is a model of rational resourcefulness, finding the literary education she craves at her local public library. At home, she indulges in small but satisfyingly sly acts of revenge on her father that provide her with some sense that retributive justice is being visited upon him for his behavior toward her. At school, Dahl’s Matilda offers direct resistance to the authority of the diabolical head teacher, Miss Trunchbull. She effectively rescues her gentle teacher, Miss Honey, from Miss Trunchbull’s manipulative clutches with help from her telekinetic superpowers.15 The musical Matilda created by the collaboration between director Warchus, writer Dennis Kelly, and composer Minchin stays close to Dahl’s characterization but places yet more emphasis upon her empowerment. On stage, Matilda is agency personified. Far from being passive, vulnerable, or impressionable, Matilda challenges adult authority and finds a way to manipulate both the structures and material of the adult world. Her manifesto

168  Helen Freshwater is spelled out in “Naughty,” the solo that concludes an early scene in which we see her miserable home life. This song defines Matilda’s spirited response to her situation. She addresses her audience directly, hands on hips, as Minchin’s lyrics tell them that instead of patiently enduring injustice and unfairness, they should consider what they can do to change their situation, even if they are only “little,” like Matilda.16 Kelly’s book goes on to add a plot layer that suggests that Matilda has created Miss Honey’s personal history, bringing her teacher to a position in which she is able to rescue Matilda from her neglectful, abusive parents. The satisfactions provided by Matilda’s eventual triumph over Miss Trunchbull may be due, in part, to the fact that the happy ending she eventually secures is entirely self-made. What’s more, the show makes it evident that she triumphs because she is a child. For Minchin, the piece’s celebration of disobedience and defiance of authority is core to its politics, and these rebellious qualities are central to being a child. He asserts that the show’s ending “has a real message of anti-establishment [sic], of using your childness to defy people who try and slap you down, who try and keep you inside the line.”17 What is especially interesting—and revealing—about this remark is that it is addressed to both adults and children, and assumes that we all have the potential to use our “childness.” As Minchin’s comment reveals, blurring between adult and child was central to the way that the production was initially conceived and then marketed. Looking back on the process of adapting Matilda in 2012, Kelly remarked that it had become clear early on in the development process that the musical “had to appeal to adults as well [as children].” He recalled that the company’s “guiding principle” became that “the show was for children from 6 to 106.” He acknowledged that they were aware of the burgeoning market for crossover children’s literature, noting that “today there is a much bigger blend between what is for an adult and what is for a child— Harry Potter, for example. I think that was what was in our minds.”18 Cast and crew made a concerted effort to sell the production to an adult audience in a series of detailed promotional video interviews undertaken before the Broadway launch. The actor who originally played Miss Honey, Lauren Ward, emphasized its cross-generational appeal: “It is a family show but I am amazed at the twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings who come and really enjoy it. . . . It isn’t just for children, it is for adults as well.”19 In the same set of interviews, set and costume designer Rob Howell offered reassurance to any adults wondering if they could attend without accompanying children: “what’s pleased everybody [in the company] . . . is that adults and children enjoy the experience as much as each other. With or without each other, actually – lots of adults turn up on their own not bringing their kids.”20 Kelly used his contribution to these videos to suggest that these adult audience members should attempt to view the production from a child’s perspective: “When I was approaching it, I felt that anyone should be able to watch this show, but to some extent they should watch

Agency, power, and the inner child  169 it as a child.”21 The interview in this series with director Warchus also emphasizes how efforts were made to blur distinctions between adult and child in both the writing and the direction of the piece. He recalled how he had responded to the challenge of working on an adaptation of a story that pits adults and children against each other, with a cast that included almost equal numbers of adults and children. He stated that he saw his directorial approach as a continuation of Kelly’s decision not to “write differently for adults and children [but] to write in exactly the same voice,” and reflected on what he thought had been achieved in the games of tag the cast played together early in the rehearsal process, observing that adults and children played it the same way. Adults don’t play tag any differently from how they did when they were children, or how children play it. They play it the same, with the same kind of panic and urgency. And so there were certain things we could do that bring everybody on to the same level. I pushed . . . to try and create a world where the conventional distinctions of adult and child are blurred.22 Warchus’s assertion that adults and children play “the same” is not supported by scholarly studies of children’s play, which indicate that age, gender, and cultural context shape adult and child play behavior, as well as providing evidence that adults and children play differently when playing together. 23 His remarks should be read as supporting the show’s broader artistic and ideological purpose: to reconfigure conventional understandings of the difference between adults and children. This reconfiguration is apparent in characterization, in casting, and in the way in which the production manages its relationship with its audiences. All of the adult characters in the show exhibit qualities that might be thought of as being childish or childlike. The behavior of the Wormwoods is driven by the kind of total self-interest that characterizes the behavior of toddlers. For Mrs. Wormwood, nothing is more important than her dance competitions. Mr. Wormwood values his success in business and his hair, above all else. Elsewhere, the suggestion that adults might not be entirely “grown-up” seems a more benevolent proposition. The relationship between Matilda and Mrs. Phelps, the friendly and helpful librarian, seems to invert traditional adult and child roles, for example. The novel establishes that Mrs. Phelps is entranced by the stories that Matilda has been telling her during her visits to the library within moments of the first introduction to the character. On stage, Mrs. Phelps’s physical reaction to Matilda’s storytelling figures her as the child in their relationship. She is desperate for Matilda to tell her a story, and she shrieks with excitement when Matilda begins, “Once upon a time . . . .” She grabs two blocks for them to sit on—one large, one small. Matilda stands on the larger block, and Mrs. Phelps hesitates for a moment before lowering herself on to the smaller one. These few moments of stage business emphasize the power balance between the two,

170  Helen Freshwater establishing Matilda as the authoritative storyteller and Mrs. Phelps as a grateful listener. As the story becomes melancholy, Phelps sniffles and bursts out, “Oh Matilda, this is very sad!” Matilda steps down off the block, takes the librarian’s hands, and asks her gently, “Do you want me to stop?” Mrs. Phelps whips back, “Don’t you dare!” The conventional adult/ child roles are effectively reversed. Miss Honey also displays traits that could be considered child-like. Standing outside Miss Trunchbull’s office, as she attempts to ready herself to broach the subject of Matilda’s exceptional ability with the head teacher, she berates herself for not being adult enough, being “pathetic,” and behaving “like a little girl.” Later, after a bruising encounter with Mrs. Wormwood and her dance partner, Rudolpho, she again blames herself for being weak and associates this lack of strength with being small. Reflecting on Matilda’s need for an assertive champion, she laments the fact that she is far from being the strong advocate that Matilda needs. The depth of Miss Honey’s perception of her failure to live up to her status as an adult is spelt out most powerfully in her contribution to “When I Grow Up,” the number which opens Act 2. Initially presented by four of the child performers, the song gains its sentimental resonance from the mismatch between a child’s idea of what adulthood might enable and the reality of adult responsibilities. The children anticipate that being adult will provide them with the knowledge to answer questions; the strength to carry “heavy things”; and the bravery to take on creatures that lurk “underneath the bed.” They also envisage using the liberty granted by adult status to “eat sweets every day,” to “go to bed late every night,” and to “watch cartoons until my eyes go square.” Of course, the adults in the audience know that we never arrive at this imagined state of omniscience, freedom, and fearlessness, and the song gains its affective power from the naïveté of the children’s optimistic and innocent view of adulthood, and the hopefulness with which they look forward to leaving childhood—a state which may seem blessedly free of adult responsibilities, pressures, and compromises to those adults sitting in the audience who are lucky enough not to have endured the kind of neglect or abuse that Matilda has. When four adult performers—playing the older children—replace the child performers on the swings, “When I Grow Up” gains a further level of emotional depth and complexity. Robin Bernstein’s engagement with questions of childhood, performance, and casting can be usefully applied here. Drawing on the insights of Joseph Roach, Bernstein proposes that childhood is best thought of as a performance and understood “as a process of surrogation, an endless attempt to find, fashion, and impel substitutes to fill a void caused by the loss of a half-forgotten original.” Directing readers to Carolyn Steedman’s work, she reminds us that “by the twentieth century, childhood became an emblem of a lost past, of a lost self, and of memory itself.” Bernstein insists, however, that the question of casting—the choice of what or who stands in for the child—is crucially important, observing

Agency, power, and the inner child  171 that “juvenile bodies cast in the surrogation of childhood have the special ability to naturalize childhood, to assert an essential correspondence between childhood and the young human body.”24 She goes on to explore the casting of non-naturalistic, non-juvenile, and non-human bodies, arguing that a “visual mismatch” should not be equated with miscasting as these non-conventional casting choices can contain a wealth of meaning (24). The choice to give adult performers roles as child characters in Matilda the Musical is obviously not miscasting, nor should it be read as a choice of convenience. In an interview, Kelly admitted that the company took their time over this decision. He describes a long period of experimentation in which “we had workshops with adults playing all the parts and where only Matilda was played by a child. We even tried her as a puppet.”25 According to Kelly, the final decision to cast children aged between 8 and 13 as the younger children and to give adult actors roles as older children was only taken late in the process, about a year before the show opened. The time that it took the company to come to this decision reflects the load of meaning casting choices can carry, as Bernstein observes. In performance, the casting of adult performers in child roles suggests that adults are still children on a fundamental level, still anticipating the moment when they will be fully adult and hoping to find the strength to manage the challenges of adulthood. This impression is given weight in the final moments of “When I Grow Up.” The child performers and the adult performers playing children are replaced by Miss Honey, sitting alone on a swing stage right, as she wistfully intones the final verse. In an interview, Minchin recalled the development of this song and his hopes for what this shift from child chorus to adult solo would communicate. He noted that Miss Honey’s singing ends the song “because we as adults actually all still feel like children and that’s what Dahl’s about, the sort of child inside the adult.”26 Many of the comments on the YouTube recording of the 2012 Royal Variety Performance of “When I Grow Up” support Minchin’s claims, as they provide a glimpse of the song’s powerful affective impact. Viewers reflect on their visceral emotional reactions to “When I Grow Up,” offering comments which talk about getting “the feels,” “tearing up,” and watching others cry in response to the song. One contributor noted, “every grown-up (:)) I know had this . . . friends, colleagues, myself. I guess it hits that one spot, or something.” The language used by many other posters also testifies to the visceral nature of the emotional “hit” of the song. Several use the phrase “every time,” as they note that their affective response remains undiminished, even after multiple viewings. Some express surprise that they are unable to explain why the song affects them, while others attempt to answer the question of why the song has such a powerful emotional impact. One commentator notes that the intensity of affect may be the product of mixing strong and conflicting emotions (“this weird mixture of joy and sadness”), while others pin its effect firmly on the poignancy of “lost childhood innocence,” “hope,” and “nostalgia.” Many reflect on how the song

172  Helen Freshwater chimes with their own experience of the challenges of adulthood and the continuing existence of the “child inside the adult” that Minchin refers to: These children sing about things that they’ll achieve one day, only to have them replaced by even tougher goals. There will always be new questions that you don’t know the answers to and there will always be new monsters under your bed. These goals only get harder as your life progresses. Children spend so much time wanting to grow up, but you’re never done growing up. This is a really sad song. But Matilda gives us hope. :)27 Several contributors unpack the song’s emotional maneuvers with great care, picking up on the way in which Miss Honey’s lines highlight its significance for adults: It begins as a deceptively simple song about how children view what things will be like when they grow up. By the end, it becomes heart wrenching when the “adult” Miss Honey sadly repeats one of the sections sung only a few seconds earlier by the children. Shows that there are times when we don’t feel always feel grown up when we are grown up. As this web poster observes, Miss Honey’s contribution presents the character as a “so-called adult” struggling with feelings of fear, inferiority, and isolation, and with her perception of herself as “pathetic, little me.” As Miss Honey sits alone, wistfully concluding the song, Matilda appears from stage left to respond with a reprise of “Naughty.” Her lines tell Miss Honey that she must stop accepting the situation and take action. The implication is that the adult woman is being tutored by the child, taking inspiration from a little girl’s resilience and courage. The conventional adult/ child dynamic is reversed in this moment: Matilda becomes the reassuring adult and Miss Honey the frightened child. Miss Honey is not the only adult to receive support from Matilda. The story of the escapologist and the acrobat which the audience hears Matilda tell the librarian Mrs. Phelps seems to blur the dividing line between fact and fiction. After Matilda reveals the evil sister’s cruel treatment of the escapologist’s daughter to Mrs. Phelps, she goes home to find herself subject to more abuse at the hands of her parents. Having been confined to her bedroom by her father, she seems to gather her strength and continues to tell the story. The narrative and her own experience seem to come into still-closer alignment, as she tells herself that the escapologist’s daughter suffered more and more intense abuse at the hands of the evil sister, “until one day . . . she beat her, threw her into a dank, dark, dusty cellar, locked the door, and went out.” She continues, “But that day, the escapologist happened to come home early. And when he heard the sound of his daughter’s tears—he smashed the door open!” At this point, the story seems to take

Agency, power, and the inner child  173 on embodied form. The escapologist breaks through the door to Matilda’s room and picks her up, accompanied by flashes of white lightning and the sound of crashing claps of thunder. In the song that follows, “I’m Here,” the escapologist initially takes the adult role, as he asks Matilda—positioned as his daughter—for forgiveness for his absence and tells her not to cry, as he seeks to reassure her that she has nothing to be afraid of now that he is with her. But the enormity of his failure as a father overcomes him as he asks himself, “Have I been so wrapped up in my grief for my wife that I have forgotten the one thing that matters to us most?” He begins to cry, and the roles reverse, as Matilda finds herself consoling him: “Don’t cry, daddy. I’m all right, daddy. Please don’t cry. Here, let me wipe away your tears.” The child is figured here as able to forgive adult failings, enabling emancipation, redemption, and rescue. Matilda rights adult wrongs, bringing justice, clarity, and healing to almost all of the adults she encounters.28

The child redeemer: modeling agency for the masses As children’s literature experts have noted, the literary tradition of child as redeemer finds its fullest literary expression toward the end of the nineteenth century. 29 But this sense of the redemptive power of children and childhood endures. Dahl encouraged readers of his novel to think about Matilda in quasi-religious terms, as her ability to move objects with her eyes is described as a “miracle.”30 The implications of this choice of terminology are highlighted as Dahl goes on to describe Miss Honey’s reaction to witnessing Matilda’s gift. He tells his readers that Miss Honey stared “at the child in absolute wonderment, as though she were The Creation, The Beginning Of The World, The First Morning” (170). Matilda the Musical encourages a rather more skeptical attitude toward the celebration of children as “miracles” from the opening number onward, and it does not preserve Dahl’s use of the language of Christian faith. It does, however, retain a strong sense that children have access to an ethical and moral clarity that adults have often lost. Being interviewed during promotion for the Broadway transfer, Kelly reflected on how appealing he found Matilda’s “sense of justice.” For him, the character’s refusal to accept hypocrisy or dishonesty is representative of a fundamental distinction between adult and child attitudes toward decision-making: As adults we get used to sort of making compromises. We sort of decide that we know it’s not fair but we’ll do it anyway because we kind of want to, or we need to, or we think it must happen for this reason. Kids feel very strongly, ‘no, that’s not right’, and Matilda personifies that for me.31 In the musical, the acuity of Matilda’s moral compass is plain to see. Hearing her father crow about his scheme to pass off “one hundred and fifty

174  Helen Freshwater five knackered old bangers as brand-new luxury cars,” she exclaims, “But that’s not fair!” When Bruce Bogtrotter is dragged off to solitary confinement in Miss Trunchbull’s dreaded tiny, spiky “Chokey” cupboard for his chocolate- cake-eating crimes at the end of the first act, she stands at the edge of stage and shouts out after Miss Trunchbull, who is exiting through the stalls, “That’s not right!” This ability to speak truth to adult power finds its most overt form in the chaos that ensues in the physical education class scene after Miss Trunchbull discovers a newt in her water jug. Miss Trunchbull singles out a boy for punishment, grabbing his head and twisting his ears. The boy screams in pain and Matilda shouts out, “Leave him alone! You big, fat, bully!” On each of the five occasions that I have seen the show, this direct intervention was greeted with a roar of approval from the audience. At this point, the narrative also shifts away from celebrating Matilda as an exceptional individual toward glorification of the energy and resilience of a mass of rebellious, “revolting” children. The musical’s reconfiguration of Dahl’s contribution to the literary tradition of child as a redeemer—away from the individual toward the mass—is partly enabled by its theatrical form, as it draws attention to the size of the audiences that it plays to. In the scene that follows Matilda’s denunciation of Miss Trunchbull as a “big, fat, bully!” audiences witness what Kelly has labeled the production’s “Spartacus moment.”32 The children realize the power of solidarity, as they deliberately misspell words in Miss Trunchbull’s impossibly hard spelling test, effectively volunteering for punishment. Their logic becomes apparent as one shouts, “You can’t put us all in the Chokey!” At this moment, the musical provides an opportunity for the audience to reconsider its relationship to the events on stage. In response to the children’s act of rebellion, Miss Trunchbull reveals that she has created individual chokeys for all of them. The sound of gates clanking and squeaking pounds the theater, as lines of green laser light strafe around the auditorium. When they settle, they stretch from stage to circle, stalls, and balcony, creating a web of lines. Miss Trunchbull shrieks, “I’ve been busy! A whole array of Chokeys! One for each and every one of you!” The implication is that the entire audience is guilty of insubordination and has been included in her plan: everyone in the theatre is imprisoned. But Miss Trunchbull’s moment of triumph is short-lived and followed by a swift reversal. Using her magic powers and knowledge of the depth of the head teacher’s cruelty and depravity, Matilda lifts a piece of chalk to the blackboard and spells out a thinly veiled threat to “Agatha” from “Magnus.” Agatha— Miss Trunchbull—flees, convinced that the chalk has been possessed by the spirit of her brother, whom she murdered. Matilda the Musical encourages audience members to consider how the actions of a principled individual may inspire mass civil disobedience: disobedience which ultimately leads to political and personal transformation.

Agency, power, and the inner child  175 The children celebrate their liberation in the rock-inspired number that follows, “Revolting Children.” They take the head teacher’s insult and turn it into a joyous celebration, dancing on their desks with exultant glee as they rock out. The children are joined by the adult performers playing the role of older pupils at the end of this number, and their vocal and physical presence gives the song’s assertion that “We are revolting children” a different emphasis, encouraging adult audience members to continue to include themselves in the collective incarcerated by Miss Trunchbull. The suggestion is that adults can refuse unreasonable authoritarian oppression by tyrannical forces as well as children, even if to do so is to be considered not fully adult. Here, it is worth reflecting on the stark contrast in musical styles between “When I Grow Up” and “Revolting Children.” Though the children, Miss Honey, and the adult actors portraying children deliver both songs, they reflect and express two distinctly different affective modes. “When I Grow Up” is essentially a pop song, reminiscent of a Sesame Street sound that evokes nostalgia and sentimentality. “Revolting Children,” by contrast, is a rock song, with strong musical links to the score’s other big rock number, “School Song,” in which adult performers appear as children for the first time. The pop style taps into the bittersweet pleasure still to be found in the residual Romantic tradition of lost childhood innocence, while the rock mode is used to express child rage and agency.33 These two contrasting modes are also reflected in the production’s marketing imagery. In May 2014, London saw a significant change in the production’s visual branding. The symbol of a child on a swing, drawn from the scenography of “When I Grow Up,” was superseded by the “Matilda Pose,” a figure redolent of child agency. Increasingly, the company’s social media management of audience affection for “When I Grow Up” seems to replace the song’s nostalgic sentiment with questions of agency, too. A 2014 Facebook campaign invited fans to submit their own responses to the question of what they were planning to do when they grow up and then placed their responses alongside those from the performers. In the run-up to the 2015 general election, the company released a video of the four London Matildas answering the question of what they would do “If I were Prime Minister,” with “When I Grow Up” playing in the background.34 The social media and promotional campaigns that have accompanied Matilda the Musical as it has become a global brand emphasize the belief that adults and children alike can—and should—channel Matilda’s rebellious energy.35 The steadily growing use, adoption, and citation of the “Matilda Pose”—which is briefly held by Matilda as part of the choreography of “Naughty”—are indicative of this conviction and its popular appeal. The pose eschews sentimentality or coyness as it signals defiance and self-belief. Matilda stands alone, legs planted firmly apart, hands on hips, shoulders back, head to the side, chin up, gazing into the distance, taking a stand

176  Helen Freshwater against injustice. Reiterated by Matilda and other members of the cast in the curtain call, the pose is captured on numerous posters and promotional imagery and has slowly become part of the broader visual language of the show as Matilda the Musical has become a global phenomenon. Adoption of the pose signals celebration of the show and its values: Minchin and Kelly have produced the pose on the red carpet, along with other celebrities attending local premieres. The entire cast, together with Minchin and Kelly, were pictured holding the pose onstage in the run-up to the Sydney premiere, while the whole audience was photographed holding a pose at Cambridge Theatre in March 2015 as part of the marketing campaign to secure success in the Audience Award category of the Olivier Awards.36 Fans have adopted the pose enthusiastically, publishing images on Facebook, Instagram, and personal webpages in which they mimic the pose.37 Many of the fans in these images are celebrating their attendance of the musical—and are photographed beside a poster that depicts the pose— but others are clearly taken at home, on holiday, or as a way of marking significant personal achievements. These images record the spread of the pose into the everyday and its remarkable success as an easily appropriated, viral symbol of self-belief. The production company effectively deploys this fan-generated content and places these images alongside those created by the company itself.38 What is of particular interest here is the fact that, although the majority of these images are of young girls, they also include men, women, and boys. Two further promotional campaigns served to highlight the show’s contention that anyone can benefit from modeling their his or her behavior on Matilda, regardless of their age or gender. The company issued a “Lip Sync Challenge” to fans in February 2015 and 2016, inviting children and adults to submit videos of themselves singing along to “Revolting Children.” A compilation of a selection of the videos featured in the campaign to gather audience votes for Olivier Awards. The editors used a split screen to place footage of men, women, and children alongside each other, miming and dancing to the song in bedrooms, kitchens, hallways, and front rooms. The message that you do not have to be young and/or female to enjoy channeling the strength of the musical’s young heroine is also apparent in the music video created for a television advertising campaign for the Broadway production, which invited viewers to have a “MATILDA moment, whether you’re big or small.” This video shows children and adults singing and dancing along with “When I Grow Up.” Opening with an image of two young girls in a bedroom covered in Matilda posters, it then shifts from the domestic sphere to the public realm, depicting men and women breaking into song and dance in shops, colleges, and parks and on pavements while out shopping, in libraries, at college, and doing the vacuum cleaning. 39 The range of ages, races, and genders represented widens throughout, concluding with images of an elderly man dancing on the edge of a swimming pool. While this glossy advertisement for the pleasures of privilege—with

Agency, power, and the inner child  177 its images of glamorously fashionable seniors, students clad in graduation gowns and perfectly manicured backyards—spectacularly fails to reflect the experiences of abuse, neglect, and poverty which lie at the heart of the show, it does nevertheless capture the idea that anyone can channel Matilda’s energy.

Performing “childness,” then and now Here, I want to return to Minchin’s use of the term “childness.” The provenance of the term can be traced back to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, where it is given voice by Polixenes, King of Bohemia, as he recalls how his son’s “varying childness” relieves his tendency to melancholy.40 The value of Shakespeare’s coinage has preoccupied several scholars. Peter Hollindale finds it usefully free of pejorative overtones. For him, childness is “the quality of being a child–dynamic, imaginative, experimental, interactive and unstable.”41 This reading draws out the term’s resonance in The Winter’s Tale, in which “childness” will always be prefaced with “varying,” invoking either children’s inevitable developmental changes or their momentary caprice.42 Carol Chillington Rutter inspects the term as part of a broader discussion of the portrayal of children and childhood in recent productions of Shakespeare, arguing that the word “contains meanings far beyond ‘childish’ or ‘child-like.’”43 For Rutter, childness is something that is not singular but plural: “residual, actual, notional, imminent” (110). These notions of “childness” as healing, plural, and dynamic can clearly be applied to Matilda the Musical. Minchin’s comment celebrates the rebellious, volatile energy of “revolting children,” and the concept of the child as healer is central to the show. Moreover, though its title may encourage audiences to focus upon the eponymous heroine, the production is crowded with actual children, as well as residual, notional, and imminent ones. When the show opens, nine child performers take the stage, and we are invited to imagine an “imminent” Matilda as the heavily pregnant Mrs. Wormwood waddles into view. Most significantly, perhaps, adult characters are also imagined and positioned as residual children, and adult performers take child roles. The production, like the performances of Shakespeare which Rutter examines, invites audiences to conclude that “childhood isn’t a place or time or a set of things that define it, like toys. Childhood persists” (113). It is also possible to argue that the musical’s evocation of “childness” brings its adult characters to “identity crises,” just as Rutter claims the children of The Winter’s Tale do. As Rutter states, “childhood (remembered, reviewed, represented by adults) proposes the counter-text to adulthood that adults must measure up to, knowing they can’t” (128). Most significantly here, Matilda’s desperate need for education and support stirs Miss Honey into action, provoking a crisis of identity and confidence that ultimately resolves with the complete transformation of her circumstances and sense of self. Yet, what is most revealing about analyzing Matilda the Musical

178  Helen Freshwater alongside Rutter’s commentary are the aspects of the show that do not map onto her reading. Rutter avers that childness is both constructed and framed by adult language and expectations as well as being performed as a “theatrical fact” in contemporary Shakespearean performance through the material presence of the child actor playing Mamillius throughout Act 1, Scene 2 (111). For her, this paradox is visible when this work is staged: In Shakespeare, adults constantly make the child. Present on stage or absent, children are narrated, “told,” fashioned in language by adults. They’re objects of adult representation, pawns in adult power games who carry the burden of adult expectation. But the effect of theatrical impersonation is that, if adults make children in these plays, children appear also to make themselves. The dramatic fiction, the immediacy and presentness of the child in front of spectators on Shakespeare’s stage, gives children space to speak, to act for themselves, to simulate agency.44 Indeed, for Rutter, this effect is still at work even when audiences barely hear these child characters speak at all. She acknowledges that the character of Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale “is a near blank textually. He has only four lines in the scene. So Mamillius is one of Shakespeare’s parts . . . that ‘means’, has always ‘meant,’ and continues to ‘mean’ entirely in performance.”45 The agency of the child is, of course, presented very differently in Matilda the Musical. Not only does Matilda have as many lines as any of the adult characters on stage, but she also refuses to accept her parents’ attempts to define or control her. She is far from being “narrated, ‘told,’ fashioned in language by adults,” as Rutter suggests Shakespeare’s child characters are. Kelly presents Matilda as a self-made, self-sufficient storyteller. She rejects adult expectations and is not a lowly, inconsequential pawn in the adult power games being played but a mobile queen. By the end of the musical, she has seen off Miss Trunchbull, saved her parents from terrible punishment at the hands of the Russian mafia, and managed to create an economically secure future for herself and her new surrogate parent, Miss Honey. Furthermore, Matilda the Musical problematizes the kind of nostalgic engagement with childhood which Rutter claims is at work when childness is evoked by Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale. Reading his speech on childhood, she comments, Boyhood in Polixenes’s remembering is a kind of Eden: innocent, unthinking, without the knowledge of Good and Evil, without sin or guilt—or conscience. There are no bad dreams in this space of being boy. … [but] Even as Polixenes cites Eden, we know that Eden is lost. And we know that he knows it. A profound sense of nostalgia hangs over this speech: a longing for the home the boy can never return to; a longing, too, for himself, the lost boy. (114)46

Agency, power, and the inner child  179 For Rutter, it is the mixing of this kind of nostalgia with hope for the future that gives the evocation of childness in The Winter’s Tale its affective power.47 But Matilda the Musical does not idealize childhood or indulge in nostalgic reminiscence. Girlhood, for Matilda, is anything but Eden. Even the most sentimental number in the show, “When I Grow Up,” suggests that children are desperate to leave childhood behind because of their frustration with the petty rules and regulations that surround them. Moreover, Matilda the Musical does not figure the loss of childhood as final. It proposes that adults can and indeed must find a way to return to their child selves—to access the “inner child” in order to be whole. Here, however, it is important to acknowledge that Rutter’s assessment of the significance and importance of the material presence of the child actor on stage certainly can be felt in Matilda the Musical: the “immediacy and presentness” of pre-pubescent performers are crucial to the effect and affect realized in and by the production.48 Though the spectacle of a small girl in the title role may now seem integral to the show, interviews with Warchus and Kelly in 2011 reveal that the creative team initially considered casting adult performers in all of the child roles. Warchus reflected on the thinking behind this, observing that they asked themselves, “Would the child playing Matilda be able to sustain our interest, the tension and drama? . . . The role is bigger than Billy [Elliot], bigger than Oliver, bigger than the Dodger.” However, he averred, “It wasn’t until we put that version in front of a full theatre that we saw just how much it worked.” Kelly offered an explanation for its effectiveness, suggesting that audiences develop more of an emotional connection with the character as a result of the production’s respect for the way that the child performers deal with the demands of their role: “It’s incredibly challenging. Matilda has to sing, dance, act and also carry these massive monologues. That’s a big ask of one little performer but I think it’s seeing her cope with all that which helps us fall in love with the character.”49 The desire to make connections between these “little performers” and the character is undoubtedly apparent in the early media coverage of the show. Several journalists undertook interviews with the girls taking on the role of Matilda in 2011 and 2012 as the show became a critical and box office success, and many of these reports take on a similar form. The interviewers focus on the girls’ backgrounds and the way they interact with each other, as if they are inspecting them for traces of vanity and self-importance. Curiously, their reports seem to have absorbed the attitude toward children with exceptional talents which is given voice by the narrator of Matilda. Dahl’s narrator tells the novel’s readers that gifted children should, ideally, have no awareness that their skills, knowledge, or accomplishments are in any way remarkable. He notes: The nice thing about Matilda was that if you had met her casually and talked to her you would have thought she was a perfectly normal fiveand-a-half-year-old child. She displayed almost no outward signs of her

180  Helen Freshwater brilliance and she never showed off. “This is a very sensible and quiet little girl,” you would have thought to yourself. And unless for some reason you had started a discussion with her about literature or mathematics, you would never have known the extent of her brain-power. 50 The interviews with the child stars of Matilda the Musical seem to channel this attitude. Judith Woods’s interview for The Telegraph with the four girls performing as Matilda, undertaken after the news that they had been nominated for a collective Best Actress in a Musical Olivier Award in 2012 is representative of this tendency. She begins by noting that the girls are “the hottest talent in town” and goes on to weigh up their previous professional experience and their aspirations, behavior, and appearance, before reassuring her readers: The four are not showy stage school brats nor [sic] diminutive divas, but noisy, funny, engaging girls. By turns thoughtful and giggly, they are polite–and professional–to a fault. . . . They revel in the singing, jokes and chaos of it all. Off stage, however, they ditch any airs or graces. “It’s much better being a normal person,” announces Sophia. “I hate it when other kids suck up to me just because I’m in Matilda, when they weren’t interested in me before. I’m the same person,” concurs Eleanor. “My mum treats me just the same as she always did, and she’s known me since I was born,” adds Cleo, artlessly earnest.51 The strapline to the piece hammers the message home: “The young stars in the hit West End stage show are up for a Best Actress award. But fame hasn’t gone to their heads.”52 In some ways, this coverage presents a determined disregard for the reality of these girls’ lives. They may not be “stage school brats,” but the children taking on the role of Matilda are clearly exceptional in their abilities and in their commitment to their work as performers. They are gifted singers; they have mastered and memorized complex dance routines; and they deliver their performances with a level of precision that many adults would struggle to achieve. As the show became a hit across 2011 and 2012, they were also subject to a substantial amount of media attention, being required to deliver off-stage performances as “perfectly normal” little girls on chat shows, at award ceremonies, and in interviews. In this context, insistence that they are “artless,” or entirely unchanged by their experience of working on an enormously successful, award-winning musical, seems highly disingenuous. Here, we might want to revisit Rutter’s observation that “childhood (remembered, reviewed, represented by adults) proposes the counter-text to adulthood that adults must measure up to, knowing they can’t,” and propose a slight revision: “childhood (remembered, reviewed, represented by adults) proposes the counter-text to adulthood that children must measure up to, knowing they can’t.”53

Agency, power, and the inner child  181

Conclusion: make your own happy ever after The appeal of Matilda the Musical is partly secured by the deeply embedded cultural and literary tradition of child as salve and savior. The fantasy of the resilient and resourceful Matilda is made possible—conceptually and emotionally—because of the many child redeemers that have brought hope and healing to adults in literature before her. Engagement with the way in which viewers respond to the sentimental heart of the musical—the song “When I Grow Up”—reveals the show’s dependence upon its audience’s cultural familiarity with the more recent reworking of the figure of the child redeemer: the “inner child” which resides inside all adults. Analysis of the promotional campaigns which have framed Matilda the Musical since its first performance in 2010 indicates how they draw on this concept, as the company has sought to maximize its appeal to an adult crossover audience by encouraging them to connect with their “childness,” as the production suggests that self-esteem—and pleasure—may be accessed by modeling Matilda’s energy and agency. To conclude, I want to revisit the show’s most significant addition to Dahl’s tale before turning to its final scene in order to propose a reconsideration of Matilda’s role in the show. The story which Matilda tells the librarian Mrs. Phelps in segments throughout the show of “the two greatest circus performers in the world— an escapologist who could escape from any lock that was ever invented, and an acrobat who was so skilled it seemed as if she could actually fly” is Kelly’s invention, though it could be mistaken as having been written by Dahl.54 The function of this story, and Matilda’s role as storyteller, shifts in revealing ways across these episodes. Initially, it may seem as though it has been introduced to give the character of Matilda greater emotional depth and transparency than she has in Dahl’s text. Describing the challenges that the novel presented as the creative team worked on the adaptation, Minchin observed: “The hard thing was that . . . Matilda and her teacher Miss Honey were these opaque and passive characters who are massively abused.”55 The story of the acrobat and the escapologist can be interpreted as a method of dealing with Matilda’s opacity. Kelly invites audiences to think of this story as Matilda’s creative response to the neglect and cruelty that she is being subjected to at home, as the characters of the acrobat and escapologist are prefigured in the exchange between Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood when they are first introduced to the audience. Complaining about his wife’s spendthrift ways, Mr. Wormwood spits out, “You spend us into trouble and you expect me to get us out. What am I? A flaming escapologist?” Mrs. Wormwood retorts: “What about me, then? I’ve got a whole house to look after! Dinners don’t microwave themselves, you know! If you’re an escapologist, I must be an acrobat to balance that lot. The world’s greatest acrobat!” It seems—at least at first—that Matilda has taken these comments and invented a more emotionally satisfactory set of parents out of them.

182  Helen Freshwater The  beginning of Matilda’s story highlights the intensity of the love between the acrobat and the escapologist: Matilda tells Mrs. Phelps that audiences came not only to see their act “but also to see their love for each other, which was so deep that it was said that cats would purr as they passed them, and dogs would weep with joy.” A further detail adds to this impression: the couple’s desperate desire to have a child. Matilda relates the tale: “as time passed, they grew quite old, and still they had no child. At night, they listened to the silence of their big, empty house, and they would imagine how beautiful it would be if it was filled with the sound of a child playing.” Mrs. Phelps’s reactions to these details reveal the emotional weight and function of this aspect of the tale. She begins to weep and, when Matilda asks her why she is crying, she tells her, “I’m crying because it’s sad. It’s just that they want that child so very much. It must be wonderful for a child to be so wanted.” The inference is clear: Matilda is telling the story of the loving parents she wishes she had. Here, Kelly’s decision to make Matilda into a consummate and extraordinarily powerful storyteller seems to highlight and celebrate the therapeutic potential of the creative imagination. As the musical progresses, however, the claims that are being made for the power of a well-told story seem to grow. Matilda’s skill as a storyteller and the affective “hit” of her tale are indicated by the extremity of Mrs. Phelps’s responses. The librarian is so engaged by Matilda’s storytelling that she struggles to maintain her grip on the distinction between fact and fiction. When the evil sister’s cruel treatment of the escapologist’s daughter is revealed, she shrieks impulsively, “Let’s call the police!” Matilda is taken aback by her behavior, as she gasps in response, “Mrs. Phelps! It’s . . . it’s just a story.”56 The development of the story, however, quickly calls this assertion into question. The scene in which the escapologist breaks into Matilda’s bedroom to rescue her suggests that fantasy is beginning to break through into reality. This, of course, is the practice to accompany the philosophy Matilda espouses in her musical manifesto, “Naughty”: you have to be prepared to write your own story if you don’t like the script that you have been given. She tells us that stories—our life stories—are not fixed or fated. They are open, manipulable, and flexible. Yet, the story’s final twist, revealed as Matilda visits Miss Honey’s humble home in the woods, invites a further reassessment of its meaning. As Matilda finds out more about Miss Honey’s circumstances and background, she realizes that the tale she has been telling is, in fact, Miss Honey’s life story. She bursts out, “A story! I’ve been telling a story, and I thought I was making it up, but it’s real! It’s your life! I’ve seen your life.” Matilda’s final ingenious act of storytelling is the creation of a trap for Miss Trunchbull: tricking her into believing that the ghost of Miss Honey’s father has returned to take his revenge. Her deception of the callous head teacher demonstrates that Matilda’s power is reflected not only in her ability to move objects with her eyes, but also—and perhaps to a greater extent—in

Agency, power, and the inner child  183 her skill as a storyteller. Ultimately, however, the story which is retold and given a new—happy—ending by the child belongs to the adult. The very final image before the curtain falls certainly encourages adult audiences to reflect on the power of accessing and “using your childness,” as Minchin puts it. The Wormwoods and Rudolpho have made good their escape, having agreed to leave Matilda in Miss Honey’s care. Miss Honey and Matilda are left alone. They hold hands and walk toward the back of the stage, and then they drop hands and simultaneously execute cartwheels. The suggestion is that their mutual support has given both child and adult access to a light-hearted, light-footed playfulness. Matilda the Musical appears to suggest that actual children—Matilda, in this case—may provide the means for adults to access their own inner child and become a “good enough” parent—both to their own “inner child” and to children in the world. The way forward for Miss Honey, the real protagonist of Matilda the Musical, is a return to her child-self, as she is empowered through conquering the idea that she cannot measure up to the counter-text of childhood. Instead, she realizes that she can.

Notes

184  Helen Freshwater









Agency, power, and the inner child  185

24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31

on Play in Early Childhood Education, ed. Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 194–219. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 23. Dennis Kelly, quoted in Cavendish. Tim Minchin, “Making ‘Matilda.’” The video and accompanying comments can be found at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=e0tRDhEmdO4 andfeature=youtu.be. Performed November 19, 2012, broadcast and uploaded to YouTube December 3, 2012, accessed March 23, 2016. On March 23, 2016, it had attracted 3,165,050 views. Comments on crying include: “I saw this today and I started tearing up”; “I’m not usually a weepy person but for some reason this song just hit me real hard in the feels.”; and “It brings me to tears!” On watching others cry: “I watched this show yesterday and my dad next to me started wiping his face and I realized he was crying not to mention a little girl in front of me started to cry once Ms Honeys part came on.” On the emotional impact of the show: “it hits me so hard, my god”; “Absolutely, hits you right in the ‘lost childhood innocence’ gut doesn’t it!”; “This song hits me right in the heart.” On undiminished affective response: “It touches my heart every time”; “gives me chills everytime”; “I cry every time”; “I always cry when Miss Honey sings.” Contributors wondering why they are having an emotional response: “this is amazing but why am I crying”; “I really can’t put my finger on why . . . but this song makes me very emotional”; “Wha—why am I crying???”; “This song (especially in the beginning) is really inexplainable in the greatest way possible.” On innocence: “It’s all about the innocence of not knowing what growing up is and not understanding that the innocence of childhood is one of the best things.” On Miss Honey’s contribution: “When Miss Honey sings, it always breaks my heart, cause she is an adult and she is supposed not to be afraid anymore =( The truth is so different.” Adult challenges and desire to return to childhood: “the point is that in their world, the only things they think about are eating sweets or watching TV, but when adulthood actually comes around, you no longer find joy in eating so many sweets you feel sick or watching cartoons you used to love as a kid. Instead, you have responsibilities, and never have as much fun as you thought you’d have”; “I don’t want to fight the creatures . . . or haul around the heavy things . . . take me back to my childhood”; “What gets me about this song is some of the things the kids mention: ‘The creatures you have to face beneath the bed’ ‘The questions you need to know the answers to’ ‘The heavy things you have to haul around with you’ They can all be seen as things like . . . jobs (having one and not having one), bills, bullies in the workplace . . . And then I remember thinking as a child ‘I’ll eat all the sweets I’ll want when I’m grown up’ . . . This song makes me want to go back to when I’m a child, and I don’t have to worry about anything important . . .”; and “If only the ‘creatures’ and the ‘heavy things’ were the way I pictured them as a child.” Only Matilda’s mother seems untouched by her powers. The musical’s final scene delivers a partial reconciliation between Matilda and her father, who finally acknowledges her as his daughter, but Mrs. Wormwood appears to be beyond redemption. The politics of gender in the production lie beyond my remit here but call out for further consideration. See Margot Hillel, “‘A Little Child Shall Lead Them’: The Child as Redeemer,” in Children’s Literature and the Fin de Siecle, ed. by Roderick McGillis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 57–69. Dahl, Matilda, 153. Dennis Kelly, Broadway.com, “Making ‘Matilda.’”

186  Helen Freshwater





















Agency, power, and the inner child  187







10 Children’s musicals for educational and community settings Lauren Acton

Music is for everyone And that means you, and you, and you, And now it’s on, on with our show!

Radio Station K-I-D-S1

In 1992, I landed my first leading role in a musical. I still remember the rush of adrenaline and nerves as I moved downstage center to sing my big solo number—feeling my stomach clench as I said my last line over the orchestral introduction and drew a breath to sing: “There will be no hippos at this dance.” I was 11 years old, and my character was an uptight owl— the dean of “Animal U”—in a 30-minute children’s musical performed for our friends and family in the 200-seat theater of an old girls’ boarding school. When the Hippos Crashed the Dance 2 was designed as an elementary school-age musical and was part of the repertory Playbill of the Original Kids Theatre Company’s 1992 autumn season. 3 Each performance was part of a double bill with another children’s musical or one-act play, allowing the parents to see two shows with an intermission or only attend the show with their budding star.4 A not-for-profit regional theater company for children aged 8–18, Original Kids Theatre Company (OKTC) was founded in 1991 in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada by local elementary drama teacher Dave Conron. Children auditioned for the main company and were cast in a fall production and a winter/spring production. Original Kids eventually expanded into the summer season with a non-auditioned camp, a year-round “Kidlets” program for young actors aged 5 to 8, and an annual alumni production for “Kids” older than 18, who attempted shows with more adult themes. Original Kids began with a repertory structure, showcasing short, half-hour productions over a week of performances, but within a decade, founding director Conron and Artistic Director Art Fiddler (another local drama teacher) had moved to selecting mostly one- to two-hour shows such as Guys and Dolls, Footloose, and Pirates of Penzance for the main season. A decade after I had performed in it, Hippos was relegated to the summer

Educational and community musicals  189 camp, where half-hour shows were still the desired format. It was brushed off for the youngest group of campers (aged 7–9) at the 2004 Original Kids Theatre Camp—rehearsed over nine days of camp and performed to parents on the tenth day. More than a decade later, it is still a favorite musical for the five-to-eight-year-old “Kidlets” in the young feeder company of Original Kids. 5 The short musical that featured animal characters and catchy songs with a moral about inclusiveness was a sure-fire way of initiating young children into the world of musical theater. More than two decades after that first Original Kids performance of When the Hippos Crashed the Dance, other former cast members and I were able to recall the lyrics and choreography with enough precision that an impromptu performance of the title song at the company’s 25th anniversary gala astounded our director with how much we remembered. This ability demonstrated a couple of truisms: first, that theater kids grow up to be adults who cannot seem to resist the occasional jazz square dance step, and second, that the things you learn when you are young—especially material that was sung or embodied through dance—stays with you for a lifetime. Children’s musical composer and creator of classroom resource Music Express Magazine John Jacobson similarly recounts that he can still remember the material from his first musical theater experiences: “I was a fourth or fifth grader and I can still sing the songs and do the moves. I know it’s the kind of thing that sticks with you for a lifetime.”6 That level of influence on the memory is part of why Jacobson began writing musicals for young people. Early musical theater experience leaves a deep impression that lasts into adulthood. Along with anecdotes from Jacobson and myself, many adults recount being able to recall every lyric, note, and step from musicals they were in as children. This is perhaps especially true of children who were in long-running professional productions such as Annie or The King and I.7 Not every child is enrolled in youth theater as I was, but many children nonetheless have very similar rehearsal and performance experiences in their elementary school, when their classroom or music teachers put on a show. Indeed, for many children, their first contact with musical theater performance happens in elementary school, and a wide range of educational shows are designed for children to perform at school or a camp, and are leased by companies such as Dramatic Publishing where directors can sort the plays and musicals by performance group with a drop-down menu that includes elementary, middle, and high school selections.8 These school musicals may be the only exposure to musical theater performance that many people have in their lifetime, and for other children it is the beginning of a love of theater that translates into supporting or pursuing the arts. This essay explores musicals that have never been produced on Broadway or Off-Broadway (and, indeed, are rarely produced by any professional company) and that are specifically written for children in school and community settings. These works are often adaptations of fairy tales, such as Aesop’s

190  Lauren Acton Fables Deluxe or Robyn Hood of Deadwood,9 or have curricular goals such as teaching kids facts about the solar system by having them rehearse and perform songs about each planet as in Cosmic Pinball.10 School musicals can be ordered in class-sized packages that contain scripts, piano/vocal conductor scores, and backing tracks from publishing houses like Samuel French, Hal Leonard, and Pioneer Drama Service. These short children’s musicals are not part of the canon of musical theater, but they form an important repertoire of works, along with Broadway JR. shows and musical revues created by educators and children’s theater directors. This chapter explores these musicals designed for amateur children’s troupes, with specific focus on how curricular and pedagogical trends in North America have affected which musicals are chosen for the classroom.

Musicals for the educational market For many years, teachers who wanted to rehearse and perform musicals in their classes had a fairly limited repertoire from which to choose. They could adapt a Broadway show if they could get the rights, come up with their own revue-format musical, or adapt plays or fairy tales by adding songs. The major drawback for the latter two types of shows is the time it takes to adapt pre-existing stories or write linking dialogue for revues—adding the task of writer/adapter to the already large task of director, musical director, and choreographer. Before Music Theatre International (MTI) began to license Broadway JR. and Broadway KIDS shows, there were also issues related to mounting Broadway shows with elementary-aged children; it was not always easy to get the rights—many shows were carefully licensed to keep the content intact and were thus sometimes inappropriate for children, in terms of age-appropriate content, length, and vocal range and difficulty. There was clearly a need for short, age-appropriate shows that had all the materials needed by a teacher/director wrapped up in a convenient package. In the seventies and eighties, musicals written specifically for the elementary school market, like Meyer and Pickens’ Radio Station K-I-D-S (1983) or Kern and Kern’s When the Hippos Crashed the Dance (1988), had many benefits. They were inexpensive to produce. They were composed for children’s voices with simple harmony. They were ensemble pieces with a lot of chorus numbers, not star vehicles. They were only 20–40 minutes long. They came bundled with pre-recorded music to play as backing tracks for the young singers as well as staging and choreography suggestions, and they frequently had educational content that reinforced the grade-level curriculum.

When the Hippos Crashed the Dance As an example of a school musical, Kern’s When the Hippos Crashed the Dance (1988) has much in common with the school musicals that followed it. It has many songs for chorus in a variety of musical styles, with the

Educational and community musicals  191 remaining songs offering the chance of brief solo moments for most members of the ensemble cast. Hippos includes linking dialogue between the songs, mostly brief scenes that comment on the previous song and set up the next, with lines fairly evenly distributed among the ensemble. The half-hour show begins with the cast entering with the opening chorus number “Animal Spring Dance.” Children dressed as different types of animals directly address the audience, welcoming them to the show and introducing the setting of an annual dance at a school for animals. They sing in unison to a jaunty rhythm: “You look a little strange, but we’re happy that you came / To the animal, not mineral, not vegetable, not anything but Animal Spring Dance!”11 The songs in Hippos are rarely longer than a minute, and after the opening number, the animal characters begin to introduce themselves with some dialogue. Owl welcomes all the animals to the dance and joins Turtle in going into the audience to examine the strange-looking humans. Ostrich comes forward and reminds the animals that if they don’t participate in the dance contest, Owl may make a lengthy speech. To begin the dance, they all sing the school song, the anthem-like “Hail to You, Animal U.” Field Mouse comes forward as the anthem ends to say that they can’t start the dance yet because the Hippos haven’t arrived. Owl chastises Field Mouse for the idea that the Hippos would be invited after the chaos they caused last year. This leads into the title theme of the musical, “When the Hippos Crashed the Dance.” This upbeat number will return again in the musical as a reprise, but in its first appearance, the animals recount the chaos that occurred last year in chanted verses between the sung choruses: Oh! You should’ve seen it when the Hippos crashed the dance! Oh! You should’ve seen it when the Hippos crashed the dance! Never in the history of cookies and punch have you ever been around a rowdier bunch! Oh! You should’ve seen it when the Hippos crashed the dance! After the applause, Owl says to Field Mouse, “now do you see why they weren’t invited?” and launches into the martial rhythm of the first solo number, “There Will Be No Hippos at This Dance.” In this solo number, like many of the others that follow, the full chorus joins in to support the soloist after the first verse and chorus. Field Mouse doesn’t appear convinced by the song, but the dance begins when Ostrich pushes Turtle out onto the dance floor to get things started. Turtle introduces the second solo number as something his dad taught him—“a little ditty and a mean soft shell.” With lyrics like “If you just trust yourself then everything will be swell,” “Come Out of Your Shell” is as much a message song to encourage self-confidence as it is a character piece for Turtle. The dance is now truly underway, and the next five songs introduce different animals with a variety of musical styles. “Pigeon and Dove” begins

192  Lauren Acton with a slow tempo as the birds act out meeting each other for the first time and discover their confidence to dance together: “It’s not hard to face the world if I help you, and you help me.” The music transitions to a disco beat, and the chorus shouts out, “Coo, coo, coo!” to encourage the dancers. The Bunnies are up next with the “Bunny Hop,” but their Tin-Pan-Alley-style song is interrupted when the Hippos join into the chorus line. The other animals realize what is happening and launch into the first reprise of “When the Hippos Crashed the Dance,” while Owl chases the Hippos away with a large can labeled “Hippo Spray.” The judges give their scores to the Bunnies: Ostrich gives a 5.6, Penguin gives a 6.3, and Field Mouse awards a 10—not to the Bunnies but to the Hippos. Owl promptly disqualifies Field Mouse as a judge and appoints Turtle in her place. An early-style rock ‘n’ roll song is up next with the leather-jacketed Snakes eliciting screams for their song and dance “Who Can Resist the Twist?” Penguin and Turtle award the Snakes good scores, but Ostrich, with her Southern accent and conservative values, finds the rock ‘n’ roll number “too rowdy.” Following the Snakes are the Flamingos performing “In the Pink Tango.” It is the only minor-key number to appear in the show, but it does have a major interlude of “La la la” before the tango ends with a shouted “Olé!” Penguin awards the Flamingos a 7.9, Turtle gives them an 8.0, but Ostrich gives them only a 3.1, saying that she felt there was a lack of Hippos. Owl takes away Ostrich’s judging privileges as well, and steps in himself to judge the next dance, a square dance for the Hens and Roosters with a nonsense chorus “Buckle Chickle Peck.” The Rooster caller is bumped out of the way halfway through the square dance, and a Hippo caller takes over: Turn to your partner, look ‘em in the eye Shake his wing and say goodbye Say goodbye and turn around Brand new partner big and round. Chaos ensues as the Hippos bounce the Hens off their blubber and Owl chases them around with his Hippo spray, while the chorus sings the second reprise of “When the Hippos Crashed the Dance.” Field Mouse asks Owl if the Hippos can stay, and the Hippos apologize with the song “We’re Very Sorry That You’re Angry.” The ensemble joins the song as the Hippos dissolve in tears and sing, “Poor Hippos, your Hippos only want to be loved.” The entire group of animals seems swayed by the Hippos’ apology, but Owl stubbornly reprises his solo “There Will Be No Hippos at This Dance.” He asks if anyone will speak up on behalf of the Hippos and we get another reprise of “There Will Be No Hippos” from Field Mouse, re-orchestrated for a light, music-box feel and with new lyrics that attempt to make Owl feel guilty. After the song fails to sway Owl, Ostrich insists that the judging take place and reminds everyone that the

Educational and community musicals  193 dance winners will be invited back next year. Turtle awards the Hens, Roosters, and Hippos a 9.8, Penguin gives them a 9.9, and Owl, finally realizing he stands alone in his opposition to the Hippos, admits that he really enjoyed the dance with the addition of the Hippos and gives them a 10. The musical ends with a reprise of “Hail to You, Animal U,” this time with the lyrics “Here’s to the Hippos. It’s time to stop regretting / And to the Owl for forgiving and forgetting.” The triumphant final chorus of the anthem ends the show, and bows take place over an instrumental reprise of the “Animal Spring Dance” music. Hippos contains some humor in the characterization and book writing that helps it appeal to audiences usually made up of indulgent parents. In addition to its musical variety and entertainment value, the musical could be tied into certain curricular goals. Any early elementary unit about animals could be amplified by a show wherein all the characters are different types of animals. As a light-hearted morality tale, Hippos can also reinforce children’s interpersonal development with messages about the importance of asking for forgiveness when needed, not holding a grudge, compromise, and inclusiveness. In the years since Hippos first came on the market, it has been joined by a multitude of musicals written for school children with musical and cross-curricular goals in mind. Below, I explore the motivations of composers and educators to write musicals for young children—musicals that will never achieve the fame of Broadway musicals but that can have a deep influence on the lives of children who perform them. Through interviews with composers and community theater directors, I examine the specific musical considerations of composing for children, the pedagogical implications of delivering elementary curricula in musical theater songs, and some reflections from adults on the benefits of their experiences with elementary-school musicals to their lives and later careers. Roger Emerson is a composer who was teaching in an elementary school in the early seventies and wanted to be able to produce musicals that suited the elementary school children he was teaching. He recounted that he initially wanted to reduce Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals for elementary performance, but in the 1970s, the rights to those shows came with strict production rules, almost always insisting that the musical be performed in its entirety: “This was before Broadway JR. was a twinkle in Stephen Sondheim and Freddie Gershon’s eye. They were verboten; they did not want to grant rights to have the shows diluted. It has changed significantly over the past 15 or so years with Broadway JR.”12 Before the advent of Broadway JR. adaptations and licensing for school performances, an elementary school would either have to pull together the resources to license and mount an entire Broadway production (which was usually beyond the means of most publicly funded schools), or the school director could create his or her own show—usually either by stringing together musical theater, popular, or folk songs with some sort of theme and narration, or by interpolating songs into

194  Lauren Acton an existing story or fairy tale suitable for school children. Emerson was part of the first wave of composer/educators who created original shows for their own students and realized that there was a market to sell the shows to others. In 1981, Emerson and his brother, Richard Derwingson, wrote a musical for young high school students: Teen was about the day in the life of a teenager. It was 45 minutes long and a major seller because there was nothing else like it at the time. Either you were going to do Hello Dolly or Grease or something along those lines, or here was something that was finally really written for schools. That was relatively easy. That was cheap, by comparison. Probably for $100 you could put on the whole thing with no residual rental fees.13 Teen was a major seller for Emerson and Derwingson, and for the next six years, while they published variations on a theme with Teen 2 and Teen 3, Emerson was also writing some simple shows for students in grades K-2 called Kid Skits. His own children were young at the time, and he said, “I was basically writing for my own kids and trying to foster music in the schools.” At the same time that Emerson was publishing children’s musicals with Jensen Publications, Philip Kern was working with his wife Susan on elementary musicals under the Houston Publishing banner. Kern recalls that Houston Publishing was extremely popular and did very well, “but it was back in the day when you could have a catalogue and Texas alone would buy everything. Oil was outrageous. [The publisher] had a small concern but was able to make a lot of money on it.”14 Kern’s comment alludes to the fact that not only were elementary school musicals popular because they filled a hole in the market, but there was also a good deal of general prosperity in the early 1980s in North America. There was fairly decent funding for arts education overall and music education in particular due to some strong music educator associations and some successful lobbying about the importance of music education for all children. MENC, the National Association for Music Education, tracked the importance of music education in the United States in symposia and in music education journals.15 In 2007, Marie McCarthy wrote an overview of MENC’s activities from 1982 to 2007, contextualized within the American and broader global socio-political and economic landscape.16 She notes that from the late seventies and into the early eighties, “there is clear evidence of increased visibility of music education in the arena of the federal government” (141). Trips by MENC presidents to Capitol Hill were part of an effort to create closer ties with Congress and make politicians aware of the value of music education—especially important when it came to allocating funds to school districts (142). In 1991, MENC revised its Child’s Bill of Rights in Music to align with the changing demographics of US classrooms and made

Educational and community musicals  195 sure that policy makers were considering the value of music education when they considered education overall.17 In the late seventies and early eighties, musicals written explicitly for children began to be marketed to teachers and revitalized awareness of how music affected childhood development in memory processing and motor learning, among other areas.18 Music and elementary educators were cognizant of facilitating classroom experiences that would benefit the whole child, and musicals were particularly good at this in their blend of the performing arts with somatic, musical, and memory development, in addition to often meeting curricular objectives. Musicals that could be performed by school children of varying musical abilities and talents formed a core part of the mission to make music accessible to all children and to give all children the benefit of a publicly provided music education. As composer and educator John Jacobson puts it: Those kids that have the benefit of dance lessons or voice lessons and theatre lessons, they’re going to get [performing arts education] anyway, and on that level, I’m glad they do. But kids that come from families that maybe don’t have any experience of [musical theater], when I see them get a taste of this, and get to have a little bit of the flavor of what this is all about, to me that’s ten-fold rewarding and why I chose this as my career path. Jacobson majored in music education in college and worked for Disney for ten years before working as a dance instructor and choreographer in the public school system. He wrote some books for Jensen Publications and Shawnee Press about choreographing and staging school musicals, and he found that those presses were also looking for people to write music for school musicals. He began writing elementary musicals more than 30 years ago, and he says that he now writes four to five musicals a year. Jacobson manages this prolific output by working with various collaborators, and creating shorter musicals for younger grades. Many of his musicals are highly successful and well received by music educators.19 Emerson and Jacobson began working together when the Hal Leonard Corporation began buying up catalogs of most school musicals in the market, including those by Jensen Publications, Shawnee Press, and Houston Publishing. Emerson, who is also a prolific choral arranger of pop and Broadway standards in the Hal Leonard’s catalog, said that he received some really helpful suggestions from Emily Crocker, the director of choral publications in 1989, about themes for school musicals. She asked him, “Why don’t you do an environmental musical?” As a response, Emerson wrote Assignment Earth: What Kids Can Do to Save the Planet for students in grades 3 to 8. 20 He remarked, “Because it filled a void, it was a huge, huge seller. It maybe made me more money than any single other project. We’d found a hole in the market, and you want to follow that up, obviously.” Emerson said that Assignment Earth was among his five top

196  Lauren Acton sellers, along with December in Our Town and three collaborations with Jacobson: The Adventures of Lewis and Clark; Dig It; and Pirates! The Musical. Emerson, Jacobson, and other composers have been able to create viable full-time composition careers over the last three decades by writing school musicals. Emerson provided an estimate of his shows’ sales: I would say generally speaking, an average show in a year’s time—say the first year—you would sell seven to ten thousand singer editions, so say 1000 piano/conductor editions—generally one [piano/conductor] for every ten [singer editions]. If it’s a hit, like Pirates, it’s generally double that . . . I was computing on Assignment Earth—this was over its life, ten years—I’ve made about $100,000 in royalties; so at 10%, you can do the math—its $1,000,000 in retail sales. It is possible to go there, but it was one of a kind and when there was no competition, and it was so timely. So those kinds of sales might never happen again. Each of the composers I spoke with noted that there is more competition now from the likes of Broadway JR. musicals, the MTI KIDS collections, and school editions of professional shows than there was 30 years ago, but there is still a good market niche for short musicals that target elementary interests, curricula, and voices.

Musical considerations: writing music for children’s voices Music education researcher Debra G. Gordon, writing about vocal pedagogy in the elementary classroom, noted that it is important for teachers to be cognizant of the range and tessitura of children’s voices when selecting repertoire for the elementary classroom. She argued that while there is some argument over specific ranges, by 2001 her personal observation led her to some specifics: “Typically, one would expect a kindergartner to have a range of c1—g1 and tessitura of d1—f1. The range expands upward by a whole step at approximately each grade level, but the lower expansion may not occur until the fourth grade, when the normal range may be b—d2 . By sixth grade the range is fairly wide, with the voice changes imminent for both boys and girls.”21 Each of the composers I spoke with talked about the special challenges of writing vocal music for children. Philip Kern noted that range is a particular consideration for younger children and that it provides a certain niche for composers of elementary musicals: “There’s a market even now for educational musicals for younger voices that take into account that there’s going to be a smaller range. I was always careful about that with music, to keep the voices on the staff. I’ve seen some shows where people seem to think that kids can sing anything.” Expecting children to sing notes outside of their range, or to have most of the notes of a song or show sitting in a tessitura to which a child has not yet developed can have an adverse effect on children’s vocal development. The concerns of the

Educational and community musicals  197 elementary music educator for healthy vocal development are sometimes at odds with the goals of a director for a show featuring children. As John Jacobson put it: It’s why I got into education to begin with: If I was just going to do Annie, I’d get a red-headed girl that can belt, and have her sing until she’s worn out, then get another one. But that is not the case in education, especially in public education, where I’ve spent most of my life. You know, you teach whoever gets off the bus. And if there’s a kid that can’t clap on 2 and 4, if they can’t do anything, your job is to find something that they can do, in the choir or onstage. I find that to be unbelievably rewarding. It’s just where I want to spend my life. The vocal demands of Broadway shows require certain types of voices, and older children are often cast in younger roles in order to meet those vocal demands in professional and semi-professional settings. It follows then that when an entire amateur class full of younger children of varying vocal abilities are all singing together, they benefit from songs and shows composed especially for their voices. Classroom musicals differ from not only Broadway shows but also children’s choral repertoire, in that there are different educational and musical goals, and one of the goals in school musicals is to make sure that everyone is singing, even if it may be at the expense of vocal pedagogy goals such as expanding range and developing tone. Roger Emerson remarked that a major goal for each of his shows is in “making it singable for boys—within their ranges. Boys prefer to sing in the chest voices, and so b-flat—b-flat1 or c—c1 is generally better for them. It’s not great for exercising the head voice, but there are more non-auditioned programs, so I try to keep things down a little more chesty, even though long run you want to expand the range.” Jacobson and Kern are also concerned with making sure that their musicals are inclusive and singable by all children in the age range for which they are writing. Kern has written a number of musicals targeted to middle schoolers, and he has certain compositional techniques that have worked well for him: I usually write for two parts—assuming the boys’ voices have changed, and make it complex as possible while still being accessible. That is, canons and rounds, so that it makes it more challenging to them musically, but they have a lot of company to hold onto the part . . . A 3-part round, once it gets going, sounds more complicated than it really is, and it’s a good challenge to the kids to keep their part going and not get distracted by the other person. If I’m going to write two parts, I try to keep things mostly consonant. If there’s a dissonance, it resolves logically, melodically, so it doesn’t sound harsh. It’s usually successful for me to put them into parallel 3rds and 6ths and the harmonizations that make sense to them.

198  Lauren Acton Emerson writes homophonic textures, but he also commented, “Call and answer works really well, because you get a competition thing going. Or descant as opposed to parallel harmony.” Most composers use a mix of techniques throughout their musicals, with different manipulations of the two or three parts in each song. Many of the early elementary musicals are designed to be performed with piano accompaniment or with a pre-recorded backing track that comes as part of the kit. Musicals for middle schoolers and high schoolers, however, often have arrangements for a small band. The artistic director of OKTC, Andrew Tribe, remarked, “We consider it kind of a right of passage that the juniors [ages 8–14] do shows with CD accompaniment and then the seniors [14–18] do a show with a live orchestra.”22 Philip Kern hired an orchestrator by the name of Steve Parsons to orchestrate the Kerns’ musical of It’s a Wonderful Life for a minimum of 16 musicians, but Kern is yet to hear a production with the live orchestra. Kern admits that he is disappointed when he knows that the orchestral parts have been ordered by a school or community group, but then he hears that the show is being performed with a backing track. He thinks that it mostly comes down to budgeting: “It’s one of those things where these days very few places want to hire in players when they can track it.” Kern did hear about a full production at an arts high school in Dayton, Ohio whose students often go on to Julliard. In community settings, it may be prohibitive to hire 16 or more pit musicians, but in a high school—especially an arts high school—the orchestra is usually made up of students who participate in the musical as an extracurricular activity or as part of their music program requirements, and the quality of the sound and musicianship can be quite high. Many of the composers I spoke with mentioned that they know it is a common practice (although not the best practice) to have students perform with the rehearsal tracks that are part of most school musical kits. Jacobson said that the “recordings are essential because they give a template” for students and teachers to follow and with which to rehearse. Most of the piano/ conductor scores are full kits that also come with staging and choreography suggestions, and the kits often include two sets of recordings—one with voices, and one without.23 During rehearsal, singing along to the version with voices is analogous to singing along with a Broadway cast recording, but most composers do not find it ideal for the students to sing along with professional voices during a performance; Kern lamented, “I’m afraid a lot of times people performed it with the voices to boost the kids.” Composers call upon a wide array of musical styles when they are creating musicals for children. Jacobson says that he tries to stay in touch with what kids are currently listening to and tie his stylistic choices for each song into the theme of the musical: Once we have a subject matter, we’ll try to have a pallet of sound for that musical. For Swamped you wouldn’t all of a sudden have a rap

Educational and community musicals  199 song, but you go with the sound of the area of Dixieland and the bayou. That usually works pretty well because you’ve got a pallet of sounds that ties things together. If you’re doing an historical musical about the history of jazz in the country, you’ll get a wider range of sounds, starting with work songs, then spirituals, then early Dixieland, then blues and more modern jazz. It’s all in a sound world, but you move through different styles. Jacobson and Emerson have developed a process of working with each other in which they normally come up with the idea and theme of the musical first, before writing the songs. Emerson said, “When John and I have an idea, we’ll brainstorm it separately, then we’ll get together and spend a couple of days determining what are the high points where we want to have a song. You’re going to have an opening, you’re going to have a closing, you’ll have a breadand-butter ballad, and something comic, hopefully.” In this manner, their compositional process is likely similar to many writing partners of Broadway musicals, but they are more constrained by their considerations of the range, difficulty, and themes appropriate to non-professional child performers. The prescriptive nature of the compositional process is not usually evident in the quality of the finished musical, especially because Jacobson and Emerson usually write with enough musical variety, creating distinct sound worlds for each show, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of formulaic repetition. Emerson points out that he is careful not to write down to the students or overly simplify harmonies and lyrical syntax. Jacobson also notes that he will try to include some humor that is appropriate but works on a couple of levels, so that audiences of parents remain engaged and “aren’t bored out of their minds. I try to write with a lot of winks to the audience, to the teachers.” Emerson’s goal of making the music accessible and still providing something of a challenge is achieved through some of the same compositional methods that he uses to make sure that boys are willing to sing and participate in the musical: “I try to do things that aren’t cutesy—that’s hard to define in musical terms, but I try to be as hip rhythmically as possible. Harmonically, I have a jazz band, so instead of a minor chord, I’ll use minor 7s and minor 9s. I’ll use a lot of rock beats. We always include something swing, or if we’re doing a variety of styles, something Latin.” He thinks that most school-aged boys are more engaged by the type of music found in their musicals than in a lot of choral repertoire, and that there is maybe less social stigma for boys to participate in a musical than there is for them to join a choir. There may be some anecdotal evidence that musicals are more popular than choirs with boys at certain schools, but that popularity or lack thereof is something that likely varies widely from school to school. Emerson also writes choral music, and he joked, “My whole career has been trying to write stuff that guys will sing.” Emerson notes that there are certain musical stereotypes that crop up in the songs: “Generally, anything that’s Hanukah related will have that sort

200  Lauren Acton of klezmer thing. I try to move away from what’s expected sometimes, but people want what they’re used to. ‘Give me oom-pah oom-pah oom-pah’— and I think why not just use the show you’ve got? And some of them do!” He says that he could probably write a show about the various celebrations in December every year because there is a wide stylistic variety between the types of songs, but many teachers teach the same musical year after year— to save on buying a new musical, or because it has become second nature to teach a musical they know well. 24 Most school musicals, unlike Broadway JR. and MTI KIDS shows, don’t require that royalties be paid for each performance. Instead, most school musicals follow the model of choral music; the schools pay for the kits once and then own the music, along with the ability to perform it for years after the initial purchase.

Music and memory: performing lessons The composers and lyricists who write musicals for elementary-aged children often write for that age group because of a deep-seated belief in the importance of music education for children, and the power of music to impart musical and curricular lessons in meaningful ways. Roger Emerson’s main goals in writing school musicals are to “foster vocal skill and camaraderie and community and hopefully teach something at the same time.” John Jacobson shared with me that his mantra in life is “what you learn through music you don’t forget.” Emerson has no doubt that musicals can help facts stick in the minds of children: “If you have followed any of Tim Lautzenheiser’s research about the myelin sheathe—you know [sings] ‘ABCDEFG’—we all know it, because it literally remains in the brain forever.”25 Philip Kern points out that the method of imbedding facts in memory through song has a long tradition in spirituals like “Go Where I Send Thee”: “because you’re memorizing a song, you’re also memorizing parts of scripture at the same time. That kind of educational trick has been popular in spirituals for hundreds of years.” The songs that these composers write for children’s musicals, therefore, often contain educational lyrics that tie into the curriculum—like learning facts about planets, explorers, and nature—or they are musicals with the same sort of moral messages that are frequently found in spirituals—musicals like Project Peace: What Kids Can Do to Build a More Tolerant World26 and A Better You . . . A Better Me! Building Character through Music. 27 It is probably not a coincidence that composers began to write school musicals with educational content and moral messages a few years after Sesame Street first aired in 1969, and Free to Be . . . You and Me was released in 1972. Children’s recall of educational content imparted by songs began to be studied by research scientists in the 1980s—usually in relation to shows like Sesame Street—and the data show that melody does indeed reinforce content knowledge better than verbal repetition alone, supporting the anecdotal evidence supplied by the authors of children’s musicals. 28

Educational and community musicals  201 Composers like Emerson, Jacobson, and Kern use the mnemonic and affective powers of music to impart messages and curriculum to children. These messages are carefully selected and approved by their publishers. For example, Emerson mentioned that he and Jacobson have been writing a zombie musical but received some criticism from Hal Leonard about whether the content was appropriate for elementary-aged children. Emerson notes that their musical “basically goes to the publisher, and goes to a committee to see what they think and if there’s anything that offends them. They’re Midwestern, so there’s always something!” It is unclear whether the publishers follow any clear guidelines or if they may be following public opinion (or their interpretation of public opinion). Rock ‘n’ roll seems to be permitted and encouraged in these musicals, but sex is off limits, and drugs are only ever mentioned as part of a “Say No” message. In building a repertoire of musicals for children, Hal Leonard publishers are also contributing to societal norms wherein children learn moral messages as well as historical facts through music and musicals. For instance, the description on the Hal Leonard site of Jacobson’s Kids Rock! includes: Kids rock when you show compassion, respect, courage. Kids rock when you listen, and are polite and honest. Kids rock when you pick up after yourself, brush your teeth, exercise, and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Find your own pair of ‘goodie two shoes’ that makes you feel good from head to toe!29 When the children are older, they also may be taught about values such as patriotism with a revue musical like We Honor You: A Salute to America’s Soldiers and Veterans: This Veterans’ Day and every day, we salute our nation’s brave veterans who served our country in moments of turmoil and in moments of peace. We also salute the current members of our military who sacrifice everyday so that we might enjoy all that it means to be an American. We gather together to send a message that our soldiers and veterans are never far from our minds and always deep in our hearts. The spirit of America is alive in each and every one of us and we say THANK YOU!30 The selection of a musical for the classroom can, therefore, become not only a curricular choice but also a moral one, and sometimes even a political one. All of the composers I interviewed spoke about the “stickiness” of music— that it can be a formidable tool in laying facts into the memory. Indeed, it is part of the product pitch for composer Ron Fink and lyricist John Heath’s musical publication company Bad Wolf Press: “It’s their patented formula: Entertaining Story + Music/Rhyme = Subject Mastery.

202  Lauren Acton Over and over again, teachers tell them that the songs are infectious, and once they get ‘stuck’ in their students’ heads, the curriculum is successfully retained.”31 The “earworm” effect of music is why advertisements so often use jingles, and everything from the alphabet to the names of states is taught with music. The act of singing the song is an important component of laying facts into the memory. Listening to songs about grammar facts or how a bill becomes a law may be a great way to entertain while educating, and has formed a large part of the educational television programming of the past several decades from Sesame Street to Schoolhouse Rock! to The Backyardigans. However, in order to internalize the facts that educators are attempting to impart, children must not only passively listen to the music, but they must also hear the music in their inner ears, or—even better—sing the songs aloud repeatedly.32 Media scholar Sandra Calvert has done extensive work on music’s effects on memory, and she calls on the work of AC Huston and others when she notes that singing songs like “I’m Just a Bill” from Schoolhouse Rock! in a classroom (music or homeroom) is “reflective, because it provides children with opportunities to rehearse content. Singing, for example, was classified as a reflective feature because it combines repetition with language that is presented melodically rather than spoken, thereby providing opportunities to rehearse the content.”33 In educational musicals, this reflective practice is taken even further in the memorization of songs. While the songs may ostensibly be memorized for the purposes of a one-time performance in front of schoolmates and parents, the educational or moral lyrics of many of the songs also benefit students when they are tested on facts that they have memorized for their musical, whether it be how far Jupiter is from the sun or strategies to rebuff peer pressure. Educational musicals not only incorporate music and the memorization of lines of text, but they usually also incorporate movement and dance. These embodied movements provide a physical, enactive avenue for memory development and access kinesthetic processes of learning. Calvert recounts that movement not only reinforces the lessons imparted in sung text, but but it also allows young children deeper understanding of the words and meaning. In an experiment that Calvert ran: Toddlers either sang “I’m a Little Teapot” and tipped their bodies over as they and the adult “poured out” the tea, or they just sang the song as an adult played it on a guitar and sang it with them. The toddlers who used enactive, body movements as ways of rehearsing the song lyrics subsequently understood the meaning of the songs better than those who simply sang them without the aid of motor rehearsal. Interestingly, one of the groups of children made up their own tea party when motor aids were not part of their condition. The implication is that the motor behaviors provided an additional modality to think about and to encode the content, which, in turn, enhanced children’s understanding of the song lyrics.34

Educational and community musicals  203 Somatic gestures, therefore, do not merely reinforce what is being learned in the songs but can also help children understand the message of the songs more easily, also providing avenues for their own interpretation and analysis. Jacobson, who is as much a choreographer as he is a composer and lyricist, said that he tries to include choreography for most of the songs in his musicals. He breaks down the steps of his choreography on videos that were once included with the classroom musical kits on videocassette and are now largely available for free on his website. School musical directors often make use of the included choreography, but some still prefer to create their own or have the students create their own choreography. Jacobson notes the importance of including movement with songs: “If nothing else, it helps the kids learn them. Or even just ‘choralography’—you know, arm movements—even on ballads, to help them be more expressive.” Jacobson came to internet fame when his choreography video for the Music Express song “Planet Rock” was uploaded to YouTube with the title “Double Dream Hands.”35 Jacobson got a call from his publishers letting him know that one of his dance videos (he does 40–50 a year) had gone viral. Jacobson went on televisions shows like Ellen and America’s Got Talent, fully aware that most people were not taking the video in the spirit in which it was intended—as a teaching tool to help children learn musical theater choreography—but were instead amused by a grown man exuberantly dancing. He recalls: To begin with it was a little disconcerting. People are writing things about you, and some nasty things about you, but then after a while I kind of went, “You know, I guess I do look a little ridiculous.” I never thought that I looked ridiculous doing what I do for a living, teaching dance and all that, because when you’re a teacher you have to be a little bigger than life. You have to do things over the top so the kids do it about halfway, but I never really thought about it. But when you step back and look at it, yes I guess it’s a little strange out of context. It was disconcerting, but after a while I went, “you know, this is what I do, and I know—I know—that it’s good for kids. And I’m not going to let the nasty people on YouTube or America’s Got Talent or whatever shame me into not doing something that I know is wonderful for kids.” So I just quickly got over my humiliation and just got right back into it. 36 To anyone familiar with children’s musicals—especially teachers of children’s musicals—the video was obviously a teaching tool for musical-dance expression in the classroom. Some of the most popular musicals for the elementary school market are musicals that engage children on multiple levels, giving them musical, dance, and performance experience and also helping them learn historical

204  Lauren Acton or scientific facts. Philip Kern said that Cosmic Pinball was their most popular musical: We had a lot of information that we tried to build into the score about the science of these planets. You know, some are gas giants and some are this much bigger than Earth. It was something that science teachers hopefully were able to get some double duty out of the show because they could talk about the planets—like how much you would weigh on Mars—trying to give kids some hands on information about space and planets and the solar system. Musicals for the holiday season are also perennially popular with schools, but Emerson notes that musicals that are all about Santa or are overtly Christian are not as popular as musicals that explore the diversity of celebration. A very popular musical for him was December in Our Town: A Multicultural Holiday Musical, with songs such as “Kwanzaa Celebration” and “La Fiesta!”37 These musicals are particularly appropriate for schools with a diverse student population, and they also teach the children about other cultures within a framework of shared celebration. There are also practical considerations for tying the content of the musicals to the curriculum, chief of which is finding time to rehearse a musical during the school day so it does not take away from other curricular goals. Jacobson noted: Time is really precious in a child’s life—there is so much to cover in a school day, especially with all the demands now. There’s little time to do something just for the fun of it. Our musicals, more and more, are now cross-curricular, and you know, I’m fine with it. Roger and I wrote The Adventures of Lewis and Clark and they study Lewis and Clark in fifth grade. If we can write a musical that helps reinforce what they’re learning in their fifth grade history class anyway, I’m all for it. But it doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun and entertaining and musical. Many of the K-3 musicals that Jacobson writes with John Higgins are intentionally labeled as cross-curricular on the publisher’s website: musicals such as Nuts! A Musical That Celebrates the Circle of Life, Mighty Minds! A Musical That Makes Learning Fun, and Grammar Rocks: Cross- Curricular Music Fun for the Classroom. Indeed, Hal Leonard has an entire series entitled “Rock ‘n’ Learn,” which is intended to “support Common Core State Standards and promote higher level learning, while rockin’ to the beat.”38 The instructional nature of musicals for the educational market is one of the major components that separates them from musicals adapted from commercial productions. The musicals that are intended to teach children specific lessons are not intended to transfer to Off-Broadway. Instead, they are part of a heuristic approach that builds music education into other

Educational and community musicals  205 curriculum goals in social studies or science. John Jacobson said: “Our major competition now are shows like Annie and the Broadway JR. series, and I think those are fantastic . . . but they are different than the shows that are curricular and tied to what is being learned in the classroom. They’re more musicals for musicals’ sake. There’s a place for that too.” Jacobson views his own work as “edutainment” and the Broadway shows as entertainment for entertainment’s sake. Although, as Bertolt Brecht argued, “the contrast between learning and amusing oneself is not laid down by divine rule; it is not one that has always been and must continue to be.”39 And in practice, Jacobson and the other composers are as much concerned with entertainment as they are with education, in fact believing that if something is entertaining, it can help the educational material “stick” more in the mind of children than if it were educational alone.

Benefits to schools As professor of music education Charlene Ryan writes in her handbook for music teachers, “Performances are the primary vehicle through which most music programs are known. They are often the first, and sometimes the only, glimpse that the school and wider community have of what music education in your school is all about . . . the component upon which judgments are often made with respect to the quality, value, and role of music education.”40 Musical theater performances, therefore, not only have a value for the students but can also influence school administrators and politicians heading up departments or ministries of education about the value of music education. Emerson commented that in his home of Mount Shasta, California, he thinks that parents and students would rise up in protest if administrators tried to cut their music programs: “About ten years ago there was a survey done, and the last thing they wanted cut was music. Bussing would go first. Athletics would go first.” Emerson obviously has some self-interest involved in the success of elementary musicals, but he writes them in addition to his popular choral arrangements because he firmly believes in the value of musical theater for students, schools, and the wider community: “I’ve always said and felt that if a school district can do nothing else, they should do school-wide musicals… If you see a school putting on a musical effectively, it’s a pretty good indication of what’s going on in the school—maybe a better barometer than some of the testing we’re doing.” He thinks that schools get the “greatest bang for their buck” from musicals because they involve students in all of the performing arts, as well as encouraging teamwork and discipline, even before any cross-curricular tie-ins. Both Emerson and Jacobson commented that musicals differ from most school athletics in that every child wins. While it may be true that there is a disparity between star roles and chorus roles in most of the Broadway JR. shows, school musicals tend to be written with many communal numbers, giving as many children as possible a chance to shine. Emerson

206  Lauren Acton said that their musicals create a sense of “community, and working together toward a common goal—I mean, who doesn’t feel good after a musical?” Jacobson stated, “You need to collaborate in sports, and on a team too, but what I like about the musical is that everybody wins. There are no losers; everybody goes home on top, feeling like a winner. At least at the elementary level, arts can be the one place where everyone can be a winner and there doesn’t have to be any negative thing about it.” This group success is especially true of musicals written for schools because they are often designed to give every child an opportunity to be in the spotlight, as contrasted with many Broadway-style shows. Andrew Tribe, artistic director of OKTC, commented that OKTC has mostly moved to Broadway JR. and full Broadway shows for the main company, but that there are certain drawbacks to them in terms of including every child: “the problem with the name recognition shows is the parts are very, very specific, whereas the shows that are made for classes have more even parts and every kid gets to shine. Broadway and Broadway JR. shows aren’t really written like that. Broadway shows have hierarchies to them.”41 At Original Kids, there is an audition to get into the company and then further auditions for each show in order for the directors to decide on casting. In such an environment, with more star-driven shows from the Broadway canon, there will inevitably be children who are disappointed with their parts before rehearsals even begin. School musicals are great vehicles for reaching out to children who may not be interested in the performance aspect of the musicals but are willing and excited to be involved in painting sets or being part of the crew. Charlene Ryan comments, “You will find that students who are not otherwise involved in the music program will come out to be part of a musical . . . [and] become regular members of other aspects of the music program . . . musicals can help build a sense of community, student morale, and allegiance to the music department.”42 This allegiance goes beyond student involvement to parent, teacher, and community involvement. Jacobson has seen parents express a lot of excitement for their children: They want to make costumes and be engaged. But I think the ones that are most surprising are the ones that are caught off guard by their own child’s participation. When they had no idea that their kid would get up there and act, or sing and dance. And they love it. They’re just so shocked, maybe, because they never had any experience of it themselves. It’s really rewarding. And you know I’m glad when the parents walk out and say, “Wow! That was not too painful!” Because a lot of things you go to at school and just want to get them over with, and hopefully that’s not the case [with musicals] for really engaged parents who recognize what it does for their child. Ryan echoes Jacobson’s point: “Parents who are not particularly comfortable with the traditional band-orchestra-choir setting tend to find musicals more accessible” (62). Middle-school educator Kate Lewicki mentioned that as

Educational and community musicals  207 they built the reputation of the musical theater program for grade 8 students at her middle school, they were overwhelmed by offers of help from parent volunteers: “The parents have been wonderful—they do not take over the set building, they patiently teach the students how to do it themselves. We have found a priceless resource.”43 Parents can become not only volunteer helpers during the rehearsal and performance process but also strong advocates of musicals and music programs over the course of their child’s school career. Ryan also suggests that music teachers and musical directors reach out to non-arts teachers in order to help build value for music-education programs among school staff: “the more you involve nonarts teachers in arts productions, the more they will come to understand the value of the program and the complexity of what students are learning” (62). The more that all teachers and parents are invested in the success of school musicals, the more difficult it is for funding to be cut or music programs to be reduced. Emerson thinks that the entertainment and educational value of school musicals has had a large influence on how many music programs across North America function and are valued: “It’s heartwarming to know that we’ve maybe changed the culture. This makes better schools and better kids and better people—it’s pretty cool.” The composers do not have the same name recognition or respect as shown to Frank Loesser, Stephen Schwartz, or Lin-Manuel Miranda, but they have an outsized influence of the lives of children who rehearse and perform their musicals. Emerson notes, “I don’t know if I’d say we’re the unsung heroes, but in some ways we are: our material is done by more kids than a lot of stuff. We don’t have Grammys or Tonys but we do get a paycheck, which is wonderful. And you do see unit sales and think—wow, I had no idea.” For older children, the Broadway JR. shows are great options to draw students, parents, and community members to the world of musical theater with their name-brand appeal, but for younger students, there will always be a place for and value in the short, children-driven musicals written specifically for the school market.

Notes

208  Lauren Acton









Educational and community musicals  209































e,

210  Lauren Acton

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

curriculum) but the story and the humor combined with music and rhyme do their stuff to help your kids understand and retain what they need to remember.” www.songsforteaching.com/store/bad-wolf-press-c-302.html. David J. Elliott and Harold Fiske, among others, have pointed out that music listening is not passive but is what Elliott calls “thinking-in-action” and “knowing-in-action.” David J. Elliott, “Musicing, Listening, and Musical Understanding,” Contributions to Music Education, no. 20 (1993): 73. See also Harold Fiske, “Structure of Cognition and Music Decision-Making,” in Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning, ed. R. Colwell (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), 360–76. Sandra L. Calvert, “Children’s Media,” 272. Calvert references A. C. Huston, et al., “Communication More Than Content: Formal Features of Children’s Television Programs,” Journal of Communication 31 (1981): 32–48. Calvert, 274. See the original video on YouTube at https://youtu.be/dm7yAWpX1Mc. Indeed, Jacobson and Hal Leonard have since taken the fame of “Double Dream Hands” and redirected the traffic to their own websites with a dedicated website to the video: www.doubledreamhandsdance.com/. Roger Emerson, December in Our Town: A Multicultural Holiday Musical (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 1995). From the description of John Jacobson and Roger Emerson’s Math Rocks: Cross-Curricular Music Fun for the Classroom on the Hal Leonard website: www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid=126016. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 73. Charlene Ryan, Building Strong Music Programs: A Handbook for Preservice and Novice Music Teachers (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 55. Tribe interview. Ryan, 62. Kate Lewicki, “Satisfying Multiple Intelligences and Diverse Talents Through Musical Theater,” Middle School Journal 34, no. 2 (2002): 42.

11 Broadway Junior  Stacy Wolf

Tamika Twelve-year-old Tamika Jenkins looked across the glass-walled, marblefloored lobby of Atlanta’s Galleria Hotel at a sea of brightly colored “Junior Theatre Festival” t-shirts worn by kids who, like her, did musical theater.1 Multiple escalators moved up and down, carrying streams of kids, their red and black tote bags flung casually over their shoulders. She felt a little stab of nervousness in her stomach, even though she knew that she was there with 20 other kids from the Arbor Arts Magnet Middle School. They were right next to her in a tight little huddle waiting for their director Ms. Carter to collect their t-shirts and folders with the schedule of activities and their room keys so that they could take their stuff upstairs. Tamika tried to breathe and focus, as her teacher had taught her to do when she got stage fright. She knew tomorrow would be here soon enough, so she tried not to worry about it now. She reminded herself that she knew every word, every note, and every step of “Seventy-Six Trombones,” “Trouble in River City,” and “Good Night, My Someone” in their 15-minute performance of The Music Man JR., which she, playing Marian the Librarian, and her friends would perform the next day for a hundred other kid performers and two professional artist judges. But at this moment, about to spend three nights I thank MTI for their generosity, openness, and help, especially Freddie Gershon, Carol Edelson, John Prignano, and Barbara, Freddie’s assistant. Thanks to iTheatrics and the JTF organizers for welcoming me in 2013, including Tim McDonald, Marty Johnson, and Carol Ripley; and to Carol for later conversations; and to Disney Theatrical Group’s Ken Cerniglia, Lisa Mitchell, David Scott, and Sarah Malone Kenny for their frequent help and support. I very much appreciate all of the teachers and artists who agreed to be interviewed for this article and generously shared their stories with Katie Welsh and me, including Michelle K. Moore and Robert Lee. For reading drafts, I thank the 2015 Musical Theatre Forum (David Savran, Dominic Symonds, Liz Wollman, Tamsen Wolff, Ray Knapp, Barrie Gelles, Joshua Robinson, and Eric Glover), Wendy Belcher, Jill Dolan, Judith Hamera, and Adin Walker. Finally, thanks to Katie Welsh for her invaluable research assistance, including conducting extensive interviews with JTF participants in summer and fall 2014. A version of this essay was published as “The Junior Theatre Festival and Broadway Junior” in Stacy Wolf’s Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 35–66. The essay is reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

212  Stacy Wolf away from her parents (who were a short hour’s drive away in a suburb on the other side of the city), she was nervous. Tamika was so involved with her own thoughts and fears of messing up (although she knew she wouldn’t. She had already done the show and gotten a standing ovation every night. She could sing her songs in her sleep.) that she didn’t notice a tall, older, baby-faced but might-be-cute boy who was trying to act casual as he came down the escalator, munching on the apple that all the kids got in their JTF tote bags. This was Daniel Davis’s fifth time at JTF, but the 14-year-old felt more nervous every year, as the Calhoun Children’s Theatre directors Sara and Bob cast him in progressively bigger parts, and he wanted more than ever to get noticed by the adjudicators observing their excerpt from Hairspray JR.—he played Corny Collins—and get selected to audition for the choreography DVD that iTheatrics tapes in New York before he aged out of the Children’s Theatre as a high schooler.

Welcome to the Junior Theatre Festival The Junior Theatre Festival takes place in mid-January during Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend, when more than 4,000 elementary and middleschool-aged children from public and private schools, community theaters, private studios, pay-to-play programs, and children’s theaters, and their teachers, directors, and chaperoning parents gather in a big hotel convention center in Atlanta to celebrate their participation in musical theater. The huge event is produced by iTheatrics, a New York-based company that adapts Broadway musicals for kids, creating hour-long, age-appropriate versions of Fiddler on the Roof, Godspell, and Legally Blonde, among others, in collaboration with Musical Theatre International (MTI: the biggest licensing company for musicals, including the Broadway JR. catalog), Disney Theatrical Group, and Playbill. JTF, which began in 2003, was the brainchild of Nicholas F. Manos, former President of Atlanta’s now-defunct Theater of the Stars. 2 As he tells it, after a large cast production of Annie (the full-length show) closed, Manos noted how deflated the kids were. (TOTS premiered the live version of Disney’s High School Musical and did 21 productions of Annie in its 60 years of operation.) He wanted to energize them and believed that connecting them to a national network of kids who love musical theater would do the trick. In collaboration with Timothy A. McDonald, then MTI’s education director and now the President and CEO of iTheatrics, they conceived of the festival, which quickly grew from 20 schools and 650 participants in the first year to almost 4,000 kids from more than 90 groups ten years later. JTF consists of numerous interlocking parts. Everyone trickles in on Friday evening, and each participant picks up a package of welcome materials: t-shirt, loose-leaf notebook with a printed schedule of events, water bottle, and a tote bag filled with snacks. Each group is assigned a meeting room

Broadway Junior  213 for an hour on Friday night to rehearse its 15-minute performance—a segment of a musical from MTI’s Broadway JR.—which is the centerpiece of the festival. Saturday morning is booked with ten or more concurrent sessions of eight or nine groups (each room designated to a color-coded “pod”), during which each group performs for all of the other groups in that pod, observers, and two professional artist adjudicators for immediate feedback. Strictly timed, these mini-productions take place in nondescript convention center rooms sans set, lights, and props, and costumes consist solely of jeans and the matching logo’d, brightly colored t-shirts provided by JTF. Saturday afternoon is fully scheduled with workshops in singing, dancing, and acting for the children, and on producing, directing, and designing for their teachers and directors, as well as kids’ auditions for various special performances. Sunday morning, the crowd gathers in an all-conference session with a few current young adult Broadway artists who fly in to talk about their careers and answer questions from the adoring audience. The festival culminates with a Sunday afternoon blowout event: a showcase of musical numbers performed by selected children’s theater companies and school groups, now fully costumed and gloriously lit, and other, less glossy numbers presented by various groups that were selected, assembled, and rehearsed during the festival. The evening ends with an elaborate distribution of awards; almost every group there is publicly recognized in some way. Over the years, as the numbers have grown, so have the artist- educator organizers’ attention to detail. Led by director of programming Marty Johnson, they constantly strive to improve the festival’s structure and expand the offerings. For example, the team designed more effective ways to give feedback to kids by adding “debriefing” sessions following each group’s adjudication to allow the kids to talk about their feelings and blow off steam, and they instituted a welcome introductory session for firsttime teachers and directors. Though JTF’s team stresses celebration and community-building in their publicity materials and throughout the weekend, “feedback” is a key aspect of this subcultural event. It’s not a competition, says Johnson, but as writer, blogger, and frequent JTF attendee Peter Filichia notes, “Well, yes, and no, for there are judges in each room who will speak plainly after a presentation” and “submit written evaluations that result in awards.”3 Still, the organizers want to emphasize the festival as affirmation that will carry the kids through until the next year. JFT combines crass commercialism and heartfelt outreach in a seamless, exuberant event. The enormous project operates like a slick corporate machine, even with thousands of rambunctious singing and dancing kids spilling into hallways, taking over space typically occupied by business people and their briefcases. Despite being fueled by progressive language and democratic affirmations, JTF is unabashedly profit-driven, since the repertoire of musicals that the kids perform is chosen solely from MTI’s Broadway JR. collection, which, as of 2015, included 37 one-hour musicals for middle-school kids and 14, 30-minute titles for elementary age kids,

214  Stacy Wolf adapted from full-length shows. In other words, schools and community theaters pay MTI around $500 to license the shows that they then perform excerpts from at JTF, and MTI profits handsomely from Broadway JR. licensing. At the same time, many of the groups that attend JTF, whose registration cost was $695 in 2016 (plus expenses), receive no funding at home and rely on bake sales and JTF scholarships to enable their attendance and participation. JTF, as a microcosm of tween musical theater across the US, is a place of political, economic, artistic, and affectual contradictions.

Daniel In the Cobb meeting room at 7 p.m. on Friday night, Daniel tried to stay calm as Sara and Bob called everyone to attention. The little kids were tired—they had driven for ten hours from Ohio straight through—but also wired from the excitement of being there, of staying in hotel rooms, and from the sugar that they had for dessert at Applebee’s—a treat for most of them. Daniel was frustrated: this was their one chance to rehearse! And they only had one hour! Daniel knew that articulating all of the words in “The Nicest Kids in Town” would be hard for him, and he desperately wanted to practice in the acoustically dead space of the conference hotel meeting room. The kids who were new to JTF were freaked out that there was no stage or lights or costumes, even though he had warned them that it felt weird at first to perform at JTF. “Just use your imagination,” he’d said. He remembered the year that they did Disney’s The Little Mermaid JR., and they couldn’t have any props or scenery so you couldn’t tell what was water and what was land. “We just had to use our bodies to emphasize the movements under water,” he had told his best friend Becca. Daniel was an old-timer by JTF standards. He started coming to the festival when he was eight because his big sister was involved with Calhoun Children’s Theatre. She had to watch him after school, so she took him with her on the bus to the theater when he was in kindergarten. At first, he didn’t really understand what they did there, though he saw how happy she was to be with her friends. It felt like a family, and they were all nice to him, even though he was the tagalong brother. But when he saw her on stage for the first time, playing Adelaide in Guys and Dolls JR., he was amazed and knew that he wanted to do it, too. He did his first show the next year when he was six and played a tree in Once on This Island JR., but even though he wanted a bigger part, he remembered thinking, “I’m going to be the best tree I can be.” He learned from the older kids that “you should always be energetic, even if you’re in the back being a rock.” He loved how everything came together for the performance and when their voices joined as one when they got all of the harmonies right. Since then, Bob and Sara were like parents to him, which was good when his Mom worked a double shift and couldn’t pick him up from rehearsal. He didn’t really mind it when they took him to their house for dinner or

Broadway Junior  215 maybe to McDonald’s if he was really lucky. But the best part was being on stage. He loved everyone looking at him. He didn’t mean that in a bragging way; he just liked to sing and dance and pretend to be someone else. He told Becca once, “When you’re onstage, and you’re being this different part of you, playing a part, you forget the test you have next week… everything that’s a burden, it just leaves. It’s the best feeling ever.” But JTF was a whole different thing because even the little kids were good. He knew that he had a huge advantage as a boy because there were few of them. He remembered his first year at JTF noticing that at the all-conference sessions, Marty or Tim or somebody always said something about how happy they were to see boys at JTF, and whenever boys did anything—it didn’t matter what—everyone cheered. He felt glad that people were applauding, but really, he thought, we’re actors and so are the girls. At the Children’s Theatre, he sometimes felt bad because there were so many girls who were so good—and better than the boys—but there were more of them. Sometimes, there was a part and a girl could do it better than a boy, but the boy will get it. Still, every year the festival got bigger, and there were more kids from performing arts academies and rich private schools added to the kids like him who went to public schools or who did afterschool community theater. He overheard Bob and Sara talking on the drive that some groups had a lot of money and could spend more time rehearsing and less time fundraising than they had to do to get the kids down to Atlanta. Finally, the kids got quiet, and the chaperoning parents (not his mom) watching or doing stuff on their phones or knitting settled down, and Sara said, “Everybody. We have 50 minutes left to rehearse. This is our chance to show them what we have. You’ve worked hard at home and this is what we’ve been waiting for.” Jessica, a 10-year-old who was in the chorus, raised her hand. She was really good for her age and would play leading roles in no time, but she was always asking annoying questions. “Are we going to win a prize?” she demanded. “Let’s not think about that,” said Sara. “Maybe we will and maybe we won’t, but that’s not the point. The point is to do your best.” Jessica rolled her eyes, not trying very hard to hide her disgust. Daniel exchanged looks with Becca who played Tracy Turnblad, the star of the show. They were thinking that the year before, their group won Best Ensemble for Godspell JR. “Places!” Sara said, and everyone scampered to their opening sides “offstage,” waiting for Bob to hit “play” on the CD player. The introduction to “You Can’t Stop the Beat” rang out, and everyone ran to their places in three lines, six kids across, with Daniel and Becca downstage just in front of the group, as they had practiced again and again at home. But the stage area—just a section of the carpeted floor—was bigger than their stage in the community center, so their lines were messed up. Bob stopped the cd. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” said Sara. “This is a new space for us. Let’s figure out where everyone should stand and try again.” This is how it went for the

216  Stacy Wolf next 45 minutes until they got the positioning right, and the choreography worked with almost no mistakes, and the harmony sounded pretty good. There was no energy, though. They were going through the motions, but everyone was too tired. They needed an audience. When they performed the show in November, they’d had a terrible, sloppy, slow dress rehearsal— even the little kids could feel how off they were—but then the performance was great, and everyone said that it was as good as Broadway. But tonight, Daniel was bummed because he really wanted to get into his character, to feel Corny’s charm and hamminess. But all they had time for was basic choreography. Oh well. He hoped that he would get in the zone tomorrow.

Licensing musicals Ever since Broadway musical theater entered the consciousness of mainstream American culture, children and youth have gathered to put on a show.4 With the invention and distribution of LPs in the late 1940s—of which Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific (1947) was the first— musical theater found a place in American homes like never before. In the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, the music of musical theater played on the radio, and songs lasted for weeks or years on the Billboard charts. Broadway stars appeared on television shows like the Ed Sullivan Show and were regularly featured in Life magazine on and offstage. At the same time, the theatrical repertoire performed by elementary, middle, and high schools; summer camps; and community theaters shifted from Shakespeare, fairy tales, and Greek myths to then-contemporary Broadway musicals, such as Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Brigadoon (1947), and Kiss Me, Kate (1948), as young people (and their teachers and directors) wanted to perform the hummable music that they were coming to know. Whether well funded or barebones, performed in a proper theater or in a school cafeteria or in a found outdoor space, in front of an elaborate set with lights and costumes or on an empty stage, and accompanied by a children’s orchestra, a single piano, or sung a capella, Broadway musicals played on youth amateur stages as quickly as they became known across America by way of national tours, LPs, or, eventually, by their movie adaptations. Some of these mid-twentieth-century amateur youth productions used published scripts and sheet music that teachers or community theater directors bought or borrowed from the library, unaware that the shows were owned by licensing companies and that they were, in fact, doing musicals illegally. Samuel French was founded in 1830; the Tams-Witmark Music Library, which licensed the first high school musical—an operetta of Robin Hood—was established in 1925; Dramatists Play Service in 1936; and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization in 1944 as the first licensing company owned by the musicals’ own creators.5 As the Broadway musical theater repertoire grew, so did the licensing companies’ properties. The R  & H Organization, which owned Carousel (1945), South Pacific

Broadway Junior  217 (1949), The King and I (1950), and later, The Sound of Music (1959), profited handsomely, as the pair’s repertoire was a valuable cultural product that amateur artists, including schools and youth community theaters, wanted to perform. Tams-Witmark Music Library and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization controlled most of amateur musical theater licensing until 1952, when composer and lyricist Frank Loesser, coming off the success of Guys and Dolls (1950), opened his own licensing and publishing company, Frank Music Corporation, in order to control and profit from his titles.6 Two years later, Loesser joined with orchestrator Don Walker and founded MTI to deal with Loesser’s properties and to compete with R & H and Tams.7 In 1988, former entertainment lawyer and music producer Freddie Gershon bought the company. In 1990, Gershon teamed with Cameron McIntosh, producer of Les Misérables as well as all of Andrew Lloyd’s Webber’s musicals, including Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita, and The Phantom of the Opera. Between one man with years of experience in the law and the music business and the other with intimate knowledge of producing musical theater on a grand scale, MTI eventually became the largest musical theater licensing company in the world. As of 2015, MTI owned 300 titles, R & H owned 100, and Tams-Witmark owned 150.8 Amateur rights account for a full 50% of MTI’s gross income,9 and almost anyone who directs musical theater with youth deals with MTI and their amateur licensing division.

The purple pod, The Music Man, and adjudication On Saturday morning, the Marquee Room, where the eight groups in the purple “pod” performed, was packed with antsy kids sitting in rows and rows of chairs with their groups. The ones who performed already were restless and veering toward rowdy. The ones who were yet to go were fidgety and anxious. The adults sort of tried to calm the kids, but there were so many more kids than adults, and the adults were nervous, too, so the room seemed to be buzzing. Tamika was surprised by how different the groups were. Some were really good, with complicated choreography done perfectly by every kid. Some groups seemed a little sad, with maybe only ten kids who looked nervous and unsure of what they were doing. Tamika now could see how talented their group was (though Ms. Carter said that “there is no such thing as talent, only hard work”). Though Tamika had never been to JTF because her parents wouldn’t let her travel alone until she was 12—even though her grades were always good enough, and she always made her bed and helped with the dishes with no complaints—she knew everything about JTF because the kids at her school talked about it non-stop year round. When Ms. Carter picked The Music Man JR. for the fall show, the kids started guessing what she would include in the 15-minute JTF version. Some of the older kids helped on the

218  Stacy Wolf script and with rehearsal, too. Lisa and Victoria, twin eighth graders who had taken ballet, jazz, and tap lessons since they were three, made up the dances. Some groups just performed 15 minutes from the middle of their show, but Ms. Carter wrote a new mini-musical that told the whole story. Tamika was glad that she would get to sing a verse of one of her solos, the beautiful “Goodnight, My Someone,” and she loved the big group songs like “Seventy-Six Trombones”—led by Juan, an eighth-grade boy whom she had to pretend to be in love with—and “Wells Fargo Wagon.” When Stephen played Winthrop and sang with a lisp, it cracked everybody up every time. Tamika wasn’t one of those “theater geeks” at the beginning of sixth grade, but doing two shows this year “brought her out of her shell,” her mother said. She played soccer in elementary school, and she still played in an afterschool league, though she was starting to like doing theater more. She knew they gave awards at JTF, but she didn’t think about theater as a competition. She told her parents at dinner one night, “It’s more about art . . . theater isn’t for competing and being the best. It’s for telling a story.” Also, she tried to explain that when you play soccer, “it’s the same every time. Theater, you do different plays, and it’s different every time.” Even before the play, though, Tamika knew about theater because her parents took her to see a lot of musicals at the performing arts center, like The Lion King, Jersey Boys, and Wicked (her favorite). The music at those shows was played live, and she expected Mr. Miller, the band teacher, to play the piano and lead the student players for their shows at school. But all of the music was prerecorded. Her friend Emma, who played the violin in the school orchestra, was sad not to do the musical. It was cool because it sounded professional, and it saved time because they didn’t have to practice with the band, but she wished Emma could do the shows, too. When the group before them entered the “stage” area, which wasn’t a stage at all, but just the front of the room with a few cubes for props, Ms. Carter motioned to them, and they all slipped out of the room and lined up in the hallway. “Quiet!” Ms. Carter hissed. It was hard to stay calm, lined up and with hands to the side like they had practiced. The door was partly open, and Tamika could see a bunch of little kids doing a song from Honk! They were cute, she guessed, but she was too nervous to watch their performance carefully. Ms. Carter had told them that one of the most important things about JTF was being able to watch other groups and learn from what they noticed, good and bad. She also told them to congratulate other kids when you saw them in the halls. Tamika would watch carefully after her group performed, she decided. The adjudicators talked to the little kids, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying. It seemed like forever. Then, finally, she heard over the loudspeaker, “Introducing Arbor Arts Magnet Middle School and The Music Man JR.!” and everyone in the room turned to look at them and started clapping, and they walked to the front of the room in the straightest line ever.

Broadway Junior  219 The 15 minutes went by so fast, Tamika didn’t even know what happened. She was sweaty and glanced at Ally on one side and Maria on the other, both breathless and grinning from ear to ear. Everyone was clapping and cheering, and Ms. Carter was practically jumping up and down. They did well. The adjudicators—a woman named Cindy in a bright flowy shirt and short hair and a man wearing big black-framed glasses and skinny jeans who she heard was a director from New York—came around from behind their table, which was covered with score sheets, to talk to their group. Tamika was even more nervous for the adjudication than she had been for the performance. Now, professionals would tell them how they did. She knew from talking to kids in other groups that sometimes the adjudicators were really nice—too nice, some said, “sugarcoating it,” Victoria had told her. “They would be much harsher and more honest with adults,” she had said. She also heard that sometimes the adjudicators didn’t like the part of the show that was performed, though it wasn’t the kids’ fault, and that sometimes groups brought in scenery or wore costumes, which was against the rules, but they didn’t get in trouble for it. But now, all the kids and Ms. Carter and the other teachers and parents leaned in as the judges spoke. “Great job!” Cindy began. “You have so much energy and spirit and seemed to be having fun. I really liked that.” “Yeah,” said the man, whose name turned out to be Alan. “I loved the choreography, especially that awesome wheel formation in the middle of ‘Seventy-Six Trombones.’ Who did that?” Victoria and Lisa grinned broadly. “We did,” they said in unison. “Good work! Keep doing that!” Alan enthused. “Let’s try something,” said Cindy. “You, Marian, what’s your name?” She looked at Tamika, who was remembering the section of the choreography that she liked best: when they made a bridge with their arms and everyone went underneath it. “Tamika?” “Tamika, let’s go the beginning of your song when Amaryllis is playing the piano. Oh, and Amaryllis,” she looked at Josefina, “Nice job miming the piano! So, Tamika, come and stand here. You, too, Amaryllis.” Uh oh, I’m in trouble, thought Tamika. She was trying to remember what Ms. Carter had said: learn every minute. Cindy said, “The song is beautiful— you have a lovely voice—but who are you singing to then?” “Um.” “Is it to Amaryllis?” “No.” She knew she was supposed to be pretending to sing to someone she was going to fall in love with. Which she said. “Yes!” said Cindy, nodding energetically. “Then why are you looking down at Amaryllis playing the piano?” “Um.”

220  Stacy Wolf “She’s teaching Amaryllis to play the piano,” shouted Maria, coming to her rescue. Tamika wasn’t normally shy, but she didn’t know what she was supposed to say. “Yes, true,” said Cindy, “but that’s not who she’s singing the song to. Instead of looking down, look up and out, and imagine someone you know and love all the way in the back of the room. Let’s try it.” Tamika took a breath and was waiting for the music to start. “No, just sing acapella. Try it now.” “Okay.” Tamika looked down as she always did and then caught herself, looked up, imagined her mom in the back of the room, and sang, “Good night, my someone, good night my love.” She heard her voice carry over the heads of the 200 people in the audience, and she felt herself for a moment become someone else, become Marian. She felt everyone looking at her. She felt different, and she knew it was good. When she finished, everyone was smiling at her. Cindy was beaming. “Amazing!” she said. “Did you feel it? Wow! That’s acting! That’s how to do it.” Cindy turned to the whole cast of The Music Man JR. sitting on the floor. “I hope you all can see what a difference it makes if you project your energy up and out. It’s a great thing for everyone to keep in mind, no matter what show you’re doing.” After it was over, they walked to a different room to “debrief” and talk about how they felt about the performance and the adjudication. Tamika wasn’t sure whether she should be happy or sad. She definitely thought that Cindy’s coaching was good. Did that mean that Ms. Carter didn’t direct her well enough? Or that she hadn’t been expressive enough? Then, Ally came up to her, frowning. “What’s wrong?” Tamika asked. Ally scowled, “The adjudicators didn’t say anything to me. They didn’t notice me. It didn’t even matter that I was there.”

History of Broadway Junior When Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents walked into Freddie Gershon’s office in 1993, Gershon couldn’t have anticipated the gold mine that the Broadway Juniors would become or how they would transform musical theater for youth. This was the year before Beauty and the Beast premiered as the first Broadway show produced by Disney, which then became Times Square’s initial family friendly commercial resident; the year before Rent transformed Broadway into a cool place for young people; more than ten years before Disney’s High School Musical would become a mass tween sensation for girls and boys alike, blowing the world of musical theater performance wide open. As Gershon tells it, the pair came to talk to him about their worries about musical theater’s American legacy. “What can we do?” Sondheim asked. “No one knows the music of Broadway anymore. Broadway’s wonderful shows are going to be lost.”10 To be sure, Laurents, who wrote the librettos for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959, for which Sondheim wrote

Broadway Junior  221 the lyrics), and Sondheim, whose musicals at the time, including Company (1970), Sweeney Todd (1979), and Assassins (1990), were emotionally dark, musically difficult, and with presumably adults-only content, had financial interests as well as artistic ones in the perpetuation of musical theater. Because only 20% of musicals run long enough on Broadway to turn a profit, artists rely on a percentage of fees from the amateur licensing of their shows. Gershon had an idea: “Let’s adapt your shows for kids. Let’s make them shorter and re-do the score to be in the range of young voices.”11 Gershon said, “I want to do Into the Woods because, if I stick with Act I, it’s a kid’s show.”12 Sondheim agreed, and Into the Woods JR. was on its way.13 Gershon quickly realized that kid-friendly scripts and scores, ready for use by teachers and community theater directors, would sell. He saw that there was a huge untapped market of elementary and middle schools and afterschool programs across the country that at the time performed musicals that were expressly written for youth or, just as often, presented shortened, cleaned-up versions of Broadway shows that teachers cut themselves.14 Either way, his licensing business was losing out. If MTI could provide a “musical in a box,” schools would benefit by having readymade, professionally edited scripts and scores, and MTI and the artists whose work they licensed would profit for years to come.15 Gershon’s prescience led to nothing less than a complete revolution in musical theater production with kids. At the same time, MTI was busy digitizing its materials. The internet was relatively new, and computer experts at MTI, including bookwriter/ lyricist Robert Lee, now Professor at the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and two of his colleagues used newly invented scanners, word processing and desktop programs, and Finale to convert extant scripts and scores, which were often incomplete or rife with contradictions. “It was an exciting time,” Lee said, who worked in MTI’s Music and Materials department from 1995 to 1998, which was at the forefront of this digitization project. He added that they also developed ancillary products, such as “Rehearse Score,” a proprietary application in which all of the music has been converted into MIDI (Musical Information Digital Interface) files, which teachers or directors can rent and use in rehearsal or share with kids to learn their parts. Into the Woods was the first full-length musical that Lee and his colleagues digitized, a notable challenge with its intricate, complicated, and multi-vocal score. (“Our eyeballs were hanging out of their sockets,” he said.) Gershon surely suggested juniorizing Into the Woods as a first project because much of the legwork had been done: its digital transformation that would make standardized, mass distribution possible as the first junior show was already in process. Gershon also knew that Sondheim’s involvement would hold considerable weight with composers and lyricists who might be skittish about shrinking their shows, and he wanted to move forward quickly—even before the full-length Into the Woods’ digitization process was completed. Next up

222  Stacy Wolf then: Annie. With its charming story, its multiple roles for girls, including an expandable bevy of orphans, and a score with many songs already in a child’s range, the 1977 hit was the perfect vehicle for junior adaptation. As Gershon anticipated, composer Charles Strouse hesitated when he approached him, but, as Gershon tells it, “I said, ‘Steve Sondheim did it.’ He said, ‘Really?’ and within seconds I got the three authors to agree to a junior version of Annie.”16 The adaptation process that was later regularized began with Annie: a writer on MTI’s staff (for Annie JR. it was playwright and lyricist Jim Luigs) drafted a 60-minute script and crafted the lyrics for shorter musical numbers. The digitized music files simplified transposition of melodies and simplified harmonies to kid-friendly keys. All changes were approved by artists—Annie’s composer Strouse, lyricist Martin Charnin, and librettist Thomas Meehan—who made revisions as necessary. The readyto-try version was sent to a school, community theater, or musical theater summer camp to get it on its feet to see if the script was easy to understand and follow and the music appropriate for kids’ voices. They also included an “Accompaniment CD” that could replace a rehearsal pianist. (For Annie JR., a full orchestra recorded the score, but for Fiddler on the Roof JR., the second show, they opted for less expensive synthesized music.)17 MTI piloted Annie JR. in 1995 at a junior high school in the tiny town of Gowanda in upstate New York (pop. 2800), directed by then-teacher Cindy Ripley (now iTheatric’s Lead Educational Consultant), who also wrote the first Director’s Guide—a model for the how-to books that accompany every licensed Broadway JR. title.18 Representatives from the home office went up to see the “prototype,” which, according to Lee, was “a big to-do. The school went all out. They made t-shirts. They laid a red carpet in front of the school auditorium’s entrance,” and the tween cast and MTI dignitaries arrived in rented limos that they “rode for one block!” Lee said, “They sold it like it was a Broadway premiere. It’s Broadway but for kids.” The show was a success, and the MTI team felt, as Lee said, “We’ve got something here. This works.” Gershon now had a real-life example to take to authors as evidence of the juniors’ JR.’s viability. MTI made an even stronger case with their next show, Fiddler on the Roof JR., which was piloted at a school in Yonkers. “It was hilarious,” said Lee, “to see a little kid wearing a big gray beard as Tevye. It was totally charming.” But Fiddler also revealed the promise of adapting an adult show for kids. “Annie was fine, but it’s still about kids. Fiddler felt more polished,” Lee explained. In the meantime, Into the Woods JR., a more challenging adaptation than Annie or even Fiddler, was in development. Sondheim and Lapine, along with a team of artists and educators from MTI, took the 1987 dark, deconstructive mash-up of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and a gaggle of original storybook characters Sondheim and Lapine created, and constructed what they hoped would be the perfect junior script and score. Some changes were apparent from the start. Gershon was certain

Broadway Junior  223 that the show should be act I only, partly because that act ends with an age-appropriate “happily ever after” (with the second act devolving into adults-only murder and mayhem) and also because the junior shows had to be around an hour long. Among other changes, Sondheim dropped the lascivious, overtly sexual character of the Wolf and the violent and threatening Witch’s “rap,” and revised the lyric of “Giants in the Sky”: “And she gives you food / And she gives your rest / And she draws you close / To her Giant breast” to “minimize adolescent snickering.”19 Through the winter of 1997–98, about 30 schools across the country staged Into the Woods JR. and provided feedback to MTI, both positive— they liked its short, one-act length; the score worked for young voices—and negative—they missed the “Witch’s Rap” and the character of the Wolf, both of which were subsequently put back. The struggle between what adults find appropriate for children and what children themselves want to perform arises because, as Perry Nodelman notes, “Adults have imposed their own theoretical assumptions about children on children—constructed them as the limited creatures the adults have imagined them to be simply by interacting with them as if the imaginings were true.”20 Still, one advantage of the piloting process is that MTI uses the experience and expertise of kids and their teachers and directors to improve the material, and they see pilot productions to assess the level of difficulty and complexity of the show. One of the pilot productions took place at French Woods Performing Arts Camp in the summer of 1998, where they also recorded the songs on the demo tapes that would later be packaged with the scripts. Michelle K. Moore, who was 13-years-old and sang the role of the Baker’s Wife, remembers that “they wanted the children to be able to learn the junior versions of the songs by listening to other children sing the songs! Some of the keys were changed & [sic] songs were cut short & adults don’t sound like kids so hearing & learning from other kids would make it more relatable & that is where we came in!” It “was really important to everyone that we sounded like kids. They wanted us to sound like us. Natural kids singing naturally!” she said. Camp musical director David Weinstein oversaw the rehearsals, which took place at the camp, and they made the recording in a New York studio. Moore recalls that everyone took the process very seriously and worked hard to get the music and difficult harmonies perfect. She said, “Honestly, it really was one of the most thrilling experiences. I felt so cool but most of all, I felt so respected. Not only were we getting this amazing experience, but we were also a part of something bigger. We were also helping other kids be able to put on shows of their own.” She continued, “I learned what it was like to be in an environment where hard work & good work could get done while having fun & while feeling like I mattered. And we were just children! We were children who were able to rise to the occasion because of how well we were treated.”21 Sondheim and Lapine revised the show again, and the next junior version, which is the current officially licensed script and score, was piloted in

224  Stacy Wolf 2002 as part of a special program for Washington, D.C. public elementary schools. One hundred forty-three children performed (with many of their peers helping backstage) the show at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’s Sondheim Celebration. 22 The JR. imprint marks a musical as an adaptation of the longer and more challenging “real” show. As Nodelman writes, “The use-value of children’s literature is most exactly stated in terms of that opposition: its marked lack of those qualities that would make it ‘adult’ and therefore, presumably, unsuitable for child readers. Its very existence as a genre implies an act of censorship.”23 But many think that this shrinking of “real” shows is preferable to the creation of “children’s musical theater,” which has no connection to the adult musical theater world. Though the JR. properties are aggressively cut and censored, they do give kids the chance to play adult roles and sing music from the Broadway repertoire. Over the next few years, MTI reached out to other composers and lyricists who agreed that trimming their shows for youth was well worth it to keep the properties selling, and the Broadway JR. catalog grew.24 To bolster sales, in 2004–05, McDonald developed and directed a national Broadway Junior on Tour, which included 15-minute segments of Into the Woods JR., Dear Edwina JR., and The Music Man JR.25 Other new titles included Seussical JR., Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka JR., and The Pirates of Penzance JR.26 In 2004, the Disney Theatrical Group began adapting their animated movie musicals into JR. and 30-minute KIDS versions, expanding the catalog even more with musicals that kids already knew and loved, including The Jungle Book JR and KIDS, The Little Mermaid JR., Aladdin JR. and KIDS (both English and bilingual English/Spanish editions) and The Lion King JR. and The Lion King KIDS. 27 From 1997 to 2005, MTI licensed 20,000 productions of JR. and KIDS’ shows. 28 In 2006, McDonald left MTI (with Gershon’s encouragement and blessing) and founded iTheatrics, the company that creates all of the Broadway Junior scripts, scores, and supplementary materials (except for the Disney shows, which Disney Theatrical Group constructs in-house), as well as organizing and producing the Junior Theatre Festival. 29 Other licensors followed the money and followed suit: in 2010, Tams-Witmark Library, Inc. hired iTheatrics to develop their Young Performers’ Editions, including adaptations of The Wizard of Oz and Bye Bye Birdie, the full-length show of which consistently ranks among the most popular titles for high schools; in 2012, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization launched the Getting to Know Collections, whose titles include The Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, Once Upon a Mattress, and The King and I. Both Tams and R & H also distribute supplementary materials similar to MTIs.30 At the same time, Broadway musicals and musical theater performance became increasingly visible in popular culture, which drew more boys to the form. Rent (1996), Spring Awakening (2006), and In the Heights (2008) and stage adaptations of Disney animated films like Beauty and the Beast (1994) and The Lion King (1997) attracted a younger and somewhat more

Broadway Junior  225 diverse audience to Broadway, who then wanted to perform those shows at school and at their local community theaters.31 With the television debuts of American Idol in 2002, reality shows to cast Broadway productions like Grease (2007), and live televised productions of The Sound of Music (2013) and Peter Pan (2014), musical theater’s presence and influence expanded exponentially, in part due to boys’ increased interest in performing.32 While musicals always attracted a small handful of boys, the numbers increased dramatically in the first decade of the twenty-first century with Disney’s High School Musical—both the movie (January 2006) and the live musical (September 2006—only nine months later—the fastest development of a stage musical in theater history) and Glee (which premiered in 2009), which made singing show tunes cool.33 In the 1980s, writes Mickey Rapkin in Theatre Geek, his book about Stagedoor Manor, the famous musical theater summer camp whose alums include Natalie Portman and Lea Michele, they “had to offer substantial scholarships just to get boys through the front door” (145). In 2008, Stagedoor Manor built a new boys’ dorm because the interest among boys increased fourfold that year (245).34 JTF celebrates and fetishizes the presence of boys, even to the detriment of girls. When I attended the festival in 2013, girls outnumbered boys 10 to 1, and this gender disparity and the presence of boys in musical theater were addressed on numerous occasions. In the all-conference sessions, boys garnered huge applause with each appearance, and several speakers, including composer Alan Menken, Disney Theatrical Group’s Thomas Schumacher, and the cast of Disney’s Newsies, who flew in for the day, talked about bullying and offered advice to musical theater-inclined boys. As for racial and socioeconomic diversity at JTF, white girls were the most visible demographic, but every group included students who looked to be of different races, and a number of groups were predominantly kids of color. The groups that participated included elementary and middle schools, which ranged from the wealthy Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School in affluent Oak Park, IL to several Title I schools in Georgia. The community theaters also ran the gamut, from well-established pay-to-play companies to free programs offered to every kid in the community who wants to participate. And whether schools or community theaters were rich or poor, every teacher and director to whom I spoke expressed passionate dedication to kids and to musical theater, believing with equal force in the pleasure of the art form and its value in young people’s emotional development. The festival showed clearly that the Broadway musical—at least this version of it—is alive and well across race, geography, and socioeconomics.

Dance auditions for iTheatrics DVDs “Finally!” Daniel said to himself as he took the stairs two at a time to get to the Saturday afternoon choreography auditions on the Terrace Level of the hotel. “My chance to get to New York City!” He held a precious Golden Ticket in his hand, named after Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket (stupidly, he

226  Stacy Wolf thought), but really a ticket to be able to try out to perform in the DVD that gets sent to all of the teachers and directors who do new shows. He didn’t know any kids who were chosen, though he’d seen a lot of the DVDs, which Sara sometimes consulted as she created the choreography for their shows. When he got to the room—a huge ballroom with rows of chandeliers on the ceiling and a big wooden dance floor in the middle—Daniel’s heart sank: there were a million kids standing around. (He later found out that 1,000 kids were called for the first round of auditions.) Some of the kids had fancy jazz shoes, but he just wore his sneakers. He hoped no one would notice that they weren’t real Converse but imitations. “Hey,” a boy who looked about his age, greeted him. “Hey,” echoed Daniel. “Is this your first time with a Golden Ticket?” the boy asked. “Yeah,” said Daniel. “Cool,” said the boy. “Don’t be nervous. It’s fun. I’m Jorge.” “I’m Daniel.” “Cool.” After a minute, Steven Kennedy, the guy in charge of choreography, got up. He gestured to a bunch of adults nearby who Daniel guessed were the judges or other choreographers. “Okay, everybody. Let’s get started. We’re going to teach you a combination for Fame the Musical JR., which we’re launching next year.” Everyone cheered. “Yeah, it’s great. Everyone form a line across the room so we can see all of you. I’m not gonna lie: this combination is pretty hard, and it goes fast. But do your best. Even if you can’t get all of the steps, look like you’re having fun. That’s just as important to us as getting the steps right. We want to see you having fun!” Steven nodded and suddenly the room was filled with the song “The Junior Festival,” better known as “Fame!”: “Fame! I’m gonna make it to heaven / Light up the sky like a flame / Fame! / I’m gonna live forever / Baby remember my name.” Loud. “Jenny is going to do it first so you can see the whole combination,” Steven shouted over the music. A skinny blond lady wearing worn-out jazz shoes got up and launched into a Broadway dance combination. Daniel felt his heart racing, as he noticed a double turn, high kicks, and some other movements so fast he could barely follow. This is really hardcore, he thought. Steven and Jenny broke down the combination, which was only four measures of eight counts, but there was a lot of movement crammed into that short time. Daniel followed carefully, repeating every step as best as he could. He only started dancing this year, so he didn’t know the names of all the steps. Everyone was quiet and focused, except one little girl who kept trying to ask questions. Steven looked at her. “We don’t want to see you raise your hand,” he said, nice but firm. That’s harsh, thought Daniel, but he understood: They want listeners. They want kids who are professionals. Or else they won’t want to work with you.

Broadway Junior  227 After around 25 minutes, Steven and Jenny and the other adults were ready to watch. “Remember,” Steven said again. “Have fun.” Right, thought Daniel. He knew that everyone there was way better than him. He did the best he could and tried to smile and look enthusiastic, but it was rough. I’m so bad, he thought. Usually, he felt that he had a better chance at getting cast because there are so few boys, but this time he knew it didn’t matter. (And later, when the callback list was posted on the JTF app, his name wasn’t on it.) Daniel left to find the rest of the Calhoun kids, who were doing workshops, and Sara and Bob, who’d gone to a workshop with a Broadway lighting designer to learn how to light a show in an old theater space with only a few ancient lighting instruments. As he walked across the forum of the convention center, he saw groups of kids all over the place, some talking but most singing and dancing in big circles, happily oblivious to the other groups also singing their loudest. He tried not to feel too bad. He knew that he was lucky to audition with a professional choreographer and really, to be here at all. He looked at the younger kids singing in circles and remembered when he was so happy just to be around other kids who love musicals.

The Broadway JR. script, score, and more The Broadway JR. scripts and scores differ from full-length versions in a number of ways that are attuned to the needs of young people’s performance.35 First, teachers and directors who work with kids need a show that is shorter in duration.36 The 60-minute format (or 30 minutes for the KIDS’ shows) is designed to fit into a school day’s schedule. And given the complexity of producing a musical, a shorter show is much more manageable for a school or community theater or children’s theater. Dialogue is reduced, as many classic musicals feel too talky, and the book scenes feel long for a contemporary audience of adults, much less kids. Songs are transposed to keys that are comfortable for kids’ voices, the harmonies are simplified, and the songs are shorter. Because most children’s voices can’t sustain a song for three minutes, the lyrics are edited to capture the essence and meaning of the song in a minute or so.37 For The Music Man JR., for example, which Tamika’s school performed, six songs were cut, including Harold Hill’s song of seduction, “Marian the Librarian,” and several love songs.38 Do the JR. adaptations oversimplify musicals in a condescending gesture to the young people who perform them? Yes and no. On the one hand, these adaptations are just that: drastic revisions of Broadway shows that shortchange kids’ learning the full score, grappling with fully formed characters, interpreting extended book scenes, and confronting complex emotional or political issues. On the other hand, Broadway musicals, as a

228  Stacy Wolf commercial and mainstream art form, were never meant to be a frozen repertoire; they are rather, as Bruce Kirle argues, “works-in-process.”39 Many classic musicals were written for specific performers, and songs added, cut, moved, or rearranged throughout the out-of-town (now extended preview) run. Revivals often reconceive the shows, as director John Doyle did with Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Company, and Passion, for example, and other directors trim dialogue that even adult contemporary audiences won’t tolerate. Professional musicals with controversial subjects often fail to find their audience, such as the first production of Kander and Ebb’s Chicago in 1975, or are never allowed to open in order to sidestep conflict and potential commercial failure, like the canceled revival of Sondheim’s Assassins in 2001. In other words, Broadway’s musicals are closer in spirit and intention to Shakespeare than to Beckett. Shows for young people need larger casts to accommodate as many kids as possible, whether in a school, community theater, or after school program. Characters with names and lines are at a premium, so minor parts might be divided into multiple roles in a junior script. Ensembles are given as much as possible to do, including musical numbers and being on stage in general. Finally, the Broadway JR. scripts have their own look: the font is larger, and the spoken text and the music appears in the order of the show, not as musical librettos usually are printed, with all of the spoken text followed by all of the songs. Some licensing companies only send sides—a modified script that contains only a specific character’s cues and lines—but the JR. scripts are clear and easy to navigate. Every JR. license also comes with an elaborate ShowKit, which includes, first, a Directors’ Guide—essentially a teacher’s manual (not unlike what textbook publishers write and include with an order) for producing musicals. Virtually, any adult can pick up this guide and follow step-by-step instructions on how to hold auditions, cast a show, run rehearsals, and produce the show, including ideas for inexpensive sets and costumes. The ShowKit also includes multiple copies of “Family Matters” with ideas for fundraising and ways to get families involved in the production; CDs—one fully orchestrated for performance accompaniment and one demo rehearsal CD children’s voices; a choreographic DVD with ideas for staging musical numbers; piano-vocal score; and 20 student scripts.40 MTI’s ever-expanding Broadway JR. and Broadway KIDS licensing business is exceedingly lucrative, and they’ve also developed a plethora of ancillary products designed to help musical theater directors at any level. Schools can license spoken “partner” tracks to help young actors learn their lines. They can request a free “Broadway Junior CertifiKIT”: MTI’s press agents will send show listings to local papers announcing the production and will provide a personalized “Certificate of Excellence” signed by the musical’s authors that can be framed and displayed in the school or theater. Most significantly, MTI’s music accompaniment materials are flexible and can accommodate any school or community theater’s resources and

Broadway Junior  229 needs. At the Junior Theatre Festival, all of the music, from the adjudicated sessions to the all-conference musical numbers, is recorded and played through a sound system. Many schools use these fully orchestrated CDs (or MP3 files) for their productions, which come with the ShowKit, eliminating the need for any accompanist, even a pianist. In addition, MTI licenses partial tracks with specific instruments missing. The idea is that if a school has some musicians—say, violinists and clarinet players—the students can play their parts and the recording fills in the other instruments. The absence of musicians means that a crucial aspect of the musical theater production experience is missing. Not only do kids lose the opportunity to navigate the challenges and have the experience of this stage of the production process, but they’re led to believe that musicians don’t matter and that you can do a musical without players, karaoke-style. Still, countless schools would not be able to do shows at all were it not for the accompaniment recordings. This material simultaneously enables and downgrades musical theater production. MTI maintains a multi-faceted, increasingly robust website for all of its shows (not just the juniors) with, for example, maps of locations of future productions, forums for discussions, and sites to rent or lend sets, props, and costumes.41 The site also offers MTI Show Support, online help, and advice from master teacher Cindy Ripley, who sometimes responds in real time.42 Directors can also find an “Audition Central” link for each show with all of the characters listed, each with a “breakdown” (description, gender, range), excerpts from the script and score to use for auditions, and casting suggestions.43 On The Music Man JR. site, for example, MTI advises, “The role of Marian is a different twist on the traditional leading lady. [ . . . ] Your Marian must have an amazing voice, be an excellent actor, and be able to move well. She must also have an air of confidence that draws Harold and your audience to her. [ . . . ] Female. Range: G3- G5.”44 Schools and afterschool programs and community theaters that produce musical theater with children interact with MTI and its subsidiaries across a continuum of intensity. At one end are groups that eschew licensing and— knowingly or not—perform musicals illegally without permission. To be sure, it’s easy enough to find a script, download some sheet music, and look for choreographic and staging inspiration on YouTube. But MTI aggressively warns prospective theater makers that doing a show without a license is stealing, plain and simple. Many of its branding and outreach efforts are meant to encourage those teachers who might do otherwise to purchase a license and do the show legitimately. They want to make doing musical theater as easy and as inexpensive as possible. Other groups—the majority, in fact—buy the license and get the scripts and do the show on their own without further engagement with the company. Other groups take advantage of the supplementary materials of MTI, especially when the group is young and new. Schools or community theaters that started doing musicals in the past ten years find MTI’s extra materials alongside the script

230  Stacy Wolf licensing and are more likely to buy additional materials. In fact, when you click on an MTI title (either the full-length show or JR.), a song from the show begins to play immediately, inundating you with an infectious show tune melody. All in all, MTI is striving to make amateur musical theater production possible for any situation, even as it makes money hand over fist in the process.

The all-festival awards ceremony Tamika might have dozed off had it not been for the flashing lights, loud and pulsing music, and more than 4,000 screaming kids at the Sunday afternoon Student Awards presentations. She was up late with her friends and some other kids they met at the dance party. The other kids were from a community theater and went to different schools in the same town and complained how no one at their school got it or understood why they did shows. And they sang at the party, too (how could they not?). Victoria told Tamika that the awards would be kind of fun and kind of boring, depending on which award their group got. She said that all of the groups got an award for something, but some were more for effort than excellence. Tamika was also thinking about yesterday afternoon’s all-conference session with some of the Newsies cast members and how cool they seemed. The girl—the only one in the show—was funny and smart. Someone asked Andrew Keenan-Bolger, the star, how he got started, and he just said to work hard (which she did), do a lot of theater (which she did), and come to JTF (which she did). Alan Menken (who wrote the music for Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast and a lot of other shows) played the piano and talked about the songs he wrote, which was also fun. Every once in a while, she thought about her parents or her math homework, but it was hard to think about anything but musicals, musicals, musicals during JTF. All of a sudden, she heard “Arbor Arts Magnet Middle School!” being announced, and their school name and The Music Man JR. was showing on the two big screens on either side of the stage. “We won, we won!” Ms. Carter said, as she raced up the stage to collect the award. They won for Excellence in Acting! Tamika and her friends were jumping up and down and screaming and giving each other high fives. She couldn’t believe it! They won! Ms. Carter held the trophy over her head and then pointed to the kids from her school. Everyone was snapping photos with their phones. After everyone calmed down, the awards continued for a while. By the time it was over, Tamika thought Victoria was right and that every group had won something or other. Sitting on the other side of the huge hall, Daniel was awake and alert in spite of the late night with his new friends from the choreography audition. It had been awesome hanging out. He really liked Jorge, and they already texted each other a bunch of times and sent photos of what they were doing. Daniel knew the awards were long. Based on their adjudication, he

Broadway Junior  231 didn’t think they were going to win anything. In fact, he felt his Golden Ticket audition was the best thing that came out of the festival this year. Daniel heard the ping of his phone and looked down to see if it was from Becca or Jorge or his mom, but then all the Calhoun kids were screaming, “Bob and Sara! Bob and Sara!” Bob and Sara won the Freddie G. Teacher Award! “Eow!” shouted Daniel, joining the cheering. Bob and Sara ran up the long aisle to stand on stage with ten other teachers who were chosen to go to New York next summer to see shows and watch rehearsals and learn about directing musicals. It was amazing. If he couldn’t get to New York, he was psyched that Bob and Sara got to go.

Broadway JR. and JTF as youth musical theater As a microcosm of musical theater for youth, JTF reveals the extraordinary power of community and common cause as well as the troublesome aspects of this vibrant social practice. The feeling of affirmation and celebration dominates the festival, as this weekend is the high point of the year for many groups, their attendance enabled by non-stop fundraising, and their performances created and rehearsed for this single showing. At JTF, young performers’ love for musical theater is supported. Many experience a rare kind of community that they never knew existed beyond their own group. Still, there are cracks in the veneer, problems embedded in the very culture JTF purports to build and sustain. First, the unrelenting dominance of Broadway offers an unfulfillable promise of professionalism. Young stars currently appearing on Broadway do interviews during the all- conference sessions. Posters, t-shirts, buttons, and mugs from Broadway shows cover tables and shelves of the pop-up souvenir shop. And of course, the Broadway repertoire provides the material for each performance and so organizes JTF’s musical and theatrical world. Many of the participants have Broadway aspirations. While a desire for stardom is the entry point for every performer and the common thread of every Broadway story (since the beginning of time), what does it mean that this event fuels such unrealistic hopes and dreams? Perhaps the desire for stardom is a natural part of pre-adolescent development. JTF tries to democratize these desires, to give as many kids as possible a chance to shine. It rewards effort and spirit as well as vocal strength and stage presence, but few if any of these kids will actually make it to Broadway. Second, despite its display of community celebration and emphasis on the simple joy of performance, JTF is haunted by economic inequity. Colorful, identical JTF t-shirts and homogenous fashion choices of 12-year-olds can’t hide the different funding circumstances of the participating groups, which range from wealthy private schools to underserved public schools and backyard community theaters. Some groups fundraise all year not only to be able to attend the festival but to do their shows at home, and their directors

232  Stacy Wolf are volunteers at the community theater or are teachers who spend extra unpaid time after school producing the play. JTF navigates other troublesome features that go beyond the quality of the individual child’s participation and that touch on larger issues of musical theater and culture. For example, as noted earlier, there are no musicians at JTF; all of the music is played from recorded tracks—the same tracks that MTI include with its Broadway Junior licenses. On the one hand, providing fully orchestrated tracks makes performing a Broadway musical accessible to any group; on the other hand, it devalues the crucial component of music and conveys the sense that the music is merely a luxurious add-on and not integral to musical theater performance.45 Moreover, JTF’s key sponsor—MTI—sees big profits from this event, which is tied to the licensing machine that enables these productions in the first place. The festival is both the beginning and the end of a cycle of production that depends on and profits the licensers. To participate in JTF, groups must license and perform a title from MTI’s Broadway Junior catalog, which includes Disney musicals; that is, they already pay the company. Though extensive, the Broadway Junior catalog excludes the hundreds of musicals that are owned by other licensors, including the R & H Organization (Cinderella, The Sound of Music, Annie Get Your Gun, In the Heights), Tams-Witmark (The Wizard of Oz, Bye Bye Birdie), and Samuel French (Chicago). JTF never hints that other musicals exist outside of MTI’s catalog. In this way, a select repertoire stands in for all musical theater, and JTF shortchanges the possibility of kids’ exposure to more shows. This dynamic need not be cast as grimly as I do here; licensing fees pay the artists, which is crucial, but JTF limits the repertoire.46 JTF, like all youth theatrical projects, is dominated by girls, but rather than allowing the festival to be a place of girl power, the adults fetishize boys and go overboard to welcome them. The Broadway repertoire is the root of the problem, with too many male parts and heterosexual romance narratives. The rareness of boys—though there are still many of them at JTF—is too often remarked. The organizers of JTF are yet to find a way to support boys, whether gay, proto-gay, or straight—though they’re all queer by virtue of their participation in this feminized activity—without fixating on them to the detriment of the many girls who are equally dedicated to performance. Other problems emerge from the musical theater repertoire itself, which, like it or not, relies on and reinforces many negative gender stereotypes— especially female stereotypes—and is unrelentingly heterosexual. On The Music Man JR. site, for example, in addition to providing a basic sense of the character and the necessary vocal range (cited earlier), MTI describes Marian: “The character progresses greatly during the show, starting as an uptight librarian and transforming into a beautiful and trusting young woman. . . . She will also need to be comfortable kissing two boys— Harold and Charlie Cowell, which requires a certain amount of emotional

Broadway Junior  233 maturity. Finally, take some time during auditions to try different pairs of Harolds and Marians until you reach the perfect match.”47 MTI is not to blame, for indeed, this is how the character of Marian is defined. But who wants a 12-year-old girl to learn that the books and intelligence associated with a librarian prevent her from being “beautiful and trusting”? And why should a fine young actor have to “be comfortable” kissing two boys? These stereotypes appear in high relief when 4,000 kids of every shape and size and race and ethnicity perform excerpts in a short period of time. I found it positively painful to watch the repetitive performances of mincing femininity and awkward heterosexuality during the adjudicated sessions at JTF. In 2013, the year of The Little Mermaid JR.’s debut, 23 groups performed excerpts from the show, and I was horrified to witness girl after girl singing—usually with great charisma and forcefulness—about wanting to sacrifice herself for a boy. Even edgy musicals like Hair (Tams-Witmark), Rent (MTI plus a PG-13 rated School Edition), and Spring Awakening (MTI)—all less frequently produced in afterschool programs and never by middle-schoolers—present conventional and conservative gender roles that often demean or diminish women. Of the thousands of schools, community theaters, private studios, and afterschool programs that produce musicals across the country, close to 100 of them participate in the Junior Theatre Festival. On the one hand, it’s a tiny fraction of all of the children who sing or dance on stage each year. On the other hand, it includes almost 4,000 children in 26 states across gender, race, ethnicity, and class.

Farewell till next year At 9 a.m. on Monday morning—too early for a non-school day—Tamika stood in the hotel lobby, which now felt familiar, since she had walked through it ten times a day all weekend. She looked around at all of the kids slouched against pillars or sitting on the floor or on their suitcases or duffle bags, waiting to go home, whether by plane or bus or car. Everyone looked tired, even the circle of girls who were leaning into each other and singing “For Good” from Wicked, which was everyone’s favorite sad song when leaving your friends. It felt like a million years ago when she sang “Goodnight, My Someone” during the adjudication. She touched her tote bag with her notebook. She wondered what show Ms. Carter would pick for the next year and if she could possibly get the lead again. She glanced up the escalator and saw a tall older boy coming down. She remembered seeing him perform in Hairspray JR in their pod. He played Corny Collins and totally hammed it up. He was so good—not a fantastic voice or a great dancer, but funny and bouncing off the walls with energy. Just as he got off the escalator, she stepped up to him. “Hey, you’re Corny Collins,” she said. “You were great.” He looked very pleased and not the least bit embarrassed. “How did you—?”

234  Stacy Wolf “You were in my pod,” she said. “Oh yeah! Now I remember,” he replied. “You played Marian the librarian! You were amazing! And you took direction so well! When Cindy coached you, you were awesome!” “Thanks!” Tamika answered happily. “You were awesome yourself.” Someone called Daniel’s name from across the lobby. He turned his head—“Coming!” he shouted, and then looked back at Tamika, “I gotta go. But I’ll see you next year, right?” “Yea,” Tamika nodded and smiled. “See you next year!”

Notes





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242  Bibliography of scholarly sources Kirle, Bruce. Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. ———. The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. ———. “Getting off the Trolley: Musicals contra Cinematic Reality.” In From Stage to Screen: Musical Films in Europe and United States (1927–1961), edited by Massimiliano Sala, 157–72. Speculum Musicae 19 Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. ———. “History, The Sound of Music, and Us.” American Music 22 (2004): 133–44. Knapp, Raymond, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kunz, Julia. Intertextuality and Psychology in P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins Books. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014. Lankford, William T. “‘The Deep of Time’: Narrative Order in David Copperfield.” ELH 46, no. 3 (1979): 452–67. Lautzenheiser, Tim. Everyday Wisdom for Inspired Teaching. Chicago, IL: GIA, 2006. ———. The Joy of Inspired Teaching. Chicago, IL: GIA, 1993. ———. Music Advocacy and Student Leadership: Key Components of Every Successful Music Program: A Collection of Writings. Chicago, IL: GIA, 2005. Lawson, Valerie. Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin. Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. ———. “Oliver Twist: The Narrator’s Tale.” Textual Practice 15, no. 1 (2009): 87–100. Leve, James. American Musical Theater. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Levy, Jonathan. The Gymnasium of the Imagination: A Collection of Children’s Plays in English, 1780–1860. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. ———. “Theatre and Moral Education.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 31, no. 3 (1997): 65–67. Lewicki, Kate. “Satisfying Multiple Intelligences and Diverse Talents through Musical Theater.” Middle School Journal 34, no. 2 (2002): 39–44. Lindenmeyer, Kriste. The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2005. Lopate, Phillip. “The Balkanization of Children’s Writing.” The Lion and the Unicorn 1, no. 2 (1977): 98–110. Lovensheimer, Jim. South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Mackey, Margaret. “Rules and Rhizomes; A Mary Poppins Sampler.” Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 24, no. 1 (2016): 1–29. Marsh, Kathryn. The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children’s Songs and Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Martin, Maureen M. “Healing National Manhood in The Secret Garden.” In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden: A Children’s Classic at 100, edited by Jackie C. Horne and Joe Sutliff Sanders, 137–53. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2011.

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Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. AABA song structure 121 Absent-Minded Professor, The 77n11 abuse 15, 73, 81, 87, 106–07, 124, 164, 167–68, 170, 172, 177, 181 Acton, Lauren 5 adaptation 5, 8, 9, 11–13; children’s performance editions 11–14; see also Broadway JR.; Broadway KIDS Addams, Jane 113n8 Adele 135 Adorno, Theodor 108 adult investment in children 22, 30 adult musical 7; see also Wollman Adventures of Lewis and Clark, The 196, 204 Aesop’s Fables Deluxe 189–90 aesthetics: poetry 98–99; and political action 108–09; voice types 117 “The Age of Not Believing” (Sherman and Sherman) 51–52, 67 agency 2, 10, 30–31, 70–71, 139–40, 148, 167, 173–78, 181; Annie 135, 148; Matilda the Musical 164–65, 167, 175, 178, 182; Newsies 151–53 Aguilera, Christina 134 Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death 110 Aladdin 5, 8, 230; Aladdin JR. 224; Aladdin Kids 224 Albano, Aaron J. 157 Allen, Woody 207n4 Altman, Rick 34, 37n38, 38n30 amateur theater 5, 8, 11–14; see also school musical Amazing Adventures of Peter Rabbit, The 13

American Children’s Theater movement 9 American Idol 117, 225 American Stage Company 112 America’s Got Talent 134, 203 Ames, Leon 62 Andrews, Julie 22, 27–28, 45–46, 49, 77n10, 126, 134, 136 Andrews, Malcolm 89–90, 92–93, 95n27 angel in the house 33, 92, 158 “Animal Crackers” (Henderson, Caesar, and Koehler) 124 “Animal Spring Dance” (Kern and Kern) 191, 193 Annie 5, 11, 13, 15, 21, 61, 189, 197, 205, 212; actresses who played Annie 121–24, 131–34, 208n7; as adapted for film 77n7, 122–23, 139, 147–48; as adapted from comic strip 68, 139, 141–44, 147–48; Annie JR. 222; compared to Newsies 138–63; compared to Oliver! 80, 85; fatherly redemption in 61, 68–71, 76, 78n18; and girls and belting in musical theater 116–37; overture 138, 161n1; and race 123, 130; reviews of 139, 143–44; and sex 69, 126–28, 160; see also Annie Warbucks; Ethel Merman; Life After Tomorrow; Miss Hannigan’s Revenge; Shirley Temple Annie Get Your Gun 119–20, 124, 216, 232 Annie Warbucks 78n18, 129 Anything Goes 23 Apseloff, Marilyn 113n12

250 Index Arbor Arts Magnet Middle School 211, 218, 230 art music 117, 155n1; see also legitimate singing; opera “As Long as He Needs Me” (Bart) 87 Ashman, Howard 162n23 Asimov, Isaac 99 Assassins 221, 228 Assignment Earth: What Kids Can Do to Save the Planet 195–96, 209n20; see also Update Earth Association for the Protection of Stage Children 14 audience see crossover audiences Austin, J. L. 105 authenticity 96–101, 104, 107–08, 111, 128, 135, 164–65 “Baby June and her Newsboys” (Styne and Sondheim) 95n36 Backyardigan, The 202 Bad News Bears 127 Bad Wolf Press 209n31, 210 Bale, Christian 149 Ball, Michael 53 Ballinger, Coleen 2 Baltimore, Samuel 33–35, 38n40, 59 Bart, Lionel 80–81, 84, 86–88 “Be Our Guest” (Menken and Ashman) 146 “The Beautiful Briny” (Sherman and Sherman) 15, 57n4, 67, 78n15 Beauty and the Beast 8, 58n63, 134, 220, 224, 230; Belle 58n63, 134–35 Bechdel, Alison 74 Beckett, Samuel 228 Bedard, Roger L. 18n24 Bedknobs and Broomsticks 4, 7, 39–41, 61, 65, 77–78n13; as adapted from Mary Norton’s books 65, 67, 77–78n13, 78n16; cast of 52; critical reception of 52; deleted scenes 52; fatherly redemption in 67–68; and the nuclear family 49–55; see also Sherman, Richard M.; Sherman, Robert B. belting 11, 107, 116–131, 133–34, 156; in Annie 116–34; definition of 18; “Tomorrow” 121–22; see also chest voice; head voice; legitimate singing Benson, Sally 77n8 Berlant, Lauren 23, 148 Bernstein, Leonard 140

Bernstein, Robin 38n32, 96, 105–06, 164, 170–71 A Better You… A Better Me! Building Character through Music 200 Bickford, Tyler 21 Big 16 Bikel, Theodore 62 Billy Elliot the Musical 3, 11, 16, 179 Billy Williams Review 107 Birch, Pat 115n45 Black Arts Movement 98–99 “Black” (Friedman, Holt, and R.C.) 103, 108 Black Panthers 99, 113n15 Blackboard Jungle 98 Blane, Ralph 76n3 blank slate 25, 32 Bleak House 89 Bliznik, Sean 235n33 Block, Geoffrey 38n37 Blue Lagoon 127 Bluest Eye, The 106 Blunt, Emily 134 Boer War 42, 50 Bohn, James 6 Bolter, Jay David 2 Bonfires and Broomsticks 49, 67, 78n16 book musical see integrated book musical book song 10–11, 125; book scene 227; see also diegetic song boy soprano 11, 123, 159; child soprano 107; see also belting; boys in musical theater Boym, Svetlana 36n9 Boys High School 99, 103 boys in musical theater 118, 120, 188, 197, 199, 215, 224, 232; see also boy soprano Bradford, Clare 105 Bradshaw, John 184n8 Brantley, Ben 139 Brecht, Bertolt 205 Bremer, Beverly Ann 115n54 Brigadoon 7, 216 Bright Eyes 137n25 Bring in the Morning 112 Britton, Jeff 102 Broadway Dreams Foundation 110 Broadway JR. 5, 11–12, 18n29; contrasted to school musicals 190, 193–94, 196, 200, 205–06;

Index  251 development of MTI JR. musicals 212–14, 220–24, 227–33 Broadway Junior on Tour 224 Broadway KIDS 11–12, 18n29, 190, 196, 200, 224, 227–28, 235n27 Broccoli, Albert R. (“Cubby”) 46 Brockes, Emma 136n20 “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (Harburg and Gorney) 143 Brothers of Islam 107 Brown, Penny 19n34 Bruce, Shelly 122 Bryant, Anita 127 “Buckle Chickle Peck” (Kern and Kern) 192 Buford, Gordon 77n11 Bugsy Malone 127 Bullies in the Hall 5 Bunch, Ryan 8 “Bunny Hop” (Kern and Kern) 192 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 70–71, 78n21, 78n23, 145 Butler, Judith 101 Bye Bye Birdie 9, 11, 13, 224, 232 Cadwallader, Jen 78n23 Calhoun Children’s Theatre 212, 214, 227, 231 Calhoun, Jeff 161 Calloway, Northern 110 Calvert, Sandra 202 campiness 23, 31, 35, 72, 74, 129 camps, summer and performance 5, 110, 188–89, 216, 222–23, 235 Candide 126 capitalism 48, 141–45, 155, 159, 161 Captain Kangaroo 102 Cara, Irene 110, 113n21 Caroline, or Change 5, 11 Carousel 10, 22, 158, 216 “Carrying the Banner” (Menken and Feldman) 150, 157 Cassidy, Jack 115n52 Cats 5 censorship 14, 19n33, 201, 224 Cerniglia, Ken 163n32 “Changing my Major” (Tesori and Kron) 74, 79n31 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 11, 57n40 Charlotte’s Web 13 Charnin, Martin 121, 129, 133–34, 136n10, 139, 143, 148, 156, 222

Chenowith, Kristen 136n19 chest voice 25, 107, 117–20, 122, 126, 132, 197; see also belting; head voice; legitimate singing Chesterton, G. K. 90 Chicago 228, 232 child: as passive object 10–11, 82, 84–86; as redeemer 164, 173–74, 181; see also child hero; child heroine child as protagonist 10–11, 81; in Copperfield 88–93; in Matilda the Musical 179; in Oliver! 81, 84–88 child development 47–48, 54; adolescent maturation 51–52; see also maturation of child as plot structure; Spock, Benjamin McLane (Dr. Spock) child hero 81, 83–84, 88–90, 149; hero’s journey 80; see also child as protagonist; child heroine child heroine 134, 142, 147–48, 155, 167, 176–77; see also child hero; child as protagonist child labor 15, 128, 139, 142, 160–61; see also Children’s Charter; Coogan Act; organized labor child wrangler 16 childhood: as associated with nature 24–27; normative childhood 20–21, 30; as performative 96, 99, 110, 164, 170; Romantic ideology of the child 25, 98, 174; see also child development childhood innocence, ideology of 29–30, 96, 165–67, 173; in Dickens 81–83, 88–89, 93; and race 104–05 childishness 7, 23 childness 166–67, 169, 177–79, 183 children as authors 2–3, 10, 96, 99–100, 102–04 children as stars 2, 15, 126, 133, 135, 188, 190, 205–06, 231 “Children Will Listen” (Sondheim) 69–70 Children’s Charter 142 Children’s Educational Theatre, The 9 children’s literature studies 5, 9, 41, 54, 61, 96, 112n1, 166, 168 children’s musical theater roles 10–11, 15–16; see also child, as passive object children’s musicals: as amateur theater 5; definition of 4–6; elements of

252 Index 190–91, 196–98, 227–28; history of 9–14; see also school musical Child’s Bill of Rights in Music 194, 208n17 “Chim Chim Cheree” (Sherman and Sherman) 45, 66, 68 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 7, 39–40, 54–55; as adapted from novel 45–47, 65–66, 77–78n13; cast of 46, 77n10; critical reception of 52–53; fatherly redemption in 61, 65–68; and the nuclear family 45–49; puns and word play in 65–66; source of names in 56–57n33, 77n2; stage version 52–53; see also Sherman, Richard M.; Sherman, Robert B. Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car 45, 77n11 choral repertoire 197, 199 choreography 12, 139, 144–45, 157, 216–17; see also dance Christian Science 71 Christmas Bus, The 5 Church, Charlotte 129 Cinderella 8, 22, 126, 232 Cinderella: as Disney character type 135; in Into the Woods 222; plot pattern 22, 32; see also Cinderella; fairy tales; Truth About Cinderella, The Civil Rights Movement 40, 97 Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa 30 Clementi, Muzio 37n25 Cleveland, Frank (Clorox) 99, 103–04, 113n15, 114n31 “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 29, 32–33; parody of 35 coffee house circuit 99; see also Nuyorican Café Cold War 6, 22, 41, 47, 48 Coleman, Bud 57n56 collective action 139–40, 149–57, 159, 161, 174–75 colonization of the child 39, 104 Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center 100 “Come Out of Your Shell” (Kern and Kern) 191 “Come Spirit, Come Charm” (Simon and Norman) 71 “Come to the Fun Home” (Tesori and Kron) 79n31

commercial theater 7, 13 commercialism 213, 231 Common Core, The 204 Company 221, 228 Concord Music 14, 18n28 Conron, Dave 188 conservativism: cultural conservatism 22, 39, 41, 139–40, 143–44, 147, 192, 233; political conservatism 140, 143–47 Coogan Act 15 Cook, Barbara 126 Copland, Aaron 99 Copperfield 80–81, 88, 90, 93; as adapted from David Copperfield 81–81, 88–93 Corpuz, Jon Viktor 137n29 Cosell, Howard 99 Cosmic Pinball 189, 204 counter-cultural 101–02 Cradle Will Rock, The 149 Crawford, Lilla 122 creative dramatics (recreational drama) 4; see also pedagogical uses of musicals; school musical Crist, Judith 22 Crocker, Emily 195 crooning 73, 125, 136n18 crossover audiences 4–8, 20, 24, 54, 164, 166–69, 181; see also crosswriting crosswriting 61, 89–92, 180, 223; see also crossover audiences Crouse, Russel 23 Curly Top 124, 137n25 cuteness 15, 120, 122, 124, 130, 212, 218 Cyrus, Miley 134 Czerny, Carl 37n25 DaGradi, Don 43, 49 Dahl, Roald 46–47, 65–66, 73, 166–67, 171, 173–74, 179, 181, 184n15, 186n50, 187n54, 224 Daigle, Kate 165 Dalberg-Acton, John (Lord Acton) 155 Daldry, Graham 90 dance 28, 31–32, 66–67, 73, 189; as a memory aid 189; and race 104–05, 115n45; see also choreography; Ländler; waltz Dangerous Minds 98 David Copperfield 80–81, 88–90, 93 Davis, Daniel 212

Index  253 Day, Doris 117 Dean, Gerri 107 Dear Edwina JR. 224 Dear Evan Hansen 4, 8 Debussy, Claude 37n25 December in Our Town: A Multicultural Holiday Musical 196, 204 “Defying Gravity” (Schwartz) 2 Derwingson, Richard 194 Diamond, Stephen A. 165–66 Dickens, Charles 11, 80–93, 94n7 diegetic song 10, 29, 123, 125, 127; see also book song Dig It 196 Diggs, Taye 110 Disney: audience 6, 8, 35; Disney invasion of Broadway 8, 220; Disney princess 134–35; emphasis on nuclear family 39, 43–44, 52; impact on community theater 8–9, 21; licensing of shows 5, 11–12, 140, 212, 224, 232; marketing 118; parenting in Disney films 40–41; sentimental populism 39 Disney Channel 134, 140 Disney, Walt 10, 39–43, 46, 49, 55, 59 Disneyfication 41 “Dites-Moi” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 10, 120 diva 11, 116, 121, 123, 125, 129, 133, 180 “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” (Anderson-Lopez) 2 “Doin’ What Comes Natural’ly” (Berlin) 119 Dolan, Jill 104 “Doll on a Music Box” (Sherman and Sherman) 66, 78n14 dolls 47, 66, 78–79n13; Raggedy Ann 106; golliwogs 106 “Do-Re-Mi” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 20, 26–28, 32, 35, 120 Dotrice, Karen 45 “Double Dream Hands” see “Planet Rock” Doyle, John 228 Dramatic Publishing 13, 189 Dramatists Play Service 13, 216 “Dream Babies” (Friedman and Schapiro) 101, 103, 106–07 Drewe, Anthony 54 Dreyfus, James 167

drugs 101–02, 106, 109, 112, 201 dual address 61; adult male perspective 65; see also crossover audiences DuBois, W. E. B. 160 Dyer, Richard 23–24, 104, 161 Eagan, Daisy 15 “Easy Street” (Strouse and Charnin) 69, 146 Ebert, Roger 52 Ed Sullivan Show, The 216 “Edelweiss” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 29–30, 33, 61, 76n6, 131 “Edges of the World” (Tesori and Kron) 79n31 education: All Day Neighborhood School Initiative 100; alternative education movements 97; Disney 41; environmental understandings of 97; and race 97, 99; in Sound of Music 25; see also language arts pedagogy; music education; pedagogical use of musicals; vocal training educational theater 8, 14 edutainment 205 egalitarianism 145–47, 51, 56–57 “Eglantine” (Sherman and Sherman) 67 Einstein Is a Dummy 13 Electric Company 110, 115n56 electric instrumentation 102, 108 Elementary and Secondary Education Act 97 elementary-age musicals 93–95, 199, 205–07, 210n32; see also school musical Ellen 203 Ellis, Sarah Taylor 34, 35n2 Emerson, Roger 193–201, 204–05, 207 Enchanted 61, 72 Engel, Lehman 87 eroticization of children 15, 127; see also pedophilia; pornography; sexuality Esparza, Raul 48, 53 Esposito, Giancarlo 109–110, 113–14n21 Evancho, Jackie 129 Everett, William 7 Evita 217 exploitation of children 15, 103–04, 110, 126, 148; see also child labor; eroticization of children

254 Index extravaganza 10 Eyre, Richard 54 fairy tales 22, 36n10, 70, 189–90, 194, 216; “Beauty and the Beast” 70; “Bluebeard” 70; “Cinderella” 222, 232; “Jack and the Beanstalk” 222, “Rapunzel” 135, 222; “Sleeping Beauty” 70 Falconer, Rachel 166 Fame the Musical JR. 226 family musical 4, 6–10, 14, 24, 80, 93, 129 family romance plot 73–74 family structures: matriarchal 97; patriarchal 7–8; post-WWII 7–8; see also nuclear family fan culture 8–9, 70, 135, 140, 175–76, 186n37; see also fanfiction fanfiction 17n6 fat cat 143, 146 fathers: absent 42–46, 50–51; redemption of 59–79, 124; see also nuclear family; Spock, Benjamin McLane (Dr. Spock) Federal Theatre Project 9, 18n26 “Feed the Birds” (Sherman and Sherman) 44, 56n20, 60, 66 Feldman, Jack 139–40 Fellowes, Julian 43, 58n66 feminism 23, 127, 159 Fernandez, Jose 115n54 Feuer, Jane 37n38 Fiddler, Art 188 Fiddler on the Roof 88, 94n17, 212; Fiddler on the Roof JR. 222 “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank” (Sherman and Sherman) 44 Fierstein, Harvey 139–40, 150, 154 Fifth Dimension, The 110 Filichia, Peter 213 Fink, Ron 201 Finn-Moosey, Robyn 131 Flanagan, Caitlin 43–44 Fleming, Ian 40, 45–47, 65–66 Flinn, Caryl 30, 34 Flynn, Richard 112n1 folk music 21, 25–28, 31, 102; puppetry 28; see also Ländler Footloose 188 for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf 110 “For Good” (Schwartz) 233

Forrest, Helen 117 Foster, Jodie 127 Foxx, Jamie 123 Frank, Yasha 9 Franklin, Charles 103 Free to Be… You and Me 200 Freed, Arthur 62 Freedom Writers 98 French Woods Performing Arts Camp 223 Freshwater, Helen 7 Friedman, Gary William 100–03, 110–12, 114n22, 114n25, 114n28, 114n56 Frozen 2, 21 Fun Home 5, 61, 70, 73–75, 78n15, 31n79, 135; as adapted from source text 74–75 Funny Girl 139 Furler, Sia 77n7 Fux, Johann 37n25 Garland, Judy 60, 62 “Gary, Indiana” (Willson) 10 Gattelli, Christopher 139, 157 gay 25, 36n3, 127, 232; gay pride 127; see also gender; queer gender: bias in scholarly reception 4; gender stereotypes in musicals 154, 232–33; see also belting; boys in musical theater; feminism; queer genres of social integration 7 Gershon, Freddie 193, 217, 220–21, 224 Getting to Know Collections 224 ghetto 10, 86–112, 113n111 ghosts 68–70, 74, 78n23, 182 “Giants in the Sky” (Sondheim and Lapine) 223 Gigi 76 “Gigi” (Lerner and Loewe) 76 Gilbert and Sullivan 14 Girioux, Henry A. 39 Glaser, Milton 137n26 Glee 9, 18n24, 21, 225 Gluck, Will 77n7 “Go Where I Send Thee” (traditional) 200 Godspell 212; Godspell JR. 215 Goldberg, Moses 17n8 Golden Age of musical theater 33, 85, 127, 134; see also Rodgers and Hammerstein “Goodnight, My Someone” (Willson) 60, 64, 211, 218–20

Index  255 Goodspeed Opera House 120, 143 Gordon, Bryony 18n24 Gordon, Debra G. 196 gospel 108 Gottfried, Martin 49 Graber, Matthew 45 Graceman, Anna 137n36 Grammar Rocks: Cross-Curricular Music Fun for the Classroom 204 Grammy Award 45, 207 Grant, Douglas 108, 110 Grant, Mark 117 “The Graveyard” (Gordon and Caird) 95n36 Gray, Harold 68, 128, 139, 141–45, 147–48, 150 Grease 13, 194, 225 Great Depression, the 9, 15, 124–25, 141, 143, 147 Great Expectations 89 Great Fire of London 67 Greek chorus 70–71 Greeley, Horace 149–59, 153 Grilli, Giorgia 56n20 Grusin, Richard 2 Gubar, Marah 8, 16n3, 24, 162n28 guerilla theater 100–01 Guys and Dolls 117, 123, 188, 217; Guys and Dolls JR. 214 Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School 225 Gypsy 10, 95n36, 119–20, 139, 220 haiku 98, 101 “Hail to You, Animal U” (Kern and Kern) 191, 193 Hair 101–02, 111, 115n54 Hairspray 24, 233; Hairspray JR. 212, 233 Hal Leonard (publisher) 190, 195, 201, 204 Hamilton 3, 17n6, 21 Hammerstein, Oscar II: and Jerome Kern 10; see also Rodgers and Hammerstein Harberger, Gladys 99 Harry Potter world 166, 168 Hatch, Kristen 127 Haters Back Off 2 “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (Martin and Blane) 60, 76n3 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 64 “He Doesn’t Know I’m Alive” (Strouse and Charnin) 130

Head Start 97 head voice 117–18, 120, 122–24, 131–32, 197; see also chest voice Hearst, William Randolph 149 Heath, John 201 Heathers, the Musical 13 Hello, Dolly! 11, 125, 194 Help Haiti Campaign 110 Henderson, Melanie 110, 113n21 Henning, Doug 133 “Here’s a Book” (Kasha and Hirschhorn) 91 Herrera, Patricia 111 “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” (traditional) 108 heteronormativity 66–67, 232–33; see also family romance plot hidden adult 6; see also adult investment in children High School Musical 9, 18n21, 21, 212, 200, 225 Hirschhorn, Joel 80–01, 90–93 Hischack, Thomas 23 Hochman, Baruch 84–85, 88–89, 99 Hoffman, Warren 104 Holden, Stephen 112 Hollindale, Peter 177 Holmes, Peggy 141 Honk! 218 Hoover, Herbert 141–42, 147–48 Hoover, J. Edgar 145 Hooverville 143–48 Hopkins, Linda 111 “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” see “Maria” “How I Feel” (Friedman) 110 Howell, Rob 168 Hughes, Felicity 89 Hughes, Ken 46, 65 Hughes, Langston 106, 115n44 Humpty Dumpty 10 Hunt, Caroline 17n20 Hunt, Peter 1 “Hushabye Mountain” (Sherman and Sherman) 48, 66 Huston, John 122, 147–48, 202 hypermediation 2–3 “I Don’t Need Anything but You” (Strouse and Charnin) 69, 121, 147–48 I “Know It’s Today” (Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire) 95n36 I Love New York Campaign 128, 137n26; see also Times Square

256 Index “I Think I’m Gonna Like it Here” (Strouse and Charnin) 121, 145–46 “I Wish He Knew” (Kasha and Hirschhorn) 92 “If I Had a Million Dollars” (Friedman, et al) 108 “If I Loved You” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 158 “If I Were a Rich Man” (Bock and Harnick) 85 “I’m a Little Teapot” (Sanders and Kelley) 202 “I’m Here” (Minchin) 74, 173 “I’m Just a Bill” (Frishberg) 202 In the Heights 224, 232 “In the Pink Tango” (Kern and Kern) 192 income inequality 143, 145–56, 161, 231 inner child 164–66, 179, 183, 183n4, 184n8 Inner City: A Street Cantata 111 integrated book musical 22; non-book musical 102 internet 3, 203, 221 Into the Woods 5, 61, 68–70, 95n21, 221; Into the Woods JR. 221–24 iTheatrics 212, 224–25 “It’s a Small World” (Sherman and Sherman) 42 It’s a Wonderful Life (Kern and Kern) 119, 198 “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” (Strouse and Charnin) 121, 145 “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (Lerner and Loewe) 76 Jackson, Arthur 115n43 Jacobson, John 189, 195–206, 209n24 Jaffe, Audrey 94n5 Jane Eyre the Musical 95n36 jazz 100, 189, 199, 218; Dixieland 199 Jenkins, Henry 22 Jenkins, Tamika 211–12, 217–20, 227, 230, 233–34 Jersey Boys, The 218 Jesus Christ SuperStar 111, 217 Jewish Girlz 111 Jim Crow era 160 Johns, Glynis 45 Johnson, Lyndon B. 97 Johnson, Marty 213 “Jolly Holiday” (Sherman and Sherman) 44, 56n29, 66, 78n15 Jones, James Earl 110

Jones, Shirley 115n52 Joplin, Janis 126 Jordan, Jeremy 139, 161 Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat 217 Joseph, Stephen M. 97–101, 103–06, 108, 110–11 Jubin, Olaf 38n31 Jungle Book JR., The 223; The Jungle Book KIDS 223 “The Junior Festival” (“Fame”) 126 Junior Theatre Festival 211–34; see also Broadway JR.; Broadway KIDS Kael, Pauline 30, 38n33 Kamp, David 9, 18n24 Kasha, Al 80–81, 90–93 Keenan-Bolger, Andrew 230 Kelly, Dennis 167–68, 171, 173–74, 176–79, 181 Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Sondheim Celebration 224 Kennedy, Steven 226 Kern, Jerome 10 Kern, Philip 190, 194, 196–98, 200–01, 204, 209n23 Kern, Susan 190, 194, 209n3 Kerr, Walter 22, 139, 132–44 Keys, Alicia 134 Kid Skits 194 Kids Rock! 201 Kincaid, James R. 15, 89, 94n6, 127 kinesthetic learning 202; see also dance King and I, The 22, 137n29, 217, 189, 224 “King and Queen’s Waltz” (Menken and Schwartz) 72 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 106 “King of New York” (Menken and Feldman) 154, 159 kinship model of childhood studies 24 Kinski, Natassja 127 Kirle, Bruce 228 Kiss Me, Kate 216 Kissinger, Brittny 132–33 Knapp, Raymond 7, 27n37, 29, 38n30–31, 38n38–39 Knapp, Zelda 79n29 Koch, Kenneth 98 Kodály, Zoltán 26 Korean War 40; see also Vietnam War Kosarin, Michael 139 Kunz, Julia 56n20 Kurstin, Greg 77n7

Index  257 Ländler 28, 31–32 language arts pedagogy 97–100, 113n8 Lankford, William 90 Lansbury, Angela 49, 52 Lapine, James 122, 222–23 Laurents, Arthur 220 Lee, Bill 62 Lee, Robert 221 Lee, Spike 109 Legally Blonde 212 legitimate singing 117, 120, 123, 126, 135n1; and the Disney princess tradition 134; and Julie Andrews 126; see also belting; boy soprano; opera Lerner and Loewe 76 Les Misérables 53, 217, 235n24 Lesko, Nancy 18n21 Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin 82–84, 86–87 “Let Me Come In” (Friedman, et al) 102–03, 105, 109 “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” (Sherman and Sherman) 44–45, 60 “Letter from the Refuge” (Menken and Feldman) 150 Leve, James 11, 114n25, 163n34 Leve, James Quincy 2 Lewicki, Kate 206 licensing of musicals: impact of 11–14; history of 216–17 Life After Tomorrow 131, 133, 160 “The Life I Lead” (Sherman and Sherman) 44–45, 60 “Light Sings” (Friedman, Holt, and J. S.) 102, 107, 110 Lind, Jenny 160 Lindsay, Howard 23 Lindsay, Kevin 113n21 Lion King, The 8, 218; The Lion King, JR. 223; The Lion King KIDS 11, 223 “Little Lamb” (Styne and Sondheim) 120 Little Lord Fauntleroy 14, 145 Little Mermaid JR., The 214, 223–24 Little Night Music, A 70–71, 78n24 Little Orphan Annie 68, 70, 141–43, 155 Locke, John 25, 28 Loesser, Frank 11, 207, 217 Lolita, My Love 137n24 “The Lonely Goatherd” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 28, 31, 37n26 Lopate, Phillip 98

Love Bug, The 77n11 “Lovely, Lonely Man” (Sherman and Sherman) 66 Lovensheimer, Jim 37n28, 140 Luigs, Jim 222 lullaby 48, 87, 120, 156 Lupone Patti 136n19 lyric time 27, 34, 109 MacDonald, Karen 208n5 Mackey, Margaret 43 Mad Show, The 114n24 Maggie Flynn 109–10, 115n52 magic 71–72, 78n21 Magic Bed-Knob, The 49, 67, 78n16 Magic Treehouse series 12 Mailer, Norman 99 Mallan, Kerry 105 Malle, Louis 127 Mame 95n36, 119 “A Man Has Dreams” (Sherman and Sherman) 44–45 Manos, Nicholas F. 212 “Maria” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 25, 32, 63 “Marian the Librarian” (Willson) 227 marketing 5–6, 8; in Matilda the Musical 175–77, 181, 186n37 marriage plot 33 Marshall, Rob 77n7 Martin, Hugh 76n3 Martin, Mary 22, 24, 26, 28, 125 Martin, Maureen M. 79n25 Martin, Michelle H. 113n14 Mary Poppins 4, 7, 22–23, 39–45, 49–50, 52, 55, 59–60, 65–67, 70–71, 126, 134, 136n20; as adapted from novels 42–44, 52–54; cast of 45; fatherly redemption in 59, 68–69, 76n4; and nanny culture 42–43; stage version of 52–54, 58n63; see also Sherman, Richard M.; Sherman, Robert B. Matilda pose 175, 186n37 Matilda (Roald Dahl) 73, 166–67, 161, 173–74, 179, 181 Matilda the Musical: as adapted from novel 167–69, 173, 181, 187n54; casting of adult actors in 171, 175, 177, 179; critical reception of 167, 179–80; fatherly redemption in 73–74; and the Lip Sync Challenge 176; marketing of 175–76, 181; in social media 164, 171, 176, 185n27,

258 Index 186n34, 186n37; see also inner child; Matilda pose maturation of child as plot structure 80, 88–89, 92, 95n36 “May We Entertain You” (Styne and Sondheim) 10, 120 “Maybe” (Strouse and Charnin) 85, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 147, 150, 157 McAdams, Rachel 207n4 McArdle, Andrea 121–22, 124, 127–29, 131–34, 139 McCallum, Robyn 17n20, 105 McCarthy, Marie 194 McCaslin, Nellie 18n27 McCracken, Allison 125 McDonald, Audra 77n7 McDonald, Timothy A. 212, 224 McIntosh, Cameron 217 McLaughlin 73 McLeer, Anne 39, 50 McMillin, Scott 109, 95n21 McNichols, Kristy 127–28 Me Nobody Knows: Children’s Voices from the Ghetto, The 96–110; see also Black Arts movement; children as authors; Cleveland, Frank (Clorox); ghetto poetry; language arts pedagogy; Moynihan Report; Joseph, Stephen M. Me Nobody Knows, The 96–115; as adapted from children’s poems 100–04; cast 101; careers of cast members of 109–10; choreography of 115n45; composition of music for 100–103, 114n28; reviews of 112; as rock musical 102; and utopianism 104–10; see also children as authors; ghetto; The Me Nobody Knows: Children’s Voices from the Ghetto; Sesame Street; urban child Mead, Margaret 47 Meehan, Thomas 139, 143, 147, 222 Meet Me in St. Louis 59–60, 62–63, 65; source material 77n8 “Meet Me in St. Louis” (Sterling and Mills) 59 meet-the-servants scene 145–46 Menken, Alan 139–40, 159, 162n23, 225, 230 Merman, Ethel 27, 117, 119–20, 124–27, 131, 133–34 Merriam, Eve 111

Michele, Lea 225 Mickey Mouse Club 143 middle-school musical 11, 13; see also school musical Mighty Minds! A Musical That Makes Learning Fun 204 Miller, Helen 11 Miller, Marilyn 117, 125 Millett, Kate 75 Minchin, Tim 167–68, 171–72, 176–77, 181, 183 Minnelli, Vincente 62 “Minuet in G” (Beethoven) 60, 64 miracle child 71, 173 Miranda, Lin-Manuel 3, 207 Miss Hannigan’s Revenge 78n18, 129 Mitchell, Lisa 163n32 mixed voice 118, 124 Moore, Michelle K. 223 Morgan, Donald 115n32 Morrison, Toni 115 Morton, Alicia 122 Most, Andrea 36n8 mothers: absent 44, 48, 50; see also nuclear family; Spock, Benjamin McLane (Dr. Spock) Motown 130 Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: The Case for National Action) 97, 99 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 37n24 MTI (Music Theatre International): formation of 11, 196, 200, 217; shows for children 5, 11–14, 119, 130, 135; see also Broadway JR.; Broadway KIDS; MTI School Editions MTI School Editions 5, 11, 13, 18n30, 196, 233, 235n24 music education 24–25, 194–95, 200–05 music hall idiom 87, 123 Music Man, The 4, 7, 10, 60, 62–64, 105, 126; The Music Man JR. 211, 217–18, 220, 224, 227, 229–30, 232 Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley JR., The 12 musical comedy 22–23 musical revue 7, 10, 98, 101, 105, 107, 112, 113n10, 190, 201 musical theater genres see adult musical; children’s musical; extravaganza; family musical; integrated book musical; musical

Index  259 revue; rock musical; school musical; vaudeville; young adult, young adult musical My Fair Lady 76, 77n10, 137n24 “My Favorite Things” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 20, 23, 35, 37n26 Napolitano, Marc 11 narrator function: Copperfield 88–93; in musicals 90–91; Oliver! 81–84 Nasaw, David 141, 149 National Association for Music Education (MENC) 194, 208n15; see also Child’s Bill of Rights in Music National Conference of Christians and Jews 100 National Conference on Young Performers 15 National Teacher’s Corps 87, 112n5 natural musicality of children 20–27, 36n9, 116–17; natural voice 116–17 “Naughty” (Minchin) 73, 168, 172, 175, 182, 184n16 naughty children 25, 30 Neal, Larry 98 Nelson, Claudia 164 New Deal, A 141, 143–44, 148 “A New Deal for Christmas” (Strouse and Charnin) 143–44 New Woman 159 Newsies 8, 122, 138–41, 149–61, 225, 230; as adapted from source texts 140–41, 153–54; choreography of 157; overture of 138, 150, 156, 161n1; and race 159–60; reviews of 139; see also collective action; progressive politics, self-reliance; Teflon Kid Ngai, Sianne 108 “The Nicest Kids in Town” (Shaiman and Wittman) “No More” (Sondheim) 69 Noble, Adrian 53 “Nobody’s Problems” (Sherman and Sherman) 52 Nodelman, Perry 6, 41, 54, 223–24 Norman, Marsha and Lucy Simon 5, 13 Norton, Mary 40, 49, 67, 78n16 nostalgia 6–7, 22 nuclear family 39–53, 69 Nurnburg, Maxwell 113n9 Nuts! A Musical That Celebrates the Circle of Life 204

Nuyorican Café 111 “N.Y.C.” (Strouse and Charnin) 69, 77n7, 153 Obie Award 101 O’Brien, Margaret 60 Occupy Wall Street 161 Of Thee I Sing 129 Oh! Calcutta! 7 O’Horgan, Tom 111 Oklahoma! 35, 105, 224 oligarchy 151 Oliver! 11, 80, 84–88, 93, 107, 119, 123, 179; as adapted from the novel 81, 84–88; see also boy soprano; child hero; Copperfield; narrator function Oliver Twist 81–90, 94n7, 95n20 Olivier Award 58n63, 176, 180 O’Malley, Byrnn 126 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever 137n24 Once on This Island 70; Once on This Island JR. 214 Once Upon a Mattress 224 “One Day More” (Schönberg, Boublil, Natel, and Kretzmer) 53 O’Neal, Tatum 127–28 “Opening Act Two” (Herman) 95n36 opera 32, 100, 109, 115–17, 124, 126, 131, 135n2; see also legitimate singing “Opportunity” (Kurstin, Furler, and Gluck) 123 orchestra function in musicals 86; see also Newsies, overture of; Annie, overture Orff, Carl 26, 37n22 Orff instruments 26 organized labor 149, 154–55, 161; see also child labor; collective action Original Kids Theatre Company 188–89, 206, 207n3; Kidlets 188–89, 208n5 Ortega, Kenny 141, 149 Oscar Award 45 Our Gang 121 Pacitti, Joanna 132–33, 137n33 Papp, Joseph 111 parenting 67–68; see also Spock, Benjamin McLane (Dr. Spock) Parker, Sarah Jessica 122

260 Index Parsons, Steve 198 Passion 228 “Pathetic” (Minchin) 73 Pattee, Amy 17–18n20 pedagogical use of musicals: curricular (heuristic) use 190, 201–02, 204–05, 209n31; earworm 202; mnemonic tool 189, 193, 200–05; see also school musical pedophilia 69, 76, 78n19, 127; see also eroticization of children; pornography; sex Perry, Katie 135 Peter Pan 8, 22, 24, 225 Peters, Bernadette 129, 136n19 Phantom of the Opera, The 217 “Piano Lesson” (Willson) 64 “Pigeon and Dove” (Kern and Kern) 191–92 Pinkalicious: the Musical 13 Pinocchio 10, 18n26 Pins and Needles 149 Pioneer Drama Service 6, 14, 190 Pirates of Penzance JR., The 223 Pirates! The Musical 196 Pitch Perfect 9 “Planet Rock” (Jacobson) 203 plantation myth narrative 146 Playbill 3, 103, 212 Plummer, Christopher 23, 62 poetry see Black Arts Movement; poetry collections by urban children; spoken word poetry poetry collections by urban children’s verse: editors and titles of 113n11; see also Joseph, Stephen M.; Koch, Kenneth; Lopate, Phillip Poets in Public Service 112 political action and children’s musicals 23, 47–48, 99–100, 105, 108–09, 111, 148, 161, 174 pop music 8, 175, 195; female pop stars 118, 133; folk-pop 102; pop ballad 121; pop idioms 87, 102; pop-rock 102, 106, 121, 134 pornography 127; see also eroticization of children; pedophilia; sex “Portabello Road” (Sherman and Sherman) 67 Portman, Natalie 225 Presnell, Harve 130 Preston, Robert 62 Pretty Baby 127

priceless child 21 primitivism 37n22, 98–99 Prince, Gerald 82 princess culture 134–35 profitability and costs of children’s theater 198, 200, 205, 213–15, 217, 221, 232 progressive politics 144–45, 147, 157 Project Peace: What Kids Can Do to Build a More Tolerant World 200 Pulitzer, Joseph 149; character in Newsies 152–55, 161 Pulitzer Prize 129 Pullman, Philip 166 Purdum, Todd S. 36n8 queer 20–21, 34, 61, 79n27, 127, 232; childhood as queer 24, 31; queered by color 106; queer temporality 34; see also campiness Quinn, Aileen 122, 124 race: color-blind casting 77n7; as depicted in musicals 22, 29; as golliwog dolls 106; Orientalism 148; in vocal types 107, 123; see also Annie; The Me Nobody Knows; Newsies racial diversity 120, 130, 204, 225 racism19n33, 96–97, 99, 104–06, 109, 115n45, 148, 160 radio 125–26, 216; see also crooning Radio Station K-I-D-S: a Musical Play for Middle School Kids 188, 90 Rajan, Rekha S. 16n4 Rapkin, Mickey 225 Raposo, Joe 114n24 Really Useful Group Ltd. 11 Reason, Matthew 17n6 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm 137n25 rebelliousness: in hymn singing 30–31; in Matilda the Musical 174–75, 177; see also collective action recorded orchestral accompaniments, use of 190, 198, 190, 206, 209n23, 222–23, 226, 228–29, 232 recreational drama see creative dramatics “Rejoice Children” (Cleveland) 99, 101 Rent 2, 112, 220, 223–24, 235n24 “Reviewing the Situation” (Bart) 87 “Revolting Children” (Minchin) 175–76

Index  261 Reynolds, Kimberly 164 Rich, Frank 80 “Ring of Keys” (Tesori and Kron) 74, 79n31 Ripley, Cindy 222, 229 Ripley, Heather 46 Roach, Joseph 170 Robin Hood 216 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles” 130 Robyn Hood of Deadwood 190 rock music 73, 107–08, 118, 126, 133–35, 175, 192, 201; Broadway rock 102; female rock stars 126, 133–34; and young adults 8–9, 18n24, 102; see also pop-rock; rock musical rock musical 10, 102, 114n25 Rodgers and Hammerstein: collaboration 7–8, 23; era 10, 119; model (musical style) 4, 22–23, 29, 35, 193; see also Golden Age of musical theater Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization 11, 216–17, 224 Rogers, Bethany 112n5 Romper Room 102 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 122, 129, 141, 143–44, 148, 155; in Annie 124–25, 139, 141–42, 144–45, 147 Roosevelt, Theodore in Newsies 139, 155, 160 Rose, Jacqueline 6, 36n9, 166 Rosenberg, Teya 54 Rostosky, Arreanna 79n31 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 25, 28, 33, 116 Rowling, J. K. 166 Runaways 10, 111–12 Rutter, Carol Chillington 164, 177–80 Ruwe, Donelle 10 Ryan, Charlene 205–06 “The Sadder-but-Wiser Girl for Me” (Willson) 63–64 Sadrin, Anny 82 Sambo 110 Sammond, Nicholas 39, 41, 47–48 Sams, Jeremy 53 Samuel French 13, 190, 216, 232 “Santa Fe” (Menken and Feldman) 150, 152 Sargent, Lyman Tower 105 Save Our Children campaign 127 Saving Mr. Banks 42, 59 Scarlet Letter, The 64

Schapiro, Herb 100–04, 106, 111–12 school musical 189–90, 193–97, 205–07; contrasted to Broadway JR. 190, 193–94, 196, 200, 205–06; see also pedagogical use of musicals School of Rock 135 “School Song” (Minchin) 175 Schoolhouse Rock! 202 Schumacher, Thomas 8, 225 Schwartz, Stephen 207 Screen Actors Guild (SAG) 15 Secret Garden, The 5, 13, 15, 61, 68, 70–71, 73 Secret Garden, The (Burnett) 78n21, 78n23, 79n25 “Seize the Day” (Menken and Feldman) 138, 151, 156–57 self-reliance 139–41, 145, 147–52, 167–68; see also agency sentimentality 22–23; intimate publics 23; sentimental realism 22; use of children for sentimental value 10, 20–23 Sesame Street 21, 101–02, 110, 114n22, 134, 175, 200, 202 Seussical JR. 223 “Seventy-Six Trombones” (Willson) 60, 64, 218–19, 211 sex: depicting sex in children’s musicals 201; normative sexuality 28–29, 32–33; sexual development 74–75, 127; see also eroticization of children; gender; pedophilia; pornography Shakespeare, William 155, 177–78, 216, 228 Shange, Ntozake 110 Sherman, Richard M. 42–46, 49, 51–54, 56n29–30, 65, 78n14 Sherman, Robert B. 42–46, 49, 51–54, 56n29–30, 65, 78n14 Shields, Brooke 127 Show Boat 10 Shrek the Musical 95n36 Simon, Lucy 5, 13 “Sincere” (Willson) 64 Singin’ in the Rain 7 “Sister Suffragette” (Sherman and Sherman) 44 “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 30, 32–34 Sleeping Beauty 72 Slick, Grace 126 Smash 18n23

262 Index Smith, Allison 122, 133 Smith, Patti 126 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 72 Snub Mosley Revue 107 “So Close” (Menken and Schwartz) 72–72 “So Long, Farewell” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 10, 31, 35 Sobieski, Carol 147 Sola, Camille 19n33 solfège system 26–27 “Soliloquy” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 22 “Something Beautiful” (Friedman) 101 “Something to Believe In” (Menken and Feldman) 158–59 “Something Was Missing” (Strouse and Charnin) 69, 159 Sondheim, Stephen 95n21, 140, 193, 220–24, 228 Song of Flubber, The 77n11 song, as function of character 85–87 song types: buddy song 69; combination song 66; conditional love song 158; establishing song 60; “I am” song 52; “I want” song 85, 92; mad song 79n31; see also speech song soprano 11, 117, 134, 136n20, 159; Disney princess tradition 134; Julie Andrews 25, 28, 126; see also boy soprano; legitimate singing Sound of Music, The 4, 7–8, 10, 20–35, 39, 62–63, 65, 120, 127, 131, 217, 224–25, 232; audience of 20, 24; as Cinderella story 22, 32; fatherhood in 63; and folk music and traditions 21, 25–31; and Maria von Trapp memoirs 70–71; and the natural musicality of children 20–27, 36n9; and normative sexuality 28–33; parody of 34–35; reviews of 30, 38n33; and sentimentality 20–23, 34; and the solfège system 26–27; use of play in 25–28 “The Sound of Music” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 28–30, 61, 63, 26n6 Sousa, John Philip 60 South Pacific 10, 22, 120, 127, 216 Soviet system 47–48, 51 Spears, Britney 134 speech song 45, 63 speechlessness and childhood 83–84

Spock, Benjamin McLane (Dr. Spock) 21, 40–41, 43–46, 48, 51, 53–55 spoken word poetry 110–11 “A Spoonful of Sugar” (Sherman and Sherman) 60 Spring Awakening 8–9, 233–34 Stagedoor Manor 225 Staple Singers, The 110 Stark, Ray 122 State Fair 4 “Stay Awake” (Sherman and Sherman) 66 Steedman, Carolyn 164, 170 Steinem, Gloria 127 Stephens, John 105 Stevens, Julie 131 Stiles, George 54 Stinky Kids 13 Stockton, Kathryn Bond 31, 34, 106 Stras, Laurie 118 Streisand, Barbra 125 Strouse, Charles 13, 77, 116, 121, 129, 134, 139, 143, 156, 222 Styles, Morag 113n10 “Substitutiary Locomotion” (Sherman and Sherman) 67 suicide 9, 75, 79n30 Summers, Donna 110 “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (Sherman and Sherman) 44, 56n29, 60 Swados, Elizabeth 111 Swamped 198–99 Sweeney Todd 12, 221, 228 Swift, Taylor 133–35 Swine of Music, The 34–35 tabula rasa see blank slate Taking My Turn 111; cast 115n58 Talburt, Susan 18n21 Talley, Lee A. 17n20 Tams-Witmark Music Library 11–13, 216–17, 224, 232–33 Tangled 118 Tarzan 58n62 Taylor, Millie 36n8 Teachers and Writers Collaborative 98 “Teamwork” (Sherman and Sherman) 53 Teddy 113n19 Teen 194; Teen 2 194; Teen 3 194 Teflon Kid 148–49, 152, 156 “Telephone Wire” (Tesori and Kron) 75

Index  263 televised musicals 7–9, 20, 24, 69, 77n7, 122, 133–34, 202, 229 Temple, Shirley 124–25, 127, 129–30, 134, 137n25 “That’s How You Know” (Menken and Schwartz) 72 “That’s Rich” (Menken and Feldman) 159 theater games 111 Theater of the Stars 212 “There Will Be No Hippos at This Dance” (Kern and Kern) 191, 192 “This Little Girl” (Minchin) 73 “This World” (Friedman, et al) 101, 108, 110 Thoma, Carl 104 Thomas, Ambroise 136n20 Thornton, Sara 84, 93n2 “Till There was You” (Willson) 64 Tilton, Martha 117 Times Square 220; revitalization of 8, 126, 128; see also I Love New York Campaign Tin-Pan Alley 192 Tiny Tim (A Christmas Carol) 152 To Sir, With Love 98 tomboy 37n21, 119, 127 Tomlinson, David 45, 50, 52, 65, 67, 77n11 “Tomorrow” (Strouse and Charnin) 69, 121–23, 129, 131–33, 136n10, 138, 156–57 Tony Award 15, 111, 115n45, 129, 157, 207 “Toot Sweets” (Sherman and Sherman) 66 von Trapp, family 29–30; Maria von Trapp 62–63; see also The Sound of Music Travers, P. L. 40, 42, 44–45, 49, 54, 56n21, 56n24, 59 Tribe, Andrew 198, 206 Troob, Danny 139 “Trouble in River City” (Willson) 21 “Truly Scrumptious” (Sherman and Sherman) 66 Truth about Cinderella, The 13 tweens 9, 130, 134, 214, 220, 222 Tzudiker, Bob 141, 149, 159 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 14; Topsy and Little Eve 123–24 Underwood, Carrie 8

Unsinkable Molly Brown, The 130 Update Earth: Kids Rock the World for a Better Environment 209n20; see also Assignment Earth urban children 10, 98, 101, 105–07, 112, 113n10music urchin: angel versus urchin 123–24; urchin appeal 139 utopianism 34, 97, 104–09, 161; and families 105 Vallone, Lynne 96 Van Dyke, Dick 45–46, 65–66 Van Peebles, Melvin 110 vaudeville 10, 120, 127, 153, 160 Victorian era 85, 164 Vietnam War 40, 43, 50, 106 Vigard, Kristin 121, 132–33 vocal damage and strain 15, 108, 196–97 vocal range: of adult women 117; of children 118, 196–97, 221–22; of songs in Annie 121–22; see also vocal damage; voice training voice training and vocal pedagogy 117–18, 131; see also vocal damage; vocal range vocal training 117, 126 Vonettes, The 107 Wachs, Ilja 84–85, 88–89, 99 Walker, Aida Overton 106 Walker, Don 11, 217 Wallis, Quvenzhané 123 Walsh, Bill 43, 49 Walters, Barbara 132 waltz 45, 60, 66–67, 73 “War Babies” (Friedman, Franklin, and Holt) 103 War on Poverty 97 Warchus, Matthew 167, 169, 179, 187n54 Warner, Rebecca 6, 17n15 Warwick, Jacqueline 123–24 “Watch What Happens” (Menken and Feldman) 155, 159 Watts, Steven 39 “We Got Annie” (Strouse and Charnin) 148 We Honor You: A Salute to America’s Soldiers and Veterans 201 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 11, 235, 217 Wedekind, Frank 9

264 Index “We’d Like to Thank You (Herbert Hoover)” (Strouse and Charnin) 143, 145 Weeping in the Playtime of Others 111 Weinstein, David 223 “The Wells Fargo Wagon” (Willson) 10, 218 West, Mark I. 57n38 West Side Story 19n33, 105, 140, 220 “What Am I?” (Cleveland) 99 What’s Happening 100 Wheatley, Sharon 130–31 “When I Grow Up” (Minchin) 164, 170–71, 175–76, 179, 181 When the Hippos Crashed the Dance 188–92, 207n4 “When the Hippos Crashed the Dance” (Kern and Kern) 191–92 “Where is Love?” (Bart) 11, 85–87 “White Horse” (Friedman, et al) 101 White, Noni 141, 149 “Who Can Resist the Twist?” (Kern and Kern) 192 Wicked 2, 4, 8, 21, 61, 70–72, 218, 233 Wilder, Alec 38n37 Williams, Emma 53 Willson, Meredith 62 Willy Wonka JR. 224 Wilson, Robert 16, 19n38 Wind in the Willows 13 Winnie the Pooh 134 Winston, Hattie 110 Winter’s Tale, The 177–79, 186n40 “Witch’s Rap” (Sondheim) 223 Wiz, The 24 “The Wizard and I” (Schwartz) 72

Wizard of Oz, The 11–12, 21, 224, 232; and Dorothy Gale 127 Wojcik-Andrews, Ian 4 Wolf, Stacy 1, 5, 12, 18n29, 34, 37n21, 234n4 Wollman, Elizabeth 7, 37n27 Woods, Judith 180 Workers Progress Administration 9 World War I 46, 62 World War II 40–42, 49, 62; post-war period society 7, 21–22, 29 “The World Will Know” (Menken and Feldman) 153–55 Wyile, Andrea Schwenke 54 “You and I” (Brown and Freed) 60, 62, 76n3 “You Can’t Stop the Beat” (Shaiman and Wittman) 215 “You Two” (Sherman and Sherman) 66 “You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile” (Strouse and Charnin) 69, 125 “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 29 young adult: Glee effect 9, 18n23, 18n24, 235n34; young adult musical 4, 8–9, 35; see also Newsies “A Younger Man” (Strouse and Charnin) 130 YouTube 2, 122, 164, 171, 185n27, 203, 229 Zaremba, Kathryn 129 Zborowski, Count Louis 17n12 Zelizer, Viviana A. 15, 21 Zornado, Joseph 124